by Gary Vikan
I’m certain that there were many AAMD members who in 2008 were engaged in on-going conversations with major donors, their contemporary equivalents of the Blisses, Dominique de Menil, and Henry Walters, about the gifting of undocumented antiquities. What happened was that most, perhaps all, of my AAMD colleagues called a time out—a time out with no foreseeable terminus. They heard, I’m pretty certain, loud and quavering voices from their trustees and from their legal counsel.
But I was lucky: the Walters is small and a place where the director can still direct. I saw no reason to withdraw from the game that I had been playing for nearly thirty years. In the course of that conversation with David Joralemon, the pieces to the puzzle of what I felt should be done or not done fell elegantly into place. These were pieces I had collected in that CPAC conference room over many hours over many months, and more recently during my visit to the Church of Saint Martin in Linard. The pieces drew on all that I had done and learned since the early ’80s acquiring works of art and working in collections that were doing great things for the public and for scholarship with undocumented (read “looted”) antiquities. So I accepted those one hundred works that David offered, along with the endowment gift.
And soon there was much more. I received call near the end of 2008 from a Walters Trustee, Juli Alderman, who had a second home in Santa Fe. There is a wonderfully jolly man out there named John Bourne with a spectacular collection of Pre-Columbian art, going back to his adventurous days as a youth, when in 1946 he was with the small group that discovered the frescoes at Bonampak in Chiapas, Mexico. (John continued to collect over the next sixty years.) I met John through this trustee and her husband, George, in 2000 and saw his collection in his magnificent home that was built a few years earlier for Gene Hackman on the outskirts of town. My only hope then was that John might eventually lend the Walters a piece or two, until that call from Juli Alderman. John had promised his collection of more than three hundred works to the College of Santa Fe, a new art school, with a promised cash gift on the order of $4 million to build an exhibition space and endow its operation.
Well, by the worst of luck for them and the best of luck for me, the recession was taking the college down with it, and John was desperate to find a new home for his “children.” I was more than happy to provide this, and had already cleared the way on the ethical front just a few weeks earlier in my conversation with David Joralemon. With these two art and endowment gifts, I was able to create the conceptual framework for a “Center for the Arts of the Ancient Americas” with two endowed positions.
I then formulated a written policy, which a friend dubbed the “Vikan doctrine,” that gave expression to my recent actions. It was based on the Walters’ commitment to three over-arching principles: Due Diligence, Transparency, and Good Faith Engagement. By this policy, the acquisition of a work of art would be conducted with full and rigorous investigation and documentation of the work’s history, whether it be a proposed purchase, a promised gift, or a possible long-term loan. If acquired or accepted as a gift or loan, it would then be promptly published on the Walters’ website and on the Object Registry of the Association of Art Museum Directors (set up as part of the new guidelines for acquisitions and gifts without documentation back to 1970). And finally, the Walters would promptly and openly respond to any plausible claim for repatriation of the work from a possible source country.
With this policy I was doing nothing more or less than what I had advised Walter Hopps to do with the Lysi frescoes over the phone that night in June 1983: Investigate, go public, and engage with the country of origin. But now, with the Internet, transparency is no longer restricted to certified letters to departments of antiquities and to scholars. The whole world is invited to explore the Walters’ storerooms.
So I have again chosen the path of Dominique de Menil, that is, of someone who by their own discretion and sense of right makes their own rules. It suited her style and it suits mine. In one bold step, Dominique de Menil created a safe harbor for the looted Lysi frescoes that were at risk of dispersal or, perhaps, destruction. She protected and preserved them, and later, she arranged for them to be studied and made available to the public in a setting infused with a sense of the holy. This seemed to me then and seems to me still to be a better approach than, in this case, letting the Atlantic Arts Partners’ one hundred works sit in a dark warehouse somewhere in northern New Jersey, or allowing John Bourne’s collection to be dispersed at auction and disappear into dozens of private homes and apartments across the globe.
