Christie's 2019 Auction

In November 2019, ARCA published a blog post raising questions about a 5th-century BCE polychrome antefix depicting a dancing maenad, which had been consigned to a Christie’s auction and that I believed the piece warranted closer scrutiny. For those unfamiliar, an antefix is a decorative architectural element once placed along the eaves of ancient roofs to conceal the joints between tiles.

What drew my attention was the striking resemblance between the object at right and three other Etruscan antefixes, also portraying maenads, that had previously been repatriated to Italy after being identified as having been illegal excavated and removed from Italy.

The provenance of the previous, 2019-consigned, antefix up for auction at Christie's read:

Provenance:

"with Ingrid McAlpine (1939-2018), London and Epsom, 1994". 

In terms of its circulation history, that sparse entry left roughly 2,500 years unaccounted for as nothing prior to 1994 was specified.  Knowing a bit about the consignor's background, I knew, that before her death, Ingrid McAlpine had been married to the ancient art dealer Bruce McAlpine, and that prior to their divorce, both were listed as proprietors of McAlpine Ancient Art Limited in the United Kingdom.

The McAlpines’ names have surfaced in connection with other trafficked antiquities that passed through the legitimate art market. Among these is an Attic black-figured hydria which reached the McAlpines through Palladion Antike Kunst, a gallery operated by disgraced dealer Gianfranco Becchina. Their names also appear alongside the red flag names of Robin Symes and Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, in relation to the donation of a looted Apulian bell-krater, both objects of which were later restituted to Italy. 

Villa Giulia, 1937 Excavation

If you look carefully, by her feet you can make out the hoof of the Silenos this lady would have been dancing with.  

This detail is remarkably similar to the antefix in the form of a Maenad and Silenos Dancing which once graced the cover of the exhibition catalog A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleishman.  

After careful restoration that antefix was first seen on the market with Robert Hecht who sold it to the Hunt collection.  Next it was circulated via Sotheby's with that collection was liquidated and bought by Robin Symes, who immediately resold it to the Fleischmanns.  In1994 the couple exhibited the piece , along with their entire collection, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, before it was formally acquired by   the museum in 1996 (96.AD.33).  The piece was restituted to Italy after it was matched by Daniela Rizzo and Maurizio Pellegrino to a polaroid in the Giacomo Medici archive.  Like the one up for sale at Christie's now, both artefacts were broken along the lower half and when whole, depicted a Silenos dancing behind the Maenad.

Now let's look at the provenance the auction house has cited.

Elsa Bloch-Diener (1922–2012) was a Swiss art dealer who operated a gallery at Kramgasse 60 in the old town of Bern.  She is known to have collaborated with Ines Jucker (née Scherrer, 1922-2013), the scholar and sometimes ancient art dealer responsible for the exhibition catalogue Italy of the Etruscans, cited in the Christie’s lot description as an exhibition where this piece was on view to the public. 

Jucker not only authenticated works for Bloch-Diener but also curated the 1991 Etruscan exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem referenced in the Christie's sale.  Also contributing to that exhibition's catalogue were entries by Giovannangelo Camporeale, Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, George Ortiz, and Christoph Reusser, names that have, at times, prompted debate and concern within the field.

In May 2002, when Swiss and Italian authorities raided Gianfranco Becchina's Antike Kunst Palladion, as well as three of Becchina’s storage facilities in Basel, authorities seized documents which identified transactions between the Sicilian and Ines Jucker which documented that she purchased artefacts from this dealer and sold them onwards.

Along the same theme Jucker studied an Attic Red-Figured calyx krater signed by Syriskos (painter); donated by Lawrence Fleischman and his wife to the J. Paul Getty Museum which had been acquired from Robin Symes in 1988.  Pictured on Medici Polaroid it was restituted to Italy.   Likewise a Black-Figure Cup Fragment with the Capture of Silenus in the Tondo which Jucker sold to Dietrich von Bothmer was also returned to Italy.

In the Israel exhibition Jucker curated, which featured the antefix up for auction and identified it as coming from the ancient site of Veio, some four hundred Etruscan objects were presented, none of large format, some with an inscriptions.  Among them were small bronzes, ceramics, jewellery, terracottas (architectural, votive, and cinerary urns), and sculptural fragments in nenfro.  In total they represented all periods and regions of Etruscan art. 

