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December 12, 2013

Bojan Dobovšek and Boštjan Slak on "Criminal Inspectors and Art Crime Investigation in Slovenia" in the Fall 2013 issue of ARCA's Journal of Art Crime


Bojan Dobovšek and Boštjan Slak write on "Criminal Inspectors and Art Crime Investigation in Slovenia" in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime. This is the academic article's abstract:
The aim of the paper is to present some presumptions about the criminal investigation of art and historical heritage-related crimes. Because credible literature on art crime investigation is rare, especially with clear empirical data, we have decided to survey Slovenian investigators about their opinions and experience relating to art crimes. Slovenian investigators rarely come across art crime cases, even in connection with other types of crime. Our survey showed that Slovenian criminal investigators are indifferent regarding keenness for art-related criminal cases investigation-: cases are not very “desirable” but also they are not “non-desirable.” In addition, investigators do not agree that they have enough knowledge about art-related crime. The most positively evaluated was cooperation with other instructions (like INTERPOL). The study results also showed that more dedication should be devoted to education about investigating art crimes; especially prosecutors and judges lack such knowledge. Some problems and experiences about academic research methods are also debated in the paper, therefore providing some help to future researchers. Our pilot study has shown that (at least in Slovenia) qualitative research methods would be more suitable. However the findings of our research are still useful to those who develop strategies for investigating art-related crimes, and for further academic research.
From the introduction:
Art crimes are most often defined as “criminally punishable acts that involve works of art” (Conklin, 1994, p. 3). Passas & Proulx (2011, p. 52), are more detailed: “... subsumed under the rubric of art crime are such activities as diverse as art thefts and confiscations, vandalism, faked and forged art, illicit excavation and export of antiquities and other archaeological material.” We list these definitions of art crime simply because most countries also penalize criminal acts against art and cultural heritage in such a broad sense. Without a doubt, such broadness limits the research of art crime, as individual acts are lost in the statistics of property crime, under which art crime falls. One can only examine the rough numbers of the frequency with which art crime occurs per year. Only in notorious cases do we have more data, but the majority of data remains uncollectable1 or, as is the case in Slovenia, it isn’t consistent, as determined by Vučko (2012) in her study. She noticed that there are severe discrepancies between annual data about art crime that the General Police Directorate gives to the public, to researchers, and that which was published elsewhere (ibid). Dobovšek, Charney, & Vučko (2009) see one of the reasons why criminologists and criminalists aren’t keen on empirical studies of art crime, in the fact that even though there are extensive art crime databases kept by INTERPOL, the FBI, and private organizations, these are sometimes hard to access. Moreover, because of social and, mainly legal, specifications of different countries, the available data only enables country-by-country analysis (Durney & Proulx, 2011).
Bojan Dobovšek is Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Slovenia. Boštjan Slak is a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Slovenia. 

Design for this issue and all issues of The Journal of Art Crime is the work of Urška Charney. Here's a link to ARCA's website on The Journal of Art Crime (includes Table of Contents for previous issues).

December 11, 2013

Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - ,,, No comments

Update on the search for the oeuvre of Polish artist Moshe Rynecki by his great-granddaughter

Elizabeth Rynecki has written about her search to identify and recover her great-grandfather's oeuvre of art which Moesche Rynecki hid around Warsaw during World War II before he was believed to have perished in the Majdanek concentration camp in 1943 of which is written:
After the Germans destroyed the Warsaw ghetto in spring 1943, SS and police officials deported between 18,000 and 22,000 survivors of the uprising, including women and children, to Majdanek as forced laborers, along with the equipment of some of the Warsaw ghetto workshops. The SS intended that these prisoners would work for the benefit of a new SS-owned labor deployment concern, East Industries, Inc. (Ostindustrie, GmbH). The surviving documentation is insufficient to determine whether and how many of the Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto were killed upon arrival at Majdanek. As many as 3,000 may eventually have been transferred to the Budzyn forced labor camp. 
Here's an article in the Spring issue of The Journal of Art Crime about the loss of works by Moesche Rynecki: 
At the outbreak of the Second World War, my great-grandfather, Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943), took his oeuvre of work (about 800 paintings depicting the Jewish community) and divided them into bundles to be hidden in and around the city of Warsaw, Poland. He gave a list of the locations where works were hidden to his wife, son, and daughter, in hopes that after the war the family would retrieve the bundles....After the war, my great-grandmother Perla and her cousin went to see if any of the bundles of the paintings survived. They weren’t very hopeful because of the enormous devastation in and around Warsaw. They found just a single package in the Pragash district, across the river Vistula. The package was in the cellar of a home. As my grandfather George recalls in his memoir:
The people were away, and the paintings, all on paper or parchment, fairly small, were strewn on the basement floor in the cellar. Some damaged, some cut in half with scenes missing. They seemed to have gone through the same fate as the Jewish people – massacred and destroyed. About 12-15 percent of Jews survived the Holocaust. So did my father’s paintings. One hundred and twenty were found out of a count of close to eight hundred works. (G. Rynecki 94)
Here's a link to her blog which updates her journey and work on the documentary Chasing Portraits: A Family's Quest for Their Lost Heritage. This blog post on Nov. 5 tells about the photos of paintings Ms. Rynecki saw in the Otto Schneid archive at the University of Toronto Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library.

