When hundreds of federal agents raided four Southern California museums early one January morning in 2008, it set the art world ablaze, suggesting that even amid an international looting scandal museums had continued to do business with the black market in stolen antiquities.

LACMA’s Michael Govan asks federal agents permission to enter the museum on the morning of the January 2008 raids.

Acting on evidence gathered during a five-year undercover probe, investigators seized more than 10,000 artifacts at the museums and more than a half-dozen other locations in California and Illinois. The objects had allegedly been illegally excavated from sites across South East Asia, smuggled into Los Angeles and donated to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Mingei Museum in San Diego and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, according to search warrant affidavits.

But in the years since the high-profile raids, no museum officials or collectors have been indicted, and none of the seized objects have been returned to the countries from which they were allegedly stolen.

Days before the statute of limitations on criminal charges were about to expire in January, a federal grand jury indicted two men in the case. Robert Olson, an 84-year old Van Nuys man, and Marc Pettibone, a 62-year-old American living in Thailand, are both accused of one count of conspiracy and one of trafficking in stolen goods. Two peripheral players in the alleged scheme pleaded guilty to similar charges last year.

Several people targeted by prosecutors — including Bowers curator Armand Labbe and antiquities dealer Joel Malter — died during the 11-year investigation. A third target, UCLA trained pottery expert Roxanna Brown, was indicted in 2008 and died from health complications while in federal custody, leading the federal government to settle a lawsuit brought by her family for $880,000.

“I’m baffled,” said Stephen Urice, a professor at the University of Miami law school who has written critically of the raids. “Given the amount of illicit antiquities moving through the U.S. borders, these guys are really hacks. Surely there must be more significant people out there.”

In recent interviews, several people with direct knowledge of the investigation expressed anger and frustration, saying the case had languished in the U.S. Attorney’s office. They described Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns, who has directed the case since its inception, as overzealous, eager to send federal agents into museums to gather evidence but too distracted or overwhelmed with other cases to bring timely criminal charges.

As a result, they say, the case has wasted millions of dollars and inadvertently encouraged the very black market it targeted by suggesting the government is weak on enforcement. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment and feared imperiling the criminal case against Olson and Pettibone, which is set to go to trial in June.

You can read the full story here. You can find the previous LA Times coverage of the case here:

Raid story: Raids suggest a deeper network of looted art

Chicago raid on Barry MacLean: Probe of Stolen Art Goes National

Robert Olson profile: “Intrigue but no glamour for smuggling case figure”

Roxanna Brown’s story: Part I, Part II, Part III and settlement

Inflated Art Appraisals are Rampant: You Say That Art Is Worth How Much? 

Here is the Olson and Pettibone indictment:

And the indictments and plea agreements for the “peripheral figures” mentioned in the story.

Michael Malter

Robert Perez

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return two ancient Khmer statues to Cambodia after reviewing clear evidence that they were looted. Here’s Jason’s story in Friday’s LA Times:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return two ancient statues to Cambodia after receiving convincing evidence they had been looted and smuggled out of the country illegally.

Recently, someone suggested we look into the ties between Douglas Latchford and the Berlin Asian Art Museum, where he is said to have enjoyed a “special arrangement” for several years.

As you’ll recall, Latchford is the Bangkok-based British collector who was the source of the looted 10th Century Khmer statues now held by Sotheby’s and the Norton Simon museum. The Sotheby’s statue is the subject of a federal seizure lawsuit brought by the U.S. government on behalf of Cambodia, which claims the statue was illegally removed from the country in the 1970s. The government alleges that Latchford, identified in court records as “the Collector,” knew the statue had been looted from Koh Ker and conspired with Spink and Son auction house to fraudulently obtain export licenses for the statue in 1975. Latchford has denied the allegations.

We’ve previously tracked Khmer art tied to Latchford to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Norton Simon Museum and the Denver Art Museum, where his partner Emmy Bunker is a research consultant. In March, a federal judge in New York found sufficient evidence for the US government to proceed with its forfeiture case against the Sotheby’s statue.

The case started in the fall of 2012 when an undercover agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) bought 12 artifacts from 70-year old  Cesar Guarderas of West Valley City Utah for more than $20,000.

Guarderas told the agent that Javier Abanto-Sarmiento, his supplier in Trujillo, Peru, had access to more than 100 more pieces of pottery. Trujillo is a major city in northwest Peru near what was once the center of the ancient Chimu kingdom. The Chimu capital Chan Chan, just 5 km outside Trujillo, is the largest Pre-Colombian city in South America and the largest adobe city in the world. It has been a World Heritage Site since 1986.

