November 13, 1999
CONTENTS:
- Greeks change tactics in fight for Marbles
(Sir Hugh Leggatt,former Museums and Galleries Commissioner: "Lord Duveen exported the cream of the British heritage to America. We're not screaming and crying over spilt milk. Most of the great institutions in America are filled with our heritage. For the Greeks to start is silly.They must shut up." )
- Lost lives- the search for a masterpiece - your help is needed
- Loans Proposed to Install Sprinklers; Historic Buildings Damaged in Ellicott City Fire Lacked Certain Safety
- Stealing Millennial Loot in Israel, From 2 Millenniums Ago
(In Israel it is perfectly legal to sell the fruits of the pilfering. Some 80 licensed dealers do a $5-million-a-year business.)
- Return of art stolen in S.F. fans speculation
Greeks change tactics in fight for Marbles
BY JOHN CARR IN ATHENS AND DALYA ALBERGE
GREEK archaeologists who inspected the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum last month have confirmed evidence of damage caused by overcleaning 60 years ago, Elisavet Papazoi, the Greek Minister of Culture, said yesterday.
Their report, to be released at an archaeologists' conference in Athens this month, "confirms that cleaning methods employed in the late 1930s deprived the Marbles of important artistic elements", Mrs Papazoi said.
It was the latest claim in a 17-year campaign to have the Marbles returned to what she called "their natural environment" on the Acropolis.
The Greek Government is using chapters of Lord Elgin and the Marbles, by William St Clair, in support of its campaign. In the book Mr St Clair criticises the British Museum for using crude copper chisels to clean the Classical sculptures in 1937-38. Significantly, it is the only solid point on which the Greeks can make a case, although the museum denies the charge.
Archaeological sources indicated that the Greek delegation's report largely approved of the British Museum's care of the Marbles in recent years, which might explain why it is still confidential. Mrs Papazoi herself praised what she called the "excellent co-operation" that the Greek archaeologists had received from the museum's authorities. She repeatedly referred to Britain as a "friendly and allied country", and politely hoped that the Marbles would be back in Athens in time for them to take pride of place in the new Acropolis Museum, to be ready in 2004.
Her approach was in contrast to that of her predecessor, Evanghelos Venizelos, who bluntly asked the Prince of Wales to return the Marbles during the Prince's visit to Athens last year.
Mr St Clair, in Athens for the signing of the Greek translation of his book, criticised "stonewalling" by the British Museum to requests from organisations such as Unesco to inspect the Marbles. He dismissed as irrelevant claims by ArtWatch UK, which monitors the arts, that Greek workmen irreparably damaged the Parthenon's sister temple, the Hephaisteion, in 1953 by using steel chisels to scrape off the surface of its sculptures and exposing the stone to air pollution. "Diverting attention like that from the Greek case is a sneaky, cowardly thing to do," he said. "It's no argument to say that the Greeks are not caring for their own relics."
Sir Hugh Leggatt, the former Museums and Galleries Commissioner, expressed irritation at the Greek position. "Lord Duveen exported the cream of the British heritage to America. We're not screaming and crying over spilt milk. Most of the great institutions in America are filled with our heritage. For the Greeks to start is silly. They must shut up."
A spokesman for the British Museum said: "The British Museum reserves comment until it has held its international conference at the end of this month, which is designed to examine all the evidence and will be attended by an international panel of eminent experts, including Greeks."
From: Antony F Anderson antonya@antonya.ace.co.uk
Subject: Lost lives- the search for a masterpiece - your help is needed
The German artist Johannes Matthaeus Koeltz fled Nazi Germany in 1937 with his family first into Austria and then via Prague to the UK. He cut up his giant Triptych "Thou Shalt not Kill" and hid the pieces with friends. The appeal by Leicester University to find the missing parts of the Koelz Triptych "Thou shalt not kill" can be found at:
http://www.leicestermuseums.ac.uk/triptych/
Your contact point is:
Adrienne Avery-Gray
Curator of Fine Art
Leicester City Museums
New Walk
Leicester
England
LE1 7EA
By Telephone +44 (0)116 255 4100
By Fax +44 (0)116 247 3057
By email hidem001@leicester.gov.uk
As background, you will find details of Johannes Koelz's CV - researched and provided by his daughter Ava Farrington - on the Institute of Art and Law website at:
http://www.inst-of-art-and-law.co.uk/koelz/cv.htm
Antony Anderson
antonya@antonya.ace.co.uk
Loans Proposed to Install Sprinklers
Historic Buildings Damaged in Ellicott City Fire Lacked Certain Safety Devices
By Raja Mishra and Linda Perlstein Washington Post Staff
(A fire ripped through Ellicott City's historic Main Street yesterday afternoon, destroying a row of 19th-century buildings and charring the core of the quaint tourist district on the eve of the holiday season.)
