The following article, presented to the list by ClIfford Scheiner, shows that what seems to be morally right not always is sustained by legal decisions. What is most important in this news article is not the history of the Sade mss, but rather what the Geneva court has reaffirmed as Swiss law concerning property rights for disputed items. People must be aware that not everything sold through Switzerland comes out with a clean title of ownership. This article shows the potential limitations for regaining art and books sold through Switzerland.
T.C.
The surrealists found the work of art fascinating. The sheets are said
to have been conserved in a phallus shape jewel case, the former
owner, Marquis de Villeneuve-Thans, specially made for them. The
original manuscript of the 120 days of sodom, written by the marquis
de Sade in prison between 1782 and 1785 was bought in the 1920ies by
the famous french family de Noailles. In 1982, by an uncommon destiny,
a collector from Geneva, the late Gerard Norman, bought it. The sale
took place in Switzerland under circumstances Nathalie de Noailles,
scion of the noble family, still regrets today. She actually lent the
manuscript to a close friend, a parisian editor who was passionate
with old books. He played her nasty trick : he took advantage of the
situation by selling the manuscript - without her knowing. For these
indelicate deeds, theft and illegal exportation of goods of national
interest, the editor was condemned in France to two years of
imprisonment with benefit of the first offender's act. In the same
time, Nathalie de Noailles took the matter to court in order to
retrieve the precious object. But without success. The sulfuric
manuscript did not return to France : after 10 years of judicial
procedures, the federal Court turned down the ladies plaint.
The decision was not easy. Only three judges against two admitted
that the buyer from Geneva was the legal owner. What did he know
exactly about the circumstances of the dealing ? Did he find out
enough about the seller's power? Did he prove cautious enough in
respect to a market where (black) traffics are of daily use ?
Legally, the affair in a fantastic cross road between Swiss and
French law, the civil code and the criminal code, old and new
international private law. Beyond al this, the international treaty
of Unilaw (organization of compared law and law unification) about
the protection of cultural goods of national interest, signed by the
federal council but not ratified by the chambers. This treaty meets
disapproval amongst the professionals of art business.
Irrelevant questions : Swiss law today protects the buyer's good
will. When a dishonest person sells an object someone else lent to
him, the legal owner cannot retrieve it if the buyer ignored the
set-up. Dura lex... This is not the case when the object was lost or
stolen - which is the small difference with the case in point. The
manuscript was lent, not stolen. The French judge called it theft, but
here it is an abuse of faith.
In the end, the only relevant question for the judges was whether
Gerard Normann was of good will. That is, above all, a matter of
appreciation, so say the judges and the federal Court must only
discreetly control the work of the genevan judges. For the majority of
them, the answer is doubtless. The buyer was manipulated, and he
cannot be blamed for agreeing to it too easily, although his
particular knowledge as an art collector should lead him to being more
careful. He got in touch with the Parisian seller through a world
famous specialist of original editions who had no intention of tearing
him into an dubious business. The proposed price -300.000 French
francs which makes 30.000 Swiss francs- was very reasonable at that
time. The price was to be paid with cheques, thus necessarily leaving
written traces. And then the seller and Nathalie de Noailles were
notoriously friends. Therefor his powers of disposing of the object
were plausible. The judges also examined the question of the missing
jewel case in which the manuscript was kept. For if the so remarkably
shaped jewel case was well known among collectors and therefore Gerard
Norman inquired where it could be, the seller guaranteed having
himself bought the manuscript without the protecting phallus.
Jean Jacques Pauvert himself, the famous editor of Sade's work,
testified to the genevan judges that Gerard Norman was known for
being an honorable man and said that the price of the manuscript
seemed normal to him. What else can we expect from a collector, said
one of the judges of the federal Court. Two of his colleagues answered
how surprising it was that the buyer did not inquire about the
necessary authorization to export the object out of France,
authorization the seller didn't have. He was not surprised either
about the Noailles family willing to sell the manuscript after having
refused to sell it several times. In lack of care, the buyer could not
say he was of good will. According to the minority judges, these
strange elements are the more important since the traffics in the
market of artworks are frequent and a real problem.
SECURMA READERS may notice some new listings of stolen art databases.
With the help of others, I have communicated with most of them and
will post them all together on SECURMA on 18 Sep as an INDEX OF STOLEN
AND MISSING CULTURAL PROPERTY DATABASES, with their cooperation.
Currently it contains about 40 websites, indexed by subject matter and
size of database.
PURPOSE: The centralized index will permit law enforcement, curators,
directors and other buyers and sellers to more effectively search
whether an item is listed as stolen or lost, especially before buying
it--the preferred way of doing it. I left the format simple so that
SECURMA users could easily print it or send it by email to others who
do not have sophisticated Internet or graphics yet--because those with
the least resources are victimized the most. I ask SECURMA to consider
posting it in an index and finding an appropriate place for the list
of 40, and maybe simply updating it by email messages posted at the
end of the list or page, however SECURMA wants to handle it.
