AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (March 30, 1999 12:26 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - A man pleaded guilty Tuesday to cutting up a painting of American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman in 1997, though he claimed he was mentally unfit at the time. "He said he suffers from schizophrenia and was psychotic," said Jan Merton, a spokesman for the Amsterdam District Court. "It is now up to the three judges to decide how responsible he is for his actions." The defendant, Gerard van Bladeren, was charged with taking a switchblade knife to the painting "Cathedra" in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, slicing the canvas several times.
A verdict is due within two weeks.
More than 11 years ago, Van Bladeren was found guilty of carving "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III," another Newman piece, also in the Stedelijk Museum. He served a short jail sentence and was banned from the museum for three years. At the time, Van Bladeren proclaimed himself a misunderstood artist and denounced the art establishment. He said he considers destroyed abstract paintings as works of art. On Tuesday, Van Bladeren repeated his dislike for abstract artwork, but added that he regrets the action. "Cathedra," a blue monochrome work from 1951, has been in the museum's permanent collection since 1975. The painting's value was not released.
Hershel Shanks likes kicking up dust, an unusual stance in archaeology, where the custom is to tread carefully and speak with restraint. But it's a good tactic for getting attention, as the field's most prominent scold well knows. A decade ago, Shanks made a name for himself with a relentless and ultimately successful crusade in his magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, to have the Dead Sea Scrolls, then controlled by a clutch of secretive scholars, made accessible to the wider academic community. He was not the first or the only advocate of this position, but he was the loudest and most persistent.
Now Shanks is stirring up dust again with provocative proposals for combating the problem of widespread looting of archaeological sites. Taking a bead on the venerable Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America, the country's oldest and largest group of archaeologists, Shanks attacks it for "vilifying" private collectors and antiquities dealers who sometimes trade in stolen artifacts.
"The theory is," writes Shanks in today's edition of Archaeology Odyssey, another magazine he publishes, that "if the collectors are vilified enough, they will stop collecting." While this position gives archaeologists "a fine, warm fuzzy feeling from the high moral ground they see themselves occupying," he argues, it has been "an absolute, utter failure" in stopping antiquities trafficking.
Archaeologists instead should encourage dealers and collectors to finance excavations and, without being pilloried, "reveal their treasures" so they can be studied, Shanks adds in an interview in his Northwest Washington office. He condemns looting and says looters should be punished. Still, Shanks compares the purchase of looted antiquities to the payment of "ransom" for kidnap victims. The 69-year-old Shanks also scores the archaeological establishment for refusing to study and write about objects that surface without clear proof of ownership, charging that they "avert their eyes from unprovenanced artifacts as if they were the most vulgar pornography." The 11,000-member Archaeological Institute, Shanks notes, refuses to publish scholarly papers on such artifacts in its journal, a stance that "deprives all of us of valuable information." Though such ideas have been broached by others, Shanks's self-made forum guarantees they will make a bigger splash now. Shanks, a lawyer who no longer practices, was never formally trained as an archaeologist. But his two-decades-old Biblical Archaeological Society, a nonprofit educational organization, and his lively magazines, which have a combined readership of about 225,000, give him a large grass-roots audience. (He also publishes Moment, a magazine of Jewish opinion.)
In addition, Shanks's essay comes at a time when America, the top collecting market in the world, is skating through another Gilded Age and its appetite for antiquities is stronger than ever. At the same time, dealers are acquiring treasures smuggled out of archaeological sites in countries weakened by armed conflicts, such as Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly, Shanks, a tall, moon-faced man, is not much loved in archaeological circles. Critics call him a publicity hound who stokes controversy to sell his magazines. An article in this newspaper once described his tactics as "Barnumesque." (Shanks passes out copies of the article with his resume.) "He likes to stir things up," says Ellen Herscher of the District, who chairs the Archaeological Institute of America's subcommittee on cultural property policy and legislation. "He's a gadfly." Many archaeologists have a bigger gripe with Shanks than self-promotion, and that is his willingness to run ads from antiquities dealers in his magazines. By doing so, they argue, he helps create demand for illicitly obtained artifacts. "My position and the position of most archaeologists," says Herscher, "is that . . . by advertising, you're helping to stimulate demand. And to carry [such ads] in a magazine about archaeology is a conflict of interest."
Of the ads, Shanks says: "They're legal and they offer a legal product." Besides, his magazines are "a forum for the freedom of expression."
He notes that his editorials advise readers not to become antiquities collectors and that he is not one himself. "I don't have a [single] piece and I wouldn't," Shanks says.
The prevailing wisdom among archaeologists is that nothing should be said or done to fog the bottom line: that private collectors, dealers -- and museums that buy or accept gifts with a murky ownership history -- could well be trading in stolen goods. When collecting stops, archaeologists say, looters will go out of business.
Patty Gerstenblith, trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America and editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, which publishes a range of views on how to deal with looting, observes that Shanks's ideas "sound superficially attractive, but people have spent a lot of time thinking about these potential solutions and it doesn't seem they would work.
"As long as there are people who will buy from looters, they will keep looting," she adds. "So you have to look at the demand that the market creates as well as the source that supplies the market." Gerstenblith, who is also a professor at Chicago's DePaul University School of Law, says what must change is "the attitude that the collector is entitled to buy just because they want [an object] or can afford it. . . . You're not entitled to buy something that is not for sale."
