Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  The more Walter spoke, the angrier he got. He knew those cut-up Byzantine frescoes were trouble, but there was nothing he could do, because Dominique was “in love.” I assumed that what just happened in Munich was a match for what happened four years earlier when Dominique and I visited George Zacos at his apartment in Basel, when she bought, it seemed to me on impulse, more than two hundred Byzantine bronzes that George had laid out on his living room carpet. And for Christmas presents to give to her children, she bought a half-dozen Byzantine ceramic bowls that were stacked in his basement storeroom.

  Dominique de Menil was decisive and, yes, she was susceptible to art infatuation on short notice. The question of the provenance of the bronzes and bowls, which George was happy to share (the Marmara shore of Istanbul for the former and a shipwreck in the Aegean for the latter), meant nothing to Dominique, who seemed to be above such legal or ethical constraints. Now something similar had happened, but with a much bigger treasure. Yanni had found his buyer.

  So yes, I could imagine that Walter Hopps had a problem; there was, after all, a big difference between anonymous Byzantine bronzes and bowls at around $1,000 each and the $600,000 frescoed interior of a Byzantine church that would inevitably show up, denuded. Moreover, although Walter gave me a rehash of that odd story of the sands of Binbirkilise, I suspected he shared my assumption that the church would show up not in southeastern Turkey but in occupied Cyprus. But why was Walter Hoops angry at me? Because, in his opinion, this was all my fault. Walter’s truncated accusatory narrative included something about the Menil Foundation’s curator seeking out Yanni Petsopoulos and, through him, these cut-up frescoes on my instruction. And then Dominique, introduced to the works and the Petsopoulos mission to save them, was smitten.

  Why had Walter concluded that I had played the role of cupid? I asked him, but it was clear his mind was made up. Moreover, he felt that since I had gotten him into this mess, it was my job to get him out. Despite being falsely accused, I gave Walter the best advice I could. I told him to assume the frescoes came from Cyprus. I told him that the offer on the table in April was $600,000; his silence at that point suggested to me that the price Dominique was quoted in Munich was much higher. Did they have legal counsel? The answer was yes; Walter had retained Herbert Brownell, Jr., legal advisor to the Met and former Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration. He referenced an export license that had been shown to him in Munich that supposedly was issued by a Turkish official, and we spoke briefly about who in Cyprus, should that be the location of the plundered church, would have the authority to issue such a license.

  Toward the end of the conversation, Walter mentioned a Turk named “Fuad” (“Big Fuad,” I believe he said) with an umlauted last name. I took Fuad to be a second Turk present at the Munich meeting, distinct from the seller. According to my notes, the year 1974 was mentioned within the context of something else Walter had seen that day in the Turk’s apartment, namely a “Cypriot mosaic head” whose image Walter said had been published by Dumbarton Oaks—information that I assumed Petsopoulos supplied.

  In fact, at the time I had no knowledge whatsoever of any Cypriot mosaic head (although in later years I would know it very well). Why did Walter tell me all of this? Did he think I would recognize Fuad’s last name or recall that mosaic head? Or was he simply burdening me with the liability of knowledge he himself wished he did not have? Whatever his motive, the combination of a looted mosaic that might further connect me to players in this transaction, and the involvement of someone named Big Fuad, suddenly made me very nervous.

  I made it clear that neither my name nor that of Harvard should be associated in any way with what I assumed was an all-but-done deal to buy the frescoes and ship them to Houston. I told Walter that he needed the advice of a respected museum director and I suggested Sherman Lee at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But no matter what Lee might say, he should do what Dumbarton Oaks had done with the magnificent Saint Peter icon we bought in 1982: Put the purchase funds in an escrow account and send registered letters with photographs to the embassies of all potential countries of origin. No bad news, and the funds are released to the Turk; bad news and they revert to Dominique de Menil. I do not recall now if we came to any resolution at the end of the call—or whether I thought Walter Hopps had come to see me as an ally and not as the villain. I remember very clearly, though, that I was rattled.