Here's on article published on Oct. 31 in The Canadian Jewish News by Fern Smiley (ARCA Alum) "Search for lost pre-World War II art bears fruit in Toronto". Ms. Smiley wrote:
While it’s possible that much of Moshe’s extant oeuvre has been stolen, this can’t be easily proven. Since Moshe’s work was never recorded or catalogued, it’s impossible to prove whether paintings that surface at auctions, for example, came from the bundles. As an art historian, Rynecki can search for her great-grandfather’s paintings, establish relationships with those who have his pieces, and potentially learn the stories that tie all of those who have experienced the work into a larger narrative.
 In return, she receives gifts, and that night at her talk, Prof. Barry Walfish gave her several more. After the questions ended, he raised his hand and explained to Rynecki and the audience that the University of Toronto Library, where Walfish works as a Judaica specialist, holds handwritten letters of her great-grandfather as well as more than a dozen photographs of his paintings. Among them was a photo of the damaged painting she showed during her talk.
In the rain, after a long lecture, Walfish accompanied Rynecki to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where he opened two archival boxes from the Otto Schneid archives. Schneid, a European-born Polish painter, sculptor and historian, wrote a book on modern Jewish art in the Diaspora. In his research, he solicited autobiographies and photos of artwork from dozens of Jewish artists in Europe, including Moshe. In 1938, after Germany’s annexation of Austria, the printing of his authoritative book by his Viennese publisher was halted by the Nazis. Schneid fled Poland for Palestine, but never saw his book in print. A Hebrew version that he prepared in Israel and was ready for publication in 1957 also never saw the light of day. The unpublished manuscripts, in German and Hebrew, along with all the background material he collected, were gifted to the Fisher Library by his widow, Miriam, in 2002.
Out of the boxed archives came more than a dozen photos of paintings Rynecki had never seen before, including one called Kabbalist and one haunting death-bed scene of Moshe’s own father, as well as the intact photographic reproduction of his watercolour Prayer, and a handwritten letter in Yiddish from Moshe to Schneid, introducing himself, which begins: “I was born an artist…”- See more at: http://www.cjnews.com/opinions/search-lost-pre-wwii-art-bears-fruit-toronto#sthash.e1LphXXJ.dpuf

December 9, 2013

"Victorian Art Theft in England: Early Cases and Sociology of the Crime Noah Charney and John Kleberg in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime

The Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime includes an academic article by ARCA Founder Noah Charney and John Kleberg on "Victorian Art Theft in England: Early Cases and Sociology of the Crime". This is the abstract:
Victorian England represents a distinctive sociological Petri dish for criminologists. Attitudes towards crime, the myth of the gentleman thief, and the important veneer of respectability beneath which flowed a rich vein of immorality and criminal activity are all unique to the time and place. And yet the influence of Victorian crime can still be felt today. The general public still assumes that thieves, in particular art thieves, adhere to Victorian (and later Edwardian) stereotypes: that art thieves are non-violent, educated men of gentlemanly aspirations. This was the case in some famous cases, notably that of Adam Worth, described here. But the perception among the general public has not caught up with the more devastating realities of art crime, that it is the third highest-grossing criminal trade worldwide since the Second World War, and that it is entwined with the drug and arms trades, and even terrorism. This paper examines two famous Victorian art theft case studies, discusses the Victorian origin of museums and the art market, and concludes with how these high-profile cases influenced the public perception of art theft, and continues to do so to this day.
This is an introduction to the article:
Victorian England represents a distinctive sociological petri dish for criminologists. Attitudes towards crime, the myth of the gentleman thief, and the important veneer of respectability beneath which flowed a rich vein of immorality and criminal activity are all unique to the time and place. And yet the influence of Victorian crime can still be felt today. The general public still assumes that thieves, in particular art thieves, adhere to Victorian (and later Edwardian) stereotypes: that art thieves are non-violent, educated men of gentlemanly aspirations. This was the case in some famous cases, notably that of Adam Worth, described here. But the perception among the general public has not caught up with the more devastating realities of art crime, that it is the third highest- grossing criminal trade worldwide since the Second World War, and that it is entwined with the drug and arms trades, and even terrorism. This paper examines two famous Victorian art theft case studies, discusses the Victorian origin of museums and the art market, and concludes with how these high-profile cases influenced the public perception of art theft, particularly the archetype of the “gentleman thief,” and continues to do so to this day. 
The extent of theft of fine art across the world, while estimates vary, is most certainly a significant contemporary issue. But the history of such theft, punctuated by extraordinary examples in times of war, is less well documented until more recent times. Two examples, one by an amateur and one by a “professional,” demonstrate the perceived potential value to criminals in Victorian times in England. Known thefts of art from churches exist but it may well be that these two cases represent the earliest examples for financial gain of the theft of fine art.