The site has a long history of plunder, as noted by Smithsonian Magazine:

Chan Chan’s days of glory came to an end around 1470, when the Inca conquered the city, broke up the Chimú Empire and brought many of Chan Chan’s craftsmen to their own capital, Cuzco, 600 miles to the southeast. By the time Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived around 1532, the city had been largely abandoned, though reports from the expedition described walls and other architectural features adorned with precious metals. (One of the conqueror’s kinsmen, Pedro Pizarro, found a doorway covered in silver that might well have been worth more than $2 million today.) Chan Chan was pillaged as the Spaniards formed mining companies to extract every trace of gold and silver from the city.

Today, Early Chimu (Moche) and Chimu pottery like this piece acquired in 2009 by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is popular among collectors of Pre-Colombian art.

Guarderas told the undercover agent that Abanto-Sarmiento “knows where to look for pottery buried in the ground” and “had a contact with the National Institute of Culture in Peru who provides him with authentic certifications stating that the pottery are replicas and  uses the certifications to illegally export genuine artwork from Peru.”

The agent subsequently acquired another 25 objects from the network, the indictment alleges. The objects were later authenticated by experts at Utah Valley University and Tulane University.

Also named in the indictment is Abanto-Sarmiento’s brother Alfredo, who remains at large in Peru, and their sister Rosa Isabel Guarderas of West Valley Utah.

Some issues to watch as the case moves forward: How long had the alleged network been in action? To whom did they sell the looted artifacts? Have any local museums done business with them?

In 1997, the United States and Peru signed a bi-lateral agreement under the 1970 UNESCO accord prohibiting the importation into the United States of specific cultural property originating from Peru, including artifacts and ethnological religious objects. But as Rick St. Hilaire has noted, the prosecutors are pursuing smuggling charges, not violations of the import restrictions. The potential maximum penalty for smuggling goods into the United States is up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Here is the criminal complaint:

Zagorski sold ancient coins online via EBay under the name Diana Coins and Paganecoins, the indictment states. Diana Coins LLC was founded in 2008 in Hackensack, N.J., public records show. Records also list Zagorski as the owner of Balkan Import Auto Sales, Inc. in Venice Florida, where he has lived. He currently resides in Chicago, authorities said. Calls to his federal public defender attorney were not returned late Thursday.

The indictment alleges:

Zagorski owned and operated a business that sold ancient coins to domestic and international customers, primarily on eBay, from his residence in Hackensack. Zagorski, along with his wife and, at times, his daughter, operated the coin-selling business under the names Diana Coins, Paganecoins, and Diana Coins LLC. For calendar years 2006, 2007, and 2008, Zagorski provided his tax preparer with false and fraudulent information by understating the amount of gross receipts and sales earned by his business. Zagorski then caused to be filed with the IRS those federal income tax returns for 2006, 2007, and 2008 containing that false and fraudulent information.

The indictment also says that Zagorski claimed gross receipts and sales of $230,000 – $314,000 between 2006 and 2008, amounts the indictment claims were “underreported.” Each of the three tax counts carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The indictment does not address the legality of the coins he was selling. Here is the complete indictment:

District court judge George B. Daniels ruled on Thursday that the government has “sufficiently pled facts regarding Sotheby’s knowledge that the Statue was stolen at the time of import into the United States.” He also found the government had presented sufficient evidence that Douglas Latchford, the British collector who initially sold the statue, “knew the statue had been looted from Koh Ker.”

The ruling, which dismissed several of Sotheby’s key arguments, is not a final ruling but allows the case to proceed. You can find our complete coverage of the case, including past legal filings, here.

Here is Daniels’ 18-page ruling:

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court of the United States is expected to respond to a petition from the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild challenging federal import restrictions on ancient coins with unclear ownership histories.

The ACCG case started in 2009 when the Guild illegally imported 23 Chinese and Cypriot coins of unclear provenance from London in an effort to challenge import restrictions granted to those countries by the State Department under the Cultural Property Implementation Act (CPIA). The coins were seized by US Customs officials and ACCG challenged the seizure in court. Both a district court and an appellate court have upheld the seizure and rejected the Guild’s arguments. If the Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, as is expected, the test case is effectively dead.

UPDATE: As expect, this morning the Court declined to hear the case.

So what was this costly legal experiment all about? We thought it a good opportunity to ask the man behind the lawsuit: Peter Tompa.

