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December 29, 1998

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

For more information concerning the MFA, take a look at the Mansoor Amarna Collection home page at http://www.amarna.com, especially the Scientific reports (full text) from Young and the comments from his critics.
Also, The Scandal of the Century at http://www.scandalofthecentury.com may be of interest to you.

Arts Club members in frame over UKPounds:1m theft

(Electronic Telegraph)
By Sandra Laville MEMBERS of a Mayfair arts club are being asked to search their consciences after the discovery that 50 paintings worth nearly UKPounds:1 million have been stolen from the club. The Arts Club, whose founders include Charles Dickens, has come to the conclusion that the paintings and part of its silverware collection has most likely been pilfered by members or staff. Each of the club's 1,000 members, who pay subscriptions of up to UKPounds:525 and include Desmond Wilcox, the television producer, Nick Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, and Tony Banks, the sports minister, have received a letter asking for information about the whereabouts of the club's property. So far David Morris, the chairman of the club in Dover Street, has received no replies. He believes that the works were stolen between 1976 and 1991, following a two-year period when the club was closed for refurbishment. The thefts were discovered after a seven-year audit was carried out. Mr Morris said he was astonished that the thefts had gone unreported for so long. This had led to theories that they were taken by someone in authority. He said: "We are talking in some cases about works being rolled up and walked out after dark. Fifty pictures are a very substantial loss." The audit was initiated by members of the committee after it came to their attention that there were gaps in their collection. Michael Preston, an arts design consultant, carried out the review after being appointed keeper of the pictures in 1991. His appointment came after Lord Aberdeen, a former chairman, saw two of the club's paintings for sale. The sale was halted and the paintings recovered. The audit examined records from 1974 to 1991. The results were reported to members in the Arts Club Journal in an article entitled "Lost and Gone Forever". In it Mr Preston concludes: "As there appear to be no references to the sale of any of them in committee meeting minutes or elsewhere, or any reported loss of them, one can but assume that they must have been removed unlawfully." Malcolm Bradbury, the author and an honorary club member, said he was saddened by the loss of the pictures. He said: "The club is a wonderful institution and the paintings are part of its history." The thefts have been reported to the police and to the club's insurers. But they have refused to pay out because the pictures were stolen so long ago. Mr Morris appealed to members' consciences after other avenues of inquiry proved fruitless. He said: "It was all brought to my attention in 1995 and since then we have been pursuing a number of inquiries. When I became chairman six months ago we decided we wanted to make the whole issue public. The letters just ask members if they have any information. They were a last resort and I cannot do any more than this. There is a great sense of sadness." The missing works include Samuel Palmer's Lonely Tower by Moonlight etching, estimated to be worth UKPounds:150,000; John Singer Sargent's Spanish Dancers; Dame Laura Knight's Circus Horses; James Whistler's St James Street, London and Augustus John's Girl in Red Dress and Blue Jumper.

Art thieves plunder East for Western collectors

(Electronic Telegraph, 13 december 1998)
By Francis Harris in Warsaw BILLIONS of pounds worth of art treasures are being looted from Poland and the Czech Republic as unscrupulous Western art collectors take advantage of lax security controls. Police believe that many items are "stolen to order" for Western collectors who employ professional gangs to raid galleries, churches and museums in the East. Officials say that more than UKPounds:5 billion-worth of paintings, sculptures, books and ancient manuscripts have been stolen since the Iron Curtain fell. But many works are irreplaceable, rendering price tags meaningless. Josef Stulc, a Czech heritage official, said: "The scale of plunder is reminiscent of the war." Those responsible are generally German and Austrian collectors. Some scout out likely items in the East and then direct thieves to the target. Eastern Europe's lax border controls make shipment to the West relatively easy. Polish police suspect that a Western collector was behind the recent theft of a first edition of De Revolutionibus by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. The book, published in 1543, showed the Earth orbiting the Sun. It was later declared heretical by the Vatican. The thief, a man in his forties, used stolen identity papers to enter a library in Cracow. After examining the UKPounds:200,000 book at a reading table, he told a librarian he was going to the lavatory. He and the book vanished. Another copy of De Revolutionibus was stolen from a Ukrainian library during the summer. Polish police say it seems obvious that Western collectors are involved. A spokesman said: "It is not that easy to sell the book or offer it at auction because it is so well-known." The nature of art theft has changed since the Eighties, when perpetrators were the culturally ignorant and interested only in easy money. These days the villains are worryingly highbrow. A Warsaw police under-commissioner, Slawomir Cisowski, said: "There's certainly a problem now with theft to order. These are professionals who know exactly what they're looking for." The threat is well understood by officials such as Maciej Dabrowski, the keeper of a priceless collection of 800,000 books and manuscripts at the national library in Warsaw. But requests for more money have received little sympathy from a succession of governments worried by other pressing demands for state cash. For the national library, the result is a shortage of closed-circuit television cameras, a dearth of guards and often ineffective security equipment. The consequences of art crime in Poland is the more severe because the nation's heritage was so badly depleted by German and Russian invaders. Andrzej Lojszczyk, of Poland's national heritage agency, which looks after 300,000 cultural items, said: "There wasn't very much left by 1989." In the neighbouring Czech Republic, war damage was less severe. But that merely left thieves with a wider selection. Culture ministry officials say a wealth of heritage remains, yet about 20,000 items are thought to have been smuggled westwards this year alone. Mr Stulc said: "Until 1994, thieves indulged in unselective plunder. Now they've moved from quantity to quality. That's clearly traceable to the involvement of foreign collectors - mostly in Germany." As in Poland, churches are a favoured target. Most of the 5,500 churches in the Czech Republic have been broken into. One was raided so often that the parish priest pinned a notice on the door saying: "There's nothing left to steal." Officials of the Roman Catholic Church have now created a series of repositories in secret locations, guarded by the latest security devices. These are rapidly filling with thousands of religious treasures. Yet the Church has about three million artworks and it is unlikely that they will all be stored. The rest are being catalogued with government aid. The task is monumental. Those taken before cataloguing began are unlikely to be recovered, even if foreign police forces identify them as stolen. Without pictures or detailed descriptions, ownership is virtually impossible to prove. The struggle now is to preserve what remains. But Mr Stulc fears that the raiders will keep coming back. He said: "Human greed has no limits. The thieves will cynically continue to exploit our vulnerabilty."

