Nelson Bunker Hunt

The death of collector Nelson Bunker Hunt was announced in October 2014. A number of obituaries have appeared in the British press:

• The Guardian (22 October)
• The Financial Times (22 October)
• The Independent (22 October)
• The Daily Telegraph (22 October)

Only the Telegraph mentioned his collections of antiquities and coins:

Forced into personal bankruptcy that required them to liquidate assets, the brothers auctioned off immense collections of Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic coins, raising more than $30 million. Sotheby’s in New York sold their art collections, and they were even forced to offload household items, including an enamel teapot which went for $20.

The frontispiece of the 1983 catalogue was the Etruscan terracotta antefix that was acquired by Laurence and Barbara Flieschman and returned to Italy from the J. Paul Getty Museum. The cover shows the Kyknos krater that was returned to Italy by Shelby White.

The Euphronios cup from the Hunt collection is the starting point for Vernon's Silver's The Lost Chalice.

As I noted back in 2008 the returns to Italy included pieces from significant North American private collectors.

The Onesimos-Euphronios cup returns to Cerveteri

The Onesimos-Euphronios red-figured cup that was returned from the J. Paul Getty Museum to Italy will be placed on display in Cerveteri (ANSA), the find-spot of further confiscated pieces. The cup is inscribed with a dedicated showing that it had been placed in a sanctuary of Ercle at Cerveteri. Additional fragments are known to have been supplied by Giacomo Medici. (For collecting history see here.)

Will this allow further information to emerge about the Met fragments?

"Why art museums must continue to collect"

David Franklin, Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, has written the foreword to Michael Bennett's provocative Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013). Franklin, whose expertise does not lie in archaeology or "ancient art", claims that the book "makes an important contribution to the current debate over collecting antiquities by presenting a much-need curatorial viewpoint". Franklin, who does not appear to understand the intellectual consequences of collecting (and Bennett overlooks such studies in his bibliography), suggests that the acquisition of recently-surfaced antiquities leads to "the preservation of knowledge".

Bennett would have done well to have read my study of the material and intellectual consequences of collecting the Sarpedon krater [see here] before trotting out a stale and lightweight assessment of the Euphronios krater returned to Italy by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art [pp. 32-33, fig. 36]. His treatment of the "hot pot" (as it was known) betrays his thinking about how to approach objects that have been removed from their archaeological context.

Bennett fails to take the opportunity in his essay to explain why the Cleveland Museum of Art returned so many classical antiquities to Italy. Indeed there could have been a helpful discussion of why the museum acquired them in the first place. More telling would have been the unwillingness of the museum to disclose the collecting histories of the items. Which dealers were involved?

I am looking forward to reflecting on the book over the next few weeks and to explore the "German" collecting history in more detail, especially in the light of another (apparently flawed) collecting history from the same Swiss dealer.

Bennett may have opened a Pandora's Box of issues that Franklin may wish, with hindsight, had remained firmly closed.

Euphronios fragments at the Met

The announcement that pot fragments formerly owned by Dietrich von Bothmer have been returned to Italy raises an issue. What are the collecting histories for other Bothmer donations?

I am particularly interested in Euphronios at the moment and note that Bothmer donated the following fragments to the New York MMA.

1. 1977.192.3a-c. 3 fragments of a red-figured cup. Attributed to Onesimos and signed by Euphronios as potter.
2. 1983.524.2. Fragment of a neck-amphora. [Euphronios no. 24]
3. 1983.524.3a-b. 2 fragments of a cup potterd by Kachrylion and attributed to Euphronios. [Euphronios no. 39]
4. 1983.524.4. Fragment of a cup attributed to Euphronios. [Euphronios no. 40]
5. 1983.524.5. Fragment of a cup attributed to Euphronios.
6. 1985.228.8.a-o. 15 fragments of a red-figured neck-amphora. Join Louvre Cp 11187. [Euphronios no. 16]
7. 1988.233.1. Fragment of red-figured cup attributed to Euphronios.
8. 1989.382.1. 11 fragments of a red-figured cup. Helen abducted by Theseus. [Euphronios no. 38]
9. 1989.382.2. Fragment of a red-figured cup. Nessos and Deianeira. [Euphronios no. 52]

Where were these neck-amphorae and cups discovered? Who has handled them? Who were the proprietors before Bothmer? What do they join?

I also note that the fragment formerly owned by Ariel Herrmann and loaned to Princeton (L.1984.56 = Euphronios no. 25) now is New York MMA 2001.563 (Gift of Ariel Herrmann in memory of Lydia Mannara). This was attributed by J.R. Guy, along with a second fragment, Princeton L.1984.57 [Euphronios no. 26].

Not praising, burying: preliminary thoughts

I am grateful to Alan Jelinek for organising today's wonderful workshop at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge today. I was able to reflect on some of the themes behind Artful Crafts and in particular thoughts (pre-Medici) on the scale of looting.

There was a mix of contributors including a philosopher so we got round to exploring some of the major ideas about the importance of context. Is there more to "art" than the creator? Why does context matter?

The Sarpedon krater was lurking on the periphery of the discussion, as well as the Kyknos krater, formerly in the private collection of an honorary fellow of a Cambridge college.

The group was able to walk round the galleries and to gain inspiration from the finds in the galleries. The Attic Nikosthenic amphora was central to our discussion, and the fragmentary (and reconstructed) Etruscan bone couch helped members to visualise the type of finds from tombs in ancient Italy.

We will be reflecting on the event in more detail next week when we reconvene in the McDonald Institute. I felt that we all gained something from the multidisciplinary setting for the day and I hope to share more in due course.