ART & AVARICE : In the Cutthroat Art Trade, Museums and Collectors Battle Newly Protective Governments Over Stolen Treasures

IN JUNE, 1988 ,Peg L. Goldberg, a 50-year-old Indianapolis art dealer, arrived in Amsterdam to decide whether to buy a painting on the market advertised as a work of Amedeo Modigliani. Paintings by Modigliani, who died penniless and alcoholic in Paris in 1924, are worth millions these days, making them ideal for forgery. Although not experienced in the stratosphere of multimillion-dollar paintings, Goldberg quickly dismissed the Modigliani as a fake. “My gut instinct was that it wasn’t right,” she explained later. Her wisdom would prove disastrously ironic.

Goldberg turned her attention instead to other art in Amsterdam. She met and was charmed by Michel van Rijn, 39, a Dutch art dealer with the same last name as his countryman, the artist Rembrandt. “He was very intelligent, very articulate, very well read,” she recalled later. “We had a great time talking about many things. I asked him if he was descended from Rembrandt, and he indicated that he was and also that his mother’s side of the family is Rubens.”

Van Rijn dazzled Goldberg with photographs of four sections of a large Byzantine mosaic dating from the 6th Century. The mosaics, each about 2 feet square, depicted the young Jesus Christ, apostles Matthew and James, and an archangel. In the photographs, tiny chips of colored glass infused the portraits with remarkable color, shading and detail. Van Rijn told Goldberg that the mosaics had been removed from the rubble of a church on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus that had been destroyed in the fighting between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. He claimed that they were owned by a Turkish archeologist who had received permission from the Turkish Cypriot government to take them with him to Munich. He said that the archeologist, sickly and in need of cash, was ready to sell them. When Goldberg asked the price, Van Rijn replied, “Three million dollars.”

Goldberg had fallen in love with the mosaics. She says she checked with various agencies, but not with the government of Cyprus, to see whether the works might be stolen and was told that they were not. Then, using a loan negotiated by telephone from an Indianapolis bank, she bought the mosaics on July 7 for $1,080,000.

About six months later, two dealers representing Goldberg approached Marion True, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, and offered to sell the same mosaics--at a huge profit. “I had not formed a view as to the value of the mosaics,” True said later, “but I can tell you when I read the price of $20 million, I said, ‘Holy doodle.’ ”

Not only did True turn down Goldberg’s offer, but she alerted the Cypprus government, an act that landed Goldberg in a civil case in U.S. federal court and shed more light than ever before on the shadowy, hypocritical and lucrative world of plundered art. Whether Goldberg had been naive or greedy, her actions and testimony exposed how easy it is, for a price, to pick up illicit art and cart it to the United States. If upheld on appeal, the decision in the case by U.S. District Judge James E. Noland to return the mosaics to Cyprus should dampen the ardor of dealers. Few are likely now to handle a piece of stolen art that can be so obviously claimed by its original owner.

Plundered treasures are in wide circulation. Looters, according to some estimates, steal a piece of art or memento of history from Italy every half-hour. Nigeria long ago lost its struggle to staunch the hemorrhage of carvings. Magnificent pieces vanish continually from the temples of India and Cambodia. Unguarded pre-Columbian sites are strewn throughout Latin America, ripe for pillaging. “There are 50,000 archeological sites in Mexico,” says Pablo F. Marentes, the cultural minister of the Mexican Embassy in Washington. “You would have to have a whole army to protect them.”

Despite widespread laws against plundering, looters, egged on by astronomical prices, hunt everywhere for untapped troves. Suspicious classical sculpture shows up in respectable museums all the time. No one really knows how much smuggled art is sold. “How do you measure illicit traffic?” asks Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, a clearinghouse in New York for information about stolen art. Others have guessed that $1 billion to $3 billion worth of stolen art, much of it antiquities, is smuggled every year. That indicates an annual traffic in antiquities of at least hundreds of millions of dollars. Dealers, claiming they must protect the privacy of their clients, often sell antique pieces without offering what is known as a provenance--a detailed list of previous owners. Not every Greek or Roman or Egyptian or pre-Columbian statue without this kind of pedigree is a piece of plunder, however. “But if a provenance is not given,” says Lowenthal, “you have to wonder if it has not come out from under the ground recently and then been smuggled across a border.”