State legislators, working with Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D), floated a proposal yesterday to offer historic-building owners loans to pay for safety additions that could help prevent the kind of blaze that ravaged Ellicott City's historic district Tuesday. "Clearly, there's some sort of state responsibility here," said state Del. Robert L. Flanagan (R), whose district includes Ellicott City. "We'll have to do a lot of work, a lot of head-knocking, to see if we can put something together." Flanagan and others suggested that the loans could easily be repaid after the owners' fire insurance premiums were lowered as a result of added safety measures. The six-alarm fire, which began just after 3 p.m. Tuesday and burned until almost 1 p.m. yesterday, gutted four businesses and numerous apartments, leaving 10 Main Street families homeless. Two more businesses suffered serious smoke and water damage but remained largely intact.
The buildings contained a hodgepodge of fire safety measures, with all but one lacking a sprinkler system, according to Howard County Fire and Rescue Department officials. Because they were built well before the state's modern fire code was enacted in the early 1980s, all of the buildings on Main Street--save those rebuilt after the street's last major fire in 1984--are not required to have sprinklers or other preventive measures.
Fire officials were unable to make a damage estimate yesterday, and the cause of the fire likely will not be known until next week, said Deputy Chief Fire Marshal Robert Thomas, who heads the investigation. Fire officials announced yesterday that the fire started in the outdoor trash area behind the Main Street Blues Cafe. Main Street yesterday was a jumble of debris and glass, with almost-stifling smoke still hanging in the air, but the tight-knit core of merchants that make up the quaint, artsy downtown promised that they would recover in time for the make-or-break Christmas shopping season. "Ellicott City is alive and well," Howard County Executive James N. Robey (D) declared after a closed-door meeting with about two dozen of the merchants. He said the district could be open to shoppers as early as this evening. The owners of most of the damaged buildings pledged yesterday that they will rebuild as soon as possible--with construction possibly starting today.
Matthew Riesner, 17, the cook at Main Street Blues who first discovered the fire, recalls the trash had been piling up in back of the club Tuesday; it was due to be collected that night. He also said that the club's grills were on but that nothing was cooking, as there were no customers. Riesner managed to evacuate two people in apartments above the club before escaping to safety. He was disappointed in the club's lack of sprinklers or a fire wall. "With all the money that goes into the town, you'd expect them to have fire walls," he said.
During the height of the drought this summer, a pile of cardboard boxes stored in the same back area caught fire, but the blaze was quickly extinguished, Riesner said. Fire officials and merchants expressed doubt that sprinklers would have done much good, given that the fire started outside. But Robert Solomon, an engineer with the National Fire Protection Association, said that his organization recommends sprinklers for nearly all historic buildings and that they help put the fire out no matter where it starts. "We've just had phenomenal performance from these systems," he said. Fatalities are far rarer, and property damage costs 20 percent to 30 percent less with sprinklers, he said. Many preservationists have come to terms with the indelicacy of punching holes in precious buildings to install sprinklers, Solomon said. But cost--as much as $4 a square foot--remains a big barrier. The people of Ellicott City need only look to Annapolis to see that. When an electrical fire demolished a century-old building in the middle of Annapolis's tourist district in 1997, the mayor appointed a task force to make recommendations on fire safety, particularly in historic buildings. The committee suggested providing businesses with low-interest, long-term loans to retrofit their buildings, and Mayor Dean L. Johnson is drafting legislation and searching for funding sources to do so. But two years after the fire, only about 30 businesses in old Annapolis have voluntarily added sprinklers. "Common sense says you ought to be sprinklered, all else being equal," said Thomas Roskelly, spokesman for the city. "But all else isn't equal. Retrofitting is a very expensive business. . . . Frankly, Ellicott City might add some impetus to that kind of effort." Yesterday, Robey began his attempt to goad Main Street merchants into action, telling them, "Let's be honest. There will surely be another fire." Ronald Spahn, attorney for Historic Ellicott Properties Inc., which owns the stucco building that housed the severely damaged Rugs to Riches antique store, said its owners are committed to rebuilding. He said the building contained sprinklers, though fire officials disputed this and said no sprinkler went off there during the fire. Charles Wehland, an Ellicott City lawyer who co-owns the two buildings that received minor damage, conceded that he had failed to install sprinklers. However, he maintained that the buildings' special fire-resistant walls and underground wiring spared them greater damage. As for rebuilding, he said: "We will rebuild. The only question is when."
c Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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Stealing Millennial Loot in Israel, From 2 Millenniums Ago
(In Israel it is perfectly legal to sell the fruits of the pilfering. Some 80 licensed dealers do a $5-million-a-year business.)
By DEBORAH SONTAG
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see images at:
www10.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/111299israel-millennium.html
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IN THE JUDEAN FOOTHILLS, Israel -- "Come, climb into the grave," said Amir Ganor, an archaeologist-cop, his hand reaching out from an underground hole. "See what the robbers have done." Indeed, it was a ruin. A tomb from the first century B.C., one of thousands hidden in an ancient urban center under the cactus-strewn hills, it had been vandalized and plundered of antiquities, human bones scattered in the dirt.
"They leave the bones, take the goods and destroy the site forever," Ganor said, shining a flashlight to show three burial places, typical for a Jewish grave site from the early Roman period. "When I first saw this, I cried."
Grave-robbing is as old as time, especially in these parts, where time really stretches back. But in expectation of sharply increased religious tourism to the Holy Land at the turn of the millennium, the robbers appear to be working overtime. Israeli authorities say that as antiquities dealers seek to stockpile merchandise, it has been open season on rare coins, oil lamps and precious glass. But merchants themselves say they do not have great hopes for an increase in sales. It must be the middlemen, they say, who are filling the diggers' heads with dreams. "I don't expect much from the millennium," said Khader Baidun, a dealer in the Old City of Jerusalem. "Those who do come, the pilgrims, are unlikely to do much rare-antiquities shopping. But there is a new phenomenon that has no basis in the market: The hysteria among people has increased; they have started thinking the land is full of gold." With guns on their hips, cell phones in their pockets and shovels in their jeeps, Ganor, 31, and a dozen agents patrol off-road Israel in defense of history. But the Antiquities Authority's antitheft unit is essentially powerless to stop the destruction. Not only is its responsibility vast -- 50,000 archaeological sites -- but the laws are not on its side: Only the little guys, the diggers and the middlemen, are acting illegally.
In Israel it is perfectly legal to sell the fruits of the pilfering. Some 80 licensed dealers do a $5-million-a-year business.
The plunderers follow in the grand tradition of the late Moshe Dayan, a master digger with an obsessive hunger for valuable archaeological finds. Dayan, Israel's legendary general, used to go so far as to use Israeli soldiers and army helicopters to help him collect national treasures for his private home.
But antiquities authorities refrained from cracking down on him, even when they caught him red-handed, as when he was nearly buried alive during an illegal dig. In exchange, he told them to help themselves to anything in his house that they wanted to display in the Israel Museum, and they did.
The motives of Dayan were never pecuniary. But today's grave robbers, their hopes pinned on a millennial rush, are driven by the expectation of double or nothing -- about $40 -- for an oil lamp. Even with dwindling resources and staff cuts, the tiny antitheft unit caught 15 would-be grave robbers in October, compared with 100 in a typical year. They have caught 20 middlemen so far this year, up from four in 1996. Each was found with at least $50,000 worth of goods. Antiquities authorities say dealers, who usually do not keep a lot of stock and only buy rare objects, are stocking up. The evidence lies in their registers, which undergo spot checks, the authorities say. "What could be better in the year 2000 than to take home some souvenir, a coin, an oil lamp, from the Jesus period?" Ganor said, sounding like a huckster for the dealers. But the dealers themselves, who have no reason to lie because their end of the business is perfectly legal, say they are not in fact increasing their buying.
