A North American Dealer on Looting in Syria

North American dealer Chris M. Maupin has commented on Simon Cox's BBC report on antiquities from Syria ("Sensationalist Reporting and the Antiquities Trade: If it’s in Print it Must be True!", February 22, 2015). Maupin only cites the supporting BBC News story ("The men who smuggle the loot that funds IS") rather than the full documentary on BBC Radio 4.

Cox interviewed archaeologist Dr Assaad Seif in Lebanon. Seif noted that the Lebanese authorities had seized a number of antiquities coming out of Syria; among them were a dozen items each worth an estimated $1 million.

Yet Maupin seems to overlook this part of the report:

This despite the fact that in his investigation Cox only once sees any antiquities described as having been looted. These he views via a Skype meeting and are described as small figurines, glass vessels, bits of pottery and coins, acquired over a period of several months.

Maupin also suggests that the movement of antiquities from their find-spots to the market place is "imaginary".

Cox falls into the trap of reporting on an (imaginary) international criminal network, operating in a shadow world of diggers, smugglers, middlemen and dealers.

Cox, and producer Paul Grant, put together a carefully researched programme that explained how objects moved from Syria. Members of the programme team even attended a conference on Syria that was held at the British Academy so that they could hear the latest information.

Those of us in the UK value the professionalism of BBC journalists: rarely a day goes by at work without some discussion of a news piece on the BBC Today programme.

Maupin's post is itself 'sensationalist' and could be described as 'ill-informed'.

Is there another reason why Maupin want to discredit the BBC?  Is he wanting to ensure the continuing movement of archaeological material from the Middle East to potential buyers?

Shaky Ground: Context Matters

I am working my way through Elizabeth Marlowe's Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Debates in Archaeology; Bloomsbury 2013). Readers of LM need to read this important contribution. There is a chapter on "Indifference to Context", and "Red Herrings" includes discussions of licit / illicit, the Nostoi exhibitions, as well as repatriation.

The work includes a short discussion (and photograph) of the bronze Marcus Aurelius in Cleveland that appears to have come from Bubon in Turkey.

Marlowe is reminding her readers that loss of context has an impact on the way that scholars can interpret works of art that have been removed from their find-spots without record.

Cuno: "the Getty has had complicated relationships with foreign governments"

James Cuno has reflected on his first working week at the Getty ("Getty Trust CEO James Cuno wraps up debut week", LA Times August 6, 2011). There seems to be a hint at a move towards a so-called licit market ("the benefits of a more open exchange of goods") in the way that the story is reported.

But Cuno stresses that he will support the Getty's current antiquities acquisition policy, designed to deter looting: "The policy is to only acquire objects that can be shown to have left their presumed country of origin before 1970."

"It's the right thing for the Getty, not only because the Getty has had complicated relationships with foreign governments in the past but because the Getty is more than a museum," he says. "The conservation work and foundation work that we do internationally can't be compromised."

The key issue is that collecting histories need to be demonstrated through authenticated documentation.

We look forward to reading his Rice University Campbell Lectures that will appear as Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (Chicago UP) [website] this December. Previous titles have posed questions: Whose Muse?; Who Owns Antiquity?; Whose Culture? Is the new title a break with precedent and perhaps more than a little suggestive?

What are "redundant antiquities"?

The AAMD written testimony to the CPAC review of Article II of the MOU with Italy is now available [pdf]. The submission by Kaywin Feldman, Director and President of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is one of the pieces made available (dated, November 13, 2009). Feldman took a critical position against the Italian authorities. (Members of the AAMD need to remember that several of their institutions had been happily buying, no doubt in "good faith", recently surfaced antiquities ripped from archaeological contexts in Italy.)

Feldman appears to misunderstand archaeological material when she wrote:

The spirit of support and cooperation emphasized in the MOU would be much better served if American museums could acquire redundant antiquities and borrow objects for long-term loan from Italian museums. AAMD believes that the United States government should encourage developed countries, such as Italy, to make redundant antiquities available to the legitimate market as a way to curtail looting.

What are these "redundant antiquities"?

The phrase seems to be traced back to William G. Pearlstein, "Claims for the Repatriation of Cultural Property: Prospects for a Managed Antiquities Market",  Law and Policy in International Business, Vol. 28 (1996). Pearlstein, who also gave a presentation at the MOU review, wrote:

Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of the patrimony claims has been to chill the overall appetite of U.S. market participants for new acquisitions to the point that, unless the present trend is reversed, the long term viability of the U.S. antiquities market may be in doubt. This chilling effect extends not only to the high-end of the antiquities market, where the market value of an acquisition can justify the legal costs of a patrimony claim, but to the great majority of redundant antiquities that lack special archeological, historical, or cultural significance to any particular source nation.