Tompa is a a lawyer, a collector of ancient coins and a registered lobbyist for several groups of coin collectors, for whom he frequently advocates at CPAC hearings at the State Department, one of the few places where issues relating to looting and the antiquities trade intersects with the federal government. He is also the author of the Cultural Property Observer blog, which champions “the longstanding interests of collectors in the preservation, study, display and enjoyment of cultural artifacts against an ‘archaeology over all’ perspective.” On the blog, he clearly relishes his role as a bête noire to archaeologists and foreign governments that are alarmed by the link between looting and the antiquities trade.

The dialogue between archaeologists and antiquities collectors like Tompa in online forums frequently starts with substance and quickly descends into sniping and personal attacks. Both groups share a passion for the ancient world but very different values about how to enjoy and preserve it. In an effort to open a more civil dialogue on the issues, we decided to launch our own test case and invited Tompa to answer a few questions here.

Chasing Aphrodite: You’re a collector of ancient coins and a registered lobbyist for several coin collecting groups. Broadly speaking, what’s the ultimate goal for these groups?

Peter Tompa: To ensure the continued access of Americans to ancient coins of the sort openly collected world-wide.

CA: Coin collectors seemingly have every reason to deplore the loss of archaeological context, and yet they often find themselves on opposite sides of the argument as archaeologists. Why is that?

PT: The single-minded obsession with archaeological context puzzles most coin collectors. Numismatists derive their own context by studying the inscriptions and iconography found on coins, by reconstructing the chronology of dies used to strike a given series, and by analyzing the weight standard and the metallurgical content of each issue. The coins themselves often provide amazingly detailed information about the politics and economic circumstances of the time, the course of military campaigns, religious practices, and artistic development. Coins include portraits of individuals whose appearance is otherwise unknown and depictions of lost architectural and artistic monuments. That’s not to say preservation of archaeological context is not a worthy goal, just that it should not be allowed to control all else.

 CA:  Much of the debate revolves around the link between the antiquities trade and looting. In your view, what percentage of ancient coins on the market are the product of modern looting (ie post 1970)? Is looting a necessary consequence of a free market in ancient art? What do the various coin groups you’re associated with do to prevent looting and the discourage or expose the illicit trade?

PT: “Looting” is a rather loaded term, particularly when one jumps to the conclusion that anything that cannot be traced back to 1970 “must be looted.” Whatever laws may be on the books, countries like Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and China tolerate (if not encourage) their own citizens to collect unprovenanced coins. So, perhaps American collectors are being asked to be “holier than the Pope.”  Indeed, what’s most different today from when the Cultural Property Implementation Act (“CPIA”) was passed is that a number of “source countries” like Italy and China have also become major “market countries” due to their increasing wealth.

I can’t say what percentages of coins were excavated since 1970. However, I suspect they vary by type and country. For example, coins have been found in Italy since the Renaissance. On the other hand, lots of mostly low value late Roman bronze coins came out of the Balkans right after the fall of Communism. Looting equates more closely with poor governance and political and economic turmoil than free markets.  Look currently at places like Egypt, Syria and Greece.    

Metal detectors are the real issue for coins. You simply can’t find ancient coins in any number without them. There are two rational ways to deal with the issue: an outright ban or a mandatory recording system that allows the State to retain any coin for its collections based on payment of a fair market value to the finder. The problem arises where you allow individuals to buy metal detectors, but then naively expect them to either not use them at sensitive sites or turn in whatever they might find for just a token reward.

Of course, the coin trade prefers a recording system like the Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme (“PAS”) operating in England and Wales because most coins end up in the collector market after recordation. However, PAS has also garnered considerable support amongst local archaeologists because these reports have led archaeologists to sites they would not have otherwise have known existed.

Coin groups believe that such issues are best addressed at the source with such programs. Nonetheless, they also have codes of ethics.  For example, IAPN (The International Assoc. of Professional Numismatists) members agree “To guarantee that good title accompanies all items sold, and never knowingly deal in any numismatic items stolen from private or public collections or reasonably suspected to be the direct products of illicit excavations in contravention of national cultural heritage legislation.” Those who have been found in contravention of this requirement have been given the choice of either resigning voluntarily or being suspended.

CA: You’ve asked the US Supreme Court to hear your challenge of the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) decision to include ancient coins in import restrictions on antiquities from Cyprus and China. What’s the crux of your complaint?

The Ancient Coin Collector’s Guild imported these Chinese and Cypriot coins into the United States to test the law barring their import.

PT: I disagree with your premise. CPAC’s former Chairman has stated under oath that CPAC did not recommend import restrictions on Cypriot coins. We also have evidence China never specifically asked for import restrictions on coins. All we seek is judicial review of whether government decision-makers complied with the law before they changed prior precedent and placed import restrictions on coins.              

