Finders Keepers

by Craig Childs

  If there is rent to pay on a showroom, an antiquities dealer has got to have steady turnover, new artifacts arriving on a regular basis so that the same dusty statue will not be seen for sale year after year. New artifacts have to come from somewhere, and many arrive through apparently legal means, either in circulation before the advent of antiquities laws or pulled from private collections in English manors and Indian trade shops. These are what make the business legal. How do you tell the difference between legal artifacts and those recently dug and laundered? You pretty much can’t, which is why professional dealers can work in the open, above the black market. A Santa Fe dealer once told me that half his collection was probably illegal, he just did not know which half.

  Here in a nutshell is how the global black market works. Freeport warehouses in Switzerland are signed over to fictitious businesses that pick up shipments from Egypt, Mali, Delhi, and Hong Kong and get out before a trace can be made. In India a common practice is to make replicas of looted objects, have them assessed by archaeological authorities who sign them off as fakes, then supply the real ones with this paperwork so they can slip through customs without a hitch. The artifacts are sometimes bought and sold between shell corporations to further obscure their origins, and with essentially new identities they move into the hands of auction houses and art dealers, their paperwork nearly impeccable. Voilà, they become legal, all traces of the black market obliterated so that antiquities can fly around the world in a nonstop migration.

  Sometimes a paper trail is found, or a smuggler testifies. The wrong object can blow up into search warrants, Interpol investigations, confiscation, prison time. Private collectors, museum heads, even archaeologists get caught in these traps. A respected dealer in Southeast Asian art was exposed in 2003 for running a multimillion-dollar illicit antiquities business, one of the largest in the world, that was hidden behind a craft showroom in Jaipur. Repercussions from his arrest extended around the world, exposing private buyers and collectors in the United States, Britain, and Switzerland. All those caught pleaded that these objects were bought in good faith. But good faith is almost meaningless now. Lies disappear into the chain of hands, and you can rarely know whom to trust.

  With other objects, however, the value and prestige goes nowhere but up. These are the ones with clean records, ones that raise little or no international suspicion. Who knows, they may even be legal to start with, objects that entered the trade early, before antiquities laws went on the books. The trick is knowing when to grab hold of these and when to let go.

  The late Thomas Hoving, a sharp-eyed and audacious art connoisseur from the United States, moved in and out of this game adroitly. Born into the jewelry-store barony of Tiffany & Co., Hoving developed keen aesthetic sensibilities and a penchant for antiquities. He worked as an archaeologist excavating sites in Italy in the 1950s, building his knowledge of Greek antiquities from the ground up, and there he inadvertently trained a man who would later become a master smuggler. (Hoving could not rightly say if he had ever bought from the man, explaining that smugglers excel at covering up their tracks.)

  Hoving eventually became a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and later took the position of director from 1967 to 1977, by far the museum’s most glamorous and outrageous years. He flabbergasted trustees with the prices he paid for artifacts, embarrassed them with arrogant blunders, and soundly alienated other museums. An acquaintance of his once told me Hoving was too wily and slippery to ever be taken down. “He knows what to protect and what can break,” this source said, adding that nobody was ever going to cut off Hoving’s horns or clip his balls.

  At the height of his museum career in the 1970s, while curator and director of the Metropolitan, Hoving jumped ship and went from being a self-described buyer of smuggled antiquities to a voice against the traffic. He helped draft an antismuggling treaty in 1970, the now famous UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The first and most powerful global convention of its kind, this treaty was intended to halt the flow of unprovenanced artifacts across international borders and had to be ratified country by country. With it, the division between right and wrong was made plain: if the origin of an artifact is not clearly documented and it was bought after 1970, it is considered loot. By purchasing this loot, the treaty declared, you are also buying the destruction of history.

  Hoving described himself to me as having once been a pirate. He said he used to laugh at provenance, proud of the fact that he had been able to move dubious antiquities out of Italy and into the Cloisters at the Metropolitan. What changed?

  “I realized that the time had come to stop the old age of piracy,” he said, “and that we ought to get together and slow down—you never can stop it—the unauthorized, unprovenanced market of antiquities.

  “You have to be perceptive about watershed changes,” Hoving told me. It was not that he wanted to avoid ruffling feathers. He simply saw where the market was heading and was wise enough to move into the lead. Countries were beginning to demand that their cultural heritages remain within their borders, not flung to the world. By 1970 some countries, namely Italy, had started gaining real political clout, and Hoving could see that the tide was turning.

  Hoving was also widely known as the man who purchased the smuggled Euphronios krater for what was then an astonishing $1 million. He bought it in 1972, two years after the promulgation of the UNESCO treaty, but six years before Italy (the source of the krater) actually ratified it. When Hoving saw the door closing with the UNESCO treaty being ratified by key countries, he grabbed the best artifact he could find and jumped through.

  The Euphronios krater is essentially a mixing bowl used to hold several gallons of wine and water. Made around 515 BC, it is the size of a cauldron, and it is considered by many the finest vessel to come out of Greek antiquity. It came to Hoving’s attention in 1971 through an acclaimed dealer, the elder statesman of smugglers Robert Hecht, whom Hoving had dealt with for years. From the moment the transaction began, Hoving believed the krater had been looted and taken illegally from Italy (he was most likely correct). It had been broken and flawlessly repaired, missing not even a sliver, which meant that it had likely been intentionally damaged so it could be packed small in order to cross international borders without drawing attention.