ANYBODY CAN START AN INTERNET DATABASE OVERNIGHT. So I collected good
advice from law enforcement and major database operators to pass to
each database owner such as: to work first with the local police,
follow legal ownership law, and avoid negotiating with thieves on
their own; to be careful what details are openly put on Internet; to
know about each other's work, and be encouraged to cooperate and
coordinate with each other; to encourage more user hits by
centralizing a database list in one place, such as SECURMA; to serve
as many people as simply as possible, hopefully with free postings for
lost or stolen property; and consider the advantages of using OBJECT
ID format and centralizing efforts to avoid duplication of effort and
listings, especially in different language databases. Those who intend
to open such databases in the future could well heed such advice, too.
THIS WILL BEGIN TO COORDINATE DATABASES. I sent each a copy of the
full list and advice to each database owner with a 18 Sep deadline to
make any corrections to their information entry and to encourage their
cooperation. For those of you with more entries, please wait until 18
Sep to check if we have it already or to post your addition. Special
thanks goes to Johnathan Sazanoff, Anna Kisluk, and Angela Meadows for
their resources, and to Lisa Shur of Canada's RCMP who must be
remembered for "daring" to use Internet the first time to post stolen
art in 1997. We've come a long way on the Net, haven't we?
NOW, everyone in this first database group knows of each other's
databases, formats, concerns for Internet security, and for working
with police, and is asked to cooperate and coordinate in this
profession. Each one is uniquely motivated, operated and organized. In
time many could well improve their services, consolidate or "shake
out". This will make searching for lost or stolen art or cultural
property a little bit easier, more professional and organized.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE, most readers will agree that there is no better
website serving cultural property law enforcement and security in the
world than our SECURMA, which Ton and wife Marian, in the late hours
at home, don't hear often enough. Thanks for your steadfastness to the
ideal and the actual work. When this INDEX begins to also serve
curators and directors who are checking for lost or stolen property in
databases, SECURMA will expand its function again, to encourage more
reporting, recoveries, and cooperation, and less loss and theft well
beyond the field of cultural property organization security managers.
David Liston
AAM(US)\ICOM Security Committees and
Smithsonian Institution\National Conference on Cultural Property
Protection
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - One of Ukraine's largest synagogues has
been damaged in a fierce fire, and the chief rabbi says that
investigators suspect arson.
The fire in the sanctuary of the synagogue in Kharkiv began
at 2 a.m. Monday and raged for several hours before firefighters put
it out, said Kharkiv's chief rabbi, Moshe Moscowitz. The sanctuary was
being reconstructed and had no electric wires or gas pipes at the
time, which has led investigators to believe the fire was caused by
arson, Moscowitz said. ``An accident is very unlikely,'' he said. The
flames spread to the ceiling of the sanctuary, which is as high as a
five-story building, but the Torah scrolls were saved, he said.
Kharkiv is Ukraine's second-largest city and home to its
second-largest Jewish community, numbering more than 50,000 people.
Russia and Ukraine have seen several attacks on Jewish cemeteries and
synagogues in the past few years. The Kharkiv synagogue was built
around 1910, but shortly afterwards converted into a sports stadium by
the Soviet government. It was returned to the Jewish community and was
reconsecrated as a synagogue in 1990, Moscowitz said.
WASHINGTON - As crowds gather for tickets, the National Gallery of Art
is putting the final touches on the millions of dollars in insurance
and security needed to make its blockbuster Vincent Van Gogh show
happen. Are the 70 Van Gogh (pronounced van GOFF) paintings coming by
air or by sea for the show, which begins Oct. 4, from their home in
Amsterdam? Dutch and American museums won't say. Nor will they say
when the pictures will be moved, or what protection they'll have.
However, Sjaar van Heugten, acting head of the Van Gogh Museum in
Amsterdam, said the wooden traveling cases must be left in his
building for at least 24 hours to "acclimatize" them to a temperature
of 66 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Only then can the precious paintings
be put inside. "The worst thing that can happen to a painting is
temperature shock," Heugten said. Van Gogh has been called the
greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, and a single Van Gogh painting
has sold for $82.5 million. So 70 of his pictures would be worth
billions if they ever hit the market, which is unlikely. Museum
authorities refuse to put a dollar value on the pictures, which will
travel to Los Angeles next year after the Washington exhibit. "In
principle, our collection has no value because we will never sell it,"
Heugten said. The U.S. museums won't say how much they are paying to
borrow the pictures, made possible because the Amsterdam museum is
closing for eight months of repair and expansion. "Museum people don't
like to talk about dollar figures," said Alice M. Whelihan, who runs
an insurance program provided by the federal government. It
supplements the private policies taken out by museums. The U.S.
government's liability is limited to $300 million for any one exhibit,
but Whelihan said security kept her from specifying the liability on
this one. Of the Amsterdam museum's 200 paintings, 80 will go
temporarily to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and another dozen to the
town of Enschede. The rest will stay in storage. The U.S. show will
include pictures of the famous austere but brightly colored bedroom
Van Gogh rented in the southern French city of Arles, and the nearby
yellow house where he hoped in vain to set up a colony of like-minded
painters. The first painting visitors will see is the somber group of
poor Dutch peasants called "The Potato Eaters," one of the early
works. There will also be the wheat field with an agitated flight of
crows - probably the last thing Van Gogh painted before his suicide.
