Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  Before the meeting I made certain that two specific board members would be in attendance. Both were women, one African American and the other white, who were known and respected for their outspoken commitment to full engagement with the challenges that Baltimore presents. Since I framed the issue as one of community service and values first and money second, their collective endorsement, conveyed with just a word or a nod, set a lofty tone for the other trustees. The second critical thing I did was to position the question as contingent on a no net loss of revenue. Or, put another way: the proposition was that the Walters would go free only when I found the money to offset the loss of income at the door, something, including lost memberships, on the order of $250,000 annually. For some, perhaps many board members, this turned the question into a benign hypothetical, because in the current economy it was hard to imagine where Vikan was going to come up with that kind of money.

  With that no-lost-cash caveat and my orchestrated endorsements, the vote was overwhelming in favor of going free. There was one vocal abstainer, who was not the board member who painted the dire picture of our traditional supporters staying away, but one whose family has a large foundation. He said something to the effect that “you don’t value what you don’t pay for” and that his family’s foundation would not support a free Walters. In response, I compared the museum’s collections—which are public assets—to clean air and green space, as something people have an inherent right to have access to. Thankfully, despite the threat, his family foundation continued to be generous to the Walters.

  FOR THE NEXT THIRTY MONTHS that endorsing board vote sat, mostly forgotten, awaiting its trigger. Then in October 2005, we reopened the reinstalled Charles Street Building with its Cabinet of Wonders. Among the hundreds who showed up to see the new galleries was one couple that stayed the entire day, Senator Paul Sarbanes and his wife Christine. They were the last to leave and before they did, they stopped to give me some advice. They had just been to Dublin, and there (did I know?) the museums are all free. Why aren’t Baltimore’s museums free? Now, that got my attention, mostly because I had just read in The Baltimore Sun that the city for the first time that anyone could remember had a budget surplus, thanks to the booming local real estate market. A surplus of $56 million!

  The Sarbanes’ enthusiasm made me think that it might be just the right moment to approach the city about bridge funds so we could go free at no net financial loss and then ride the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s new economic model that would allow us to stay free. The city, then the Walters’ single largest funder, had been cutting the museum’s operational support in bits and pieces since the early ’90s. What if I were to ask Mayor Martin O’Malley to restore funding for the Walters in 2006 to the level that it had been in 2001 and keep it there for three years? In return, we would eliminate our general admission fee.

  A few weeks later I met with the mayor’s Chief of Staff, Clarence Bishop, whom I had gotten to know well and to admire in my service on a local tourism board he chaired. There were four of us in his office at city hall. The others were Bill Gilmore, Executive Director of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, and my Board President, Bill Paternotte, who was 100 percent behind going free. I had crafted a little bar graph showing the decline in city operational support going back nearly fifteen years and overlaid it with a bump up in 2006 to match our 2001 level. Clarence smiled, and I immediately knew two things: first, that Bill Gilmore had already briefed him and second, that we were on our way.

  Sounds good, he said, but there are two conditions: first, the Baltimore Museum of Art must be part of the strategy; and second, Baltimore County must match the city’s bridge funding support dollar for dollar. I welcomed both. After all, the Walters and the BMA are both city-owned and city-funded museums, so they should move in tandem to serve the city. And since Baltimore County residents use the two museums as much as city residents do, the county should pay its share. In early February 2006, Doreen Bolger of the BMA and I met at the Walters with our respective board leaders. It was like magic. Not only were our counterparts up Charles Street eager to go free, our respective lost income projections were, by the best of luck, an exact match. There was no haggling, just planning.

