[Aztlan] Getty Museum returning 2 antiquities to Greece

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Ongoing developments in this area will gradually impact the market
for American antiquities as well.
Lloyd Anderson

>From 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/arts/11gett.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>:

====================================================


July 11, 2006

Getty Museum Agrees to Return Two Antiquities to Greece

By HUGH EAKIN


After months of international scrutiny of its collection of Greek 

and Roman antiquities, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles 

announced yesterday that it had agreed to relinquish ownership of 

two of four rare ancient works that the government of Greece says 

were illegally removed from within its borders.


The compromise accord, which was initially reached in May at a 

meeting in Athens between the museum’s director, Michael Brand, and 

the Greek culture minister, Georgios A. Voulgarakis, provides for 

the return to Greece of a large stele, or grave marker, acquired by 

the museum in 1993, and a small marble relief from the island of 

Thasos bought by the museum’s founder, the oil magnate J. Paul 

Getty, in 1955.


The Getty has not yet worked out the formal arrangement under which 

the stele and the relief, both on view at the Getty Villa in 

Pacific Palisades, Calif., will be repatriated. But officials said 

the accord might include a provision for long-term loans from 

Greece. Talks continue about the other two objects sought by the 

Greek government, with a goal of reaching an accord by late August, 

officials said.


Mr. Brand said the museum decided to give up title to the stele and 

votive relief even though negotiations on all four objects were not 

complete because the Getty was eager to establish a new working 

relationship with Greece.


“These talks have been going on a long time, and it seemed like a 

good idea on both sides to start making some progress,” Mr. Brand 

said yesterday in a telephone interview from Australia, where he 

was traveling.


At a news conference in Athens, Mr. Voulgarakis said the 

breakthrough would lend momentum to Greece’s bid to recover 

additional antiquities from museums in the United States and Europe.


“This is a very important day,” he said, adding, “We’re confident 

that ongoing talks will yield the results we want.’’


Though the grounds for the Greek claim to both objects’ being 

returned are clear, both sides said, the circumstances of their 

removal from Greece were very different.


The Getty bought the 2,400-year-old stele in 1993 from Safani 

Gallery, a Manhattan dealer of ancient art, and the work had not 

been documented in published reports. Bearing an arresting image of 

a dead warrior named Athanias, it is a rare example of incised 

black limestone from the ancient Greek region of Boeotia, which 

includes the present-day city of Thebes.


Though there is no hard evidence of an unlawful excavation, Mr. 

Brand said, the museum determined that such a work ? unlike, say, 

Greek vases ? was not made for export in ancient times and could 

only have been removed from Greece.


Reached by telephone yesterday evening, Alan Safani, the owner of 

Safani Gallery, said that his father, who ran the gallery at the 

time, had no information that the stele was illegally removed from 

Greece when he sold it to the Getty.


"He bought it in Europe in the late 1980's, and it was properly 

imported into the U.S., with all the paperwork," Mr. Safani said. 

"It was a straightforward transaction."


The marble relief ? which dates from 500 to 480 B.C. and shows two 

female figures approaching the shrine of a goddess, possibly 

Aphrodite ? has been identified as part of a group of pieces 

excavated by French archaeologists on Thasos in 1911. Greek 

officials said it was stolen from a storeroom at the French 

Archaeological School in Thasos soon afterward and eventually 

entered a private Austrian collection before it was bought in 1955 

by Mr. Getty in London.


Mr. Brand said, “This is a piece where we know where it belongs at 

a site, and it will be reunited with that group.”


The other two works claimed by Greece ? a gold funerary wreath from 

the fourth century B.C. adorned with blue and green glass inlay, 

and a marble kore, or statue of a young woman, from the sixth 

century B.C. ? were acquired in 1993 and are also prominently 

displayed at the Getty Villa, the home of the museum’s antiquities 

collection.


The kore has also been claimed by Italy. According to a Getty 

Museum publication, the statue is made from marble from the Greek 

island of Paros and was acquired through the European art market.


Though Greece first laid claim to the four disputed objects in the 

1990’s, negotiations did not begin in earnest until last fall, when 

its Culture Ministry submitted a new request for the four pieces. 

Late last year, a few weeks before he officially took the reins of 

the Getty Museum in early January, Mr. Brand contacted the ministry 

to open talks on the objects. In May he traveled to Greece to 

broker a settlement.


After that meeting, he said he would recommend that the Getty board 

approve the return of “some of the claimed antiquities in the near 

future.” Last month the board unanimously approved the return of 

the stele and the marble relief.


Vivi Vassilopoulou, director of antiquities at the ministry, said 

Mr. Brand’s “placating’’ style had been pivotal to the deal.


“For the first time in 10 years, we had a Getty director coming to 

us with a proposal to work things out,” Ms. Vassilopoulou said.


The accord comes as the Getty tries to resolve a much larger claim 

by Italy for 52 objects in its collection, as well as cope with the 

current Italian trial of its former antiquities curator, Marion 

True, on charges of conspiring to acquire looted artifacts.


The Italian claim against the Getty includes numerous objects 

acquired by Ms. True and other curators for the museum that have 

been traced by Italian prosecutors to Giacomo Medici, an Italian 

dealer who was convicted in 2004 of trafficking in illicit 

antiquities.


The Italian evidence record says that the kore was acquired from a 

London dealer, Robin Symes, in June 1993. The object appears in 

several photographs seized from a Medici archive in Switzerland, 

“evidently dirty with soil, and with breaks that are very fresh,” 

according to the documents. The Italian record says the kore was 

never exhibited before the Getty bought it.


After talks in Rome in late June, the Getty said it had reached a 

tentative agreement with the Italian government to return some of 

the objects in dispute, including “several masterpieces,” though it 

gave no specifics. Mr. Brand is to report formally to the Getty’s 

board on those discussions when he returns to Los Angeles later 

this month.


Mr. Brand said it was likely “that there would be a couple of 

objects, or some objects, that will require further discussions.” 

But he added that in the next two or three months “a significant 

part’’ of Italy’s claim “could be resolved.”


It remains unclear how such an accord might affect the trial of Ms. 

True, which began in November.


In the months preceding Mr. Brand’s negotiations in Athens, Greek 

officials opened their own investigation of Ms. True, who has a 

vacation house on the Greek island of Paros, and of Christos 

Michaelides, a Greek dealer of antiquities with close ties to the 

Getty, who died in 1999.


In raids this spring, Greek officials entered Ms. True’s house and 

confiscated a small number of antiquities. Greek prosecutors have 

threatened to press charges against her for possessing antiquities 

that had not been registered with the authorities.


Lawyers for Ms. True say that the confiscated artifacts were 

already in the house when she bought it in 1995. They add that the 

chief archaeologist of Paros examined the objects a decade ago and 

determined that they were not valuable.


Asked what claims Greece would pursue next, Mr. Voulgarakis 

declined to give specifics. Nor would Ms. Vassilopoulou, but she 

said, “We’re aggressively compiling evidence that establishes Greek 

provenance and ownership for all of these disputed items.”


Anthee Carassava contributed reporting from Athens for this article.