Few dates have shaped museum acquisition practice as profoundly as 1970. The adoption of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property has come to function not only as a legal reference point but as a moral dividing line. In many institutions, an object documented outside its country of origin before 1970 encounters fewer obstacles. After 1970, the questions begin in earnest.

But what happens when the decisive date is 1969?

To finance the acquisition, the museum applied for a subsidy from the Brabant Museum Foundation, but the Foundation hesitated.  Was the purchase compatible with international agreements governing cultural property? It asked the Ethical Code Committee for Museums - formerly the Museum Code of Conduct Committee to review the case.

The Commission framed its advice around two questions: whether the museum had complied with the relevant provisions of the professional code of ethics, and whether it had exercised sufficient care in investigating the provenance of the bell. The export date of 1969 was noted as falling just before the 1970 UNESCO Convention. Although the Netherlands had not ratified the Convention at that time, the Dutch ethical code expected museums to act in accordance with its spirit.

The Commission acknowledged that the proximity of 1969 to 1970 might raise doubts. Nevertheless, it found no reason to question the stated circulation of the piece as supplied by Nies. On that basis, it concluded that illicit trade, as defined under the code, was not at issue and that the acquisition had been carried out with appropriate care. The Brabant Museum Foundation accepted the advice and the purchase proceeded.

The advice, however, was not unanimous. One member of the commission dissented and stated that he "would have been in favour of asking the opinion of the government of the country of origin in order to overcome the one-sidedness of the information available to the purchaser".  If doubt existed regarding provenance, as he believed it did, the museum should not proceed.  Even before 1970, he argued, the object should not have left Cambodia without authorisation from the relevant authorities. 

This minority view will later take on greater resonance.

In 2005, Jos van Beurden revisited the case in the academic journal Culture Without Context. His analysis focused on two aspects that had received relatively light treatment in the Commission’s recommendation.  The first concerned the certainty of the 1969 date. The Commission had referred to the possible coincidence of 1969 and 1970 but ultimately accepted the dealer’s account's of the object's circulation. Yet, in subsequent conversations Nies reportedly described 1969 as only "most probable" rather than definitive. The boundary between acceptable and problematic rested on a date that was not firmly documented, and instead amounts to hearsay. 

The second issue concerned Cambodian law. The assertion that no permission was required for export from Cambodia to Thailand sits uneasily with information we know about Cambodia's cultural property laws.  Extensive legal protections for Cambodia's cultural heritage date to the French colonial period, the early years of the country's independence, the Khmer Rouge period, as well as modern times.

In 1863, a treaty between France and the Kingdom of Cambodia established Cambodia as a protectorate of France. In 1884, a Convention between the Kingdom of Cambodia and France gave the administrative power of the State to the French, giving the French Governor for Cambodia power over all territory.

Both a 1900 decree law and a 1925 decree expressly state Cambodian cultural artefacts as being the property of the state.  According to these, no object could be exported without the authorisation of the Governor General, something the Dutch museum's bell does not have. 

Following the adoption of a new Constitution in 1993, earlier existing laws remained in force unless expressly repealed.  Legal experts, including former Director of UNESCO's Department of Cultural Heritage Lyndel Prott, supported the view that the 1925 legislation had not been abrogated by the intervening turmoil of the Khmer Rouge period.  If her interpretation was correct, the removal of the bell from Cambodia without authorisation would have been in contravention of domestic law, regardless of whether it occurred before or after 1970. Taken into focus, the dissenting commissioner’s suggestion therefore that Cambodian authorities should have been consulted before this object's purchase now appears less an outlier than a missed opportunity.

Despite this, the museum’s co-founder and curator, Dr André Lehr (1929-2007),  defended the acquisition that the Ethical Commission had approved. What more, he asked, could reasonably be required?  Implicit in that response was a narrower understanding of cultural heritage, one that placed greater weight on monumental works of art than on portable everyday religious objects. 

Yet for source countries such as Cambodia, portable antiquities are integral to the archaeological record as well as to national cultural identity. The distinction between movable and immovable, monumental or portable has little relevance in the country's heritage law and even less in the lived experience of loss among its  people. 

But this Asten case illustrates how the year 1970 has come to function as a kind of ethical shorthcut. For many institutions, “pre-1970” suggests relative safety, while “post-1970” triggers more rigorous investigation.  Over time, the date has risked becoming less a reference point for inquiry than a substitute for it.  If a buyer can be convinced that an object can plausibly be placed outside its country of origin before 1970, the intensity of scrutiny may diminish.