  In his own zestfully written account, published in 2001 in the online magazine artnet and in his book Making the Mummies Dance, Hoving wrote of a controversial exchange he had back in 1971 with the Metropolitan’s curator of Greek and Roman art, Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer, as the two men flew to Zurich to see the krater for the first time. Hoving had asked von Bothmer where he thought the krater came from. Von Bothmer’s response was to say nothing.

  Hoving wrote, “I at once interpreted Dietrich’s silence as his knowing the thing was illegal. At that moment he and I established an unspoken understanding. We would avoid knowledge of the history of the vase. We would never talk about where we really thought was its provenance.”

  To sell it cleanly, Hecht told Hoving the krater came from an antiquities dealer in Beirut who had had it in his family since at least 1914—which later turned out to be false, but which would have dated it to well before laws imposed by Italy or UNESCO, implying it was legal. Lebanon, not party to the treaty, was a convenient source for the krater. According to what Hecht cooked up, the artifact appeared legitimate, its fictitious provenance strong enough to pass muster with attorneys.

  In Zurich, acting as buyers for the Metropolitan, Hoving and von Bothmer found the krater in the house of a supposed furniture restorer, a place loaded with antiquities in various states of repair. When Hoving first caught sight of the piece, he was overwhelmed by its scale and elegance, and struck by the fine paintings girdling it: winged, helmeted gods lifting the bleeding body of Sarpedon, the son of Zeus killed in battle. A luminous black glaze surrounded the reddish figures. On the other side he
saw an electrifying scene of beautifully muscled warriors dressing for battle. Hoving had to have the krater. He said it was the single most perfect and powerful work of art of its size he had ever encountered. Only the most neurotically ethical buyer would have been able to step away from this one.

  Once word got out that the Met had dropped $1 million for a single artifact, the market took off, and a heightened wave of looting and smuggling started. Intended or not, Hoving’s purchase—essentially on the morning after the antismuggling UNESCO treaty—triggered a black-market cascade, a sudden rush of investors toward antiquities. The treaty’s restrictions coupled with the explosive need for new artifacts created a bottleneck, the foundation for the current artifact market.

  Italy strongly objected to Hoving’s purchase, and the New York Times did its damnedest to uncover wrongdoing, yet in the 1970s the deal looked surprisingly untouchable. Zurich was the ideal conduit for moving the Euphronios krater into the United States. In 1972 Switzerland, a country known for its leniency toward underground traffic, was not even considering signing the UNESCO treaty (even the United States did not officially recognize it until 1983).

  Almost two decades after Hoving abandoned his post at the Metropolitan, UNESCO caught up with the rest of the world, and even Switzerland got in on the action, signing the convention in 2003. Italian and Swiss investigators raided a Geneva warehouse in 1995 and brought down an antiquities smuggling ring that led them to Hecht. In Hecht’s Paris apartment they came up with enough material to lead them to the conclusion that the Euphronios krater had nothing to do with the supposed Beirut dealer. The krater, they charged, was acquired in 1971 by a crew of looters at an Etruscan tomb near San Antonio di Cerveteri in Italy. In 2008, after years of legal battles and negotiations, the Metropolitan finally gave up the Euphronios and sent it back to Italy.

  I asked Hoving if he saw any contradiction about having bought the Euphronios after being part of the UNESCO treaty, and he snapped at me, saying I obviously didn’t know anything about it.

  “It was years before we found out the krater was smuggled,” he said brusquely.

  But hadn’t Hoving written that he knew it was smuggled when he bought it? No, not exactly. He said he had merely believed it was smuggled, a notion he and von Bothmer decided to keep to themselves for the longest time. The difference between believing and actually knowing it was smuggled was enough to put him in the ethical clear, at least in Hoving’s mind. I asked him if any blame was attached to him and he told me that Hecht had “bamboozled” him.

  When I spoke with Hoving, he was seventy-seven years old and the krater had just gone back to Rome, supposedly for good. Almost four decades had passed since his suspicious purchase, and in that time the antiquities world had changed markedly, one could say thanks to Hoving’s own hand.

  When Hoving started working to stop the illegal trade (when it suited him, apparently), he became a loose cannon among institutions, a former insider taking strong positions against museums that were buying artifacts with questionable provenances. He fingered the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, declaring that a sculpture of Aphrodite bought by the Getty in 1988 for $18 million had been looted from Morgantina, Sicily, and eventually it was repatriated. He took personal credit for getting the museum’s curator Jiri Frel fired in 1984 for blundering excesses. (At a dinner with Frel in Rome, Hoving claims the enraged former curator snatched a bottle of mineral water and began striking him with it until waiters and patrons jumped in and stopped the fray.)

  From there the dominoes continued to fall. The Getty was caught holding artifacts that, like the Euphronios krater, had come through Robert Hecht. Italy, inflamed with its new power in the global artifacts arena, demanded justice, and both Hecht and the Getty’s new head curator, Marion True, were indicted and stood trial in Rome, and their trial is ongoing.