We also believe that current restrictions are grossly overbroad. The CPIA only authorizes restrictions on coins “first discovered in” and “subject to the export control” of a specific country, but U.S. Customs has instead placed far more extensive restrictions on coins based on their place of production. This has greatly limited the ability of American collectors to legally import historical coins openly available abroad.

 CA: As you’ve noted, two lower courts have both ruled against you and the odds are very slim that the high court will agree to hear your case. If the Supreme Court does not agree to review it, what next?    

PT: We will continue to press our case before Congress, CPAC and in the press.  Nor do we foreclose further litigation.

CA:  What’s your relationship with the museum community these days? In the past, you were often joined by museum officials in testifying against import restrictions before CPAC. These days, that is less common. What changed? What are your views of museums adopting the 1970 rule for acquisitions? Will coin collectors adopt similar standards?

PT: You should ask AAMD why it no longer presses government decision-makers to comply with the CPIA before imposing import restrictions. The 1970 rule is an arbitrary construct that has created a huge universe of “orphan artifacts,” — legitimate material that museums can no longer acquire. It has no impact on current looting, and indeed only distracts attention away from the poor stewardship of cultural resources in places like Greece and Italy.  Coins have routinely been traded for decades and centuries without ownership history being retained when they pass from one person to another, and only the smallest number of coins has records of sale or purchase.  I can think of no good reason for coin collectors to voluntarily adopt rule as flawed as the 1970 stipulation as a result.

We’re grateful to Peter for his responses and look forward to answering questions on his blog in the coming weeks. For more about the ACCG’s Petition for Certiorari, see here. For more on coin collectors’ view oncultural patrimony issues, see here. 

Museums and private collectors across the globe are buzzing with excitement over the March 22^nd auction at Sotheby’s Paris of the Barbier-Mueller Collection of Pre-Columbian Art.  But they should be concerned that almost half (119 out of 246) of the artifacts from present-day Latin America have no stated provenance before 1970.

Peru has announced it is seeking the return of 67 objects in the collection that it claims were illegally exported from the country, which has required government permission for the export of archaeological material since 1822. Judging from our analysis of the collection, it is likely the first of several claims.

UPDATE: The government of Guatemala has made a claim for 13 objects in the collection. ”You cannot allow private collectors to unlawfully enrich themselves at the expense of the Americas’ pre-Hispanic cultural heritage,” the culture ministry said in a statement. 

UPDATE 3/21: Mexico has called on Sotheby’s to halt the auction, citing 51 objects in the collection as Mexico’s property. The government has also said that 79 of the 130 objects of Mexican origin being offered for sale are “handicrafts,” i.e. modern fakes. Sotheby’s insists it will go forward with the auction, saying it “thoroughly researched the provenance of this collection and we are confident in offering these works for auction.” The auction house acknowledged it has “had dialogue with several nations and given careful consideration to their concerns about this sale, and we continue to welcome discussion regarding any new information on specific issues.”

UPDATE 3/21: Costa Rica has also claimed objects in the auction, the New York Times reports. 

UPDATE 3/22: Nord Wennerstrom calls the results of Day 1 sales “a train wreck” for Sotheby’s: 87 of the 172 lots failed to sell amid claims from Latin American countries and indications that several lots are modern fakes. Others suggest the asking prices were overly optimistic. 

The Barbier-Mueller Collection was built over a century, but major additions to it were made after 1992. According to the official Sotheby’s publicity, the works were gathered primarily for aesthetic purposes, though Sotheby’s emphasizes, “many possess historic provenance.” In an interview earlier this month, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller described being inspired to add to the collection of his father-in-law, Josef Mueller, while mounting an exhibition to commemorate the Columbus quincentenary in 1992. “I became really caught up in the project, and started visiting specialist dealers to complete the collection,” Barbier-Mueller recalled. “Provenance was always a concern.”

Looking at some samples from the collection, one can see why.

Maya polychrome vessels: Lts 41,121, 122, 214-219, 222 & 223. Estimate: between 18,000 and 40,000 Euros each 

Of the 11 painted Maya vessels from Guatemala and Mexico, nine have no listed provenance before 1986.

The market for Maya polychrome vessels developed around 1970 as looting of ancient Maya burial sites became more sophisticated and widespread. The growth of trafficking networks in Mexico and Central America prompted Guatemala’s 1966 Decree No. 425 – Law on the Protection and Conservation of Monuments and Mexico’s 1972 Federal Law on Archaeological, Artistic and Historic Monuments and Zones, which clarified claims of national ownership on all archeological material.