The main nucleus of the Israel displayed ensemble came from the collection of the late Ivor and Flora Svarc, many of whose holdings would be donated to the Israel Museum.  Svarc's objects were complemented by pieces already in Israeli collections, along with loans from the collector-dealer Jonathan Rosen and other private collectors, mainly in Switzerland.  

As cited by Drs David Gill and Christopher Chippindale in Material Consequences of Contemporary Classical Collecting the vast majority of the artefacts exhibited during this exhibition were previously unpublished.  This made this public display of the items their first concretising stop towards having an art marketable pedigree. 

The fact that we know this object comes from the context of Veio, can also be found in the same catalogue as the restituted Getty atefix, A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleishman.

Page 197 refers specifically to the artefact currently up for auction:

A number of fragmentary examples of antefixes of this type, as well as of molds for producing them, have come to light at Civita Castellana (Falerii) (see Andrén; Sprenger/Bartoloni), finds which clearly prove their local manufacture. But the votive deposit of Campetti at Veii has yielded the head of a silenos of identical type and made of Veian clay (see Vagnetti 1971), which led P. J. Riis to suggest that this type of antefix was invented at Veii. The lower half of an antefix of this type with a provenance from Veii is in a private collection in Switzerland (see Jucker), and similar fragments have recently been excavated in Rome (see Cristo fani). 

With that in mind, it is necessary to return to the same question previously directed at Christie’s: 

On what evidentiary basis, supported by what verifiable documentation, did the auction house authorise the consignment of this artefact?  In the absence of any demonstrable chain of custody or export records, the decision to green-light its sale raises serious concerns regarding the robustness of the auction house’s internal due diligence procedures.

In this case, the question is not rhetorical but fundamental. Is Christie’s in possession of any concrete paperwork supporting the legitimacy of this Dancing Maenad’s appearance on the market, or was the absence of evidence simply overlooked given its publication in an exhibition, in the hope that the object’s passage through the auction process would escape closer scrutiny.

Ashraf Omar Eldarir has recieved a six month prison sentence in US Federal court. 

ARCA has written a lot about Eldarir, a naturalised U.S. citizen from Brooklyn.   The first time was back in 2022 after he was indicted in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, on two counts of smuggling, under Title 18 U.S. Code § 545, 2 and 3551 et seq. after he flew into John F. Kennedy International Airport on from an international flight from Egypt with three suitcases filled from top to bottom with illicit antiquities wrapped in protective packaging.

In our second article we published an open source list of many of the Egyptian artefacts actively in circulation on the US and European markets which were traceable to Eldarir, reminding buyers that Caveat Emptor, if the name on the collecting history of their Egyptian artefacts included any of these names or combinations of stories they were likely to be looted.

⇏ Ashraf Omar Eldarir (see our earlier post today).

⇏ Anything with any spelling that says something like ex-private Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir collection; ex-Salahaddin Sirmali collection.

⇏ Anything with "formerly Collection Salah al-Din Sarmali Bey. Acquired by Izz al-Din Tah al-Darir Bey in Egypt.

In our third story, we examined how the insatiable U.S. demand for Egyptian antiquities between 2012 until 2020, and the ease with which illicit pieces could be laundered into the licit market and resold, often for substantial sums—created fertile ground for smugglers like Mr. Eldarir.  We also expanded our growing list of his identifiable imports and published an example of one of his forged provenance letters, and raised the obvious elephant-in-the-room question: catching one man with 590 artefacts in his suitcases is one thing, but what about the 'don’t ask, don’t tell' dealers and auction houses who eagerly absorbed his material into the supply chain? Eldarir’s scheme relied on fabricated attestation letters and never once produced an export license or verifiable proof of ownership, yet the ancient art market had welcomed his goods all the same.

In February 2025 we reported that after a prolonged federal court case, Eldarir had finally elected to do what most federally charged individuals tend to (eventually) do.  Knowing he stood a snowball's chance in hell of being found not guilty, the former doctor-turned-smuggler pleaded out, admitting that he had smuggled ancient Egyptian artefacts into the United States over a series of trips to and from his home country.  In theory, for his role in these affairs, US sentencing guidelines estimated that he could serve as many as three to five years behind bars and might even face denaturalisation, which could send him back to the very country that he so prolifically robbed.

ARCA continued to ask what happened to these two high value pieces sold through Christie's to a dealer in Switzerland. 

