Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  The Fleischmans were thoroughly charmed. They had finally gotten their catalogue and the recognition they wanted. For all the hoopla, the incident that left the deepest impression came as the Fleischmans and True were walking to the auditorium for Larry's lecture. They met a group of ten-year-old schoolchildren, who began peppering him with questions: How did you get all these things? Where did you store them? What will you do with them?

  Suddenly, one boy called out, "Mr. Fleischman! Is this about the best thing that has ever happened to you?"

  "Yes," the collector said, laughing. "It surely is."

  NOT EVERYONE WAS tickled. The exhibit and the Getty's relationship with the Fleischmans drew protests from archaeologists, who accused the museum of glorifying the fruits of the looted antiquities trade. More than 85 percent of the objects on display had no documented ownership history, a good indication that they had been recently looted.

  The Getty came in for scorching criticism from Boston University archaeologist Ricardo Elia, who accused the museum of helping the Fleischmans legitimize their loot, which could now be sold off at higher prices or donated for major tax deductions. He also accused officials at the Getty and the Cleveland Museum of Art of cozying up to the collectors in hopes of obtaining the collection down the road.

  "Collectors create the demand for antiquities and provide, however indirectly, the financing for lootings," Elia wrote in an October 1994 opinion piece for the Art Newspaper. "The link between collecting and looting is so strong that it is no exaggeration to say ... that collectors are the real looters."

  Elia had good reason for his suspicion that the Getty was after the Fleischman collection. Getty management and board members were well aware that the Fleischmans were potential major donors. True and other senior Getty officials took the Fleischmans on a tour of the museum to explain the planned renovation, which would transform the Getty Villa in Malibu into the nation's first museum dedicated exclusively to antiquities. The museum's hope was obvious: the collectors would be so impressed with the plans being spun out by their dear friend that they would agree to donate some of their antiquities to the Getty.

  ELSEWHERE IN THE Getty, the Fleischman exhibit brought to the surface unresolved tensions, the same crosscurrents that had provoked the fight between Luis Monreal and John Walsh over the Aphrodite six years earlier. Staff at the Getty's Conservation Institute complained that while they traveled the world protecting archaeological sites from degradation through tourism, weather, and plunder, the museum's staff was effectively encouraging looting. The institutional hypocrisy was such that conservators were often given the cold shoulder by foreign officials, who suspected that they were actually staking out the country's archaeological treasures for the museum's voracious curators. The staff members sometimes found themselves drawing crude diagrams on paper napkins to explain the institutional "firewall" between the Getty folks who were eager to preserve their cultural heritage and those who wanted to buy it.

  The tension had become particularly acute when the Conservation Institute hosted a series of classes for seni or archaeological officials between 1989 and 1992. The location was Paphos, Cyprus, an ancient Roman settlement and World Heritage site featuring a number of stunning mosaics. The Getty flew in cultural administrators from Poland, Tunisia, Chile, and other countries for seminars on how to protect the Paphos mosaics and other celebrated sites from the increasing rush of cultural tourists. Over dinner and drinks, however, conversation invariably drifted back to the Getty's own appetite for art and the dilemma it created. Foreign officials puzzled over how the Getty Trust could give them grants to preserve patrimony with one hand while using the other to pay for all the ancient art it wanted. Back at home, conservation staff counted every acquisition of an unprovenanced antiquity as a moral setback.

  In early 1993, the bad feelings erupted. Miguel Angel Corzo, Monreal's replacement, invited Harold Williams in for a discussion with his staff. Sitting around a large table in a conference room, the conservators began speaking out about the museum's ethics—an astonishing event within the top-down culture of the Getty Trust, where dissent was rare.

  Politely but firmly, the staff discussed how the Getty was undermining its own image: The museum's acquisitions were becoming a problem. They were getting in the way of what the conservators were trying to do. It was high time the trust changed the museum's acquisition policy. The Getty should do the right thing.

  As always, Williams was a polite and curious listener. He asked good questions and was not dismissive. Without giving away how he felt, he thanked everyone, then left.

  10. A HOME IN THE GREEK ISLANDS

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1994, True was vacationing on the Greek island of Páros at the home of her friend, Dutch archaeologist Stella Lubsen, when Lubsen mentioned that a nearby house was going on the market. True had always longed for a holiday home in Greece. Páros holds a special meaning among those who have dedicated their lives to studying the classical world. The island was a hub of the Cycladic culture of the early Bronze Age, and its quarries of semitranslucent white marble have been coveted through the centuries. The Greeks prized the marble so highly that they used it in their best works, including the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the head and arms of the Getty's Aphrodite. Now largely known as a backpackers' paradise, Páros is blessed with white beaches and rolling hills dotted with traditional Greek "sugar cube" homes. Many of True's new friends spent their summers on nearby islands.