While details on the amateur thief and the investigation are less available the stories of both are, nonetheless, interesting as possibly the first significant theft of art during this period.
Noah Charney holds Masters degrees in art history from The Courtauld Institute and University of Cambridge, and a PhD from University of Ljubljana. He is Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Rome, a Visiting Lecturer for Brown University abroad programs, and is the founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group on issues of art crimes. Charney is the author of numerous academic and popular articles, including a regular column in ArtInfo called “The Secret History of Art” and a weekly interview series in The Daily Beast called “How I Write.” His first novel, The Art Thief (Atria 2007), is currently translated into seventeen languages and is a best seller in five countries. He is the editor of an academic essay collection entitled Art & Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World (Praeger 2009) and the Museum Time series of guides to museums in Spain (Planeta 2010). His is author of a critically acclaimed work of non-fiction, Stealing the Mystic Lamb: the True History of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece (PublicAffairs 2011), which is a best seller in two countries. His latest book is The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting (ARCA Publications 2011). Upcoming books include The Book of Forgery (Phaidon 2014), The Invention of Art (Norton 2015), and an as yet untitled edited collection of essays on art crime (Palgrave 2014).


John Kleberg is a retired Assistant Vice President at The Ohio State University where he was instrumental in organizing a program to identify and record un-catalogued art and artifacts possessed by the University as well as having administrative responsibility for security, police, and other business and finance operations. He also has been a law enforcement administrator, trainer, and educator in Ohio and Illinois. His undergraduate degree is from Michigan State University, graduate degree from the University of Illinois, and he has done post-graduate work at The Ohio State University and Kent State University. He is the author of numerous articles on campus safety and security issues, co-authored several books and is a consultant on campus security issues, including campus museums, libraries, and galleries.

Design for this issue and all issues of The Journal of Art Crime is the work of Urška Charney.

Here's a link to ARCA's website on The Journal of Art Crime (includes Table of Contents for previous issues).

December 6, 2013

Gurlitt Art Collection: The Economist publishes letter from Judge Tompkins on "Hildebrand Gurlitt's secret"

Here's a Letter published in The Economist (December 7, 2013; from the print edition):
Dealing with stolen art
* SIR – The discovery of a treasure trove of so-called “degenerate” art in a Munich flat triggers many challenges for Germany, not the least of which is, what to do with all these unique art works (“Hildebrand Gurlitt’s secret”, November 9th)? If many of the works were stolen from their original owners around 70 or so years ago then they should be returned to the heirs of those same dispossessed owners.
Getting close to doing that is the great challenge. Undoing the harm of the theft of any work of art, even more so when the theft was part of the evil of the Nazi regime, is a uniquely international problem. It demands both an international but also a creative answer. What is needed is, in short, an adhoc International Art Crime Tribunal. Such a tribunal would be assisted by art historians, provenance researchers, advocates to assist the commission and, crucially, claimant advocates and advisers to work with claimants so that they can properly and effectively present their claims. By this means the tribunal could create the kind of independent, neutral ground necessary for the lasting resolution of the disputes that will inevitably arise concerning the stolen art.
The tribunal should be entrusted with the task of resolving the fate of each work of art, not only by deciding the historical and legal claims to it, but also by explicitly evaluating, and giving equal weight to, the moral claim of the claimant. This is crucial. In the past claims to art looted in wartime have been undermined or destroyed by insufficient legal evidence to establish prior ownership, even though the moral claim for return of looted art is clear.
None of this is new. Precedents for all these aspects of the proposed tribunal exist, and have in a variety of settings and circumstances been used during recent decades. The challenges presented by these pictures provide a rare chance to bring together many of the valuable lessons learned over the long years of hard-won, accumulated experience gained in trying to undo the art crimes of the Nazis.
JUDGE ARTHUR TOMPKINS
Trustee and faculty member of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art
Hamilton, New Zealand

December 5, 2013

Thursday, December 05, 2013 - ,, 1 comment

"The Crime That Pays? The Canadian Print Media's Construction of Art Fraud, 1978-2012" authored by Josh and Adie Nelson in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime

Josh and Adie Nelson authored "The Crime That Pays? The Canadian Print Media’s Construction of Art Fraud, 1978-2012" in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime. From the abstract:
This article examines the Canadian print media’s construction of art fraud from January 1978 until December 2012. Our content analysis of N=386 articles reveals that art fraud was portrayed as a low-risk crime that pays and as a “victimless” crime. In contrast to conventional crime news, which is situated in the front portions of newspapers, articles on art fraud were most often positioned in sections devoted to “entertainment.” The media’s portrayal of art fraud as a phenomenon that was more entertaining than vexatious resonated in its portrayal of offenders as charming rogues and artful dodgers, with the most notorious of offenders depicted as heroes, and in its casting of victims as fools or “legitimate” victims. This peculiar construction would seem to offer considerable inducements for schadenfreude, a revelling in the misfortunes of others.
From the article's introduction:  
Examinations of the “professional imperatives” (Chibnall, 1977: 23) that guide press reporting on crime have repeatedly suggested the folly of supposing that these dicta encourage a faithful rendering of the incidence and dynamics of crime. Thus, in emphasizing that journalists are tasked daily with producing a “certain quantity of what is called ‘news’,” Breed’s (1955) classic study suggested how this role obligation could catalyze a “persistent search in the drab episodes of city life for the romantic and picturesque, its dramatic accounts of victim and crime” (see also crime: e.g., Ericson, Baranek & Chan, 1987, 1989, 1991; Hugill, 2010; Katz, 1987; Peelo, 2006; Rajiva & Batacharya, 2010). While the frenetic quality of this quest may have abated in more recent eras with the rise of “supermarket journalism” (Mawby, 2010a, 2010b; McGovern, 2010) and the concomitant ability of journalists to “simply ‘buy’ their stories off the shelf from the press offices that are responsible for ‘managing the media’ about a particular crime or event” (Wilson, 2011), journalism’s cynical mantra, “if it bleeds, it leads,” continues to resonate both its disdain for coverage of the mundane and prosaic and rapt readiness to endow statistically atypical incidents with especial lustre. As Reiner (2002: 307) observed in his commentary upon the news media’s tendency to position the extraordinary as ordinary, “[f]rom the earliest studies (e.g., Harris 1932) onward, analyses of news reports have found that crimes of violence are featured disproportionately compared to their incidence in official statistics. Indeed, a general finding has been the lack of relationship between patterns and trends in crime news and crime statistics.”
Josh Nelson is a graduate student at the University of Guelph in the department of art history & visual culture and, beginning in September, 2013, a doctoral student in art history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His doctoral research addresses a criminal event that the Canadian print media early and, ostensibly enduringly, dubbed the “Great Canadian art fraud”; it examines the social context in which this highly-publicized incident emerged in media reports of the early 1960s, was weighted with significance, framed as portentous and defined as a “crime against culture.”

Adie Nelson received her PhD at the London School of Economics and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. She is the author/co-author/editor/co-editor of approximately two dozen books and her writings have appeared in journals such as the British Journal of Sociology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Qualitative Sociology and the International Review of Victimology.

Design for this issue and all issues of The Journal of Art Crime is the work of Urška Charney.

Here's a link to ARCA's website on The Journal of Art Crime (includes Table of Contents for previous issues).

Thursday, December 05, 2013 - ,,, No comments

Isabella Stewart Gardner Theft: Boston's WGBH News' Emily Rooney reports Anne Hawley's first public comments about threats after the theft and interviews FBI Investigator Geoff Kelley about why suspect(s) not named and speculates about the paintings

Boston's WGBH's Emily Rooney reported Dec. 3 that the FBI has issued "wanted posters" for the 13 missing artworks stolen in 1990:
The posters don't sport the usual most-wanted suspects. instead, they display the missing artwork in an effort to get someone to come forward with what they know about the most significant art heist in history.
In addition, Ms. Rooney reported that "Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley is opening up about the loss":
"It was such a painful and horrible moment in the museum's life," Hawley said. Until now, Hawley has said little about the theft and what happened in the immediate aftermath. "We also are being threatened from the outside by criminals who want attention from the FBI, and so they were threatening us, and threatening putting bombs in the museum," she said. "We were evacuating museum, the staff members were under threat, no one really knew what kind of a conundrum we were in."
[...]

WGBH News' Emily Rooney interviewed Jeff Kelley, a special agent in the FBI's Boston field office, and a member of the art crime unit.

Emily Rooney: You have been in this for at least ten years.
Jeff Kelley: It is actually 11 years now I have been the investigator on this case.

Rooney: You essentially know who did it.

Kelley: Yes.

Rooney: Why can't you say?

Kelley: We have to temper what we put out there in the public, and we certainly want to get the assistance of the public and we feel it is important to kind of lay our cards out on the table and say we know who did it, and we know who is involved, but we need your help. 
[...]
Rooney: The former Boston Herald reporter Tom Mashburger has a great tale of being, essentially, blindfolded and taken to a place where somebody unrolled something and he got some chips. Is there any possibility what he saw is one of the real pieces?