  A few weeks later we met with Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith. Like Clarence Bishop, his first reaction was a broad smile. He later said the two museums had never before come together with a common goal and a single financial ask. Baltimore County was officially on board. This is what led to that sunny May day in Druid Hill Park and the public announcement that the Walters and the BMA were going free. It was a radical step for both of us. We had done something good, and I was proud. And sure enough, attendance at the Walters rose by more than 40 percent that first year and stayed up there, and participation by African Americans in the life of the museum increased by a factor of three. And no, our traditional supporters did not abandon us. On the contrary, they endorsed what we had done by upping their annual support significantly each year, even during the depths of the recession. For a museum director, it gets no better than that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Living with Loot

  M y entire profession career has been in three art museums, Dumbarton Oaks, the Menil Collection, and the Walters, that are filled with undocumented ancient and medieval artifacts. These are the kinds of works of art that the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee was created to keep out of the US. I first became aware that I was living with what the archaeologists with me on CPAC would call “looted antiquities” soon after I arrived at Dumbarton Oaks in 1975. I learned that there was a vault downstairs with a huge door and combination lock. Behind this was most of a 6th-century Byzantine silver treasure, the infamous Sion Treasure, that could not be seen by the likes of me and was not even to be spoken of. The Sion Treasure was discovered by villagers in 1962 in Lycia, in southwestern Turkey. Most of it was soon spirited out of the country to Switzerland by George Zacos and his wife Janet, and sold to Dumbarton Oaks for $1 million in 1963.

  In the fall of 1981, I intersected with the Saint Peter icon, recently removed from a church in northern Greece by way of Michel van Rijn. And in 1983 I encountered the Lysi frescoes and the Kanakaria mosaics, stolen from northern Cyprus by way of Aydin Dikmen. Clearly, those who saw me as a repatriation hero in Indianapolis were unaware (or forgiving) of all those years I had spent in cohabitation with the Sion Treasure and Saint Peter and, at the Walters, with the Sion Treasure’s Baltimore equivalent, the Kaper Koraon Treasure. My first big Walters exhibition, Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium, was a quest to reassemble that hoard of 6th-century church silver that was clandestinely dug up by looters in late 1908 in northern Syria. Henry Walters bought much of it (then called the Hama Treasure) from Joseph Brummer in Paris in 1929. This was considered just fine back then.

  By the time I quit CPAC that was all old news. Fresh news—which finally brought clarity to my thinking—came in the spring of 2007 when a Kress Fellow at the Walters came to show me something startling. She opened a glossy French magazine, one of the many that focus on regional French archaeology and art, and in it showed me the picture of a 13th-century enamel reliquary that was identified in its caption as volée (“stolen”).

  Then she produced a photo of a reliquary at the Walters, and it was immediately obvious that the two were one and the same. According to the magazine, that stolen reliquary was, at least until 1890 when it was inventoried and photographed, in the Church of Saint Martin in the village of Linard, near Limoges. We agreed that the right thing to do was to make contact with that town and church to learn the rest of story. Most immediately, was that church still in existence? And if so, how do they, meaning the priest and the mayor, know that the reliquary in question was stolen and not simply sold by the church? Our Kress Fellow tracked down the town’s mayor on the Internet. She emailed him and he wrote back with a photo of the church, which was clearly intact and fully functional.

  There are, as backgr
ound, three things to know. First, the 13th century was a time of intense church building in France, a prime example being the Church of Notre Dame in Paris. Second, these grand new churches needed the implements of the mass. These included patens and chalices for the communion bread and wine and also fancy covers for their sacred altar books, crucifixes, “Holy Doves” to contain the presanctified host during Lent, incense boats, and reliquaries with bits of holy bodies. The incense containers are shaped like boats because incense came to France in boats, the Holy Doves take that form to recall the Dove of the Holy Spirit, and the reliquaries, which in French are called châsses (“boxes”), have the shape of a tomb. They are small oblong boxes on stubby feet with gabled roofs; they have a wooden core, are covered with sheets of enamelwork, and have a trap door at the back with a lock to give access to the relics.

  An industry developed in the central French town of Limoges to supply these various liturgical objects, and the medium was gilt copper and enamel. This specifically was champlevé (“raised field”) enamel, a technique of cutting away the metal background and filling it with colored enamel paste with a preponderance of the color blue. The front panel and roof usually bear complementary scenes that may (or may not) relate to the specific relics inside. In the case of this Limoges reliquary, the roof shows the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem and the front panel shows them presenting their gifts to the Christ Child.