What did Pearlstein have in mind? And what does Feldman consider to be in this category?

Are they suggesting breaking up tomb-groups in the reserves of Italian museums to sell on some notional licit market? What will be the implications for future studies of this archaeological material?

Returns and Loans

In the aftermath of some of the returns to Italy (and remember that the Polaroids seized in Geneva show 1000s more items), some museum directors in North America have been calling for the creation of a "licit market"; for them "ownership" seems to be a key issue. (See also related observations from Paul Barford dealing with comments from some dealers.)

I prefer a move towards the loan of archaeological material along the lines of Maxwell L. Anderson's EUMILOP project back in the 1980s.

Loan material has of course started to move from Italy to North America. The February 2006 agreement over the Sarpedon (Euphronios) krater allowed for :

... long-term future loans—of up to four years each, as Italian law allows—of works of art of equivalent beauty and importance to the objects being returned. The loans will be chosen from a list of objects submitted by the Metropolitan or by others, with joint approval.

A Laconian cup from the Museo Nazionale, Cerveteri was placed on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 2006 (Randy Kennedy, "Italy Lends Antiquities to 2 Museums", New York Times November 29, 2006), and in January 2008 "Three Spectacular Vases" from Italy joined it (see further comments and images from Culturegrrl). Philippe de Montebello described the three as "extraordinary new loans" that would "illuminate the superb achievements of [Euphronios'] contemporaries". Indeed, "these masterpieces will expand significantly our visitors' experience of classical art".

The three further loans were:

1. An Attic head oinochoe (jug) with the "signature" of Charinos on loan from the Museo Nazionale, Tarquinia.
2. An Attic red-figured cup "signed" by Euxitheos as potter (see the Sarpedon krater) and Oltos as painter on loan from the Museo Nazionale, Tarquinia.
3. A Paestan bell-krater attributed to Python on loan from the Museo Archeologico, Naples.
   

Promoting Licit Markets

Michael Conforti, president of the AAMD, has used an interview with the Art Newspaper to call for an opening up of the "licit market" in antiquities (Helen Stoilas, "New guidelines for US museums acquiring antiquities", The Art Newspaper July 17, 2008).

Some archaeologists would prefer that institutions not purchase such works at all, to ‘pretend they didn’t exist’ and thus not encourage the market for them.” But he says that there is still a market for such work outside of institutional buying. As a means of curbing the looting of archaeological sites, the AAMD promotes the creation of “licit markets” through which countries could legally export archaeological objects and “strongly urges all nations to provide a legal method for the sale and export of art.

It is a topic Conforti addressed earlier in the year, and last August (2007) I reviewed the potential sources for antiquities with "secure" histories.

Conforti also draws attention to the new AAMD's database:

The AAMD has set up a website where museums will be required to post “an image and the information about the work…and all facts relevant to the decision to acquire it, including its known provenance”. If further research uncovers questions over ownership, the museum is expected to “take whatever steps are necessary to address this claim, including, if warranted, returning the work, as has been done in the past”.

It is such a useful database that when I checked it today I still received the message:

There are currently no Cultures registered. Please check back again soon.

The Art Newspaper fails to draw attention to two key issues. It is not enough for AAMD institutions to say that they will (try) not (to) acquire material that surfaced after 1970.

a. What about long-term loans of antiquities to institutions? (This is a different issue to short-term loans for which the AAMD has a policy.)
b. What about disputed material already acquired?

So why not use the AAMD database / register to "publish" images of all antiquities acquired since 1970? And why not include short- and long-term loans?

Michael Conforti and the Licit Market in Antiquities

Michael Conforti, the president elect of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and Director of the Clark in Williamstown. Ma, has been talking about his views on the "licit trade" in antiquities ("More Talk With: Michael Conforti", Time, March 28, 2008). In the wake of some many returns of antiquities from museums that are members of the AAMD it is interesting to read these comments:

There also needs to be established a "licit" market in works of art, including antiquities, in those countries that currently ban it. That's clearly what's encouraging so much illicit excavation. The source countries have a responsibility to establish some way that they can endorse a licit market. And that's a process that we would like to be part of at the Association of Art Museum Directors. We see traditional acquisitions as part of the future of museums as well.

These comments of course are recycled from John Merryman, James Cuno and Michael Brand (among others).