Kelley: I know Tom and he has the utmost integrity. But from what I have learned about the art itself, I don't think that what he saw was the actual painting. He described it as being unrolled, kind of unfurled, but from speaking to the experts at the museum and at other museums, the paintings are so thick that they would really be almost impossible to roll up.

Rooney: Do you think that they are still in existence and do you think together — because with 13 objects, some of them are odd objects, they weren't all paintings — to think that they're together?

Kelley: I don't know if they are still together. I think they are all in existence.
Note: The correct name of the reporter "Tom Mashburger" is Tom Mashberg.
Here's a link to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwnQs1BvvlU.

December 4, 2013

Wednesday, December 04, 2013 - , No comments

DIA evaluation of $2 billion includes only 'works bought directly with city funds' -- Detroit Free Press

Last summer Christie's evaluated the artworks of the Detroit Institute of Arts as part of a city bankruptcy filing; now "Orr says DIA masterpieces worth less than thought," writes Mark Stryker for the Detroit Free Press
The 459 most valuable masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Arts have a fair-market value of less than $2 billion, Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr said Tuesday. That figure is significantly below most predictions for the value of the art, which many observers expected to reach at least several billion dollars — perhaps as much as $8 billion. A figure less than $2 billion is likely to inflame the passions of bondholders, unions and other creditors who see DIA masterpieces as a prime source for recovering the billions they are owed by the city. It also increases the chances that a court battle over the fate of the DIA will become even more contentious as Orr prepares his plan of adjustment to restructure city finances. On another front, the lower-than-expected estimate could make it easier for Orr to justify his push to extract roughly $500 million in revenue from the DIA to help restructure the city. A high Christie’s estimate had been widely expected to increase pressure on Orr to demand even more from the DIA. “I do think it gives creditors more ammunition,” said Nicholas O’Donnell, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in art-related law. 
[...]
In May, the Free Press consulted art dealers and auction records to estimate the market value of 38 big-ticket works at the DIA. The tally was $2.5 billion. Included in those works were six paintings bought by the city between 1922 and 1930 that also were evaluated by Christie’s. The newspaper’s estimate for those works was more than $500 million, including price tags between $50 million and $150 million for Matisse’s “The Window,” Bruegel’s “The Wedding Dance” and Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait.” So how could 459 works add up to less than $2 billion? Part of the answer could be that many of the DIA’s most valuable works — including those by Caravaggio, Ruisdael, Van Gogh, De Kooning, Giacometti, Cezanne and others — were not evaluated because they were either donated to the museum or bought with funds other than city dollars. Though every piece of art at the DIA is owned by the city regardless of how it was acquired, Orr decided to evaluate only works bought directly with city funds to avoid messier legal entanglements of donated works and expedite the evaluation process. The DIA owns roughly 65,000 works.

The Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime Now Available

The e-Edition of the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime is now available. Noah Charney is Editor-in-Chief of the 10th issue published by ARCA; Marc Balcells, John Jay College of Law, and Christos Tsirogiannis, University of Cambridge, serve as Associate Editors. In the Letter from the Editor, Dr. Charney writes: 
For this issue, I’m pleased to introduce two new editors who will put together the JAC along with me: Marc Balcells and Christos Tsirogiannis. Readers will know their written work from past issues, and they will not only help me to edit, but also contribute regularly, with Marc taking on the role of our primary book reviewer, and Christos preparing a new regular column. They interview one another in this issue, to provide an introduction to readers. In this issue you’ll find academic papers on art theft in the Victorian era, the in-depth story of the looting and return of the Axum obelisk, two pieces on art fraud and forgery, and a dissertation from one of our program graduates on Armenian “cross-stones” in Azerbaijan.
Table of Contents:

ACADEMIC ARTICLES: "The Crime That Pays? The Canadian Print Media’s Construction of Art Fraud, 1978-2012" by John and Adie Nelson; "Victorian Art Theft in England: Early Cases and Sociology of the Crime" by Noah Charney and John Kleberg; "Criminal Inspectors and Art Crime Investigation in Slovenia" by Bojan DobovÅ¡ek and BoÅ¡tjan Slak; "The Mythology of the Art Forger" by Felicity Strong; and "Destruction of Jugha Necropolis with Armenian Khachqars (Cross-stones) in Azerbaijan" by Marine Fidanyan.

REGULAR COLUMNS: David Gill's Context Matters on “The Cleveland Apollo Goes Public”; Noah Charney's Lessons from the History of Art Crime on “Art-Burning Mother & Art Loss Register Issues”; and Christos Tsirogiannis' Nekyia on “From Apulia to Virginia: An Apulian Gnathia Askos at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts”.

