Date: 06/12/99
By JOYCE MORGAN
An international expert on illegal
antiquities has raised the specter of looted art in the National Gallery of
Australia.
Dr Neil Brodie, co-coordinator of
the Illicit Antiquities Research Center at Cambridge, wrote to the gallery in
September asking how it had acquired a 10th-century Indian temple column.
He said he had not received a
reply to his letter or follow-up e-mail.
Dr Brodie, who addressed a Sydney
conference on art crime yesterday, said temples and historic sites in
South-East Asia were being looted, and antiquities sold abroad.
''I wrote to [the NGA] and asked
what their acquisitions policy was ... and what checks were in place,'' he said
outside the conference.
Dr Brodie is concerned that looted
material could end up in galleries.
He has asked the NGA about the
provenance, or pedigree, of the column, and wants to know how it was removed
from India, and when.
The more recently a piece had been
removed, the more likely it was to have been looted, Dr Brodie said.
''The cultural damage caused by
the unrecorded removal of artifacts is irreparable.
''People assume something is
innocent until proven guilty. I think we should be taking the opposite tack:
guilty until proven innocent.''
Dr Brodie said the public should
be more aware of the extent of the trade in illicit antiquities and more
questioning of objects they saw for sale.
''They see all these objects
appearing, and they don't ask where they're coming from,'' he said.
''They just think: 'Oh, that's
nice' ... they have to do more checking into things.''
The National Gallery's director,
Dr Brian Kennedy, said he was not aware of Dr Brodie's letter or e-mail.
All reasonable checks had been
made, and there was no evidence to suggest the column - which had been bought
from Sotheby's in New York in September 1998 - had been looted.
''Obviously, you can't prove it
wasn't, but you can make every effort to check, in as much as you can do
that,'' Dr Kennedy said.
The column, believed to be from a
Jain temple in Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan, was a relatively inexpensive
purchase and was not vital to India's national heritage, he said.
Dr Kennedy did not know how long
the work had been in America.