One was this portrait head of a man, sold first through Christies New York in 2012 for $52,500.  Despite the trafficker's arrest in the US, this piece was still up for sale during the COVID-affected TEFAF Maastricht art fair in 2020, at the stand of Swiss dealer, Jean David Cahn.  Here the piece was called "a Portrait Head of the Emperor Severus Alexander" with a price on request. 

Upon arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport on January 22, 2020 from an international flight from Egypt, Eldarir had submitted a customs declaration form to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP), as required for all travellers entering the United States.  On that form, he had stated that he was bringing in merchandise and agricultural products worth $300.  However, when CBP officers inspected his luggage, instead of finding low value business related products, they discovered three suitcases filled from top to bottom with antiquities wrapped in protective packaging. 

Inside Eldarir's careful bubblewrap and foam padding were a total of 590 Egyptian artefacts.  Some of these still had sand and soil adhering to them, a telltale sign which underscored their recent excavation, and, in the words of the agents examining his luggage, still smelled of wet earth. 

Along with the antiquities, CBP agents found documents "written in Arabic on watermarked paper with stamps affixed on the top right of the documents, and two-hole punches along the left-hand side" along with blank paper resembling that of the purported provenances, with the same watermark and two-hole punches along the left-hand side and thirteen loose stamps similar to the ones used on the provenances.  When asked if he had ever sold historical artefacts previously, Eldarir replied that he had sold "a few in the last few years", a statement which would turn out to be a gross understatement.

Given that he was unable to provide the customs agents with sufficient proof that the packaged artefacts he was importing into New York had legally been exported from Egypt prior to the enactment of the country's 06 August 1983 Law No. 117 "on the Protection of Antiquities, CBP seized the antiquities pending further investigation.

Eldarir was subsequently arrested on 28 February 2020 and charged in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, on two counts of smuggling, under Title 18 U.S. Code § 545, 2 and 3551 et seq.  As part of that investigation, the United States also sought forfeiture of the following antiquities in accordance with: (a) Title 18, United States Code, Section 982(a)(2)(B):

forty-one (41) ancient Egyptian gold artifacts;

nineteen (19) ancient coins;

two (2) Greco-Roman rings;

thirty-one (31) ancient Egyptian talismans (Ptolemaic period);

fourteen (14) ancient beads;

twenty-six (26) ancient Egyptian wooden figures;

four hundred (400) ancient Egyptian faience ushabtis;

three (3) ancient Egyptian wooden panels with painted figures;

one ( I ) ancient Egyptian large stone face;

two (2) Egyptian wooden masks;

two (2) Egyptian stone panels with hieroglyphics; 

three (3) ancient Egyptian canopic jar lids;

two (2) ancient Greco-Roman stela;

one (1) ancient Greco-Roman terracotta headless torso with robes;

seven (7) ancient Greco-Roman terracotta statues; 

three (3) ancient Egyptian large terracotta vases; 

two (2) Egyptian smalIterracotta vases;

two (2) Egyptian alabaster artifacts;

two (2) ancient Egyptian Osiris headpieces/crowns; 

twenty-six (26) ancient Greco-Roman oil lamps; 

one (1) Greco-Roman terracotta pilgrim's flask;

one (1) ancient Egyptian polychrome relief.

For years prior to his arrest, Eldarir had been successfully laundering plundered artefacts onto the licit ancient art market.   Often his pieces carried with them a fabricated provenance claiming that the pieces were part of "The Ashraf Eldarir Private Collection of Ancient Art, New York, USA", or "Acquired by Izz al-Din Tah al-Darir Bey in Egypt December 1946 from Salah al-Din Sarmali Bey" or that they had been inherited through the trafficker's grandfather. 

To disguise their illicit origins, and to cosmetically claim that the pieces were derived from a collection which predated Egypt's ban on export, Eldarir's trafficked artefacts sometimes mentioned that his grandfather or "Ezeldeen Eldarir," was a friend of Prince of Egypt, Omar Tosson, with whom he shared a passion for archaeology or that the collection had been formed during the 1930s-1940s, mostly as gifts from Prince Tosson, which he claimed had been moved to the United States "in 1948 where it remained with the family until the present day."

With no export licenses, and no factual proof which supported his vague claims of long term ownership for the pieces he handled, aside from what would turned out to be self-made documents giving a cosmetic overhaul of legitimacy, Eldarir's smuggled antiquities circulated among US and Europe's prestigious ancient art galleries from 2012 until shortly after his arrest was announced publicly.  After which ARCA published a list of material it had identified as being linked to the suspect trafficker.  This compilation of suspect Egyptian antiquities was made public on 8 July 2020, and can be found here.

