January 17, 1998

CONTENTS:

- Re: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure network

- Re: Two questions . . .

- locking systems

- updating safety procedures ( bomb threat, chemical or hazardous material spill, accidents, and various other situations)

- Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

- 1998 DISASTER RECOVERY SOURCEBOOK NOW AVAILABLE

- effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

- Rag-picker nabbed for stealing artefacts

- Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

- RE: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure

- RE: Two questions . . .

- Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

- Further developments in the Schiele Case -Die Presse Vienna 16th January 1997 edition

- Re: RE: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure network

- Schiele in New York: New delays - What does Prosecuting Attorney Morgenthau want?

- Harvard museum acquisitions shock scholars

- Re: up-dating safety procedures

- Sotheby's auctions off its honor (Book Review)

Re: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure network

Re: Two questions . . .

locking systems

updating safety procedures

( bomb threat, chemical or hazardous material spill, accidents, and various other situations)

Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

1998 DISASTER RECOVERY SOURCEBOOK NOW AVAILABLE

SEVENTH EDITION OF THE DISASTER RECOVERY YELLOW PAGES(tm)

effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

1. People are inundated by signs and only attend to those which offer them something they feel they need

2. People don't remember general signs when they want to do something at a specific site.

3. Logical restrictions can be made more palatable by linking an explanation of the damage that can be done to an alternative offered that fulfills the visitors needs.

Here's an example: In interviewing people on why they slapped a tank we found very good-hearted people rapped on a the Alligator Snapping Turtle tank in what they considered a gentle way to make contact with the immobile animal inside. Rather than just say don't rap on the tank - it disturbs the animal - we tested out signs that gave information about the behavioral characteristics of the animal (why it was immobile) and asked the visitor to look for slight eye movements that indicate the animal sees you. The rapping stopped, people read the sign off to other people (even strangers) who had not yet read the sign and were tapping, Looking closely at the massive turtle's eyes became an interactive activity. We now have a series of customized signs at the tanks we identified as most impacted by visitor rapping.
So if you restrict flash photography, I suggest you

1. Observe visitors and find out where the flash pictures are most often taken

2. Talk to visitors to find out why these particular objects/pieces were chosen for photographs

3. In addition to your general list of proper behaviors and restrictions, put specific signs in these locations (this particular paint is damaged by flash photography) and offer people specific alternatives for that site. (i.e. a postcard or print of this piece is available in the gift shop, a designated "souvenir" photo spot is right around the corner, etc).

Linda Wilson
Visitor Studies and Evaluation
Shedd Aquarium
Chicago IL 60605
Lwilson@sheddaquarium.org

Rag-picker nabbed for stealing artefacts

The Crime Branch of the Delhi police have nabbed a rag- picker, also a smack-addict, for allegedly burgling away priceless artefacts worth crores of rupees from the Art Museum situated within the Rashtrapati Bhavan premises until not long ago. Reflecting a lack of adequate security at the house of the most important person of the country, the accused_identified as Vinod alias Fauji, a resident of Loni in North-East Delhi_simply scaled the three-foot outer wall and entered Rashtrapati Bhavan from the Willingdon Crescent side_at least on three occasions in the last one and a half months. He also found the door leading to the museum_on the occasions he had ventured into the President's house_rather carelessly latched and little prods were enough to slip himself inside the museum. Vinod also told the police that he had earlier broken into the house of the Youth Congress leader, Mr. M.S. Bitta_who is under Z category protection. The Curator of the museum, Mr. Pramod Ganpatya, reported the case of the missing artefacts to the Chanakya Puri police after the museum staff noticed the absence of certain paintings and furniture. The lock of the door to the museum was not latched properly as well. A case of burglary was registered at the Chanakya Puri police station on December 27 and after three days, the Crime Branch took over the investigations. Addressing presspersons here this afternoon, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime), Mr. Karnal Singh, said initially there was no clue as to who could have stolen the goods. The police landed a vital clue after a polythene bag, containing a bill issued from the Central Cottage Industries Emporium, was recovered from the museum. The police followed the lead and found that the bill had been apparently a duplicate and must have been thrown in a waste- paper basket.
The police interrogated the sweeper and through him, they tracked down and interrogated a scrap-dealer who collected trash from the Emporium. Mr. Karnal Singh said the police questioned more than 200 people before narrowing down their suspect list to Vinod. Raids at his one-room house in Loni followed. The police nabbed Vinod, dug up the floor of his room and recovered a chunk of the stolen articles, including gold and silver plated utensils, expensive table-ware and cake-stands, cutlery, brass- ware and knives. Interrogation of the accused was done and he confessed to having entered the President's house in the last week of November. After scaling the wall and entering the premises, he went inside the museum and stole the goods. He later sold the goods to various junk dealers. The main reason why he was into burgling_Vinod was also found to be involved in at least 16 other cases of burglary_was his addiction to smack. Vinod also said that even when spotted by security guards, he had not been checked as they, probably, thought he was just a rag-picker.