  Nevertheless, when I hung up the phone and looked out again into the clear early summer air of Minnesota, I felt a sense of relief that all this was taking place half a world away and really had nothing to do with me. And as things unfolded that summer back in Dumbarton Oaks, I had good reason to believe that was true. It was soon clear that Walter Hopps had decided to find out for himself where the Munich frescoes had originated. I knew that because a few weeks after the call to Paris, I saw his medieval curator, Bertrand Davezac, fishing around in the Dumbarton Oaks photo archive.

  And I later heard from the head of the archive that the Menil Foundation had hired a graduate student from Georgetown University to do some research, which I assumed was their continuing effort to track down the violated church. This made perfect sense, given DO’s long history of documenting the Byzantine monuments of Cyprus. So I figured that Walter was taking charge, he would figure things out, and I was effectively out of this mess. This gave me some comfort.

  MY SENSE OF COMFORT LASTED FOUR MONTHS, until Monday, November 7th, which was a very bad day for me. I recall seeing a beautiful Bentley with the vanity plate “Stanley” parked just opposite the entrance to Dumbarton Oaks as I walked in to work that morning. It signaled that Dumbarton Oaks’ lawyer, Bill Stanley, was on site. A short time later, as I was leading a women’s group through the Byzantine galleries, the front desk security officer came to tell me that my boss, Giles Constable, wanted to see me in his office, immediately. The tour ended abruptly and, in a moment, I was sitting in Giles’ rococo office under the somber gaze of William Stanley of Covington & Burling. The feeling in the room was cold. Bill Stanley’s narrative fit the mood. Dumbarton Oaks had been approached by the Embassy of Cyprus for some legal advice, which Giles was happy to extend through Covington & Burling, given DO’s long and close association with Cyprus through various excavation and documentation projects. The embassy had received a registered letter, in August, from Herbert Brownell, Jr., of the New York firm of Lord, Day & Lord. It included photographs of Byzantine frescoes that Brownell’s unnamed client intended to purchase, subject to whatever evidence Cyprus could supply that the frescoes had been stolen from a church on the island.

  I immediately understood this to mean two things: first, that the Menil Foundation sleuths, Bertrand Davezac and the Georgetown graduate student, had failed to find those Munich frescoes in the Dumbarton Oaks photo archive; and second, that Walter Hopps had followed my advice and, by way of Herbert Brownell, had sent registered letters with photographs of the frescoes to all potential countries of origin. (I found out later these included Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Romania, Syria, Turkey, and Yugoslavia.) Cyprus responded with the claim that the frescoes had been stolen after 1974 from the Church of Saint Euphemianos just outside the village of Lysi, in the occupied northern sector of the country. The Embassy of Cyprus contacted Dumbarton Oaks for help, DO contacted Stanley, and Stanley and the Ambassador of Cyprus to the United States had met with Brownell.

  I gathered pretty quickly from Bill Stanley’s story that conversations were underway that might lead to some long-term loan agreement with eventual repatriation, and that Brownell had revealed his client to be the Menil Foundation. But they were now at an impasse over the embassy’s demand that the Menil Foundation divulge the identity of the seller and the location of the frescoes, which Dominique refused to do. So then, as I understood it, Herbert Brownell let it be known to Bill Stanley that there was someone at Dumbarton Oaks who had special knowledge of the circumstances of those frescoes, and that someone was Gary Vikan. Giles, and now
Bill Stanley, knew that I had worked for Dominique de Menil.

  I was becoming increasingly anxious, especially when that tony lawyer declared that my Menil Foundation connection now “compromised” Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard, because it gave the appearance that they had somehow colluded in the deal. Bill Stanley requested that we meet later that day at the offices of Covington & Burling on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, so that I could make a statement revealing, I assumed, what I had learned in confidence from Yanni Petsopoulos the previous April.

  That afternoon, in a windowless Covington & Burling conference room, Bill Stanley, Giles Constable, and I were joined at an enormous table by a young lawyer with short blond hair, who was there with a legal pad to record what I had to say. No one seemed at all interested in where the frescoes were now. Perhaps they assumed I didn’t know. And I suspected that Walter Hoops had kept our late-night phone call to himself, so I felt no need to go into anything about the Munich Turk, Big Fuad, and the mosaic head. I made it clear that I had been approached in confidence about these frescoes and for that reason had not said anything to Giles Constable about them; nor would I reveal the name of the person who approached me, whom I never understood to be the owner. The young blond guy said something about lawyer-client confidentiality, but that was meaningless to me, given that any action that might be taken by the Embassy of Cyprus on the basis of information I supplied would certainly come back to me. I had made a promise, and I intended to keep that promise—sort of.

