Bonhams: Response to April Sale

Chantelle Rountree, the head of Antiquities at Bonhams, has been speaking about this week's sale ("Bonhams: Antiquities turn in sprightly performance with £1.5m sale at Bonhams As Tarzan Adds Strength", M2 PressWIRE April 30, 2009 Thursday):

"This sale shows that if you offer items of real interest with good provenance the market remains strong despite the general economic gloom. Collectors who are passionate about their subject know that items of this kind come along rarely."

The sale is reported to have raised £1.5 million. High prices included:

• lot 30: A Hellenistic terracotta funerary wall painting, £132,000
• lot 32: A Roman marble male torso, £93,600
• lot 54: A Roman mosaic panel, £168,000
  

For lots that had once passed through the hands of Robin Symes and Graham Geddes see my earlier comments.

Ex Symes Bronze Sold at Bonhams

A Greek Daedalic bronze figure that had once passed through the hands of Robin Symes has been sold at Bonhams (London) for £9000 (lot 10). It is still not clear why Bonhams failed to declare this important part of the collecting history.

Other lots that have received comment here:

• lot 11: A Greek bronze situla, £8400
• lot 17: Attic bell-krater from the Graham Geddes collection, £8400

Another related lot that interested me:

• lot 37: Roman sarcophagus from the Graham Geddes collection, £4080

Whose Culture?: Reprint Articles

Whose Culture? has now arrived. Four of the nine main essays have appeared elsewhere:

• Sir John Boardman, "Archaeologists, collectors and museums" = E. Robson, L. Tradwell & C. Gosden (eds.), Who Owns Objects? The ethics and politics of collecting cultural artefacts. Oxford: Oxbow, 2006. [revised and abridged] [see my 2007 comments] [see also D.W.J. Gill, review in Journal of Field Archaeology 32.1 (2007) 103-06.]
• Kwame Antony Appiah, "Whose culture is it?" = "Whose culture is is, anyway?", New York Review of Books 53, 2 (February 9, 2006) [online] = chapter in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. [see my 2008 comments]
  
• Derek Gillman, "Heritage and national treasures" = chapter in The Idea of Cultural Heritage. Leicester: Institute of Art and Law, University of Leicester, 2006.
• John Henry Merryman, "The nation and the object" = International Journal of Cultural Property 3 (1994) 61-76. [Note not vol. 4 (1995) as cited in the bibliography and in the acknowledgments]
  

A Collector on CPAC: Looking Back

Papers filed by the ACCG and its supporting bodies in a FOIA request served on the US State Department include a declaration by Jay Kislak.

It is worth remembering Kislak's comments about CPAC in a report from the New York Times (Jeremy Kahn, "Is the U.S. Protecting Foreign Artifacts? Don't Ask", April 8, 2007 Sunday).

But the committee's current chairman, Jay Kislak, a real estate magnate and collector of pre-Colombian artifacts, bristles at the secrecy under which the State Department has the panel work.

''In my opinion the restrictions, regulations and lack of transparency under which we are asked to operate in pursuing our duties at C.P.A.C. are to say the least unusual, and in many cases they are unbearable, immoral and maybe either extra-legal or in contradiction'' of the law, he said.

Is it usual, tolerable, moral and legal (and not forgetting ethical) to acquire recently-surfaced archaeological objects (including coins) that have no recorded collecting history prior to 1970?

"Outdated and largely rejected practices"

Jenifer Neils, who has written on the Parthenon, is well placed to review James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? (American Scientist April 29, 2009) [review with Swharon Waxman's Loot]. Cuno does not seem to get the message being sent to him from the reviews -- and Neils puts it well:

Although [Cuno] strives to be ecumenical, pulling his examples from China, Nigeria, Turkey and Italy, his arguments are one-sided and hence surprisingly narrow. He supports the now outdated and largely rejected practices of museums that acquire antiquities without documented provenance. And he utterly fails to provide any other perspectives, especially those of archaeologists.

She concludes:

Cuno is a museum director whose writ is clearly to defend the acquisition practices of the major western museums in light of increasing pressure to refrain from purchasing objects of dubious or no provenance. The public might be better served by less atavistic museum professionals, ones who could address our changing times and evolving ethical standards and offer creative solutions for the enjoyment of our collective past.

I hope that Cuno's voice in Whose Culture? has been toned down ...

Antiquities as Investments: A Word of Caution

One thing is clear from the return of antiquities to Italy and Greece: the same names pop up time and time again. And those in the know are wise enough to avoid antiquities that once passed through, say, the hands of certain dealers or the halls of certain auction houses.

Who wants to buy an antiquity only to find that it features in one of the thousands of images forming part of the archives in the hands of the Italian and Greek governments? Imagine spending tens of thousands of dollars, pounds or euros to buy a piece of ancient art only to find that it has a more than interesting collecting history. (And who in this time of global financial uncertainty can afford to make that sort of mistake?)

Time and again we have read that museums and private collectors have bought "in good faith" - they never meant to buy looted objects.

That is why auction-houses, for example, need to provide the full collecting histories for objects. It is not enough to check datasets for stolen objects - the staff need to undertake some rigorous checks of their own and then make their findings public. That is what due diligence is all about.

Cyprus and the Coin Collectors: Yet Another Round

In February 2008 I posted an update about the FOIA request served on the US State Department by:

• The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild (ACCG)
  
• The International Association of Professional Numismatists (IAPN)
• The Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG)

The IAPN and PNG are so interested in this action that they have yet to issue a statement in the press sections of their websites.

But now there is movement ... Peter Tompa has posted a development on the ACCG website:

In papers filed by attorney Scott A. Hodes on April 24, 2009 with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the numismatic groups have argued that the State Department has wrongfully claimed such information to be “secret.” Past Cultural Property Advisory Committee Chairman, Jay Kislak, has added weight to the numismatic groups’ position. In a declaration filed with the Court, Mr. Kislak indicates that greater transparency is necessary to allow museums and members of the public to make informed presentations to CPAC. He has also stated that official State Department documentation falsely suggests that CPAC agreed with the controversial decision to impose import restrictions on coins of Cypriot type.

Tompa senses that there has been an attempt to hide information:

one heavily redacted document appears to confirm back channel coordination between the archaeological community and the State Department’s Cultural Heritage Center over extending Cypriot import restrictions to include coins

We continue to wait ... Tompa suggests another six months ... perhaps in time for Thanksgiving?