  True's position at the Getty had given her a passport into the upper reaches of Greek society, which revolved around Greece's oldest private museum, the Benaki. Founded in 1930 by Antonis Benakis, an art collector and scion of a prominent family of Greek expatriates in Alexandria, Egypt, the museum was located just around the corner from the Presidential Palace in Athens. Like the Getty Trust, the Benaki was run by a private foundation that, in addition to housing a large art collection, sponsored scholarship and education. Its donors include Greece's oldest, wealthiest families, and the white neocolonial family mansion housing it served as a de facto embassy of Greek elites. The Benaki's director was Angelos Delivorrias, a charismatic, chain-smoking expert in classical Greek sculpture and a close friend of True's. They had met years earlier when Delivorrias was a visiting scholar at the Getty. When the museum banished Jiri Frel, Delivorrias had emerged as a leading candidate for the job, until he turned it down because his wife refused to relocate to California. That paved the way for True to be promoted from within. The Benaki director maintained close ties to the Getty and True. Indeed, True so trusted Delivorrias that he was one of the first people she had asked to look at the Aphrodite.

  Just down the road from the Benaki was the younger Museum of Cycladic Art, founded in 1986 to hold the private collection of billionaire shipping magnate Nicholas Goulandris. Since his death, the museum had been artfully run by his prominent widow, Dolly Goulandris, the famous but reclusive queen of Greek society. She and her husband, who had built a shipping empire second only to that of Aristotle Onassis, had amassed an enviable collection of Cycladic sculpture over twenty-five years with purchases in both Greece and abroad. Almost all of the collection came from undocumented excavations. The Goulandrises bought freely from looters, dealers, and auction houses alike. Dolly often did so with the permission—at times the encouragement—of Greek government officials, who occasionally asked her to snatch up objects the state could not afford. The Goulandrises considered their purchases of illicit antiquities a public service. Dolly tapped New York antiquities collector Shelby White, one of her closest friends, to serve on the museum board. White, a socialite and Met trustee, and her husband, Leon Levy, had built their own impressive antiquities collection. The Fleischmans were regular members of the Greek crowd as well.

  True had fallen in with this group during her regular visits, when she joined gatherings of the cultural elite at Dolly Goulandris's house on Skyros. The crowd also flocked to the luxurious compound of Robin Symes and
Christo Michaelides, whose extended family owned an entire peninsula on the nearby island of Schinoussa. When elites from around the world docked their yachts there for cocktails under the setting sun, True was among them. She found it increasingly difficult to avoid the occupational hazard of curators becoming chummy with collectors and dealers who stood to benefit financially through flattery and friendship. "I have to say, I enjoyed it," she later said. "I enjoyed these people."

  Now Lubsen was offering True membership in the club. The small villa for sale next door to Lubsen included a renovated 1,400-square-foot farmhouse, a converted chicken coop that served as additional sleeping quarters, and a swimming pool. True was desperate to buy it. "I don't want anyone to have this house but me," she told Lubsen. "I don't know how to do it, but I would love to buy it."

  Of course, on her curator's salary of about $80,000 a year, True couldn't afford to buy it outright. And finding financing would be a problem. She couldn't get an American bank to loan her money for a foreign house, and Greek banks wouldn't give mortgages to foreigners. She was already burdened by monthly payments on her Santa Monica condo, where she had taken in a housemate for a time to help pay the mortgage. She would need a private loan on generous terms to buy the Páros home. Her thoughts turned to her friends the Fleischmans.

  When True returned to Malibu, she approached John Walsh about the ethics of asking the couple for a loan. He advised against it, pointing out that such a personal favor would be "problematic" and "misinterpreted" as a quid pro quo. After all, the Getty had just exhibited their collection and was hoping to acquire it in the future.

  For months, True fretted over how to make the purchase. Lubsen and her husband offered to make the down payment, but True still had to come up with the rest. The dream of owning her own hideaway in the cradle of ancient civilization appeared to be beyond her grasp, until she turned to another friend, Christo Michaelides. He had wealth and connections, both from his sister Despina Papadimitriou, who had married into a prominent Greek shipping family. "There is a lawyer ... who arranges loans for shipping companies," Michaelides told True. "Why don't you talk to him?"

  The lawyer, Dimitrios Peppas, had done legal work for Michaelides' family and had arranged loans for Christo himself. With Peppas's help, True obtained a four-year loan of $400,000, with a balloon payment due at the end. The arrangement allowed True to buy the house and gave her four years to find other financing. Peppas passed the loan through Sea Star Corporation, a Panamanian shell company created exclusively for the transaction. Michaelides later told a relative that his family was the true source of the money.

  BACK IN MALIBU, True was hard at work forging a new acquisition policy that would break with other museums and put the Getty firmly in the camp of those who wanted to discourage looting. Her partner in the endeavor was an Australian archaeologist named John Papadopoulos, whom True had lured away from the University of Sydney a few months earlier. Papadopoulos's wife worked at UCLA, and he'd been desperately searching for a position in Los Angeles. As an archaeologist, however, he had been reluctant to accept a position at what was widely considered to be the museum world's leading consumer of black-market antiquities. When True approached him in 1993 with an offer to become an associate curator in the Getty Museum's antiquities department, he said as much. That's perfect, True replied. "I want someone with an archaeological background. I want to start moving in new directions."

