KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - The patron walked calmly into Ukraine's National Library, flashed a police identity card and asked to see a number of antique books that were among the institution's most prized treasures. Sitting at a table, the man submerged himself in study, jotting notes on a pad and occasionally sipping from a bottle of water. He returned the books, left for a break and then came back to request more volumes.
Librarians paid the visitor little attention as the hot day last August dragged on. They did see him leave 10 minutes before closing time, but didn't notice he had taken a landmark treatise by Nicolaus Copernicus, printed in 1543 and valued at up to $400,000. It was the first edition of ``De revolutionibus orbium coelestium'' (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), printed in Germany when Copernicus was on his deathbed. Only 260 copies of the book that revolutionized astronomy and Western thought are known to exist. The unsolved theft exemplifies what officials in Ukraine, Russia and other former Soviet republics see as a growing and alarming threat to their cultural heritage - learned criminals targeting unique items of great artistic and historic value to steal and smuggle abroad for sale.
``We see that the criminals are becoming more educated. Their crimes are better prepared. They have escape and sale venues ready, and the thefts often come on order,'' said Col. Alexei Bykovtsev, a senior investigator with the Russian Interior Ministry. The theft and smuggling of antiques and art treasures is a major business for organized crime in the former Soviet Union, according to police. More than 40 gangs, composed mainly of Soviet emigres living in the West, traffic in Russian cultural treasures, they say. In another recent case, Russian customs officials stopped a German man as he was leaving the country. In his luggage were four meteorites weighing 1,056 pounds and the world's only complete skeleton of a prehistoric cave bear - stolen from the museum of the St. Petersburg Geology Institute.
Investigators suspect some missing cultural treasures find their way to private Western collectors who order the thefts. Criminals try to sell other items to antique dealers or through auction houses, police say.
Sotheby's and Christie's, top British auction houses that have sales of Russian art, say they follow strict rules and have not encountered stolen artworks from Russia or Ukraine in recent years. Theft and smuggling of cultural treasures was not unknown in the Soviet era. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its rigid border controls along with free travel abroad opened the floodgates.
Widescale emigration added to the problem, with some Russian criminals establishing themselves in the West.
At first, gangs focused on quantity over quality, smuggling out religious icons and other relatively common items in large amounts. Today, criminals are focusing on museum pieces, having saturated the West with cheaper icons, paintings and books. ``At the end of 1980s, only a few items from among those seized could be considered rarities. Now, they are predominant,'' said Bykovtsev, the Russian police colonel. Not all of the antiques taken abroad are stolen. Government regulations make it very difficult to legally export antiques and art, so some gangs buy items in Russia or Ukraine and then smuggle them abroad.
Antique thieves are assisted by lax security at museums and other poorly financed cultural institutions. Many museums, especially provincial ones, lack money for guards and alarm systems. Thieves are also helped by lack of proper registration systems at some museums, meaning it can be months or longer before curators realize an item is gone. Museums rarely possess photo or video catalogues of their exhibits, so they don't have descriptions of missing items, making it difficult to track them down on the international market.
Because there were no complete records, curators at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg took weeks to discover that at least 38 medieval Jewish manuscripts had been stolen. For the lack of microfilming equipment, there were no copies of the stolen works. The fate of most stolen manuscripts is unclear, although librarians say some turned up on markets in New York and Jerusalem in the early 1990s, with an asking price of millions of dollars. Judaica experts say some also have been offered at ``unofficial auctions'' around the globe.
Despite the lack of money and resources, police claim some progress in tackling the problem. In one recent case, authorities recovered ancient Asian and Near Eastern manuscripts stolen from the Russian National Library in 1994 and worth up to $250 million. A former aide to President Boris Yeltsin was sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the theft.
Recent successes include the seizure in Britain of three Russian paintings stolen from a museum in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. A fourth missing painting was bought by a collector in the United States, who agreed to return it, officials said. Russia, where 1,600 police officers are involved in fighting art theft, registered a drop in such crimes from 3,493 in 1994 to 2,492 in 1998.
Still, just 56 percent of cases were solved in 1998, and the Russian list of missing treasures includes about 40,000 items, mostly icons, but also books, sculptures, paintings and medals. That leaves Bykovtsev, the Russian police investigator, somewhat pessimistic. ``We expect an increase in pinpoint, contract crimes,'' he says.