Inside a Shadowy World

THE FOUR SECTIONS of mosaics Michel van Rijn sold to Peg Goldberg were parts of a larger work set into the apse of the Church of the Panagia Kanakaria in the village of Lythrankomi on Cyprus in the year 530, almost 15 centuries ago. Somehow the whole mosaic survived the era of Iconoclasm in the 8th Century when overzealous Byzantine emperors ordered the destruction of church images considered an affront to God. But it did not survive the invasion of northern Cyprus by Turkish troops in 1974. After the Greek Cypriots in Lythrankomi fled two years later from the Turkish occupation to a haven in southern Cyprus, the surviving sections of mosaic were stripped from the church.

Goldberg had been introduced to Van Rijn by Robert Fitzgerald, an Indianapolis art dealer who was charged last September in the theft of artifacts and other valuables from the home of an Indianapolis psychiatrist. Fitzgerald, whom Goldberg said she knew “casually,” had flown to Amsterdam to help her purchase the disputed Modigliani. Van Rijn himself, once convicted in absentia in France of forging Marc Chagall’s name to prints, does not have the most savory reputation in American art circles. “I have known his story for 10 years, I think, in various permutations and combinations,” Gary Vikon, curator of medieval art at Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, would testify later, “and he is a shady dealer.”

Goldberg did not regard herself as knowledgeable about Byzantine art. But, as the holder of a master’s in psychology from the Christian Theological Seminary of Indianapolis, she knew her Christian history. She knew that in the medieval era Christ was rarely depicted as an adolescent. The mosaics showed, she would say later, “something totally different than anything I had seen before. I mean, this is when the debate was raging about was Jesus merely a good man, was he divine, was he both divine and man. And these apostles were apostles; they weren’t saints. These were men. . . . The other thing I was looking at was the extraordinary shading.” The detailing, she said, “was phenomenal in comparison with anything I had seen before.”

Goldberg, Vikon says, should have immediately doubted Van Rijn’s story that the mosaics belonged to an ailing archeologist who had taken them with permission. “All the red flags are up,” Vikon said later. “All the sirens are blaring.” Moreover, if she had any interest in the mosaics, Vikon insisted, Goldberg should have asked the government of Cyprus about them.

Goldberg said later that she had contacted the International Foundation for Art Research, the UNESCO office in Geneva and the customs offices of several countries, including the United States, to ask about the mosaics. Why she did not contact the Cyprus government isn’t clear: After agreeing to be interviewed for this article, she failed to return repeated telephone calls.

The tall, heavy-set Goldberg had started her art business as a hobby, buying small works for her home collection and then, when she tired of them, selling them. As sales gradually increased, she said, “I discovered I was making more money and having more fun than I had had for about the last 15 years.” She quit her job as a social worker in 1981 and started selling paintings professionally out of her home. She did well and became influential, in 1986 winning a four-year term as a commissioner of suburban Hamilton County. The mosaics were her first purchase of more than a million dollars.

She sought to make that purchase with extraordinary haste. On July 5, four days after she met Van Rijn, she flew to the free port of the Geneva airport, where the archeologist, Aydin Dikman, and Ronald Faulk, a Californian serving as Van Rijn’s attorney, had brought the mosaics from Munich. Geneva is an ideal place to buy smuggled art because Swiss law allows a purchaser to keep stolen goods if bought “in good faith.” To Goldberg, the mosaics “didn’t look nearly as good as the photographs. . . . They were so fragile, so old, so thin.” But she still wanted them, in fact, “more than ever--I mean, I was in awe.”

Goldberg persuaded Van Rijn, Fitzgerald and Faulk to lower the price of the treasures and agree to take their commissions out of future profits. But they did not, in fact, wait for future profits. Van Rijn and Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent Faulk, took most of the purchase price as commissions for themselves, leaving Dikman with only $350,000. Goldberg flew the mosaics to Indianapolis, arranged for their restoration and, despite her professed love for them, prepared to sell them.