One of the more interesting high value pieces was this portrait head of a man, sold first through Christies New York in 2012 for $52,500.  Despite the trafficker's arrest in the US, this piece was still up for sale during the COVID-affected TEFAF Maastricht art fair in 2020, at the stand of Swiss dealer, Jean David Cahn.  Here the piece was called "a Portrait Head of the Emporer Severus Alexander" with a price on request. 

On March 30, 2016 in Paris, France UNESCO held a large multidisciplinary symposium examining the movement of cultural property in 2016.  The Paris event was facilitated in part because of the conflicts ravaging the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic, as well as in Libya and in Yemen, which had led to a surge in trafficking in cultural property, mainly archaeological objects.  The meeting was also arranged to discuss how the sale of antiquities could be used to finance crime highlighting Resolution 2199, which had been unanimously adopted by UN Security Council on 12 February 2015.  By holding the meeting UNESCO hoped to:

"bring together for the first time market stakeholders, including representatives of auction houses and online platforms, museum representatives, cultural heritage experts, specialized intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations as well as Member States, to take stock on the situation of the illicit trade in cultural heritage and identify areas to improve synergies and strengthen international cooperation to successfully overcome this worldwide issue."

Invited speaker Vincent Geerling, Chairman of the Board of the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA) and then-director of Archea Ancient Art gallery in Amsterdam told the audience in Paris, as he had previously in Berlin in 2014, that many art dealers and sellers have good knowledge of where their stock originates from, but acknowledged that consignors haven't always kept good paperwork to prove it.  Asking for a show of hands from the audience, Greeling asked if any of the UNESCO invitees had ever inherited an antique from a relative that came without its original collecting documentation.

When discussing collection histories as they relate to the current situation in the MENA region, Geerling proclaimed, complete with an accompanying powerpoint slide, that:

"during the past two years, IADAA has checked with every member to ask if anything from the troubled areas had been offered and they reported back not a single dodgy Syrian or Iraqi object had been offered to any of our members"  

Laster, in June 2016, Geerling spoke again, this time at the ArtConnoisseurs 2016 series, held in conjunction with Cultures – The World Arts Fair in Brussels. 

In that talk, recorded in the video above, Geerling discussed IADAA's strict form of due diligence and highlighted in his slides that the Association maintained a code of ethics which included due diligence guidelines for members dealing in Classical, Egyptian and Near East antiquities. During this lecture Geerling went on to say:

"the past is a funny place, they do things differently there.  In the 1960s and ’70s...the old days... not all dealers in ancient art behaved like virtuous schoolboys, but those who founded the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art in 1993 understood that a different attitude was vital and acted on the UNESCO 1970 Convention even before their respective governments did."

Geerling also proudly stated that membership [in IADAA] is highly sought after, but hard to achieve, and that applications are rigorously vetted.  Like with the earlier UNESCO presentation, Geerling underscored that:

"During the past two years, IADAA has checked several times with every member to see if they have been offered anything from the troubled areas, and they reported back: no, not a single questionable Syrian or Iraqi object had been offered to any of our members."

I guess he should have widened his illicit antiquities membership query to include Egypt as two of IADAA's French members, Didier Wormser of Galerie l'Etoile d'Ishtar and David Ghezelbash of David Ghezelbash Archéologie are currently under investigation and have been indicted in France for their handling of illicit Egyptian material.  

Wormser's investigation goes back a full two years before Geerling's presentations, to 2014, and started when French authorities begin looking into his involvement in the handling of stolen Egyptian artefacts sold on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.  During his trial, Wormser admitted to the French court that he had purchased a total of six pieces from a looted Egyptian tomb in the Saqqara necropolis via an offshore, British Virgin Islands company, Finatrading Development Ltd., owned by the controversial Swiss businessman, Yves Bouvier.   

As per the Art Newspaper, while standing trial at the Paris criminal court on 30-31 August 2022, Wormser told the court during his that he "stopped buying from Finatrading because it failed to deliver proper provenance documents." Yet the 61-year-old former IADAA-affiliated dealer didn't stop at the purchase of just one or two items from the Swiss Freeport king.  Investigative documents purport that Galerie L’Etoile d'Ishtar purchased as many as 90 antiquities from Finatrading between 2003 and 2005, and then had those objects shipped from Switzerland by Bouvier's Paris connected firm, Art Transit & Associés SA.  