Subject: Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

RE: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure network

RE: Two questions . . .

Re: effects of Electronic Flash on paper, paintings, etc.

Further developments in the Schiele Case

-Die Presse Vienna 16th January 1997 edition

The sister-in-law of Gruenbaum sold Schiele's "Dead City III"

Re: RE: security matters openly discussed on an unsecure network

Schiele in New York: New delays -

What does Prosecuting Attorney Morgenthau want?

Harvard museum acquisitions shock scholars

For more than a generation, Harvard's venerable museums have operated under a strict policy designed to revent the acquisition of artifacts from the network of grave-robbers, smugglers and shady dealers trafficking in archeological plunder. ''A bad reputation, once gained, is difficult to improve,'' said the Harvard committee that wrote the 1971 policy aledging that Harvard would no longer accept ''by purchase, bequest, or gift'' objects of questionable pedigree. But in recent years the university's Arthur M. Sackler Museum's acquisition of some classical antiquities - including 182 Greek vase fragments bought in 1995 and recently showcased in a second-floor gallery - have shocked scholars because of the likelihood the 5th century B.C. pieces were looted from tombs in Italy. In addition, Harvard's museums have been acquiring undocumented objects from an international dealer so notorious for dealing in looted artifacts that he was barred from Italy for almost a decade. The museums' director said he sees no reason to sever ties to the dealer. It is ''heartbreaking,'' said archeologist Claire Lyons, vice president for professional responsibility of the Archeological Institute of America, that ''such a prestigious academic museum, whose curators and director are also faculty members, is not up to speed on current ethical norms.'' In an interview with the Globe, James Cuno, director of Harvard's art museums - which include the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger - strongly defended the acquisitions, saying there is no evidence any of the items was stolen or removed from the country of origin after 1971, the year Harvard's acquisitions code took effect. ''The decision I took was, I thought, a very ethical one and I would stand by it and do it again,'' he said. ''If we hadn't acquired them, they might be in some private collection lord knows where. No one would know about them; no one would learn from them. Then what service would I have done?'' Objection raised That Harvard might have compromised its ethical standards has provoked debate within its fine arts faculty. A 1996 Sackler exhibition prompted a formal objection on ethical grounds by Irene J. Winter, then chair of the fine arts department. The exhibition comprised bronzes on loan from collectors - including Harvard benefactors Leon Levy and Shelby White - whose purchases of undocumented antiquities have prompted as much debate as the prices they pay. In her 1996 letter to Cuno, Winter raised questions about the dubious origin of several of the pieces, including one bronze owned by Levy and White, which, she noted, had been ''purchased in clear contravention of international convention, for which its purchasers have shown consistent disregard over the years.'' Levy and White have insisted that their acquisitions have been proper. The Harvard policy envisions the same rigorous standards for loans as for acquisitions. But there, too, Cuno said the curator could find no evidence the loaned items were suspect. And he insisted that Harvard can continue to buy on the antiquities market if it can find no evidence the items were plundered in recent years. Harvard policy, however, asks for ''reasonable assurance'' that an object was not exported from its country of origin after 1971 in violation of the laws of that country. And it is on that issue where Cuno and his critics differ: He says an ''innocent until proven guilty'' policy is sufficient. But many art historians and archeologists, noting that up to 80 percent of antiquities on the market were looted in recent decades, insist on tougher standards. ''Ethically, given the enormous amount of looted material on the market, we are obligated to presume these items to be guilty until they are demonstrated to be innocent, and therefore the burden of proof should be on the purveyor of the object,'' Winter said. With its decision to acquire the vase fragments, Harvard has created a vivid case study of the tensions between museums and archeological preservationists. Harvard professor and museum curator David G. Mitten recommended in 1995 that Cuno acquire the fragments from a New York dealer who had obtained them over time from J. Robert Guy, an archeologist at Britain's Oxford University. Guy has two, many say conflicting, roles: He is among the world's preeminent experts on Greek vase fragments, and he has longstanding business relationships authenticating classical vases for dealers who have been implicated in buying antiquities plundered in Italy - where most Greek vases and fragments are found. Indeed, London antiquities dealers several years ago arranged funding for Guy's Oxford fellowship - prompting howls of outrage from Oxford faculty members. Cuno acknowledged that despite Guy's expertise, he provided Harvard with no documentation regarding the origin of the fragments. Nor could he say where they came from - a dead giveaway, archeologists say, that the items are unclean. Cuno said Guy had obtained them from friends, including dealers, over several decades - a suggestion they might have been in Guy's possession before Harvard's policy took effect in 1971. Repeated efforts to reach Guy for comment were unavailing. But archeologists who know Guy say he is in his 40s and could not have begun collecting until the 1980s. In 1985, Guy authenticated a celebrated 6th century B.C. Greek jar for Sotheby's, the London auction house. Just after its sale for about $180,000, it was disclosed by British journalist Peter Watson that the jar had been looted and smuggled out of Italy to a dealer, Giacomo Medici. A year ago, Medici was arrested by