Although the Getty specializes in classical sculpture and master paintings, Goldberg offered the mosaics there because she knew it was one of the few institutions in America that could afford her price and might be attracted by such a rare work. But Marion True told the two dealers representing Goldberg that the Getty did not collect Byzantine art and, even more important, that she believed that the government of Cyprus considered the pieces of mosaic stolen and wanted to recover them. Only a year before, Vassos Karageorghis, director of the antiquities service of Cyprus, had asked her to let him know if any Cypriot works were ever offered to her.

Goldberg soon telephoned True, who was traveling in Switzerland, to insist that a thorough check had been made to ensure that the ownership of the mosaics was clear and legal.

“Ms. Goldberg, it’s not for you to explain this to me,” True recalls telling the art dealer. “You must really talk to the Cypriots. . . . Whoever you asked, you didn’t ask the Republic of Cyprus.”

True telephoned Karageorghis, who alerted his government. The Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, joined by the government of Cyprus, then filed suit in federal court in Indiana demanding the return of the masterpieces. Lawyers for Goldberg used two defenses that had proved successful in some previous art plunder cases. They maintained that because Goldberg had bought the mosaics “in good faith,” they could not be confiscated. Moreover, they insisted that Cyprus had lost the right years ago to recover the mosaics because it had failed to hunt for them diligently. But, in a decision hailed by all those concerned about the incessant plunder of archeological art throughout the world, Judge Noland ruled against Goldberg last Aug. 3.

“The Church of Cyprus, the original and rightful owner of the mosaics,” Noland wrote, “has requested and made a proper showing for the return of the mosaics,” which he called “part of the religious, artistic and cultural heritage of the Church and the government of Cyprus.” Barring a reversal of the decision on appeal, the mosaics will go back to Cyprus, though not to their original home. The Church of the Panagia Kanakaria remains in an area still controlled by the Turkish troops who allowed the church to be pillaged in the first place.

Lord Byron’s Obsession

THERE IS LITTLE new about the plunder of art. In the opening years of the 19th Century, Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin, a Scottish lord serving as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire of Turkey, removed 88 sculptured sections from the walls of the Parthenon, the magnificent temple to the warrior-goddess Athena on the Acropolis in Athens, and shipped the marbles to Britain. The Turks, who ruled Greece in those days, did not care much about the Parthenon and even supplied Lord Elgin with the papers he needed for export. This confiscation of a great treasure of classical art infuriated the English romantic poet Lord Byron, an emotional admirer of Greek culture who would die in 1824 in the Greek war of independence.

Byron wrote poems castigating Elgin mercilessly as a violator of shrines. Even the thought of the ambassador’s homeland drove Byron wild. He denounced Scotland as “a land of meanness, sophistry and mist.” “Frown not on England--England owns him not,” Byron told Greece, “Athena! no--the plunderer was a Scot.”

But Byron was out of step with his times. After a debate in the House of Commons, the British government bought the marbles from Elgin and gave them to the British Museum. In those days, most politicians, scholars and, in fact, poets did not see anything wrong with transferring the antique treasures of poor countries to the museums and private collections of richer countries better able to protect them. Without the force of this belief, many great museums would be denuded of some of their most glittering prizes. Not only would the British Museum have no Elgin marbles, it would not have its Rosetta Stone, Benin bronzes and myriad mummies as well. The Louvre would not have its Winged Victory and Venus de Milo. Nowadays, a century and a half later, however, most people would probably agree withByron. After World War II, the breakup of empires and the whipping up of nationalism awoke many developing nations to the importance of their artistic heritage. Archeologists, now more attuned to science than ever before, complain that ripping monuments and pieces from their original sites distorts history. Pangs of conscience temper the acquisitive drive of some museum curators. In the arena of public opinion, the flamboyant Lord Byron has won a clear victory over the rapacious Lord Elgin.

Yet, while almost everyone deplores plunder of culture, plunder still goes on.