According to the leaked Panama papers, Yves Bouvier established Finatrading Development Ltd. via the firm Mossack Fonseca law chambers in the BVI in 1995. This startup date is just one year after Yves Bouvier's father formed Expositions Natural Le Coutre S.A., and shortly before his own fast-moving climb to wealth in the art market and freeport worlds.  Bouvier now rents nearly a quarter of the Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève Freeport and owns between 5-6 percent of the Swiss firm. 

During the 90-transaction Wormser time frame, as stated in a New Yorker article, Bouvier sold his first painting to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, - Vincent van Gogh’s “Paysage Avec un Olivier.” That pair's art transactions would only begin to raise eyebrows later after the pair fell out and began filing lawsuits against one another.  But the dates of the Wormser and Finatrading Development Ltd. transactions are interesting for another reason.  

Early transactions occur at the same time Swiss Customs, in 2003, uncovered >200 trafficked Egyptian artefacts housed at the Geneva Freeport behind door 5.23.1 in 2002.  That stash, later restituted to Egypt, included two perfectly preserved Egyptian mummies, sarcophagi, statues and various hacked apart coffin faces removed from wooden coffins to be sold onward as mummy masks.  

The 2003 seized ancient objects had been smuggled out of Egypt through a complicated network of identified smugglers which implicated 15 Egyptians, two Swiss residents, two Germans, and one Canadian.  Whether or not the objects Wormser purchased via Bouvier passed through the hands of this clan remains a topic meriting further exploration. 

David Ghezelbash, who opened his own gallery in the heart of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris in 2007 previously overlapped, in 2005, with indicted FRench dealer Christophe Kunicki at Cabinet Jean-Philippe Mariaud de Serres.  Ghezelbash was himself indicted on 23 March 2022 for receiving, fraud and money laundering in an organized gang and placed under judicial control.  Embroiled in the investigation of the Louvre Abu Dhabi's Egyptian antiquities purchases, the Art Newspaper indicated that Ghezelbash has closed his ancient art gallery though he remains listed as a France-based IADAA-affiliated dealer as of the writing of this article. 

All of which brings me back to the words of IADAA's chairman in June 2016 when Vincent Geerling stated:

"The trade is as horrified by the destruction and iconoclasm as anyone else and we share a common cause in wishing to defeat it.

The trade has more incentive than anyone else to stop the crooks because of the damage they are causing the reputation of the legitimate trade.

We will not find a workable solution unless all parties to the debate work together, including the trade."

Geerling's June 2016 talk also stated that members of the association knows what it takes to sell antiquities: well-provenanced antiquities in glossy catalogues, posh galleries and expensive art fairs.  

I guess two out of three ain't bad. 

ARCA thinks it's time for the trade to put its art market money where its mouth is and to admit that the lack of transparency in the ancient art trade makes it a welcoming home for money laundering and illicit transactions.  One with shell companies and offshore accounts which are designed to shield willing dealers and collectors from risk and which makes law enforcement officers' work in investigating this type of crime all the more difficult. 

It is time for IADAA to stop putting their collective heads in the sand and to honestly admit they have no way of monitoring their membership's actions. 

• forty-one (41) ancient Egyptian gold artifacts;
• nineteen (19) ancient coins;
• two (2) Greco-Roman rings;
• thirty-one (31) ancient Egyptian talismans (Ptolemaic period);
• fourteen (14) ancient beads;
• twenty-six (26) ancient Egyptian wooden figures;
• four hundred (400) ancient Egyptian faience ushabtis;
• three (3) ancient Egyptian wooden panels with painted figures;
• one ( I ) ancient Egyptian large stone face;
• two (2) Egyptian wooden masks;
• two (2) Egyptian stone panels with hieroglyphics; 
• three (3) ancient Egyptian canopic jar lids;
• two (2) ancient Greco-Roman stela;
• one (1) ancient Greco-Roman terracotta headless torso with robes;
• seven (7) ancient Greco-Roman terracotta statues; 
• three (3) ancient Egyptian large terracotta vases; 
• two (2) Egyptian smalIterracotta vases;
• two (2) Egyptian alabaster artifacts;
• two (2) ancient Egyptian Osiris headpieces/crowns; 
• twenty-six (26) ancient Greco-Roman oil lamps; 
• one (1) Greco-Roman terracotta pilgrim's flask;
• one (1) ancient Egyptian polychrome relief.