  The third and last thing to know, as you imagine yourself standing in my shoes when I learned all of this, is that the Walters has many 13th-century Limoges pieces—almost as many as the Met—and among them, six reliquaries. (There are around seven hundred surviving Limoges reliquaries.) Henry Walters loved medieval art, he loved Paris, and he was collecting in the ’20s when an abundance of medieval Limoges was available.

  What we know in the case of this reliquary is that Henry Walters acquired it in Paris in 1927 from a dealer named Henri Daguerre. Daguerre bought it from Brimo de Laroussilhe, a dealership formed around 1910 that had acquired it from its first known owner after the church, Joanny Benoit Peytel, who died in 1924 and would have been in his mid-40s in 1890. Peytel, who made his fortune in Algeria, was a well-known French collector of both medieval and modern art. He eventually gave several important works to the Louvre, including a Sisley and a Watteau, but also a late medieval relief sculpture from a church in a town near Nancy. Interestingly, the website for that town, Pont-Saint-Vincent, notes that no one seems to know how Peytel had obtained that sculpture from the local church.

  It occurred to me as I wondered what to do next that the priest of the Church of Saint Martin and the local mayor may have a legal case to make paralleling that made by Cyprus in claiming back the Kanakaria mosaics. Should they choose to sue the Walters for the reliquary’s return, the case would likely be tried in a US Federal Court under US (not French) law. The reason for this is that while the transaction took place in Paris, the buyer was American, the money came from America, and the destination of the piece was America. Under US Common Law, a thief cannot convey good title.

  So all the mayor and priest would have to prove is that the piece was stolen, and no amount of due diligence on Henry Walters’ part (I doubt there was any) and no string of intermediary owners before Henry would alter the outcome: title and rightful possession would still rest with the Church of Saint Martin. And this would be true even if someone associated with the church, like a disaffected deacon, sold the piece to Peytel without the official authorization of the French Catholic Church. (Which is my guess as to what actually happened.) And if it could be shown that transaction took place after 1905, when the French government nationalized church treasure, there would be a State claim as well.

  I know that at the time I did not feel any obligation to act; I did not think Henry Walters had done anything wrong and did not believe any aggressive action was imminent from the mayor. Of all the untitled, looted, or otherwise clandestinely transferred ancient and medieval art that I had crossed paths with in my life, this category of Limoges enamel ranked very low on my suspicion scale. This was because I assumed that the vast majority of those Limoges pieces that were traded through Parisian dealers a century ago, and are still traded today with the modern reincarnation of Brimo de Laroussilhe, had left the medieval churches for which they were made during the French Revolution. (The French have long since come to terms with the churches and monasteries they destroyed and the church property they plundered during the Revolution.) Perhaps I was wrong, but that was my assumption. Besides, the French are so enlightened about these things, and their greatest museum, the Louvre, is filled with Napoleon’s plunder. In any event, the mayor was not asking us to do anything, at least at that moment. And since they had our contact information, I had to assume that the local authorities would eventually be in touch.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, IN June, Elana and I were on vacation in France and decided to pay a visit to Linard, which is truly a tiny town that time has forgotten. The local church matched what I recalled from the mayor’s email, and it is dedicated to Saint Martin. Just opposite the church was a donkey in a field, who found us very interesting. This seemed almost poetic. I tried the front door and it was locked. I went around to the side, where I discovered an old man laying stones for a terrace in the company of his black and white shepherd mutt and one of the fattest cats I’d ever seen. He said there had been a funeral in the church that afternoon, and that I should try the south door.