ONE OF MY LAST OFFICIAL acts as Director of the Walters, on December 8, 2011, involved the repatriation of a spectacular gold monkey head, the size of a child’s clenched fist, to the Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Peru. Apparently part of an elaborate necklace, the monkey head was among loot taken from the famous Moche tomb site at Sipán in 1987. Soon it was sold to John Bourne, who, in the mid-90s, gave it to the Palace of Governors in his hometown of Santa Fe. It was seized by US authorities on behalf of Peru soon thereafter, but eventually returned to the Palace of Governor when its precise origin could not be demonstrated. (In 2011 the Palace of Governors was prepared to transfer the piece to the Walters on John’s behalf—before the second Peruvian claim.)
Perhaps when she learned of my actions, Maria Kouroupas thought that I had returned the monkey head out of principle; and it’s true that principle was involved, but so was an FBI Agent from the Criminal Investigative Division. In this case, as with the Linard reliquary, I felt that I had done the right thing. The necklace is a spectacular work of first importance to Peru, it had clearly come from a plundered site post-1970, and at least one other monkey head from the same set had recently been returned to Peru. Like the Elgin Marbles, John Bourne’s gold monkey head should be sent home, so that a great work of art might once again be made whole.
Chapter Nineteen
The Mysterious Mr. Egrette
The story of “Renoir Girl” and her “Flea-Market Renoir” emerged with a big media splash in the late summer of 2012. A woman in northern Virginia, who portrayed herself as naive about art and all-but-destitute, claimed to have stumbled upon a tiny, elaborately framed painting at a flea market in West Virginia in late 2009. The work is a sketchy river view in bright pinks and greens and has a metal plaque on the frame with the name “Renoir.” On the back is a sticker with the work’s title, Paysage, bords de Seine. Renoir Girl claimed she found the painting in a box with a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll, which is what had attracted her attention. As her story went, she paid $7 for the lot.
Eventually, after apparently forgetting about her purchase for more than two years, Renoir Girl decided to check out her flea-market Renoir—she said, at the urging of her mother. A regional auction house in northern Virginia confirmed that what she brought to show them in a plastic garbage bag was indeed by Renoir, and estimated its auction price in the $75,000 to $100,000 range. They told her that it was painted in 1879 on linen, and that it was likely dashed off by Renoir as a souvenir for his mistress on a napkin in a restaurant beside the Seine where they were dining. The auction was scheduled for September 29, 2012, and Renoir Girl was all over the media, from Good Morning America to The Washington Post, whose reporter Ian Shapira covered this art-world fairy tale in depth. And we all wondered, where did that Renoir come from? Could it have been stolen?
Henry Walters didn’t like the Impressionists, so this was not an issue for the Walters Art Museum. It was, however, an issue for the Baltimore Museum of Art, specifically because the Virginia auction house traced this particular Renoir back to a gallery in Paris where it was purchased in 1926 by Philadelphia-born lawyer and collector Herbert L. May. May was then married to shoe manufacturing heiress Saidie Adler of Baltimore, who was a major collector of modern art in her own right and who bequeathed most of her substantial collection to the BMA when she died in the spring of 1951. Knowing this, the staff of the BMA checked their files and felt confident, as the auction approached,
that they had no record of such a Renoir ever having been in their collection.
But Ian Shapira decided to do his own research. He visited the BMA library, requested the Saidie May file, and in it found evidence that Paysage, bords de Seine was lent by Saidie to the museum in 1937. That revelation prompted the BMA staff to examine their temporary loan file, where they found that this particular Renoir did indeed belong to Saidie May, that it was part of her bequest to the museum, and that in the fall of 1951 it was in an exhibition called From Ingres to Gauguin. But most important, Shapira learned from that file that the painting was reported stolen on November 17, 1951. The theft took place between 4:00 p.m. on November 16th and 1:00 p.m. on the 17th, and there was no sign of forced entry.