The difficulty is that plausible is not the same as proven.

A prominent collector and dealer in Southeast Asian antiquities, living in Thailand, Latchford was indicted in the United States for crimes related to a many-year scheme to sell hundreds of looted Cambodian antiquities on the international art market.  In September 2020, the indictment against him was dismissed following is death. 

Prior to his Denver donation, Latchford had attempted to sell two other Dong Son bells to a private American buyer one year before the Dutch museum purchased their own from Nies.  In a 2003 email Latchford described the bells as rare and referred to a recent find in the Battambang region of northwestern Cambodia, noting that he had been able to obtain several examples. Photographs taken before cleaning of these objects showed encrustations consistent with recent excavation not a storied life in a permanent collection.

In November 2021, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced a civil forfeiture complaint seeking the return of four looted Cambodian antiquities from the Denver Art Museum.  Three of these, including the Dong Son bell were gifts from Douglas Latchford, while the forth had been purchased by the Thai-based dealer outright.  Later that month, the DAM deaccessioned the pieces from its collection and they were picked up by U.S. officials for return to Cambodia

While the Denver case does not establish that the bell acquired by the Dutch museum in Asten is illicit, it does, however, reveal how narratives once accepted as adequate can later unravel.  References to a “recent find,” coupled with physical evidence of fresh excavation, transformed what might once have been treated as plausible provenance into grounds for forfeiture.  And Latchford's association with other Dong Son bells from Battambang further sharpens our scrutiny of the Dutch bell's collection story.

While there are other instances of bells of this type in circulation within the art market. the parallels in both museum acquisitions are difficult to ignore.  Both the Denver and the Assen bells are stated to have been found in Battambang and both circulated through Thailand where Latchford lived and operated.  

Both also have limited to no documentation with a heavy reliance on the donor or dealer's stated account as to their origins.  And in both cases, institutional approval was based on circumstantial information provided by the individual proffering the work for aquisition or donation.

Marcel Nies has stated in the past that he never sold any piece on behalf of Latchford directly and that he wasn’t aware of the gravity of the allegations against the antiquities dealer until he was indicted.  Despite this, seven artefacts in Nies  publications match to Skanda Trust artefacts which were published in Latchford’s and Emma Bunker's books.  

For cultural policy observers, the comparisons are instructive. It suggests that the absence of disconfirming evidence at a given moment does not resolve underlying uncertainty.  It also highlights the evolving expectations placed on museums today as what was considered reasonable due diligence in the early 2000s may no longer suffice.

Back in 2004, the dissenting member of the Dutch Ethical Commission proposed a straightforward step: consult the source country.  At the time, that suggestion did not prevail.  

Today, direct engagement with source-country authorities and subject matter forensic researchers is increasingly viewed as standard due diligence practice when documentation is incomplete, vague, or contradictory.  The burden of proof is finally shifting toward demonstrating lawful export rather than relying on the absence of proof to the contrary.

This shift reflects broader changes in the governance of cultural property. Source countries have become more assertive in seeking restitution and international cooperation has intensified.  High-profile cases involving traffickers have exposed the fragility of dealer-based narratives where once vague provenance statements like: Private collection Italy, 2000 once sufficed.  As result, forward-thinking museums have responded by strengthening provenance research, enhancing transparency and, in some cases, revisiting past acquisitions.  

The bronze bell purchased in Asten in 2004 sits at the intersection of these complex developments.  The Dutch Ethical Commission concluded that the Assen acquisition complied with the applicable code and that sufficient care had been taken.  Within the framework applied at the time, that conclusion may have been defensible.  Yet the minority opinion and subsequent events invite reconsideration of what sufficiency should mean.

The 1970 Convention remains a cornerstone of international cultural property policy. It provides an essential baseline.  But it was never intended to function as a rubber stamp date for hypothetical transactions that left their countries of origin in circumstances that remain unclear.  Treating 1970 as a bright line can obscure the continuing relevance of domestic export laws and the ethical imperative to seek clarity when doubt arises.

The Asten and Denver bells together illustrate a larger point.  Provenance research is not merely an administrative exercise.  It is an inquiry that unfolds, sometimes over decades, shaped by new evidence, evolving norms and changing relationships between museums, identified bad actors in the art market and source countries. 

Decisions that appeared settled in one decade now look provisional in the next.

By Lynda Albertson

East Indiamen Madagascar by Thomas Goldsworth Dutton (fl 1840) National Maritime Museum Greenwich, London

A lesson from our regulatory past. 