Six of the Mayan vessels passed through Merrin Gallery between 1986 and 1990. The Merrin Gallery was also the source of a bronze statue of Zeus that was returned to Italy in 2010. The stated provenance claimed Edward H. Merrin had purchased it from a Swiss collection in the 1960s; in fact, it had been stolen from the Museo Nazionale Romano in 1980. The Merrin Gallery also appears frequently in the business records of Sicilian antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina, who has been charged with trafficking in looted Classical antiquities. In dealing with Pre-Colombian material, his first passion, Merrin “certainly handled masterpieces that should never have been removed from their original sites,” Ian Graham, a Mayan expert and director at the Harvard Peabody Museum, told the New York Times in 1989, the same year the Mayan vessels began passing through the gallery. Merrin’s response: ”Look, I have four children, I have a position in society, I am active in a number of charities – I’m simply not interested in anything illegal.” In 2005, Ed and Samuel Merrin were both charged with conducting a 10-year scheme to defraud their customers who collected Pre-Colombian art.

Ulúa Marble Vase: Lot 34. Estimate: 40,000 – 50,000 Euros

Scholarship has explicitly linked the market demand for Ulúa marble vases, such as Lot 34 for sale in the upcoming auction, to the growth of illegal looting networks and pillaging in Travasiá, Honduras. Anthropologists Christina Luke and John Henderson have investigated the direct and detrimental affects museum and private purchases have on this ancient Mayan center, and the connection is unmistakably apparent: “Looting at Travesía for marble vases increased dramatically during the period when more and more marble vases appeared in galleries and when they were stolen from well-known collections.”  (See Luke, Christina and John Henderson The Plunder of the Ulúa Valley, Honduras, and a Market Analysis for Its Antiquities)

Despite the 1997 Honduran Decree 220-97 that retroactively claimed “the state was the official owner of all cultural patrimony” (Luke and Henderson, 149) the market demand continues to fuel the destruction of a rich cultural site — and production of modern forgeries. Lot 34, with no listed provenance before 2004 and estimated to sell for between 40,000 and 50,000 Euros, may well be a contemporary example of how rising prices are promoting both the devastation and falsification of ancient Mayan cultural knowledge.

Red Lists Raise Red Flags

Latin America has not been in the spotlight for cultural heritage claims to the same degree as Italy or Greece in recent years, but the illicit trade of pre-Columbian objects is a serious and continuing problem for countries such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil and Peru. Along with UNESCO’s international effort to increase protection of cultural heritage, Latin American countries passed a flurry of national legislation in the 1970s to establish legal ownership of cultural property.

More recently, the International Council of Museums has published several Red Lists of Endangered Cultural Objects. Compiled by an international group of cultural heritage professionals to combat the illicit trade and rampant looting of national artifacts, “all the categories of objects in the Red List are protected by legislation and banned from export, and may under no circumstances be imported or put on sale.”  ICOM could not be more explicit: “The Red List is an appeal to museums, auction houses, art dealers and collectors not to acquire these objects.”

A glance though the Barbier-Mueller catalogue shows quite a bit of overlap with the Red Lists — from Nayarit and Olmec figures to Gran Nicoya stone grindstones, many of the categories of objects on sale in Paris on March 22^nd are internationally recognized as the product of rampant looting.

As with all ancient burial objects, the polychrome vessels and Ulúa marble vases are “essential to the understanding of the Maya belief system, mythology, and ideology.” (ICOM Red List: Latin America, p.8)  Yet as these invaluable pieces are illegally looted they become untraceable to their original locations and all context is lost.  Without context, our understanding of one of the most advanced cultures of ancient Mesoamerica is irreparably crippled.

Frechette graduates in May and will soon be looking for gainful employment. Send any leads to us at ChasingAphrodite@gmail.com and we’ll pass them along.

UPDATE: See Donna Yates’ excellent analysis of the Barbier-Mueller collection here and here.

It is easy to forget that American museums were not the only ones caught in Italy’s investigation of the illicit antiquities trade.

The Getty, the Met, the Boston MFA, the Cleveland Museum and Princeton received most of the attention for being linked to the network supplied by antiquities trafficker Giacamo Medici. But Medici objects were also traced to museums and collectors in Germany, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Australia, Japan.

Today, eighteen years since the raid on Medici’s warehouse, at least one European museum is still refusing to return clearly looted material: the Ny Carlsburg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

Camilla Stockmann, an arts journalist at the Danish daily Politiken, has followed the story since 2006 and recently wrote me with an update: despite years of negotiations, the Copenhagen museum and Italy have still not reached an agreement.

