Due diligence The measures that an individual or institution can reasonably be expected to take when investigating the pedigree of an object being considered for acquisition in order to ensure its legality.
Provenance The history of ownership of an object.
An illicitly traded archaeological artifact (illicit antiquity) is one that has at sometime been traded in contravention of national or international legal regulations. Typically, it will have been removed illegally from an archaeological site or monument, and/ or exported illegally from its country of origin. Possibly, it will have been stolen from a museum or other cultural institution, or from a private owner. The act of removal is normally unrecorded and probably destructive. Illicit antiquities are often sold by reputable vendors without any public indication of ownership history (provenance).
In 1993, for example, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) released details of six pieces of sculpture that had been stolen from the storeroom of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, and subsequently recovered. Three had been sold through Sotheby’s auction house. Four years later, in 1997, Peter Watson showed that many Italian antiquities sold at Sotheby’s
London with no published provenance had come from one dealer in Switzerland, who was acting as a ‘front’ for another dealer, the Italian Giacomo Medici, who was in turn smuggling the antiquities out of Italy where they had been illegally excavated. Medici was arrested by the Italian Carabinieri in 1997 and in 2005 he was convicted of receiving and illegally exporting stolen antiquities. It is not known how many illicit antiquities he had managed to pass onto the market without provenance before his arrest.
Over the last 20years between 65% and 90% of antiquities offered for sale on the market have had no clear published provenance, which suggests that a large, perhaps major, part of the market is comprised of illicit antiquities. Even when an antiquity is sold with a provenance, it does not mean that the provenance is genuine. A now infamous example of what appears to be a deliberately confused provenance is provided by the Euphronios krater. In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought a sixth-century BC Attic red-figure krater attributed to the painter Euphronios. It cost the museum $1 million, which, at the time, was considered to be an outrageous price. The krater was said to have been bought from an Armenian living in Beirut through the mediation of US dealer Robert Hecht, who could document that it had been in the possession of the Armenian’s family, and thus outside Italy, since 1914. By 1973, however, doubts were being expressed about this apparently legitimate provenance, and it was suggested instead that the krater had, in fact, been excavated illegally in Italy in 1971. In 1993, the Metropolitan’s director at the time of purchase, Thomas Hoving, suggested that there had actually been two Euphronios kraters, a fragmentary one in the possession of the Armenian, and a better-quality one excavated illegally in 1971. Unbeknown to the Metropolitan, Hecht had switched pieces, selling the illicit one to the Metropolitan with the good provenance, and selling the Armenian’s poorer quality piece to a private collector.
In 2001, the Italian Carabinieri raided Hecht’s Paris flat, where they seized a handwritten memoir. In this memoir, Hecht had recorded two different versions of his role in the Euphronios affair. One was that he had obtained the krater from the Italian dealer Giacomo Medici, mentioned above in connection with Sotheby’s. The other version was the one made public by the Metropolitan, that he had acquired it from the Armenian. In November 2005, Robert Hecht was charged in an Italian court with the illegal export of antiquities and conspiring to receive stolen art (see Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation). In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum ceded title of the Euphronios krater to Italy, along with title to 20 other antiquities, though refused to admit any knowledge of illegal origin. The krater will return to Italy in 2008. The real provenance of the krater has still not been made public, and presumably is known only by Hecht, and perhaps Medici.
The Euphronios krater is just one example of how a provenance might be invented or changed to disguise the illegal origin of a piece. There are many more. In 1997, the British dealer Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was found guilty of handling antiquities stolen from Egypt and jailed for 6 years. To smuggle the antiquities, Tokeley-Parry disguised them as tacky tourist souvenirs by first coating them with liquid plastic and then painting them with garish colours. Once back in England, the plastic and paint were removed with acetone and the pieces were restored to their original condition. To pass them off as legitimate he invented a provenance, an ‘old collection’, the Thomas Alcock collection. Thomas Alcock was said to be a British Army engineer who had passed through Egypt early in the twentieth century. Tokeley-Parry manufactured labels dabbed with used teabags to give them the appearance of age which he attached to pieces in an attempt to make the false provenance appear more convincing.
It is virtually impossible to verify a provenance or to research an unprovenanced antiquity’s pedigree. Museums and salerooms are under no obligation to release information on the subject, and most usually do not. As a result, it is easy for an innocent or an unprincipled buyer to claim that there was nothing to suggest that a purchased piece was illicit. The difficulties attending provenance research have led to the development of the concept of ‘due diligence’. Due diligence describes the measures that an individual or institution can reasonably be expected to take when investigating the pedigree of a potential acquisition to ensure its legality. Due diligence should take account of the character of the vendor and the price asked (a suspiciously low price would indicate a dubious provenance), and should include checking the potential purchase against appropriate registers of stolen artifacts. Now that it is known that so many unprov-enanced antiquities have an illegal origin, in future it will be difficult to claim innocent purchase without first conducting the necessary due diligence.
Unfortunately, even due diligence cannot guarantee the legitimacy of a piece. Documents can always be forged, and it is not always easy to assess the character of a vendor, as was made clear by the conviction in 2002 of New York antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz. Schultz had bought pieces from Tokeley-Parry, knowing them to be stolen from Egypt, and had been until 2001 the president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, the United States’ foremost dealer association.
World History