Despite Critics, Nazi Loot Hunt Is Right & Proper

In case you hadn't noticed, it's now fashionable to scorn efforts to recoup assets stolen by Hitler and Europe from Holocaust victims and their heirs. The Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman, who once led his own delegation to negotiate with Swiss banking authorities, now charges that the restitution battle is "desecrating the memory" of the Holocaust. A few usually crystal-clear writers are weighing in with similarly murky criticisms. Jonathan Tobin, one of the brighter voices in American Jewish letters, worries that the rash of "grandstanding" on Swiss loot, Nazi gold and stolen art is "distorting our view of the Holocaust." And recently on this very page, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer attacked what he called the "grotesque scramble for money" that would, he cautioned, revive "Shylockian stereotypes." Hold on! I agree that the spectacle of shyster lawyers trying to make a fast buck from Holocaust victims is repugnant. And I'm not enthralled by the simmering battle among Jewish organizations for "a piece of the action." As Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress, which has been in the forefront of the restitution struggle, puts it: "No one should be making a profit from the Holocaust." But that doesn't justify a blanket denunciation of those seeking truth and justice. The WJC has carried on a tough but honorable struggle. And not every lawyer involved in class actions is a money-grubbing ambulance chaser - some actually work pro bono and others for what is, by current court standards, minimal amounts. Besides, seeking court intervention is the only way many victims ever receive any compensation. Anyone who doesn't want restitution doesn't have to ask for it.

Time Is No Factor

I also dismiss the argument that wartime looting is "commonplace." So is wartime murder. And just as the mechanized slaughter of 6 million Jews was not commonplace killing, so the systematic, organized despoiling of Europe's Jewish communities and Jews is not akin to soldiers' pilfering watches from civilian houses. The fact that 50 years have gone by also is irrelevant. History doesn't work overnight. As historian Sidney Zabludoff points out, it took the U.S. more than 30 years to finally come to grips with a much less heinous crime than the Holocaust - the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans. The current battle is not redefining the Holocaust or its perpetrators- it's underscoring what happened. And its success will help aging survivors live their last years in dignity, provide for their heirs and give some financial backbone to future Jewish education and communal life, providing the ultimate answer to the Nazis and their helpers: continued Jewish survival. The weakest - and in many ways most dangerous of the neo-revisionist arguments is that struggling for truth will create new anti-Semitism. As former Nazi slave laborer Rudy Kennedy recently told "60 Minutes," "Anti-Semitism is not created by Jews, it's created by non-Jews." Still, if one follows the skewed logic of the critics, then rather than risk giving anti-Semites a self-fulfilling view of Jews as gold-grubbers, it's better that the money being sought should remain with the Swiss bankers who've sat on it for 50 years, or that the French and Austrians retain the looted paintings and precious books they hoarded, or that the Norwegians, Dutch, Croatians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and others who profited from the Holocaust, keep the plunder they hold. Best yet, wealthy German industry shouldn't pay its former slave laborers. As for the aging survivors and their heirs, I guess that giving up the search means they get to feel morally superior - happy in the knowledge that they've relieved their critics' discomfort.
Chesnoff's book on the wartime plunder
of the Jews, "Pack of Thieves,"
will be published by Doubleday in 1999.