What makes the Glyptotek’s foot-dragging particularly striking is the quality of evidence supporting Italy’s claims. Medici’s criminal sentence identified several objects in the museum that are shown in Polaroids seized in Medici’s warehouse: a terracotta relief depicting a chariot race; an acroterion (roof ornament) depicting a winged sphinx; and terracotta reliefs that comprise a pair of mounted warriors.

Then there is the tomb of an Etruscan prince from the Sabine Hills outside Rome, show above. It includes the Prince’s shield, weapons, banqueting equipment and bronze incense burners. Most striking are the remains of a horse-drawn carriage. “From Etruria and Latium, which stretched south west of the River Tiber, only a limited number of similar tombs are known,” the museum boasts in its display text.

The tomb in question, archaeologists have concluded, is in the Colle del Forno necropolis. It was looted shortly before being discovered by Italian archaeologists in 1970. “Fortunately the tomb raiders didn’t do a thorough job,” Italian archaeologist Daniela Rizzo testified in Medici’s trial. Additional material from the tomb was recovered and is now on display in the archaeological museum of Fara in Sabine, waiting to be reunited with the objects in Copenhagen.

Hecht’s memoir recounts purchasing the entire set from Medici for $67,000 and selling it to the Copenhagen museum for $1.2 million Swiss francs, or about $240,000.

Finally, there are the Glyptotek’s Etruscan antefixes depicting Maenad and Silenus. They bear an uncanny resemblance to the one the Getty Museum acquired in 1996 and put on the cover of the its antiquities catalog before returning it to Italy. The Getty acquired its antefix from the Fleischmans, who purchased it from the Hunt Collection, which was largely composed of material from Medici.

Are the antefixes related? Pictures tell the story: on the left if the Getty’s, returned to Italy in 2007. On the right is one of the Copenhagen antefix, which remain at the Glyptotek.

And here are the Polaroids seized from Medici’s warehouse showing the antefixes soon after emerging from the ground:

Further evidence about the Glyptotek’s role in the illicit trade comes from Medici’s principal connection to the art market, American antiquities dealer Robert Hecht.

Mogens Gjødesen, the museum’s director from 1970 to 1978, was tight with Hecht, a frequent visitor to the museum. In in his handwritten memoir, Hecht describes sharing pickled herring and drinking akvavit with Gjødesen and his wife on several occasions.  ”A former curator told me that he (Hecht) was called the ironmonger amongst the employees since he always showed up with a plastic bag with artefacts that he wanted to sell,” says Stockmann.

A 1970 letter from Hecht to Mogens Gjødesen discusses sending “the children” to Copenhagen.

Indeed, Hecht’s handwritten memoir reveals that when he first obtained the famous Euphronios krater from Medici, he offered it first to Gjødesen, who unsuccessfully “tried to get a Danish shipman to buy it for the Glypt.”

The journal also reveals that Hecht appears to have sold the Glyptotek illicitly exported silver figures from Greece: “After my wife’s departure I went to Greece and was shown a magnificent group of geometric AE figurina* (now in coppenhagen). (*Helmeted nude rider, 2) This group was appreciated by the Carlsberg Foundation & was acquired by the Glypotech within a few months. This group has both an artistic + a cultural interest. A helmeted mounted horseman, 2 horses back to back, the upper half of a youth, a potter at work, a miniature helmet, et. Al. The patina is smooth, pea green.”

The Danish Stonewall

When confronted with this evidence, the Glyptotek initially denied any acquisitions from Medici or his associates after 1970. As evidence emerged that contradicted that, their position shifted. Stockmann says:

“Until 2007 The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek denied any wrongdoing but after substantial politic pressure the museum sent documents about the items bought from Medici and Hecht during the 1970s to Italy. In 2007 Italy asked for a great number of items returned. Since 2008, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Italian Ministry of Culture have tried to reach an agreement.”

In 2009, the New York Times reported that those negotiations had bogged down. While most American museums had managed to reach agreements with Italy on contested material, Italy’s top negotiator said the Glyptotek “had taken a very different attitude.”

Recently talks have restarted, Stockmann told me. Both sides agree that all items related to the tomb of the Etruscan Prince should be returned to Italy in exchange for comparable loans. But the terracotta antefixes have “been the subject of a conflict.” In particular, Italy objects to language in a draft agreement on cultural cooperation that would prevent it from bringing further claims in the future.

Usually, stonewalling is a good sign that problems go far deeper. So I’ve looked into our archives to see what else I could find.

Gjødesen and the Getty Forgeries

As it happens, Gjødesen was a visiting scholar at the Getty Museum in 1978 and 1978, just as his directorship at the Glyptotek was coming to an end. While at the Getty, he had the opportunity to weigh in on two important acquisitions being considered by the museum.