The more ship you can see, the higher the vessel sits in the water.

The less ship you can see, the lower the vessel sits in the water.

If you own a ship, you make more money by transporting more goods. 

Logistically, ships sitting high in the water carry less cargo.  Those seen sitting low in the water carry more cargo. 

Either is ok when the ship is moored safely within a harbor and in most cases when the weather is calm. 

But when a large vessel sets out to sea, the heavier ship, sitting lower in the water, suffers from increasing drag as it moves. It is generally less responsive to steering making a heavily laden ship more difficult to manage in rough seas.  If an overly-laden vessel gets caught in a storm, it's easier for it to take on water and also to sink.

When ships sink, sailors and passengers drown and cargo is lost to the murky depths.  But the insurance fees paid out to the voyage's financers and ship owners were designed to cover such financial losses, so for the shipping industry, more cargo (still) equalled = more money.

That’s how it was in nineteenth-century Britain. 

A ship's crew and passengers might die, but the ship's backers and owners were still compensated financially through marine insurance.  Likewise, due to the booming trade market of the period, the demand for marine insurance created opportunities for profit for both the marine merchants and their voyage underwriters, who in turn profited from high premia which more than compensated the underwriters for the losses incurred when an insured merchant's vessel sunk. 

In 1871 alone 856 ships sank off the coast of Britain. Nearly 2000 sailors and an unknown number of passengers drowned at sea.  

Profit-driven, many shipping barons were unpulsed, more interested in how and when the merchandise got from point "A" to point "B".  More so, with the death of all hands on deck, it was sometimes impossible to verify or disprove events which had occurred in distant ports or on the rough open sea.  To them, the risk to human lives was not a particularly motivating factor to change the status quo of overloading.  Humans may have been drowning, but merchants and many of their underwriters were still making fortunes. 

Sailors often referred to these overly-laden vessels as coffin ships, a way to describe a ship that was overinsured and worth more to its owners sunk than afloat. To them, merchants turning a blind eye to the coffin ships represented the depths to which the merchants operating in the market could stoop.  

But despite their worries, it was an offense for a sailor to refuse to sail, and to do so could mean many months, or even years, in the gaols.  Such were the state of affairs that in 1871 alone, 1628 sailors, including two complete crews, were jailed for refusing to work on overladen merchant vessels.  For many, despite their reluctance and awareness of the awful toll on human life aboard such ships, desperation drove their decisions, forcing them to agree to work as the crew, making them part of an equation that valued commerce and merchandise over humanity. 

Despite the sometimes strident calls for help from worried seamen and the families of those lost at sea, the general consuming public seemed blindly unaware or disinterested in the problem.  That is apart from one man, Samuel Plimsoll, an English social reformer.

Plimsoll fought for a safe loading line on all ships to be passed into law on all English ships and asked for regulation to prevent the overloading of cargo encouraged by the ships' greedy owners.  Plimsoll's principle was based on one already known by seamen as far back as the Middle Ages.  Back then, ships from Genoa, Italy in the Venetian Republic, and the Hanseatic League, required ships to show a load line indicating how heavy the vessel was weighed down with merchandise. 

Yet Plimsoll's reasonable proposal met with powerful opposition and earned him the hatred of many shipowners.

Many of the most vocal members of parliament against reforms were these self-same shipowners and underwriters; men more intent on maximizing their profit than bowing to the expense of morally and ethical moderation.  From their point of view, shipping was a lucrative business couched in the notion of free trade. Their profits should not be bogged down under the weight of moral and ethical considerations.  

Fortunately, in 1876, after years of fighting, Plimsoll's calls for reforms succeeded and Britain's Parliament passed the Unseaworthy Ships Bill into law.  But while this Act required a series of 'lines' to be painted on the ship to show the maximum loading point it didn't specify where.  As a result, some unscrupulous shipowners chose to paint the load line in areas of the ship more convenient and continued this ruse, to disguise their overloaded vessels. 

It was not until 1890 that the country's Board of Trade officials finally applied the regulation that every ship must have a clearly visible Plimsoll line, a line on a ship's hull, in a very specific place, which indicates the maximum safe draught, and therefore the minimum freeboard for the vessel in various operating conditions when loaded with cargo.

I suppose one could draw a few parallels between this maritime story and today’s art merchant climate, where the art market's focus seems to discourage regulatory oversight in favor of self-regulation, ensuring the free movement of merchandise. Likewise, many collectors seem oblivious to, or disinterested in, the problem of illicit trafficking. 