EDITORIAL ESSAYS "Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You: the Axum Obelisk" by Suzette Scotti.

REVIEWS Marc Balcells reviews The Venus Fixers by Ilaria Dagnini Brey and Saving Italy by Robert Edsel. 

EXTRAS "Marc Balcells Introduces Christos Tsirogiannis" and "Christos Tsirogiannis Interviews Marc Balcells".

December 3, 2013

Tuesday, December 03, 2013 - , No comments

Persian chalice authentic or fake? Dutch Art Investigator Arthur Brand has no doubts

Dutch art investigator Arthur Brand is of the opinion that the chalice "that helped make possible the Iran nuclear deal, as reported in the media, is a fake."

In the LA Times article by Christi Parsons "The chalice that helped make possible the Iran nuclear deal" has been surrounded by controversy regarding its authenticity:
Some experts believe the vessel, known as a rhyton, was crafted in the 7th century BC in what later became the Persian Empire, now Iran. It features three trumpet-shaped cups that sprout from the body of a griffin, a fabled creature that typically has the head and wings of a bird and the body of a lion. On the chalice, the eyes are deep-set and wide open, like those of a bird of prey. The object was allegedly part of a cache of antiquities found in a cave near the Iraqi border in the 1980s, shortly after Iran's Islamic Revolution. "These were great treasures from a great civilization," said Fariborz Ghadar, an Iranian scholar who served as a deputy economic minister to Iran's shah. "Their discovery was of great significance to those who consider themselves Persians, who honor that period in history." 
In 2003, the chalice surfaced in the hands of a well-known antiquities dealer, Hicham Aboutaam, who ran a firm based in Geneva. As he passed through U.S. customs at Newark International Airport, Aboutaam presented a certificate indicating the vessel was from Syria. He was waved through. Aboutaam then set out to document the object's value. Three experts he consulted determined it was from Iran; two concluded it was consistent with the antiquities taken from the cave. An art collector was prepared to pay $1 million, but federal investigators caught wind of it. They charged that the object had been taken from Iran illicitly, making its importation to the U.S. illegal. The dealer was prosecuted and paid a $5,000 fine. The chalice was then placed in a climate-controlled storage unit. The value of the chalice remains uncertain. Some have maintained that it is not 2,700 years old at all, but a modern fake. But Iranian officials have insisted it is genuine and demanded its return.
Arthur Brand pointed out previous questions about the object's authenticity in an Oct. 14 article by Frud Bezhan in Radio Free Europe "U.S. Gift To The Iranian People A 'Fake':
Unfortunately, according to Hamid Baqaie, the former head of Iran's Cultural Heritage Organization, the artifact is without question a modern forgery. "Firstly, the way it has been made and the style in which it has been made shows it's a fake. This artifact doesn't have any roots in ancient Iran," Baqaie says. "Secondly, from a technical point of view the materials used to make it also show that it's not an original." 
Archeologist Oscar White Muscarella, a former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has gone on record as saying he, too, does not believe the artifact is the real deal. He wrote in a paper published last year that it took only a glance at a photograph of the artifact to convince him it was a fake.
Dutch art investigator Arthur Brand wrote in an email:
I saw many western-cave objects, some looted, more fake. I saw them too in the Aboutaams' shop. The one the USA gave to Iran is mostly fake, partly constructed from original pieces. I even know who did the construction. It is the same man who made the partly fake which was offered in Germany a few years ago. I made a documentary about that piece, together with the German ARD. Skip to 8.10.
Another Western-cave invention of the Aboutaams, in their shop, secretly filmed by me (see photo below):

December 1, 2013

ARCA Associates participating in International Conference on Protecting Cultural Heritage As a Common Good of Humanity: A Challenge for Criminal Justice; Italian conference scheduled Dec. 13-15 in Courmayeur Mont Blanc

ARCA's CEO Lynda Albertson; ARCA lecturer Richard Ellis and 2012 and 2013 award winners, Jason Felch and Duncan Chappell, will be speaking at the International Conference on Protecting Cultural Heritage As a Common Good of Humanity: A Challenge for Criminal Justice on December 13-15 in Courmayeur Mont Blanc in Italy 13-15 December 2013.