The first was an archaic relief showing a Greek soldier binding the head of a fellow warrior. The Getty’s crooked antiquities curator Jiri Frel dubbed it The Death of a Hero. Several experts were dubious about the authenticity of the relief, noting the execution of details like the closed eye seemed off for the Archaic period. At $2.3 million dollars, it was not a decision to be made lightly.

Gjødesen’s opinion helped sway the board, Getty records show. In a letter to Frel dated December 14, 1978, he wrote:

From time to time it happens that a discovery is made which elaborates, extends or totally changes our conception of Greek art. This has happened once again. I am, of course, referring to the archaic Attic relief, dating from about 525 B.C. which you have determinedly tracked down during the past years and are now in a position to submit to the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum with a view to its acquisition.

You have asked my opinion. To put it bluntly, the relief is a sublime masterpiece of incredible subtlety, sentiment and expressiveness, a work of grace, intimacy and poetry, with a surprising touch of realism. It needs no letter of recommendation.

He added a key detail to clinch the objects’ authenticity:

So far the master remains anonymous, though not unknown to us, for in 1958 a relief, obviously by the same hand although of a different but for the time equally unexpected theme, was unearthed at Anavysos in Attica and brought to the Athens National Museum.

He concluded:

It is a miracle that this piece of sculpture was produced and is preserved. It is an even greater miracle that it is available. The opportunity should not be missed; it is unlikely to return. I cross my fingers for you and for the museum.

The Getty acquired the piece for $2.3 million in 1979. There are indications that Frel received a substantial kickback in the deal. Soon after, experts from around the world condemned the relief as a crude fake. The carving was incorrect, particularly the heads and hands, noted Brunhilde Ridgeway. The fragmentary image was impossible to reconstruct in a credible way, and no funerary relief of the Archaic period was known to have the same proportions.

In the 1980s, the Getty declared it a fake and returned it to the dealer.

It was not the only fake whose praises Gjødesen sang while at the Getty. Soon after the archaic relief was acquired, a head attributed to the legendary master Skopas was offered to the Getty. It had been “in a private French collection since the 1830s” and considered “one of the most important pieces of ancient art in the United States,” Frel claimed.

Gjødesen was among the scholars who lent support to Frel’s claims. The Skopas head was later established to be a modern forgery.

Was Gjødesen fooled? Or was he, like Frel, part of a scheme whose depths we have not fully plumbed? And when will the Copenhagen museum come clean?

We recently heard about a gathering in Fargo, North Dakota that mixed beer, live punk music, spoken word, archaeology, the general public, and a do-it-yourself attitude for cultural heritage. Punk Archaeology?! We wanted to know more. Here’s a report from our correspondent Andrew Reinhard, the Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and a DIY punk scribe who makes music in his basement.

Nothing could be more punk rock than an archaeology unconference held at night in a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, in February. The brainchild of professor Bill Caraher of the University of North Dakota, graduate student Aaron Barth of North Dakota State University, and professor Kostis Kourelis of Franklin and Marshall College, the February 2nd event was organic as punk itself.

“The idea came up in conversation between myself and Kostis Kourelis, an archaeologist and architectural historian,” Caraher recalled. “We both observed that quite a few archaeologists had some interest in punk rock music. As we considered the causes and consequences of this coincidence, we got to think about how punk rock music – and the larger aesthetic and lifestyle associated with that musical form – influenced archaeology. We then began to document some of these musings in a blog Punk Archaeology and, from time to time, talked about turning the blog into something more.”

Aaron Barth stepped up to help, speaking with Caraher during fieldwork about Punk Archaeology, deciding to bring Punk Archaeology to reality by hosting a colloquium in Fargo. “We had a great group of scholars willing to contribute, an intriguing group of bands, and a fantastic venue for a meeting that interrogated the borders of the academy, popular culture, and loud, chaotic, and confused social critique,” Caraher said.

Punk Archaeology speakers gathered at the Hodo Lounge on the afternoon of Feb. 2nd to prepare for the evening and to discuss current projects. Caraher, Kourelis, and Richard Rothaus of Trefoil Cultural and Environmental will spend the weekend of Feb. 9-10 documenting the Man Camps of the Bakken Oil Fields with celebrated cultural photographer Kyle Cassidy. This visit continues a string of trips conducted to study life just outside of the boomtown of Williston, North Dakota. In April, Rothaus and I will also be making a 100-mile transect of the North Dakota Badlands wilderness to explore environmental and archaeological impact of oil exploration in the western half of the state.

The evening kicked off at the Sidestreet Grille and Pub promptly at 7:17 with a four-song set of my own punk songs about problems facing archaeology and cultural heritage. Barth assisted on drums.