"Antiquities is a dead business," said Abu Shakra, another dealer in the Old City. "Look at my stock. I haven't bought anything in seven years."
The antitheft unit's job is an almost ludicrous pursuit. Working with tips from informers in Arab villages, where, they say, most robbers come from, they roam a vast area in the dead of night. Wearing night-vision goggles, they try to sneak up on small gangs of men who work with pickaxes and metal detectors. At ruins south of Bet Shemesh and a few miles from the Palestinian territories, Ganor covered the terrain as if he knew what lay beneath every mound, which he probably does. To most Israelis, the hills are geographically and psychologically off limits, part of a forbidding landscape that surrounds them. But to Ganor, the dirt is just cover for an extensive Roman and Byzantine city beneath. "Robbers really like this place because it's a huge graveyard," he said as he descended crumbling steps and wriggled his very tall body headfirst into a hollow. "They search for the smoothly cut rock, with curves, which indicate the entrance. They are good, like archaeologists."
As he sat underground, his cell phone rang. "We have one, come," he said, scrambling up and into his jeep. One of his agents had caught a man with a metal detector at an already excavated site in Bet Shemesh. Ganor drove on and off the road, then clambered up a hill, physically transforming in a matter of minutes from mild-mannered archaeologist to Israeli policeman.
Within seconds, the man was cuffed and seated on an ancient mosaic floor as Ganor and his agent searched his bag. "If I had found something it would be in my pockets," the man informed them, asking for the apple in his bag. "Generally I find coins, today nothing," he whispered so the officers could not hear.
As the officers drove the man, an Israeli who would not give his name, to the Bet Shemesh police station, the agent, Alon Klein, said: "That was a stupid one -- broad daylight. I could see him from the road. I parked my car behind and then I sneaked through the brush like Indiana Jones." The man started to cry. It later turned out that he had a long police record of plunder and pilfer, all to support a drug habit, the police said. "It's not a very good profession," the man said, hanging his head. The real professionals work under cover of darkness and rarely get caught. They use expensive, finely tuned metal detectors, and then hack away at layers of history, leaving Ganor to stumble on the wreckage of another site ruined, and sometimes, in a manly way, to cry himself.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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Published Friday, November 12, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
http://www7.mercurycenter.com/premium/local/docs/art12.htm
Return of art stolen in S.F. fans speculation
BY DAN REED
Mercury News San Francisco Bureau
SAN FRANCISCO -- Twenty-one years after thieves lowered themselves through a skylight at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and pulled off the city's largest art heist ever -- snatching four Dutch Old Master paintings -- an unknown man quietly dropped three of them off at a New York auction house last week and disappeared.
The FBI is examining the returned paintings, including one once believed to be a Rembrandt, to try to glean clues about the brazen 1978 Christmas Eve theft, which embarrassed the museum and prompted a $1.2 million upgrade in its security.
The whereabouts of the paintings for two decades -- and the original plan of the thieves -- remain a mystery. But some experts in the rarefied world of fine art speculate the thieves may have been caught off guard by the blaze of publicity the heist generated, and realized the well-known paintings were too hot to fence.
Then the question for them was: Uh, what now?
``One doesn't know what their motivation was,'' said Sharon Flescher, executive director of the non-profit International Foundation for Art Research in New York City. ``But it's extremely difficult to sell works that are very identifiable from very highly publicized thefts. And to me, that explains why they stay underground for several years.''
No clues, for example, have enabled investigators to crack the 1990 theft of 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Those paintings and etchings, which included the works of Rembrandt, Manet and Degas, were valued at $200 million. None has surfaced.
Still, it's much more likely for thieves to raid a private collector's holdings, avoiding the increasingly high-tech safeguards at museums. Worldwide, Flescher said, only about 12 percent of stolen art came from museums; 53 percent was taken from homes. And American museums in particular, she said, have strong security.