Heroics and Hypocrisy

PLUNDER MIGHT NOT persist so tenaciously if museum curators were not so ambivalent. Some pieces are so valuable, rare and beautiful that curators blind themselves to the obvious origins. Museums make courageous decisions to stop plunder one day while making purchases that encourage it on another day. Hypocrisy reigns.

As a result of the Goldberg case, for example, True, the Getty curator who alerted the Cypriot government, could go down in the annals of art as a heroic warrior against plunder and the Getty Museum as a defender of mankind’s cultural heritage. True offered a stirring pronouncement of Getty policy in a deposition for the trial: “We as an institution would not want to be buying art against the wishes of the country of origin.” Byron would have approved.

But just a few months before, both the Getty museum and True had become entangled in what looked like an archeological art imbroglio of their own. After the Getty purchased a colossal statue of Aphrodite from a seller whose identity Getty officials refused to reveal, True and Getty director John Walsh suddenly found themselves fending off accusations that the piece was smuggled.

Their accuser--Thomas P. F. Hoving, editor of Connoisseur magazine and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art--insisted that the marble and limestone statue had been stolen from an unexplored classical archeological site in Sicily 10 years earlier, smuggled to Britain, sold to a British dealer for $1.5 million and then resold to the Getty Museum for $20 million. Although the Getty Museum had checked with Italian officials to determine whether the statue was listed as stolen, Hoving said, there obviously was no record, because the site had never been worked and classified by archeologists. After the Hoving accusations were published, the Italian government started a criminal investigation that is still going on more than a year later but, Ministry of Culture officials say, has thus far turned up no evidence that the statue was stolen. Getty officials declared themselves innocent and pledged that the Aphrodite, if proved stolen, would be returned to Italy. But, following the policy of most American museums, it still refuses to reveal the name of the seller, the price paid or the provenance. After spending a year restoring the statue, the museum recently installed it for permanent display.

There is a good deal of irony in the role of Hoving as the knight trying to bring down the Getty Museum over the issue of plunder. The tall, graying, urbane, 58-year-old Hoving had been accused of plunder himself when he ran the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977.

In 1972, Hoving announced that the museum had bought an unsurpassed and previously unknown Greek krater, or vase, wrought in the 6th Century BC by the potter Euxitheos and painted by the artist Euphronios. Although Hoving refused to reveal any details about the purchase, the New York Times reported that Hoving had flown to Switzerland to buy the krater for $1 million from an agent acting on behalf of an Armenian coin dealer in Beirut.

Hoving was told that the vase belonged to the Armenian’s old family collection and that he had to sell it because he needed cash. In an account of the scandal in his 1973 book “The Plundered Past,” Karl E. Meyer noted sarcastically, “The ‘old collection’ and the owner in difficult straits are among the hoariest dodges in the illicit trade.”

Most archeologists, according to Meyer, presumed that the vase had been looted recently from an Etruscan tomb in Italy. The government of Italy, for one, did not accept the Metropolitan’s title and started legal proceedings in Italy for recovery. But nothing could be proved, and the vase is still a pride of the Metropolitan collection.

Ever since Lord Elgin’s marbles showed up at the British Museum, many curators have insisted that museums have the means to preserve art that might be ruined if left in place. Constance Lowenthal, who continually monitors cases of stolen art, sees some merit in the argument that museums may be saving art for mankind if they purchase works now moldering in abandoned monasteries. “But an Aphrodite!” she says with a mocking smile. “What harm could be done to her if she lay underground until an archeologist came to dig her up?”

Pirating the Past

OFTEN, PLUNDER IS powered by instincts more sublime than greed. At its simplest level, people enamored of foreign lands and cultures want to possess and admire samples of their beauty and art. Sometimes these collectors even feel, perhaps justifiably, that some of their pieces might have lain ignored and rotted if left in the original countries.