What I find rather frustrating is that Richard Lacayo never asks the difficult questions in these interviews.

Why have members of the AAMD been acquiring recently surfaced antiquities? Is the Merryman model for a licit trade flawed? Are member museums of the AAMD being transparent over their long-term loans?

Ethics and Partage

Richard Lacayo has followed up his interview with James Cuno. This time he talks to Alex Barker, director of the Museum of Art & Archeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia and chair of the Ethics Committee of the Society for American Archeology ("A Talk With: Alex Barker", Time, February 4, 2008).

The agenda remains that set by Cuno, namely that of partage. Sharing finds from excavations is one possible way forward. Loans are another way as recently explained by Thomas Noble Howe, "A New Way Forward for U.S. Museums".

Lacayo and Barker also discuss John Merryman's proposal for a "licit" trade in antiquities. It is a question I posed last August. Barker gives a rather abbreviated reply. I had earlier commented on Merryman's flawed model for the "licit" trade where he gave the Getty as a good example of a museum following correct "due diligence" procedures. And given recent events we now know that trust was misplaced.

I would have liked the interview to have picked up on Cuno's suggestion about reasonable acquisition policies for museums.

For more on this topic see the Society for American Archaeology's Ethical Issues in Archaeology (AltaMira 2003). Barker has a chapter, "Archaeological Ethics: Museums and Collections".

Can there be a "licit" trade in antiquities?

Derek Fincham has responded to my comments on due diligence.

Essentially we are both reacting to John Henry Merryman's essay, "A Licit International Trade in Cultural Objects" (2005; originally published in 2004).

Can there be a licit trade?

Where are the objects with secure histories?

Here are some possible sources:

a. De-accessioned material from museums. Take, for example, the Apulian column-krater attributed to the Laterza painter that was given to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by Thomas G. Appleton in 1876 (Acc. no. 76.66 = Padgett, no. 35). This was sold at Sotheby's New York on December 11, 2002 (lot 62) for US$10,158.

b. Documented old collections. The Sotheby's New York December 9, 2004 sale included several Apulian pots from the William Randolph Hearst collection; some could be traced back to the collection "owned" by the Chapter of Durham Cathedral (England).

c. Excavated material that has left the country of origin through partage. Part of Sir Henry Wellcome's collection of Egyptian antiquities was formed in this way. (See D.W.J. Gill, "From Wellcome Museum to Egypt Centre: displaying Egyptology in Swansea," Göttinger Miszellen 205 (2005) 47-54.) The Middle Kingdom blue faience hippopotamus in the George Ortiz collection was excavated in 1907 from tomb 416 at Abydos. It had then passed into the collection of the Revd William MacGregor.

For a "licit" trade to work there needs to be:

a. Authenticated documentation. The material that will be returned to Italy from the Getty includes items that are said to come from named "old" collections - but that information appears to have been falsified (presumably by one of the vendors in the chain). (This will be discussed by Gill and Chippindale in the next number of IJCP which is now in press.) [UPDATE: Gill, D. W. J., and C. Chippindale. 2007. "From Malibu to Rome: further developments on the return of antiquities." International Journal of Cultural Property 14: 205-40.]

b. Integrity. Can we trust the word of the dealer? I am sure there are decent dealers out there but the honest ones have to recognise that some of their colleagues have not been helping to enhance their image. Why did Sotheby's stop selling antiquities in London? See Peter Watson's Sotheby's, the Inside Story (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) for some of the possible reasons.

But is there a pool of antiquities out there?

My study of 1300 lots of Egyptian antiquities sold at auction at Sotheby's New York over the last 10 years suggests that perhaps only some 30% of the objects are documented before 1973 (i.e. before the Archaeological Institute of America's resolution that brought the problem of looting to the attention of a wider public).

And what are the sources for the other 70% of Egyptian antiquities? Can we be sure that they have surfaced on the market by "licit" means? Can responsible public institutions buy Egyptian antiquities which they cannot be certain were known before the 1970 UNESCO Convention? And "due diligence" only works when you can trust the documentation that is provided by the vendor - and that is where thorough research steps in.

What about long-term loans?

Finally, Finch raises the idea of long-term loans. Kevin Butcher and I mentioned this as an idea in our review article of the first few numbers of Minerva: K. Butcher and D. W. J. Gill, "Mischievous pastime or historical science?" Antiquity 64 (1990) 946-50. Our model at the time was the impressive Emory University exhibition programme that included material from Syracuse. But loans are different to "a licit international trade".