  It was scruffy inside, for sure. The altar was covered with that plastic some people put on their sofas and lampshades so they will never have to buy another. And there were only three cheap and ugly silver-plated items of modern manufacture visible: two candlesticks and one crucifix. I poked around all over the place, including the sacristy, where the Walters reliquary was, I assume, once locked away. There were cobwebs, lots and lots of cobwebs. And junky church paraphernalia of the poorest quality. So where did our Limoges reliquary, the “stolen” one, fit into this scene? I had no idea. But before I left, I dropped a note for the mayor in his mailbox at the Mairie, saying I had stopped by.

  One of my favorite places to enjoy the Walters and to feel the numinous is from a bench in the southwest corner of the medieval galleries, just behind the French Limoges altar we created as part of the 2001 reinstallation. There is a stained glass window with scenes from the life of Saint Vincent just behind me as I look toward the altar. This is a window that came out of the Abbey Church of Saint-Germaindes-Prés in Paris shortly after the French Revolution. Just before me is a French Gothic altar ensemble that only two museums in America could attempt—the Walters and the Met. And we did it first.

  So sitting there, I see that “stolen” Limoges reliquary, the one with the story of the Magi, the one I now know somehow inappropriately made its exit from the little Church of Saint Martin in Linard with its attendant donkey. I vividly recall the church’s decrepit sacristy. And I ask myself the question for which I do, at last, have the answer. What’s right? Obviously, it’s right to hold on to our little stolen châsse. And in any event, we heard nothing further from the mayor.

  THE IMPLICATION OF MY NEWLY resolved thinking on things looted was realized just over a year later in the course of a telephone conversation with the Curator for the Atlantic Arts Partners in New York, David Joralemon. Tall, extremely bright, with lots of nervous energy, David is always in a hurry and often brutally honest. He called me in early November, 2008, with news of the possible donation of more than one hundred works of Pre-Columbian art, along with a substantial cash gift that could allow me to endow a curator plus a conservator. This was a huge deal for the Walters, and something that I really wanted. I had lived with a superb collection of Pre-Columbian art for ten years at Dumbarton Oaks, and I had become convinced that the future for this still exotic art among scholars and the public was all but limitless.

  But recently, the antiquities ground rules for art museums had changed dramatically. The previous July, the Association of Art Museu
m Directors had published new guidelines for the acquisition of antiquities with this critical passage: “AAMD members normally should not acquire a work unless research substantiates that the work was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970.” Yes, there were some subtle exceptions, but basically, the American art museum community had agreed to the magic year 1970—the date of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. They had come to Jesus, and had abandoned their “not knowingly” policy of hypocrisy. This for the most part was good—and about time.

  The AAMD’s dramatic conversion came about thanks to two unlikely (and unwilling) evangelists. The first was a well-known antiquities dealer named Fred Schultz who, in January, 2002, went on trial in Federal Court in lower Manhattan under the National Stolen Property Act for conspiracy to smuggle and sell illegally excavated Egyptian antiquities. Schultz’s subsequent conviction was on appeal in April 2003 when I resigned from CPAC. He lost, and then went to jail.

  This scared the bejeezus out of members of the AAMD. Someone they knew and someone with whom a few of them had done business was in jail. The other shoe fell in April 2005 when Marion True—the aptly named “True” in the celebratory words of Judge Noland in Indianapolis—was indicted in Italy on criminal charges accusing her of participating in a conspiracy to launder stolen art through private collections and create fake documentation. (Charges were eventually dropped as the statute of limitations expired.) Now not just a dealer, but a curator. And how about her director, the beloved John Walsh, and the Getty board, who seemed to be fully aware of what was afoot?

  These were dark days for the American art museum community, and especially for the Met and the Getty. Each eventually capitulated to Italian demands for repatriation of truly major works, the Euphronios Krater on the part of the Met and the Morgantina Aphrodite on the part of the Getty, along with several dozen lesser but still important ancient pieces. This was much more than a brush fire of anxiety and angst, it was a public relations catastrophe. So in an effort to reclaim the moral high ground, the AAMD adopted the new 1970 guidelines. This was generally good, but they had gone too far. And the issue was now practical for me, since the new guidelines would have put most of what David Joralemon had to offer the Walters out of bounds.