Italian police in Switzerland, where a warehouse was discovered with 10,000 looted antiquities from Italy worth more than $30 million. Guy has done similar work for other European dealers, including London dealer Robin Symes and Swiss dealer Herbert Cahn, who have been involved in frequent controversies over charges that the antiquities they sell are looted. In Britain and Switzerland it is not illegal to buy or sell antiquities that have been illegally looted. No one has suggested that Guy acted illegally, rather that working for dealers like Symes makes him part of an international network that encourages destruction of archeological sites. Cuno said Harvard's decision to buy the fragments, given the lack of documentation, ultimately rested on the view that Guy's reputation was so established that he would not risk selling looted artifacts. But some of Guy's colleagues, also experts in the field, said they are virtually certain that the fragments, whose importance to collectors has grown markedly since the 1980s, were removed from Italy since then in violation of Italian law, which since 1939 has prohibited the export of antiquities. Gloria Ferrari-Pinney, a University of Chicago archeologist who plans to join Harvard's faculty later this year, said that in the absence of documentation, ''then you have to assume they were acquired illegally. And Italy is such a major source of these vase fragments.'' ''We would do it again'' Some museums began to change their rules, if not necessarily their practices, in response to a 1970 UNESCO treaty. Harvard was among the first. The US Senate ratified the treaty in 1972, but implementing legislation was not passed until 1983. Loopholes in the law, however, have emboldened some museums, and Harvard is a study in miniature compared to the extensive acqusitions of undocumented artifacts by major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Last month, the Globe reported that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1988 accepted a donation of Mayan antiquities even though its attorney knew the items were illegally removed from Guatemala. But Harvard, with its history and reputation, reasoned in 1971 that its new stance could help ''eliminate or at least diminish the power of the black market.'' The consequences of inaction, a team of academics who drafted the policy wrote, were unacceptable. Mitten, who urged acquisition of the vase fragments, also has purchased several undocumented classical antiquities from Robert E. Hecht - some of them, including 70 ancient Greek coins, as recently as last year. In the 1970s, the Italian government declared Hecht persona non grata and ordered him out of the country for nine years for his alleged involvement in the illicit trade in antiquities. For similar reasons, he was banned from Turkey during the 1980s. Mitten, a professor at Harvard for 37 years, has cordial relations with Hecht. ''I don't think there is any reason to question'' Hecht's credentials,'' Mitten said. ''We have bought from Bob Hecht and will continue to do so. He's very square with us. We have every reason to believe him.'' Thomas P. Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has quite a different view of Hecht, having weathered a 1972 scandal involving the purchase of a 2,500-year-old Greek vase from Hecht for more than $1 million, only to have evidence surface that it had been looted in Italy. The true origin of the vase was never proven, and Italy ultimately dropped criminal charges against Hecht in the case. ''Nobody would accept anything from Robert Hecht unless they were really looney,'' Hoving said. ''In his entire career maybe there are two or three pieces he had that, by chance, were legitimate, that fell onto the truck. But the rest, no way.'' But even now, said Cuno, who insists that he had never heard of the man until the Globe made inquiries, Hecht's ownership of an antiquity ''is not enough to prevent'' Harvard from buying from him. As for the vase fragments, Cuno said: ''We have done a great service in acquiring them. And we would do it again.'' The acquisitions underscore a deeper philosophical divide: Despite Harvard's archeology-friendly policy on paper, the willingness of Harvard and other institutions to acquire such items, in the view of many archeologists, only encourages further plundering of historically rich sites. ''It's out of the ground,'' argued Cuno. ''It's out of the country [of origin]. It's on the market. We're a public institution. Our job is to encourage research and preservation. If you don't acquire it, where would it go? Back to the netherworld of private holdings in conditions inimical to its preservation.'' Indeed, Cuno insisted that countries like Italy are equally to blame for looting, with their tight restrictions, lax enforcement, and official corruption. And he rejected the view that plundered items should automatically be returned to the country of origin, saying such ''politically correct'' solutions amount to ''ethnic cleansing - taking it from the world culture to a parochial culture. What really is best for the world? Return the items and reinforce a parochial, atomized view of world culture or encourage the exposure of these items to scholarship elsewhere?'' Nancy Netzer, a Boston College art historian and director of BC's McMullen Museum of Art, offered an opposing view. ''Museum directors, and I include myself, are a greedy lot: If they like it, they want it. But you have to impose some discipline and walk away when a piece smells bad. If it is a piece of cultural property, especially if it recently came out of the ground, you have to figure out where it came from, when it left, and how it left. If you cannot satisfy yourself, you have to walk away from it. We have to be bound by more than just the law. There's the ethics, too.'' Marc Shechtman and Liz Donovan of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
Globe Online Complete coverage of looted antiquities is available on Globe Online at
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/paintings/.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 01/16/98.
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