This cultural heritage protection conference is the initiative of International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council of the United Nations; Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme-ISPAC; Fondazione Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale-CNPDS; and Fondazione Courmayeur Mont Blanc in co-operation with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime-UNODC, Vienna under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
ISPAC is organizing an International Conference aimed at exploring the indispensable role of crime prevention and criminal justice responses, at both international and domestic level, in combating all forms of trafficking in cultural property and related offences in a comprehensive and effective manner. This Conference addressed to international organizations, national enforcement agencies, academics, cultural institutions, private sector operators in art and antiquities follows a long-established commitment of ISPAC in the protection of cultural heritage and public goods as one of the most relevant challenges for contemporary criminal policy. Cultural heritage has come to be perceived not only as an asset for the "source Countries", but also, more relevantly, as the object of a cultural right any human being is entitled to, as well as a fundamental heritage for the whole mankind. Hence the growing interest that the United Nations, as well as many other international organizations, have been developing in the phenomenon, and the commitment to produce and implement international legal instruments aimed at protecting cultural heritage. 
In the past, several instruments have been adopted. The prevention and sanctioning of harms traditionally inflicted to cultural property during wars was the first aim to be pursued through the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954), and its Additional Protocols as well as the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions (1977). Other interventions by the international community focussed on illicit imports, exports and transfers of ownership of cultural property under any kind of circumstance, and namely the UNESCO Convention (1970), as well as the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (1995). The international commitment to the safeguard of cultural heritage found also expression in several other international instruments, such as the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (2001), the European Convention on Offences relating to Cultural Property (1985), the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (1969) and its revised version (1992). 
Nowadays the pervasiveness of this phenomenon, and its very complex features, are increasingly acknowledged at both international and national level. Trafficking in cultural property, as well as all other crimes related to cultural objects (such as looting, illicit import and export, forgery, and so on), are believed to be a constantly growing sector of criminality, and an increasingly attractive one for national and transnational criminal organizations. Hence, too, the growing involvement of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in drafting and implementing international instruments to face offences against cultural heritage. Since 2009 several initiatives were adopted pursuant to Economic and Social Council resolution 2008/23. In its resolution 2010/19, then, the Council considered that the Organized Crime Convention (2000), as well as the UN Convention against Corruption (2003), should be fully used for the purpose of strengthening the fight against trafficking in cultural property. At its twentieth session, the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice prepared a draft resolution (2011/42) entitled Strengthening Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Responses to Protect Cultural Property, Especially with Regard to its Trafficking, in which it mandated the Secretariat to further explore the development of specific guidelines for crime prevention and criminal justice responses with respect to trafficking in cultural property, and invited Member States to submit written comments on the UN Model Treaty for the Prevention of Crimes that Infringe on the Cultural Heritage of Peoples in the Form of Movable Property. Finally, in April 2013, the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice recommended to the ECOSOC a draft resolution on Strengthening Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Responses to Protect Cultural Property, Especially with Regard to its Trafficking, to be submitted for adoption to the General Assembly. The Thirteenth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (to be held in Qatar in 2015) will specifically focus - among others - on comprehensive and balanced approaches to prevent and adequately respond to new and emerging forms of transnational crime, such as trafficking of cultural property. 
ISPAC's Conference aims at exploring the indispensable role of crime prevention and criminal justice responses in combating all forms of trafficking in cultural property and related offences in a comprehensive and effective manner; the need for States to consider reviewing their legal frameworks, in order to provide the most extensive international cooperation to fully address trafficking in cultural property; the possibility for national jurisdictions to make trafficking in cultural property (including stealing and looting at archaeological and other cultural sites) a serious crime, as defined in art. 2 UNCTOC, as well as to fully utilize that Convention for the purpose of extensive international cooperation; finally, the importance of a speedy and effective finalization of the Guidelines, on the basis of the work carried out in the last years. Further issues worth consideration will be the need for credible and comparable data on different aspects of crimes against cultural property, including the links with transnational organized crime and the laundering of illicit proceeds, as well as the benefits of collecting and comparing best practices both in the public and in the private sector. 