Leo Castelli was a dealer of almost unrivalled influence in postwar art. "I don't pick painters because they seem to be good," he once said, "but because they seem to be leaders of a new movement." In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Abstract Expressionist tide began to ebb, he persuaded not only New Yorkers but European collectors that American art was still capable of leading the way. His slick public relations and successive controversial discoveries created an excitement unmatched anywhere else in the world, and propelled the prices of works by living artists into the millions for the first time. "Anyone can discover an artist," he said, "but to make him what he is, give him importance, that's really discovery." Castelli made as many major artists what they were as anyone of his time. Diminutively built, he combined old-world charm and commercial acumen with the wonderment and enthusiasm of a child. Trusting to his own enthusiasm,he made a fortune by furthering the careers of such modern masters as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd and Richard Serra.
In the mid-1950s Castelli prowled the low-rent Manhattan studios of near-unknown painters who were hacking a fresh path away from the Abstract Expressionist legacy of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and towards the new movements that would dominate the visual landscape in the second half of the century.
Although Castelli had connections with the European art world, privately sold some Kandinskys and was a personal friend of Giacometti and de Kooning, he was not interested in profiting from established reputations. He was interested in building new ones, in helping young artists in whom he believed and in catching the next wave. In the spring of 1957 Castelli experienced what he later called his "first great epiphany". At a museum show of younger artists, he was "thunderstruck" by an arresting image entitled Green Target, by the then unknown 27-year-old Southerner, Jasper Johns. A few days later he was visiting the loft of another young artist, Robert Rauschenberg, when he stumbled into Johns's studio on the floor below. In Johns's lush renderings of everyday objects such as targets or American flags, Castelli saw "the treasures of Tutankhamun", a direction in painting that was "entirely fresh and new and not related to anything else". Johns's exhibition at Castelli's gallery the following year was a sensation, resulting in sales to the Museum of Modern Art, a cover feature in ArtNews magazine, and overnight celebrity.
A Rauschenberg show soon afterwards, in 1958, was also a success, and six years later Rauschenberg became the first American to win the major prize at the Venice Biennale. At that first show Castelli had bought Rauschenberg's Bed, painted on a quilt, for $1,200, and although the artist once called Castelli "an egotistical maniac", he was delighted when the dealer gave the painting - by then worth $10 million - to New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1988. Another great catch in his early years was Frank Stella, a young Princeton graduate who was moonlighting as a house painter while producing severe canvases that foreshadowed the Minimalist movement of the mid-1960s. Castelli, who was famously generous, offered him $300 a month to paint full time and produce more works for sale at his now thriving gallery.
Castelli was coming to be known as a Svengali, responsible for making the reputations of young painters - whom he supported with monthly stipends - and ending the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. Dozens of artists, representing Pop Art, Minimalism, conceptual art and Neo-Expressionism, flourished in his hothouse. Generous and shrewd, Castelli inspired loyalty among his well-remunerated stable of favourites, and liked to make friends with his customers. But some artists and critics sniffed that he was a lightweight and a self-promoter. De Kooning, an elder statesman of Abstract Expressionism at a time when Castelli was promoting younger artists, once marvelled at his old friend's quiet salesmanship: "You could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them." The loyal Johns, quick with a riposte, made a sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans, which Castelli promptly sold to a prominent collector.
Leo Krauss was born in Trieste, then still under the flag of the Habsburgs, the son of a Hungarian father; but he soon took the euphonic surname of his mother's socially prominent Italian family. It was his cultivated father, however, who pushed him to excel academically, giving him every educational advantage. Although he struggled with mathematics, he mastered five languages and absorbed a broad education in art history.
THE family of Henri Matisse yesterday won a landmark case over royalties which a British publishing house had refused to pay for seven years. Phaidon Press, they argued, had passed off "coffee-table books" as serious critiques of the French master's work to avoid paying copyright fees. Months before a High Court hearing, Phaidon settled the case, agreeing to pay fees of some £12,000 and the family's legal costs.
The outcome could have huge implications for other artists or their estates for up to 70 years after an individual's death. Hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees are at stake, according to the Matisse family's agent in London, the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), the non-profit collecting society.
The dispute centred on the interpretation of a clause in the 1988 Copyright Act which allows the reproduction of images without permission or payment if a publication is for criticism and review purposes. That normally applies to reviews in newspapers or magazines, rather than books for commercial purposes.
The Matisse estate, headed by his grandson, Claude Duthuit, alleged that Phaidon unlawfully reproduced works by the French master in at least six of its popular titles, including Matisse by Nicholas Watkins and Minimum by John Pawson. The estate's solicitor, Suzanne Garben of Denton Hall, said that the Matisse estate did not believe that these books were produced for criticism or review. These are picture books, she said: "You buy them to look at the pictures. There is not that much text."
Phaidon, which has specialised in art books since it was founded in 1923, had insisted that there was a distinction between the reproduction of works of art on "merchandise such as T-shirts, mugs and ashtrays" and "serious art books for critical purposes". Yesterday, its managing director, Andrew Price, said: "Both sides are satisfied with the outcome."