Re: up-dating safety procedures

Sotheby's auctions off its honor

Sotheby's, the world's most famous auction house, has also become infamous over the last decade, what with revelations about lending millions to buyers whose eyes were bigger than their pocketbooks and peddling paintings looted by Nazis. Along comes British journalist Peter Watson with more fuel for a fire that, while it won't amount to a funeral pyre for Sotheby's, will surely leave it singed. Watson has already accomplished that, in fact, through exposes on British and American television and through the prior publication in England of ''Sotheby's: The Inside Story,'' which is now out in the US in an updated edition. Acting on leads from a British Museum curator and a disaffected former Sotheby's employee who'd kept a cache of incriminating documents, Watson spent several years investigating the auction house's practice of illegally spiriting art out of its country of origin. He focused on antiquities, Old Masters, and Indian art, and his sleuthing took him as far afield as a tiny Indian village, Lokhari, which has no electricity, no running water, and almost no remaining sacred art. Centuries-old sculptures that were venerated as gods had been brutally ripped out of their settings and found their way to Sotheby's sale rooms. Watson's description of the pathetic remains of these Indian shrines -along with his account of actually watching tomb robbers in Italy use huge mechanical diggers that not only removed individual sculptures but also destroyed entire sites so they could never be properly studied by archeologists - make compelling reading. But Watson gets in his own way when writing about filming all this for TV: You yearn for the excitement of footage of the actual crimes. In describing Sotheby's shenanigans on Bond Street, Watson uses the tactics of a James Bond. He poses as an art collector. He and his colleagues go around with concealed microphones and cameras to record wrongdoing. They go undercover to buy an Italian Old Master and get Sotheby's to smuggle it to London, where it would fetch a better price than it would back in Naples. What Watson unearths is horrifying, though he mutes some of the shock with an overabundance of detail, hammering repetition, and a scrambled chronology. He also tells you a bit too much about himself and not enough about Sotheby's, which has a fascinating 254-year history. Ironically, given Watson's discoveries, it was Sotheby's that changed the public perception of auctioneering from shady business to gentleman's profession. The house's cavalier attitude astounds. Watson quotes an internal memo from the Sotheby's press office: ''Should we stop selling anything that might have been smuggled, for PR reasons? How much would there be left to sell in certain instances?'' Not a whole lot, Watson shows. Take the case of the Apulian vases, antiquities from southern Italy, that led to the above memo. The 6,000 Apulian vases that had been legally excavated by 1983 are all recorded in a three-volume scholarly catalog; subsequent legally excavated examples appear singly in professional journals. Apulian vases in Sotheby's auctions appear in neither. ''By definition, therefore,'' Watson writes, ''these vases had been illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.'' The particular batch Watson refers to sold for handsome prices at auction - though none went to the British Museum, which had dearly wanted one stellar example but decided against bidding because it deemed the sale unethical. Sotheby's, meanwhile, played dumb and kept mum. ''I don't think one ever knows where antiquities come from,'' Felicity Nicholson, Sotheby's authority on ancient art, blithely told Watson. ''We assume that our clients have title to whatever it is they are selling.'' But Watson follows the trail of unprovenanced art to show that it hasn't merely shown up on Sotheby's doorstep - that the auction house was deeply involved in the particulars of smuggling it out of countries including Italy and India, countries with extremely stringent export laws. An innocent reader might expect that Watson's revelations would lead to massive reforms. But no. After a burst of publicity in Britain, a few heads rolled and there were a few announcements that the auction house would clean up its act. While the British public heard plenty about Watson's damning findings, the British authorities failed to go after Sotheby's, because, Watson laments, ''The British government is known to be worried that London will lose its preeminent position in the international art market. ... An official inquiry into Sotheby's would not have helped.'' Watson's indignation ignites the reader's. So you're happy to read his account of a statue of the Egyptian Lion Goddess Sekhmet, which Sotheby's arranged, at great expense, to have smuggled out of Italy, to Britain, and on to America, where, Watson almost gleefully reports, ''It emerged that it was a cast, made of a mixture of Portland cement, charcoal, calcite chips, and some wood.'' The Lion Goddess proved as phony as Sotheby's sense of honor.
This story ran on page D13 of the Boston Globe on 01/16/98.
c Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.