Ian Shapira’s revelation, along with the BMA follow-up, got full coverage in the Post on Thursday, September 27th; the auction was cancelled and the FBI stepped in and seized the painting. What caught my attention was the date the painting was reported stolen, November 17, 1951. It took me back more than a quarter century to a mysterious package I received at the Walters on May 1, 1986. It was a book mailer, and the return address bore the name “EGRETTE” preceded by the initial “R” in capital letters, each stroke of which was squiggly, as if done by a very old person. Below that was “10 Church Street,” which I recognized to be an address in lower Manhattan, and finally, “New York, N.Y. 10012.” Inside was a handsome wooden carving, maybe six inches high and three inches wide, that I recognized immediately to be a rare Coptic devotional plaque of the 6th century. The object looked strangely familiar to me, so I went to the museum’s photo files and started to flip through the several dozen cards with Coptic art. And there I found the photo of a wooden plaque that I initially took to be its twin but, with a closer look, it was obvious that the object in the photo and the object on my desk were the same. The card bore these words in red letters: “Missing, October 2, 1951”—just six weeks before the BMA Renoir disappeared.
The return address now deserved a closer look. This time I recognized it to be not the name “R. Egrette” but rather, the word “regret,” and not at all by a shaking hand, but rather by a very precise and calculated hand wanting to look old and feeble, and anonymous. As for “10 Church Street,” a little investigation revealed that the post office in that section of Manhattan has a different ZIP code from that written on the return address. This caused me to take the word “church” not as an address but rather as qualifier for the word “regret.” The act of mailing seemed to be an act of repentance.
Not long thereafter I learned that the Department of Classical Studies at Johns Hopkins received a similar package from “R. Egrette” of “10 Church Street, New York, N.Y. 10012” the same week the Walters received its package. The Hopkins package contained objects from the same region and period, namely, Coptic Egypt. And these objects, too, went missing in October, 1951. So someone apparently had access to two Baltimore collections in the fall of 1951. That he or she returned the works after thirty years indicated that knowledge of their origin was never lost, and the “regret/church” label, which obviously did not need to be there, indicated remorse and an apology of sorts. And the simultaneity of the two mailers suggested that someone was at last setting things right. This all made sense to me, since someone with security access in 1951 to those two museum collections (neither thefts involved objects on public display) likely had some seniority, so if one were to assume that person was then at least in their mid-30s, that would make him or her around 70 in 1986. Who was that person?
Fast forward now to the spring of 2013. Renoir Girl is finally forced to reveal her identity as she presents her legal case as the rightful owner of the flea-market Renoir. She is Marcia May Fuqua, then 51, an unmarried driving teacher with a bumpy employment history from the tiny town of Lovettsville, Virginia. She presents herself as a good-faith buyer with no knowledge of art history. But her story quickly unravels. She has forgotten what flea market she visited, and the only likely candidate, the “Harpers Ferry Flea Market,” has no record of the transaction. And there is Marcia May’s mother, Marcia Mae Fouquet (different spellings, similar pronunciation), then 84, who for decades ran an art school out of her home in Great Falls, Virginia, where her daughter was, according to former students, often there to help out. Certainly, daughter Marcia May knew something about art history.
But the most interesting part of the daughter’s backstory is her mother’s backstory. In the fall of 1951, Mom was a 23-year-old junior in art studies at Goucher College in Baltimore. And there was much more of interest: Daughter Marcia’s brother Matt told Ian Shapira of the Post that their mother had the Renoir in her house for “fifty or sixty years” and that it came from “a museum in Baltimore.” Matt also claimed that his mother wanted the painting returned to the museum because that would “put this behind us.”
Mother died at age 85 in September 2013. Matt later stated, when deposed for the civil action initiated to determine ownership, that he had lied about the Renoir being around the house all that time. But forget that: On January 10, 2014, the day Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia ruled against Renoir Girl and ordered the painting returned to the BMA, a triumphant and vengeful Matt (who apparently hates his sister) opened up to reporters just outside the courthouse, seemingly oblivious to what he had said under oath just a few months earlier. The painting, Matt said, had been in his mother’s house since the ’50s. Did she steal it? No, he said, “it was a gift.” It seems Mom was a beautiful woman and had plenty of boyfriends. And as for its return to the BMA, he said, “My mother wanted this.”