  That direction, she explained, included drafting a tougher antiquities acquisition policy, one that would closely mirror the ethical guidelines of the American Institute of Archaeology, which called on members to refrain from publishing unprovenanced artifacts. The idea was to prevent academics from lending any legitimacy to looted objects or boosting their value by assigning dates. True admitted to Papadopoulos that the Getty's 1987 policy, which relied on the word of antiquities dealers and notification of foreign governments, was deeply flawed. She said it had led to needless tensions inside the Getty, as well as between curators and archaeologists around the world who shared the same broad goals.

  Convinced of True's sincerity, Papadopoulos took the job in January 1994. Even before he began working with True on the new policy, the curator assigned him to another delicate task. The archaeological director at Francavilla Marittima, located in Calabria and one of the oldest known Greek outposts on the Italian peninsula, had alerted the Getty that several objects donated to the museum under Jiri Frel had almost certainly been looted from an area of the site where ancient religious items were buried.

  "Can you look into this?" True asked Papadopoulos. "I don't want to just give this material back. I want to do it in a way that will fully document it, so it won't just go back into the market in two or three years and then end up in some private collection."

  Papadopoulos began digging through the Getty's archives. What he found confirmed their worst fears. The objects in question were among hundreds of Corinthian and Greek vase fragments, ivory pendants, small sculptures, and amber and bronze objects that Frel had lumped under two nonsensical categories. One bore the title "Favissa," Latin for "pit"; the other "Monte Testaccio," the name of an Italian hill region renowned for its rich layers of discarded ancient pottery. The headings didn't make any sense to Papadopoulos. Then it dawned on him: this was one of Frel's jokes, wrapped in a riddle.

  The initials, "F" and "M," stood for Francavilla Marittima, the true origin of the items. Frel had acquired the material as donations between 1978 and 1981, precisely the time when looters were mining the ruins of Francavilla Marittima. Some of the shards matched others at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bern, which also had acquired hundreds of items apparently looted from the same sixth-century B.c. pottery dump. In all, the two museums had more than three thousand plundered objects from the site. Since the objects weren't worthy of display, the matter didn't draw wide public attention. But archaeologists and curators knew that they represented one of the most massive collections of illicit objects ever discovered.

  After alerting the grateful Italians, True had Papadopoulos coordinate with representatives from Bern and the Italian Ministry of Culture to publish photos and detailed descriptions of the pieces before returning them, a laborious process that would take seven years. They hoped that this approach would serve as a model for repatriations and right some of the wrongs committed by Frel.

  Although most curators in True's position would have done nothing, hoping not to draw attention to the mess, True's boldness only enhanced her reputation as forward-thinking and an ally of source countries. Italian newspapers carried glowing comments by the Carabinieri about the Getty curator.

  TRUE AND PAPADOPOULOS'S first draft of the new acquisition policy committed the Getty to a "bright-line" provision, one that barred the museum from accepting antiquities lacking a documented ownership history dating back to 1972, the year the American Institute of Archaeology had recognized the 1970 UNESCO Convention. Only a handful of university museums, such as those at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, had adopted such strict acquisition policies, and even they did not always follow their own guidelines.

  The policy met with immediate resistance from Debbie Gribbon, the museum's assistant director. She considered it too severe and worried that it would put the Getty at a competitive disadvantage. Drawing the bright line at 1972 would also be embarrassing, since the Getty's shelves were overflowing with objects that would be deemed tainted under the new guidelines. Gribbon had lived through four-alarm cultural patrimony drills before, only to watch them disappear. She considered the growing concerns about provenance just another passing fad.

  Others at the museum also pressured True to back off. True's crusade was at cross-purposes with the basic job description of a curator—to acquire. And conceding legal ground on antiquities could lead to such concessions regarding paintings and drawings, which had their own peculiar problems.

  George Goldner, the Getty's drawings curator and one of the
brightest minds at the museum, expressed more personal concerns before leaving the Getty in 1993. A friend who had helped act as a go-between to keep True from leaping to the Met, Goldner began wondering whether the curator was trying to whitewash history. He recalled approaching True years earlier with his misgivings about the Aphrodite, which he felt was certain to spark the interest of Ital ian authorities. "Do you know where this thing is from?" he'd asked. "Yes, I do," she'd said mysteriously, in a way that suggested she knew more than she could say. Now she was touting a stringent antiquities policy. Goldner feared that such a policy might come across as taunting the Carabinieri, who still wanted back their "Morgantina Venus," the name Italian authorities used for the Aphrodite.

  You're getting yourself in trouble here, Goldner told her at one point. You're not dealing with dumb people. They're not going to say, What a nice girl in a nice dress! She's not buying looted antiquities! They're going to say, Why is she here when no other curator is here?

  True said that the Getty was doing the right thing and that she wanted everybody to know that it had a great acquisition policy.

  TRUE'S PUSH FOR the new policy coincided with the end of construction at the Getty Center, the massive new hilltop campus in Brentwood. The center stood as Harold Williams's greatest accomplishment—nearly one million square feet of new floor space to accommodate the museum's burgeoning art collection and unite the Getty Trust's programs, long scattered throughout the Los Angeles area.