To handle crowd control, Sandra Creighton, in charge of visitor
services at the gallery, is hiring 55 extra staff members. "That's not
security," she said. "We monitor the visitors closely and keep in
touch by walkie-talkie, with messages like 'How crowded is your room
now?"' As for security, gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska would only
say that she never discusses it. The paintings will be covered with
glass, presumably to protect them from the slashings that damaged a
Van Gogh in 1978 and other Dutch paintings more recently. The gallery
expects up to 400,000 people during the three-month show. By 11 a.m.
on Sunday, a line of more than 600 had circled the gallery's East
Building, waiting for the doors to open so they could pick up the
first advance passes. Some had come before dawn. The line was almost
as long Monday. Mark Leithauser, in charge of the Washington
installation, has been planning his 10 rooms for more than a year and
a half. He worried, among many other things, about just how to paint
the walls. They will be the background for displaying both Van Gogh's
dark early work and the bright, violent coloring of his last years in
France. For the Dutch pictures, the walls will be a soft gray; for
France, light greens and deeper blues. Then there's the overhead
lighting, which has a system of filters to adjust for the season, the
weather and the time of day. Too much light can cause damage to the
pictures. Leithauser said J. Carter Brown, former director of the
gallery, had set the policy: "We borrow the best pictures, so we have
to give them the best handling."
"Van Gogh's Van Goghs" will be at the National Gallery of Art from
Oct. 4 to Jan. 3, 1999; and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Los Angeles, from Jan. 17 to April 4, 1999.
comments@foxnews.com
c 1998, News America Digital Publishing, Inc. d/b/a Fox
News Online.
Forwarding the following message to the MSN mailinglist by no means shows our approval nor disapproval of the service or product offered.
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It turns out that, if you spend enough time around old books and
decaying manuscripts in dank archives, you can start to hallucinate.
Really. We're not talking psychedelia, "Lucy in the Sky With
Diamonds" stuff, here. But maybe only a step or two away from that.
Experts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the
covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high -
or at least a little wacky-by sniffing old books. Fungus on books,
they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores. The story of
The Strangeness in the Stacks first started making its way through
the usually staid antiquarian books community late last year with the
publication of a paper in the British medical journal, The Lancet.
There, Dr. R.J. Hay wrote of the possibility that "fungal
hallucinogens" in old books could lead to "enhancement of
enlightenment." "The source of inspiration for many great literary
figures may have been nothing more than a quick sniff of the bouquet
of mouldy books," wrote Hay, one of England's leading mycologists
(fungus experts) and dean of dermatology at Guy's Hospital in London.
Well, said an American expert on such matters, it may not be that
easy. "I agree with his premise - but not his dose. It would take
more than a brief sniff," aid Monona Rossol, an authority on the
health effects of materials used in the arts world. For all the
parents out there, these revelations would seem ideal for persuading
youngsters to spend some quality time in the archives. But attention
kids: You can't get high walking through the rare books section of
the library. Rossol said it would take a fairly concentrated exposure
over a considerable period of time for someone to breathe in enough
of the spores of hallucinogenic fungus to seriously affect behavior.
There are no studies to tell how much or how long before strange
behavior takes hold. Still, this much seems apparent - if you want to
find mold, the only place that may rival a refrigerator is a library.
Just last week the Las Cruces, N.M., Public Library was closed
indefinitely, prompted by health concerns after a fungus outbreak in
the reference section. Library director Carol Brey said the fungus
promptly spread to old history books and onward to the literature
section. The town's Mold Eradication Team, she said, shuttered the
library as a precaution. "We didn't want to take any chances," she
said. A mold removal company will address the problem, which is
believed to have originated in the air conditioning system.
Psychedelic mushrooms, the classic hallucinogenic fungus, derive
their mind-altering properties from the psilocybin and psilocin they
produce naturally. One historic example of this phenomenon,
scientists now believe, is the madness that prevailed in the late
1600s in Salem, Mass., where ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus, infected
the rye crops that went into rye bread. Ergot contains lysergic acid,
a key compound of the hallucinogenic drug LSD. This tiny fungus and
its wild effects on the rye-bread-eating women may have led to the
Salem witch trials. Rossol, a New York chemist and consultant to
Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History who publishes the
newsletter Acts Facts, the journal of Arts, Crafts and Theater
Safety, said that there have not been scientific studies on the
hallucinogenic effects of old books. But, relying on accounts from
newsletter readers who report their own strange symptoms - ranging
from dizziness to violent nausea - she says there is no doubt that
moldy old volumes harbor hallucinogens.
For some years the Canadian Conservation Institute has maintained a
list of companies in Canada and the United States specialising in
document recovery. Hopefully this will be of use to Securma users.
See below. I should point out that because we are a federal
government agency we cannot endorse any of these companies.
+++++++
USA:
American Freeze-Dry
411 White Horse Pike,
Audubon, NJ 08106
Jack Magill
(609) 546-0777