  Hoving laughed about Marion True and the Getty debacle. “They had it coming,” he said.

  He laughed, too, when I asked him how he felt about Italy finally forcing the Metropolitan to give back the Euphronios krater.

  “Museums have too much shit anyway,” he said.

  Hoving envisioned a brave new world of artifacts being exchanged rather than sitting under the thumb of curators in large metropolitan museums. When the Getty decided to send artifacts back, it signed an agreement of exchange with the Italian culture ministry that allowed the museum to receive long-term loans of artifacts. The Metropolitan made a similar move, accepting a rotation of artifacts in return for the Euphronios and other pieces.

  Put simply, Hoving was a shit stirrer. Listening to his catty eloquence and his degrading quips, you realized he must have been like a bomb going off in the staid world of antiquities.

  Complain as one might about the buying and selling of the past, the fact remains that there is a legitimate antiquities market. It is part of international art commerce, a free flow of publicly owned artifacts—such as those from St. Lawrence Island and other pockets of legal sources—that has been going on for as long as there have been early cultures to root around in. These artifacts, at least most of those acquired before 1970, can move openly across many borders, bought and sold in broad daylight. For the countless miscellany of vases, bells, and statues, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between those that are fundamentally legal and those laundered beyond recognition.

  Artifact prices on the open market are soaring. Speculation is the primary element determining value, which allows prices to go outrageously high on a whim. In 2007, a 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian limestone figurine the size of a chess piece, of a lion in a human pose, was publicly auctioned. It started with an opening bid of $8.5 million and four bidders quickly elevated it to $27 million (it was not expected to go over $18 million). Finally an anonymous gray-suited English gentleman standing in the back of the room lifted his paddle and carried the bid up to $57.2 million and took the artifact home.

  Everything in the figurine’s record-breaking sale was legal, the relevant records open to the public. The artifact had been on loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art since 1948, until the actual owner, the museum’s former president of the board, decided to pull it from display and put it up for auction at Sotheby’s. The auction house called it one of the “last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands.”

  Noting a sudden escalation in the market brought on by this figurine, Time magazine ran an article putting antiquities at the top of its list for discretionary investments. The article made sure to say that you need not be scared away by million-dollar price tags. For under $10,000 you too can be a successful player in the antiquities market by legally buying two to four quality artifacts from a dealer, flipping them at a profit, then buying and selling more expensive pieces, and so on. The Time reporter concluded by saying, “No matter how ornate a stock certificate might be, an Egyptian amulet is always going to look better in your living room display case.”

  This statement stunned archaeologists, who carped at the magazine, saying it failed to mention downsides such as countries losing their cultural heritage, looters ransacking history, and an underworld where artifacts are being moved by some of the same people who handle guns and drugs.

  Indeed, legal sales are a veneer spurring greater demand, which inevitably results in more digging and smuggling to push fresh artifacts onto the market. How do you keep a market legitimate when it causes the last tombs to be raided? It is a precarious ethical balance dealers live with.

  Hicham Aboutaam, part owner of the prestigious New York City and Geneva gallery Phoenix Ancient Art, once told me he does everything in his legal power to track provenance before he buys or sells. He said that it behooves him to acquire only legal artifacts. This master antiquities dealer adds, however, “It would be naive to say we can know everything, especially when it comes to the many smaller works of art. Who out there is willing to spend more money on lawyers than the actual value of the piece?”

  Aboutaam, no
w one of the most powerful public dealers in the world, grew up in Beirut, where his father was successful in the same line of work. He was raised in a house full of artifacts he considered both the basis of his education and his toys. He began collecting at the age of thirteen, first seals and scarabs, then Roman and Greek antiquities.

  The antiquities business used to be very different, though: artifacts sold in back rooms, museum curators drifting in and out, buying as if they could not get enough. The antismuggling laws on the books were lightweight, and dealers who violated them could put up a jewelry store or a furnishing business as a front, and get away without much hassle.

  Times have changed. Now that UNESCO’s convention and heaps of newer laws have taken effect, antiquities dealers are probed to the point where they have to either go deeper underground or go public. Entering the public spot-light with full-color aplomb, as Aboutaam has done with his highly visible sales, can be risky. Aboutaam has not had an especially easy go of it. In 2001 it was reported that the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth returned a Sumerian statue it had bought from Phoenix Ancient Art for $2.7 million, citing purported tax problems with the object. The gallery refunded the purchase price. Then, in 2003, Phoenix forfeited a $20,000 alabaster stela when the piece went up for auction at Sotheby’s. The auction house, which has since hired a former federal art-crimes prosecutor to handle provenance issues, recognized the stela as already belonging to a museum in Yemen, and customs agents quickly seized it. In December of that same year Aboutaam was arrested for providing false documentation while moving a 2,000-year-old silver vessel into the United States, claiming its origin as Syria when it actually came from Iran (he says it was a paperwork error). The Iranian piece had been sold to a private buyer (a trustee for the Metropolitan) for nearly $950,000, but was seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.