  I was set on protecting the actual name, Yanni Petsopoulos, but I had no compunctions about sharing what he had told me in my office in April. If they could come up with four from two plus two, that would be their ingenuity at work and not Vikan breaking his promise. So I explained that I was approached during the opening festivities surrounding our exhibition honoring the Saint Peter purchase by “a Greek dealer in Byzantine art working out of London.” Now, while this almost certainly meant nothing to either Bill Stanley or Giles Constable, to anyone with any familiarity with the antiquities trade, only one person would qualify, namely, Yanni Petsopoulos. I told them about the sketch and photographs that this unnamed person had shown me, about the story of Binbirkilise and how I didn’t believe it, and mentioned in passing that the frescoes were said to be in Germany. I wondered as I spoke whether I learned that from Yanni or from Walter. But no one seemed to care. All they cared about was that unnamed name.

  I had the feeling that I could be stuck there indefinitely until I came up with a compromise: If they managed to discover the right name themselves on the basis of what I had just told them, then I would confirm that indeed that was the right name. As it turned out, this little game took exactly two days. The embassy’s first try was Constantine Leventis, which was not a bad guess. Leventis was the Permanent Delegate to UNESCO from Cyprus and an active player in the propaganda and lobbying campaign surrounding the plunder of Christian sites in the Turkish sector of the island. And, as I would later learn, in buying back looted Cypriot antiquities. I was told the Leventis family made money selling Coca Cola to the Nigerians. Anyhow, on day two the embassy came up with the winner, Yanni Petsopoulos.

  After the law office rendezvous came the absolute low point of the day, which was my audience with the Ambassador of Cyprus in his embassy office on R Street. Why this was necessary I have no idea, but feelings were running very high in the embassy. What had been cold until now had suddenly turned hot, to the point that the ambassador was shouting—not necessarily at me, but certainly in my direction. The room was small and dark, and there was children’s art high up on the walls, all of which was devoted to showing miserable Cypriot families being abused by the occupying Turkish troops. The ambassador was seated behind his desk with his press officer, Marios Evriviades, at his right, and I was on the other side of the desk, with Giles and Bill Stanley to my right.

  I was asked to repeat what I had said just a short time earlier in the conference room of Covington & Burling. I do not recall that the ambassador had any specific reaction to anything I said, but I do remember vividly his rant against “Mrs. de Menil,” which Giles, through his gestures and occasional grunts of affirmation, clearly endorsed. The words “severe” and “severely” punctuated the rant, with the former applied to what Mrs. de Menil had done and the latter to how she should be treated. The only specific accusation I recall, though, was that Mrs. de Menil was not only in cahoots with the Turkish looters, but she intended to keep the frescoes in Houston for at least fifteen years, while the ambassador thought that five years was more than enough. Here I piped up with two unsolicited comments: first, that Dominique de Menil was a profoundly spiritual woman and that she wanted to bring the glory and spirituality of Byzantine Orthodoxy to America; and second, that restoring these frescoes was going to take a long time and lots of money, and that would be an irrationally large investment to make if they would only be seen in America for five years. Eventually we left, with nothing resolved other than the guessing game.

  SIX WEEKS LATER, ON CHRISTMAS Day, 1983, I decided to leave Dumbarton Oaks to become the chief curator at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.a My Princeton graduate school friend and fellow medievalist, Bob Bergman, had been appointed Director of the Walters in 1981, and he was eager that I join him as chief curator. I was not at all keen on moving to Baltimore, but my relationship with Dumbarton Oaks, and specifically Giles Constable, had taken a nose dive, and that was not only because I had embarrassed Giles and his friend Bill Stanley in front of the Ambassador of Cyprus.