In the early 1960s, for example, Nigerian traders would trudge through the sultry tropical heat to the verandas of expatriates and set down offerings of magnificent Yoruba carvings for incredibly low prices: 10 Nigerian shillings (about $1.40 then) for a small carving and one Nigerian pound ($2.80) for a large piece. The larger carvings are worth at least $1,000 today. Although Nigerian law did prohibit the export of antiquities without a permit, few expatriates bothered to try to obtain permits before they left the country. When Nigerian officials finally clamped down, the traders had sold most of the old carvings.

An American who worked in Nigeria in those days as a researcher for an economic development agency--and who now has a modest collection of Nigerian sculpture with a few pieces worth a few thousand dollars each--tried to explain recently why he bought the carvings. “I have to admit to avarice,” he says. “I really wanted those Nigerian pieces. I really loved them. At the time, I felt that almost all Nigerian officials did not care whether I took them or not. It was not art to them. They looked on the carvings as part of their everyday life.

“Now I feel that material like this should be kept in its own country,” he went on. “It’s part of the country’s cultural heritage. But I would never give up my pieces now. I love them too much. But someday I might donate them to a museum, perhaps in Nigeria, perhaps here.”

From time to time, specialists have proposed a legal market in cultural art to satisfy the desires of small collectors and allow governments to concentrate on saving the truly important examples of their national culture. In his extensive study of plunder, Karl Meyer reported that archeologists say that 90% of the objects found in digs are duplicates that could easily be allowed to leave the country. Unrelenting laws that prohibit such removal are usually circumvented anyway by corrupt officials and dealers. Meyer believed that a rational, legal trade would make it easier to protect the vital pieces that could not be sold. But such proposals, as Meyer put it, have always been “doomed by nationalist passion.”

Moreover, the prices of antiquities have soared so high in recent years that it is doubtful now that dealers would ever restrict themselves to a legal market in small, relatively inexpensive cultural objects. Only last December, Sotheby’s in New York auctioned a 5,000-year-old, 9-inch-high marble sculpture of a head from the Greek Cyclades for $2,090,000. A Swiss couple had bought the piece only a quarter of a century ago for $12,000. Ironically, these fearsome prices have been inflated by collectors who were driven out of the Impressionist and contemporary painting markets by the prices there.

Laws Without Teeth

THE CHANGE in attitudes toward plundered art over the decades culminated in the adoption by UNESCO in 1970 of a convention prohibiting “the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property.” The convention did not demand the return of plundered art but only prohibited imports from then on. It also finally made it illegal under international law for cultural artifacts and art to be plucked from their homelands for sale to another country. The convention clearly reflected a new mood, but it has proved a weak instrument.

Although 65 nations have signed the convention, only one--the United States--is a major purchaser of classical and archeological art. Neither France nor Switzerland nor Britain nor Holland has signed the convention. Because the United States was a strong supporter of the UNESCO convention, the Senate ratified it unanimously in 1972. But it took 11 years for Congress to pass legislation implementing the act. Under the 1983 law, a staff of two officials and a secretary, counseled by a Cultural Property Advisory Committee, was set up in the U.S. Information Agency to oversee American implementation of the UNESCO convention. But USIA did not get down to work on the problem until 1986, and it has very little to show so far.

In 1987, USIA imposed emergency restrictions on the importation of pre-Columbian ceramic and stone artifacts from the Cara Sucia region of El Salvador. And last March, it imposed emergency restrictions on the importation of antique textiles from the Bolivian community of Coroma. Those are the only official acts of the U.S. government under the UNESCO convention so far--although USIA is considering a request by Canada for a bilateral agreement that would stop the flow of Canadian Indian and Eskimo artifacts to the United States and a request by Peru for emergency restrictions on the importation of artifacts looted from burial grounds of the Moche Kingdom on the desert coast of northern Peru.

Since 1972, however, the United States has had another and perhaps more potent weapon against plunder--a law authorizing the Customs Bureau to confiscate any pre-Columbian Indian sculpture or mural imported from Latin America without a permit from its country of origin. That law stemmed from festering anger over the rampant thievery of Mayan stelae, or limestone tablets, from Mexico and Guatemala for many years.