Art thefts on rise
There has been a dramatic rise in art thefts beginning in the mid-1980s, Anna Kisluk, the director of Art Loss Register's New York office, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. The register compiles one of the world's largest databases of stolen art.
The international trade in stolen and smuggled art is a multibillion-dollar business. Flescher's predecessor at the art research foundation, Constance Lowenthal, told the Times in 1996 that art theft has been linked to money laundering and drug dealing because expensive paintings offer an efficient way to transport wealth across borders.
In the 1978 de Young break-in, thieves waited until nightfall and slipped into the museum through a gallery skylight. They stole the three recently returned paintings -- ``Portrait of a Rabbi,'' which had been certified as a Rembrandt but is now disputed; ``River Scene at Night'' by Aert van der Neer; and ``Interior of the Church of St. Lawrence'' by Anthonie de Lorme. A fourth work stolen that night, Willem van de Velde's ``Harbor Scene,'' is still missing.
They then clambered up an antique Dutch chest on display by pulling out its drawers to use as steps, then escaped through the skylight with the framed paintings in hand.
They apparently overlooked a much more valuable Rembrandt, ``Portrait of Joris Decaullerii,'' also on display in the gallery. At the time, ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' was valued at $1 million; the other three a combined $75,000. Harry Parker, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, said an impeccable ``Portrait of a Rabbi,'' if a certified Rembrandt, could fetch $20 million at auction. But it's not impeccable, having been damaged after it was stolen in a clumsy attempt to clean it. And it may not be a Rembrandt. In the years after the theft, leading Rembrandt scholars began suggesting ``Portrait of a Rabbi'' may have been painted by one of the artist's students or colleagues, said Carolyn Macmillan, a spokeswoman for the Fine Arts Museums. The other recovered paintings also were battered. ``River Scene at Night'' was cut into three pieces.
Returning in 10 days
The FBI is to return the artwork to the museum in about 10 days, when restoration work will begin and Rembrandt experts will be invited to try to authenticate the disputed painting.
The unidentified man left the paintings in a box Nov. 2 at William Doyle Galleries in New York City on a busy day called ``Walk-in Tuesday,'' when the public is invited to bring in works of art for free appraisals.
``No one noticed a box that was anonymously dropped off,'' said Louis Webre, a vice president for the auction house. It sat untouched for hours until a phone call came, telling them where to find the package; it was filled with stolen paintings.
Alan Fausel, a former assistant docent at a de Young museum who now works for William Doyle Galleries, summoned police. ``I wasn't sure exactly what was going on,'' he said Thursday. ``Somebody thought these things were worth a million. I wanted someone reputable other than my own staff to back me up.'' Inside the box was a note saying the paintings belonged to the de Young, which the museum later verified.
Art theft experts say thieves sometimes try to get a ransom to return stolen treasures, but they usually shake down private collectors, not museums. In the 1978 case, pictures of the missing paintings were sent to auction houses and art dealers, making the works hard to unload. Graham Desvernine, a former FBI agent, said he recovered some stolen Picassos when the bandits put the word out that they were trying to peddle them. He posed as a buyer and recovered the loot. ``Or a lot of them just hold on to them. They don't know what the hell to do,'' said Desvernine, who runs a private detective agency in San Francisco. Desvernine and others also speculated that sometimes private art lovers will buy hot paintings -- not to display but simply to keep to themselves. Or the ultimate owners of stolen artwork may be connoisseurs from other nations with little or no contact with the United States.
Flescher, from the art research foundation, said sometimes lesser-known paintings pass through innocent hands until the person who finally is caught with the contraband can honestly say he knew nothing was untoward.
Last year, a collector put up for auction a Pissarro that had been stolen, coincidentally, the same year as the de Young break-in. But it had already passed through several owners by the time the man went to market it. When he did, it was spotted as the artwork stolen from a private collector. ``Sometimes the person who bought it unwittingly from thieves tries to sell it,'' she said. ``That person, not aware that there is any need to be cautious, tries to sell it at open auction and it's recognized.''
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Contact Dan Reed at dreed@sjmercury.com or (415) 434-0371.
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