  Giles had hatched a scheme to bring Wendell Phillips’ large Sabean art collection to Dumbarton Oaks. He presented the idea to me that fall as a fait accompli, along with a complete redesign of the Dumbarton Oaks medieval galleries. Mostly, I was angry that Giles hadn’t consulted me, but I was also irritated by the fact that Sabean (ancient south Arabian) art has virtually nothing to do with what Mr. and Mrs. Bliss had collected or with what scholars at Dumbarton Oaks studied. So I did what I thought was right: I wrote a long and detailed letter laying out my complaints to Derek Bok, the President of Harvard, with a copy to Dean Henry Rosovsky. (I got polite responses from both.) I have no idea whether either cared what Gary Vikan had to say, but the Wendell Phillips Collection never came to Dumbarton Oaks. This was good, but between my protest letter and my apparent role as Dominique de Menil’s mole at DO, it was clear that my time with Harvard had come to an end.

  What did I think I was getting myself into? I can’t say I was optimistic. After ten years of working and socializing among the cultural and academic elite in Washington, DC, the prospect of moving to Baltimore was not at all appealing. Sure, I knew that the Walters had a spectacular collection—that it was an Art 101 kind of museum with nearly one of everything from ancient Egypt to Fabergé and that it was especially strong in my area, the Middle Ages. I also knew that it was the collecting legacy of a father and son team, William T. and Henry Walters, who made their fortune in the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. I was aware that, like Dumbarton Oaks, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Frick Collection in New York, the Walters had a strong personal flavor, but unlike the others, it was encyclopedic in scope. Truly, “a little Met.”

  I also knew that unlike DO, the Walters is city-owned, relatively poor, and that it has a public mission. The Walters has always been beloved by collectors and scholars worldwide, and, most important, it was beloved by Kurt Weitzmann. KW assured me, as if this information had been delivered to him on Mount Sinai, that while the Met and the Morgan Library are wonderful places with great art, neither was a match for the combination of collections, curatorial scholarship, and conservation research that historically defined the Walters. I never questioned KW’s opinion, which probably explains why I remained at the Walters for twenty-eight years.

  But what I knew and believed about the Walters in 1983 as I contemplated my move did not square with the museum I first encountered in March 1972. What prompted that visit was research
for Illuminated Greek Manuscripts; thanks to KW’s hype, I was so excited the night before that I couldn’t sleep. So imagine my puzzlement: The Walters I found that day was a dump, and an empty dump at that. The galleries were dark and gloomy and seemed to be abnormally warm and damp. The parquet floors in the Old Master paintings galleries were raw and stained, with puddles here and there, the result of dripping condensation, I later learned, from the uninsulated roof. But it seemed to me at the time that maybe the Walters’ night security was a pair of untrained German Shepherds. And the ambient lighting was greenish, because green corrugated fiberglass was then used to keep the harsh sunlight out.

  While I stayed for an entire day, I can remember encountering only two people. One was the legendary Curator of Manuscripts, Ms. Dorothy Miner, then in her last year of life. Her domain was the ornate, warm, and woody old “Library,” with its mezzanine of shelves that was accessed by a sliding ladder and served by a basket on a pulley (so as to safely lower books). The Library, with its priceless collection of illuminated manuscripts and rare books, was secured behind what seemed to me a golden chain, but was in fact, nothing more than a brass chain hung across its open door so that no visitors would wander in.

  Ms. Miner, who wore a little fur hat, greeted me and a fellow KW student with great enthusiasm; she seemed to have all the time in the world for us. Ms. Miner was in a teaching mood, which I gathered was normal. We learned, among other things, why it was that so many Walters manuscripts had to be rebound. It seems that Henry Walters’ Paris dealer, Leon Gruel, knew that Henry was a man in a hurry. So Gruel would reorder the pages in his books, putting all the pictures at the front.

  Those few hours in the library were magical. And as we left Ms. Miner’s lair, we encountered the other person whom I recall sharing the museum with us that day. It was the venerable Mrs. Poe, a frail, elderly woman who sat alone behind a small, glass display case in the sculpture court. This was the Walters “store” at the time, and besides the beloved Walters Christmas cards, she offered a short list of old Walters publications. I bought an exhibition catalogue from 1947, I think for just $4.75. Mrs. Poe, I was told, had been with the Walters since it opened in 1934.