There are conflicting assessments about the effectiveness of the 1972 pre-Columbian law and the UNESCO treaty. Although the Customs Bureau sometimes makes a sensational sweep, such as its seizure of 1,300 pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru in a series of Southern California raids in March, 1988, the bureau, in fact, acts rarely under the various American laws covering plundered art. In the fiscal year ending last September, the Customs Bureau recorded only 22 seizures of art objects, 18 involving pre-Columbian cultural objects. Nevertheless, many American dealers now shy away from Mayan art. “The pre-Columbian trade has moved to Europe,” Lowenthal says.

Although the Indianapolis federal court ruling on the Cypriot mosaics has been hailed as an important blow against the market in smuggled art, it may have only limited application. There was no argument in the case about the fact that the mosaics were stolen. Everyone knew they had once adorned the walls of a church in northern Cyprus. In most cases of art plunder, however, no one knows for sure whether a piece has been stolen and, if so, from where. At most, the ruling, if upheld, weakens the perennial defense argument that the original owner loses title to a stolen work of art if the owner does not mount an immediate and continual campaign for its recovery.

Glimmers of Nobility

BUT LAWS AND court cases cannot solve the problem unless curators and collectors accept in their hearts--and not just in pious statements of policy--that beauty and rarity do not justify plunder. “American collectors are the key to the problem,” says Mexico’s Marentes, talking about pre-Columbian art. “If the U.S.A. collectors want something, that’s it. If someone wants to own them in the United States, people will bring them to the United States.”

At times there are strong hints of a change in mood. In 1976, the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco received word that an architect had left the museum an unusual bequest. Curator Thomas K. Seligman, led to the home of the deceased, was shocked at what awaited him. “On the floor, tables, and walls,” Seligman wrote, “were painted murals most certainly from the pre-Columbian culture of Teotihuacan just outside present-day Mexico City.” The paintingshad vanished from Teotihuacan in the early 1960s. The Mexican government sued the De Young for recovery of the murals, but the courts ruled that the paintings had been stolen long before the enactment of American laws against plunder. They belonged now to the museum.

But the museum recognized that Mexico had a moral claim to the murals. In a negotiated settlement with Mexico, the De Young agreed to raise funds for the conservation of the murals, return 70% of them to Mexico in 1986 and sponsor a joint exhibition with the Mexican government on the art of Teotihuacan. Nothing of this size and value had ever been returned voluntarily by an American museum, and the De Young action sent waves of nervousness through the museum world. Some curators complained that this would make life difficult for them.

“A lot of countries--think about the Elgin marbles--are trying to get things returned that they allege have been taken out of their country improperly and are important for their cultural patrimony,” Seligman explains. “Some people felt that our decision put an increased burden on them.” But, no matter what the discomfort to others, De Young officials believe, as Seligman wrote later, that “returning important objects to their countries of origin, if those nations are able and willing to care for the objects, will help reconstitute the archeological heritage and protect the sites of the world.”

All tales of artistic plunder somehow hark back to the Elgin marbles. In 1982, actress Melina Mercouri, then the Greek minister of culture, demanded the return of these Parthenon sculptures. Mercouri did not file a lawsuit but tried to embarrass Britain by making her plea before a UNESCO conference of cultural ministers in Mexico City. Britain reacted with predictable scorn. Sir David Wilson, keeper of the British Museum, said, “To rip the Elgin marbles from the walls of the British Museum is a much greater disaster than the threat of blowing up the Parthenon.” He accused all those supporting the Greeks of “cultural fascism.”

Nevertheless, the Greek demand has struck a chord with some British intellectuals. Writer Christopher Hitchens is leading a campaign for their return in the name of magnanimity and justice. The campaign strikes some analysts as wildly romantic and somewhat troubling. Hitchens was scolded recently by G. W. Bowersock, professor of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “The energies of a journalist,” Bowersock wrote,”could be much better employed on the less romantic but more helpful task of stopping the illegal removal of important antiquities that is still part of the art market today.”

“If they ever returned the Elgin marbles,” says Lowenthal, “that would undo the public collections of the last two centuries.”