Both Herscher and Gerstenblith defend many archaeologists' refusal to give professional opinions on the authenticity and quality of artifacts that may have been stolen. By doing so, they say, archaeologists would abet the illegal trade and increase the value of pilfered pieces.
The two also disagree with Shanks's suggestion that antiquities-rich countries like those in the Middle East should buck prevailing taboos on "trading away their patrimony" and openly sell antiquities found in great quantities -- such as oil lamps and pots. By selling such items to Western museums and collectors, governments would deprive local grave robbers of income that could instead go toward the legitimate work of indigenous archaeologists, Shanks says.
The flaw in this argument, Herscher says, is that wealthy private collectors and dealers are not interested in the commonplace artifacts that governments would be willing to sell. Rather, they are looking for "the rare beauty, the special something that speaks to their soul" -- in other words, precisely the kind of artifact no government would sell.
Shanks's critics say his essay comes at a time when private collectors and dealers are beginning to feel the effect of international efforts aimed at restricting the antiquities trade. In 1983 the United States ratified a 1970 UNESCO convention on cultural property to help foreign countries stop the flow of looted goods into this country. Each country, however, must negotiate a bilateral treaty with Washington before U.S. law enforcement authorities can move against traffickers or seize looted goods. So far, only five countries -- Peru, Mali, Guatemala, El Salvador and Canada -- have signed such treaties. Cyprus has requested one. More important, say archaeologists, several recent lawsuits by foreign governments have resulted in the return of artifacts to countries from which they were stolen. A Boston collector decided earlier this month to settle a lawsuit by returning 1,700 ancient coins to Turkey, and in 1993 the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a collection of gold and silver objects to Turkey. A 1997 federal court ruling, currently on appeal, held that Italy should get back a gold cup bought for $1 million by a New York collector. And a 1993 federal court decision returned artifacts illegally exported from Guatemala. Also, Guatemala two months ago demanded the return of 32 pre-Columbian objects from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
As a result, Herscher says, "after many years of relative quiet," antiquities dealers are beginning to complain. In 1997 a spokesman for dealers was quoted in a trade publication denouncing the U.S. agreements with Canada and Peru; last month the same publication, Art and Auction, ran an article titled "The War on Collecting," she said. "I believe there are people now who will stay away from something if they feel it has questionable background because of all this education and publicity," Gerstenblith says.
Shanks disagrees, arguing that current policies are not effective enough.
"We really are on the same side," he says of himself and archaeologists. He hopes his essay will "start a discussion" on how to enlist collectors and dealers in the battle against the looting of antiquities. It's a topic, he says, on which "there has never been open public debate."
c Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
A sleepover for young girls at a downtown museum, designed as an educational and cultural experience, turned nightmarish for a female chaperone assigned to the group who was attacked by a museum security guard, police said yesterday.
Police say the attack took place about 2:30 a.m. Saturday at the Canadian Museum of Nature on McLeod Street and involved a guard with Bradson Security, the firm responsible for security at the museum. The victim, a 22-year-old woman who works part-time at the museum, was being assisted by several other chaperones, who were all connected directly to the group of young girls. Museum of Nature officials said the woman went to staff sleeping quarters in the museum basement and about 2:30 a.m. other staff found the woman in distress and police were called.
Museum officials spent yesterday trying to calm public concern over the attack. Overnight sleepovers have long been a part of regular educational activities offered by the museum, like dinosaur birthday parties and tours.
"The museum is taking every precaution to ensure the safety of both the staff and our visitors," said Joanne Charette, director of communications for the museum. "This is entirely an isolated incident and we want to stress that in no way were the children affected by this."
In this case, the children arrived late Friday afternoon and spent the early evening touring and playing inside the museum before going to bed.
Museum officials said the children have their choice of sleeping among several exhibits, including the dinosaurs or the birds or the exhibits depicting the Bay of Fundy.
Museum-assigned chaperones also often sleep over in order for them to be there when the children wake up in the morning. "The children were sleeping on another level of the museum and were unaware anything was going on," said Ms. Charette. "I'm not sure they could be aware today that anything went on. The incident took place on another level altogether." Ms. Charette went on to stress that the museum also has female security personnel on duty overnight. Following the incident, the suspect immediately fled the scene in a vehicle belonging to the museum.
Police, who knew the suspect's identity, later reached him via his cellular telephone. Over the course of the next several hours, the lead investigator in the case, Const. Steve Burnie, spoke with the suspect numerous times as the suspect drove west on Highway 401.
Finally, about 1:30 p.m. Saturday, the suspect agreed to turn back and head for Cambridge, where arrangements had already been made for him to turn himself in to Cambridge OPP.
"It was just a group of young girls on a sleepover, a common occurrence for the museum," said Const. Burnie, who works with the sexual assault unit of Ottawa-Carleton Police. "Fortunately, the girls were in another designated sleeping area for children and they were oblivious to what was taking place." Const. Burnie travelled to Cambridge Sunday to pick up the suspect. Dominic Letourneau, 20, of Gatineau, has been charged with sexual assault and theft.
He appeared briefly in court yesterday and was released on several conditions. Police say they had no previous complaints involving assaults at the museum and consider Saturday's an isolated incident. Museum officials say they have been assured the suspect will not be re-assigned to work at the museum.
The victim did not require hospital treatment.