Despite cultural Plimsoll lines, like local legislation and international conventions such as the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, disreputable commercial actors in the art market continue to conduct commerce outside calculated ethical lines. 

And like the sailors on ships, desperation sometimes drives the decisions of subsistence looters in source countries who facilitate the supply chain, and remain as actors to the commerce equation, despite whatever harsh penalties they might face. 

It’s hard to envisage a non-legislative solution that will protect commerce and protect culture at risk.  For now, the foxes in charge of the art market hen house are woefully incapable of self-regulating, and are resistant to the idea that there is even a problem worthy of being addressed. 

By:  Lynda Albertson

h/t to Dave Trott for his details on shipping regulations and statistics. 

• introduce a new criminal offence "theft of cultural property" which will make a distinction between simple theft in general and heritage theft in particular.  This offense would carry a sentence of 2 to 8 years of imprisonment,

• introduce a new criminal offence, the illicit trafficking (specifically of) cultural goods, which would be punishable by a sentence of 2 to 6 years of imprisonment, 

• increase the penalties for crimes which lie downstream from the looting and theft of cultural property, this could including money laundering and/or receiving stolen goods, when those goods or proceeds are considered to have been the direct result of the illicit handling of cultural property, including specific penalties for the "illegal possession of cultural property" which would be punishable by eight years of imprisonment,

• address the crime of pillage, seeking sanctions not only against the unjustified possession of metal detectors when found in possession of cultural goods on heritage sites, but the simple possession of tools used for tomb raiding, whether or not the person is found with heritage objects in their possession,

• address the destruction, disfigurement, or desecration of cultural and landscape heritage,

• allow for tougher penalties in cases involving art forgeries, 

• allow for the use of undercover operations to track illicit trafficking of cultural property crime, including wiretapping,

• allow for the reduction in criminal sentencing in cases where defendents work with law enforcement and stolen art is recovered.

"Spain is rich in art treasures: artwork ranging from religious works, modern paintings, ancient architecture, Roman ruins, and Visigoth remnants are densely scattered across Spain’s cities and countryside. Whereas some of the art is world-renowned and protected, much of the art is still hidden in churches and in depopulated towns and is left vulnerable to damage and theft. Spain’s cache of hidden works has great cultural value to the Spanish cultural identity; however, these works are often misappropriated because their existence is virtually unknown or unprotected. This paper sets forth recommendations for Spain to follow to protect is patrimony, most importantly the necessity of creating an extensive catalogue, encompassing both State and Church property."

"How we view forgery is dependent upon how we view art as a society. In this paper I will argue that forgeries have been received differently according to the role art is playing at the time they are discovered. I will show how the role of art began changing during World War II, due to the looting of Nazi leaders, and how this affected forgery, using the case of the Van Meegeren forgeries as an example. I will show how art is valued today according to its historicity, rather than its aesthetic capabilities. Such a claim explains why forgeries could have once been acceptable, but now are not because they falsify history. They are placed into historical contexts where they do not fit and thereby misconstrue the public view of history. This paper is important because it shows that by understanding the perception of forgeries at certain periods, we can better understand the role of art and the values placed upon it in society."

"The ability of investigative agencies like Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to effectively recover stolen works of art depends in part on how comprehensive and complete their databases of stolen works are. The scope of these databases and their effectiveness in recovering artwork depends on how many reports of theft are submitted by museums to the investigative agencies. This paper looks at the various influences that inform a museum’s response to theft, including sending in reports of theft. It examines how a concern with public image and a lack of funding affect the resources museums have at their disposal to handle museum theft and provides some strategies to improve the deterrence of museum theft worldwide."

In 2008, while working at an archive of an unnamed institution it was discovered that an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn was missing from the collection. According to a letter on file it was approved to be sent out for restoration in 1998. However, no record was ever found to confirm that it was sent out for treatment. It was last accounted for in a 1990 inventory. Months were dedicated to digging through files and paperwork. After attempting to track the object starting with its provenance, port of entry, and adoption into the collection, the paper work dropped off and a more rigorous search began. Emails were sent and searches commenced, until one afternoon in 2009 I received a letter from the head of the institution asking me to halt the investigation with no explanation offered. While the particular piece’s rarity and monetary value hold no comparison to the Rembrandt cut from its frame during the 1990 Gardener Museum heist, the unnamed institution continues to guard the knowledge of the prints disappearance. This object and the circumstances that ensued led me to further investigate and explore a larger system of values using Rembrandt as a model. I began by questioning the institutional value of maintaining the secret of a missing artwork that was not of any particular rarity or monetary significance.