On October 9th last year, Caraher emailed me to see if I’d create some music to play for the unconference. Three months and 17 songs later, the album was as finished as it was ever going to get, and I was ready to play it live. In the spirit of punk’s DIY attitude, I set some limits for myself: each song must 1) be about archaeology or cultural heritage; 2) be recorded at home in my basement by myself with instruments I already owned and without any help from anybody; 3) take three hours or less to write, record, and mix the lyrics and music for each tune; 4) have each part (guitars, drums, vocals) be recorded in three or fewer takes. These rules–musical austerity measures if you will–forced me to strip down to the basics while being as creative as possible in working with what I had. It also allowed me to consider major issues relating to Punk Archaeology ranging from repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, to austerity measures creating more art theft, to the destruction of cultural heritage by religious extremists, to the need for archaeologists to be better at sharing their data with each other and with the world.

We played “Sand Diggers” about how war, oil exploration, and immigration enforcement often complicate proper excavation, “American Looters” criticizing popular treasure-hunting programming such as American Diggers, “Untenured” focusing on the perils of being an adjunct professor in the Humanities, and “Repatriate”, an aggressive call to museums to participate in the “Give-Back” movement. “Sand Diggers” resonated particularly deeply with the crowd, protesting the current drilling underway in the Baaken Oil Fields and the possible disturbance of archaeological sites on Killdeer Mountain and
elsewhere in North Dakota.

The spoken word part of the night followed, featuring “papers” by myself, Barth,Caraher, Kourelis, Rothaus, Kris Groberg (NDSU), Joshua Samuels (NDSU), and Peter Schultz (Concordia College). I spoke about discovering punk from a historical perspective, ultimately going native with the music and culture, exploring the punk family tree of bands and how that informed my world-view both personally and professionally. Groberg, an assistant professor of art history at North Dakota State University, recalled her earlier life as a “punk rock mom”, often sleeping bands like Fugazi in her basement when their tours brought them through Moorehead. Caraher instructed all speakers to keep their talks to “the length of a Minutemen song”, to hold the interest of the curious, drinking public, getting immediately to the point.

This collection of narratives was followed by a six-song set with a full-on punk band featuring Todd and Troy Reisenauer of Fargo’s Les Dirty Frenchmen on lead guitar and bass, Barth on drums, myself on vocals and rhythm guitar, and the University of North Dakota’s chair of the Music department, Michael Wittgraf on keyboard. We tore through two more originals, “Publish and Perish” which was transformed by the crowd into a ska rave-up, and “History” featuring a reading from Herodotus’ Histories. We then launched into a set of covers from the ‘60s with The Stooges’ “I Wanna be Your Dog”, heading in to The Humpers’ 1996 song “Losers Club”, a tribute to Ralph’s Corner Bar in Moorehead, Minnesota, a historic landmark in the Red River Valley punk scene that was
demolished in the late-‘00s. We finished off with “Born to Lose” by Johnny Thunders (1991, his final recording), and then destroyed the bar with the unabridged version of “My Way” by Sid Vicious to mark the anniversary of his death on Feb. 2, 1979.

Fargo punk legend June Panic followed us and played a mellow acoustic set. What’s archaeology without a nod to mythology and legend? As the final band of the night, Fargo’s What Kingswood Needs, set up, members of the audience took turns at the open mic to remember their times at Ralph’s Corner Bar. These oral histories were recorded, creating a time capsule of memory on one of the brightest and certainly most colorful eras in the Fargo-Moorehead region.

What Kingswood Needs finished the evening with two sets of original, modern punk songs, pulling from contemporary acts like Green Day, Blink 182, and Sum 41, closing the time-loop, bringing the Stooge’s proto-punk of 1969 all the way through to 2013. Thoughts on Punk Archaeology will be published post-haste by the University of North Dakota in the form of a ‘zine, the immortal DIY punk publication platform. Performances and talks were live-streamed during the event, and an edited version of these will be posted in the coming weeks. Caraher’s reflections on the event can be read on his New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World blog.

Sponsors included the North Dakota Humanities Council, the Cyprus Research Fund, Bismarck-based Laughing Sun Brewery, Tom Isern of the Center for Heritage Renewal at North Dakota State University as the Patron of Punk, as well as Rothaus who donated the gas in his truck, ferrying instruments to and from the venue, Fargo’s Sidestreet Grille and Pub.

 Join the Punk Archaeology conversation and be kept up to date on publications, audio,video, and future events on Facebook. 

You can follow Andrew Reinhard on Twitter at @adreinhard.