PROGRAMME (contacts with panellists are in progress)
Opening Session • LODOVICO PASSERIN de ENTRÈVES, Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Courmayeur Mont Blanc Foundation, Italy • FABRIZIA DERRIARD, Mayor of Courmayeur, Italy • AUGUSTO ROLLANDIN, President, Region of Aosta Valley, Italy • LIVIA POMODORO, President, Court of Milan, Italy; CNPDS/ISPAC Chairman • Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism • Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Keynote Address • JOHN SANDAGE, Director Division for Treaty Affairs, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime-UNODC, Vienna, Austria 
Session I ILLEGAL TRAFFIC OF CULTURAL PROPERTY : THE NEED FOR A REFORM Chair DUNCAN CHAPPELL, Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Sydney, Australia; ISPAC Board Member
• Cultural Heritage and Commons: New Tasks for International Community. UGO MATTEI, Professor of Private Comparative Law at University of Turin, Italy; University of California, Hastings College of Law, USA 
• Curbing Illegal Traffic of Cultural Property: Initiatives at the International Level STEFANO MANACORDA, Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Naples II, Italy; Collège de France, Paris, France; Deputy Chair and Director ISPAC 
• Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network: an Empirical Report from Regional Case Study Fieldwork SIMON MACKENZIE, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Glasgow, UK
SESSION II THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST ILLICIT TRAFFICKING OF CULTURAL PROPERTY Chair TULLIO SCOVAZZI, Professor of International Law, University of Milan Bicocca, Italy
• ALBERTO DEREGIBUS, Colonel, Cultural Heritage Protection Unit, Carabinieri Corps, UNESCO, Paris, France
• SARA GREENBLATT, Chief, Organized Crime Branch, Division for Treaty Affairs, UNODC, Vienna, Austria
• FOLARIN SHYLLON, Professor at Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan, Nigeria 
Session III INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES NATIONAL JURISDICTION Chair EMILIO VIANO, Professor, Department of Justice, Law and Society, American University, Washington DC, USA 
• HUANG FENG, Professor of Criminal Law, Director Institute for International Criminal Law, Beijing Normal University, China 
• DEREK FINCHAM, Associate Professor, South Texas College of Law, Houston, USA 
• Cultural heritage crime in the Islamic Penal Code of Iran MIR MOHAMMAD SADEGHI, Professor of Criminal Law and Head of Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran; UNESCO Chairholder for Human Rights, Peace And Democracy, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran 
• HELENA REGINA LOBO DA COSTA, Professor, University of São Paulo, Brazil (tbc) 
• ADOLFO MEDRANO MALLQUI, Professor of Criminal Law, Lawyer, Lima, Peru Coffee Break 
SESSION III (continued) POLICE COOPERATION Chair EMILIO VIANO, Professor, Department of Justice, Law and Society, American University, Washington DC, USA 
• RICHARD ELLIS, Founder of Scotland Yard! s Art and Antiquities Squad, London, UK • ANTONIO COPPOLA, Major, Head of the Operative Cultural Heritage Protection Unit, Carabinieri Corps, Rome, Italy 
• STÉPHANE GAUFFENY, Colonel, Central office for the fight against Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods (OCBC), Central Directorate of Judicial Police, Paris, France (tbc) 
• DOMENICO GIANI, Inspector General of the Gendarmeria Corps, Vatican City (tbc 
SESSION III (continued) RETURN, RESTITUTION AND CONFISCATION Chair LUIS ARROYO ZAP ATERO, Professor of Criminal Law, Universidad Castilla-la-Mancha, Spain
• Restitution and International Judicial Cooperation MARC-ANDRÉ RENOLD, Professor of Art and Cultural Property Law; Director of the Art-Law Centre; Holder of the UNESCO Chair in the International Law of Cultural Heritage at the University of Geneva, Switzerland
MARIE PFAMMATTER, post doctoral researcher, University of Geneva, Switzerland
• PASCAL BEAUVAIS, Professor, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, Paris France
• STEVEN FELDMAN, Partner, Herrick, Feinstein LLP, New York, USA
• MARK V. VLASIC, Senior Fellow & Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University, Washington, USA
SESSION IV THE ROLE OF THE PRIVATE ACTORS IN PREVENTING ILLEGAL TRAFFIC Chair LUIS ARROYO ZAP ATERO, Professor of Criminal Law, Universidad Castilla-la-Mancha, Spain
• ROBERT WITTMAN, Art Crime Investigator, President of Robert Wittman Inc., Pennsylvania, USA
• JAMES RATCLIFFE, Head of Recoveries, The Art Loss Register-ALR, London, UK
• LYNDA ALBERTSON, Chief Executive Officer, Association for Research into Crimes against Art-ARCA, Rome, Italy
• ROBERT N. LAYNE, Executive Director, International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection, Denver, CO, USA
• MARK STARLING, Chair, International Convention Of Exhibition And Fine Art Transporters-ICEFAT, Toronto, Canada
Round Table PROTECTING CULTURAL PROPERTY: CASE STUDIES AND BEST PRACTICES Chair SIMON MACKENZIE, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Glasgow, UK 
• GIOVANNI MELILLO, Prosecutor, Court of Naples, Italy 
• FABRIZIO LEMME, Professor and Lawyer, Rome, Italy
• TESS DAVIS, Vice Chair of the American Society of International Law! s Cultural Heritage and the Arts Interest Group - Researcher SCCJR, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK 
• FABIO ISMAN, Journalist, Italy 
• JASON FELCH, Journalist, Los Angeles Times, USA 
Conference Venue Conference Hall, Hôtel Pavillon Via Regionale, 62 - 11013 Courmayeur (AO) Official Languages English and Italian with simultaneous interpretation 
Conference Secretariat Fondazione Centro nazionale di prevenzione e difesa sociale-CNPDS Palazzo Comunale delle Scienze Sociali 3, Piazza Castello - 20121 Milano MI Tel.: +39 02 86.46.07.14 - Fax: +39 02 72.00.84.31 E-mail: cnpds.ispac@cnpds.it - Home page: www.cnpds.it Home page: http://ispac.cnpds.org