Mother Marcia was living in Baltimore in 1951 at the time of the three thefts and was involved in the world of art, and Goucher’s campus was then within a few blocks of the Baltimore Museum of Art. That does not, however, put her in the BMA after hours on the evening of November 16th, much less in art storage at the Walters and at the Hopkins Department of Classical Studies a few weeks earlier. A student simply would not have had privileged access to all three local collections. Certainly there is a believable end-of-life, making-it-right flavor to the public appearance of the Renoir in 2012 when Mom must have been aware her impending death. But what could be the comparable make-it-right moment for her or her family in 1986 when the “regret” packages were sent? While mother Marcia definitely was not the thief, she probably knew the thief. And now she’s dead, so perhaps we will never know. But there is another intriguing piece that may be part of this puzzle, again, from 1986.
My first major Walters exhibition, Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium, opened in April 1986, two weeks before the “regret” mailer arrived. I was especially eager to borrow a silver bowl in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art for the show, but the BMA staff could not locate the bowl, so we had to settle for a photograph. Then, on August 1st, three months to the day after the “regret” mailer arrived at the Walters, the BMA silver bowl suddenly turned up. It seems that the museum’s registrars had just received a call from a former BMA employee saying that while cleaning out his garage, he opened a cardboard box and in it discovered a tin box containing a silver bowl that he said he did not recognize.
He did, however, recognize the accession number on the tin box as indicating the collection of the BMA, and so he made the call. How did that tin box get into that cardboard box in his garage? The explanation was odd in the extreme as was the fact that the bowl appeared at the exact moment when it was needed for the deliberations of the International Byzantine Congress, which converged on the Walters that very week to see the Silver Treasure exhibition. He claimed that when he left the BMA in the early ’70s to take a job in Washington, DC, his successor at the museum packed up his materials and inadvertently included the tin box with the bowl, neither opening it up to check its contents nor recognizing the BMA accession number on the outside. The man had volunteered that it had taken fourteen years to discover the mistake because it was only when he retired from his Washington, DC, job
that he had “time on his hands” and cleaned out his garage. What else, I wondered, might be in that garage?
What makes this strange story especially compelling in relation to the events of fall 1951 is that the individual in question is familiar to long-time Walters staff members as a skilled art packer whose expertise was welcomed in those years at the Walters as well as the BMA. Not only that, this person died in January, 1987, just six months after he returned the BMA silver bowl. And we know from internal records that he had personally transported that silver bowl between the BMA and the Walters in 1951, which suggests that he should have recognized the bowl and its tin box. And finally, and most important, in 1951 he was Assistant Building Superintendent at the BMA, and this gave him privileged after-hours access. Then, a last tantalizing clue: the Walters “regret” package was sent from the ZIP code of New York University where this person had done his professional training in the ’50s.
Just maybe there was a budding romance between the rising young superintendent at the BMA, then 35, and the attractive 23-year-old Goucher art student. Baltimore is a small town and they were both devoting themselves to modern art; it is likely they would have met. Recall that brother Matt, when interviewed by reporters outside the courthouse on January 10, 2014, suggested that the Renoir was a gift from one of his mother’s many suitors. His girlfriend Jamie Romantic completed his thought with the claim (as if it were family lore) that one of her beaus had worked at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Why steal the Renoir? Undoubtedly, the BMA superintendent had heard the endearing story about that unusually small and sketchy painting in the current exhibition, From Ingres to Gauguin, that Renoir dashed it off over lunch for his mistress and soon-to-be wife. Perhaps he or perhaps both of them knew that this beautiful young woman appears in Renoir’s famous Boating Party at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
