Critical to their return was Tess Davis, a U.S. art lawyer and affiliate researcher at the University of Glasgow, who stressed Cambodia had only won the first in a series of battles, in what could prove to be a protracted war over the return of looted art. “The kingdom has taken on the art market, an entire industry, and a powerful one at that,” Davis told The Diplomat. “Collectors, dealers, museums, auction houses, they have deep pockets and top lawyers on their side. But Cambodia has something even more important: the truth and the law. And that’s something no amount of money can buy.”

[...]

Davis, dubbed by some as ‘Indiana Jane,’ said the looting and trafficking of antiquities was a crime that would no longer be tolerated, “not by governments, not by law enforcement, and not by the leaders in the art world itself.” The thefts have also been seen as a symbol of Cambodia’s perennial problems, ranging from corruption to a culture of impunity among the country’s well-heeled and politically connected. Davis said Cambodia had given the art world a simple choice, “to do the right thing or not.” She said the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Christie’s had stepped up and fulfilled their obligations, but others like the Cleveland Museum of Art and Sotheby’s have been more reluctant. “They are fighting with everything they have to stay in the past, a past where they could do whatever they wanted. They act like antiquated colonial relics, while their competitors have entered the 21st-century, and are thriving in it,” Davis said.

Sofia Cecchi: What was the initial spark that made you want to study the ethics of collecting and the trade in illicit antiquities? 

Professor Elia: While a grad student digging at Stobi (then Yugoslavia, now the Republic of Macedonia) in the late 1970s, my mentor, James R. Wiseman, showed me how looters were destroying archaeological sites in the search for marketable antiquities. Prof. Wiseman also created an innovative section of the new Journal of Field Archaeology, called “The Antiquities Market,” which featured articles about the topic. I also learned a lot from the writings of Oscar White Muscarella, who among other things destroyed the myth of the "reputable dealer" in the antiquities market. 

Sofia Cecchi: “Collectors are the real looters.” More than twenty years have passed since you made this memorable statement. Have any positive changes occurred in the past decade? 

Professor Elia: There is definitely more public awareness than ever about the problem of looting and the fact that collectors, both private and institutional, are driving the market by creating the demand for antiquities. Looters, of course, are the ones doing the looting, but they are operating in a supply-and-demand economic system that starts with the creation of demand for cultural objects. So collectors, whether they are private individuals or museums are, indeed, the real looters and in the last two decades there has been a huge growth in public awareness of this fact. This comes from several sources: increased media attention; more aggressive legal actions by source countries; and a depressing spate of armed conflicts in the world that have resulted in both destruction looting of archaeological sites.

Photo credit to Tess Davis (Facebook)

Three of Cambodia’s ancient sandstone warriors were welcomed back to their birthplace yesterday, greeted by lotus wreathes and a troupe of traditional dancers adorned in gold. The ceremony marked the end of a 40-year absence for the Duryodhana, Bhima and Balarama statues. The mammoth, 10th-century characters all belong to the same tableau of mythological Hindu figures once locked in battle at Prasat Chen, a remote jungle temple in Preah Vihear. Over the past year, Cambodia has regained five of the nine statues pillaged from the temple’s Eastern entrance, haphazardly hacked from their pedestals and sold on to international art markets during the Khmer Rouge era. “Surviving civil wars, looting, smuggling and travelling the world, these three have now regained their freedom and returned home,” Deputy Prime Minister Sok An said during yesterday’s repatriation ceremony.

With the help of the U.S. government and UNESCO,Cambodia first got the ball rolling in 2012 when it filed a suit against the New York-based auction house Sotheby's after the institution put a statue known as "The Duryodhana" -- valued at about $3 million -- up for sale. Earlier this year, with the case still ongoing, Sotheby's agreed to return the statue. The mighty "Duryodhana" was one of the impressive pieces unveiled at Tuesday's ceremony, alongside statues known as the Bhima and Balarama, returned by the Norton Simon Museum of California and Christie's auction house, respectively. While legal action was originally taken against Sotheby's in the case of the "Duryodhana," Christie's returned its statue voluntarily after discovering it was looted. The Norton Simon Museum did the same. 

Tess Davis, an affiliate researcher at the University of Glasgow who specializes in cultural heritage law, said Tuesday, "It's a very exciting day, not just for Cambodia, but for all countries that have been plundered." "Cambodia's on the right side of history here," she added. 

Anne Lemaistre, head of Cambodia's UNESCO office, called the statues' return "a big coup" for Cambodia and said that it might act as an incentive for other museums and private collectors to return looted antiquities. "Now let's see what Cleveland would say," Lemaistre said, referring to the museum’s recent denial that the Angkor statue in its possession was looted. 

Buddhist majority Cambodia, which has a rich cultural heritage influenced by Indian traditions and Hindu legends, is famed for its temples, and the intricate engravings of graceful traditional dancers and mythological characters adorning their walls. Representatives from Christie's and the Norton Simon who attended the ceremony said they were delighted to have been able to help Cambodia recover some of its valuable cultural heritage. "These statues... were callously hacked... and trafficked on the international art market," Jeff Daigle, deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia, said in a speech, expressing the U.S.’s commitment to stopping the illegal arts trade. "We must not forget that the commercial trade in illicit art remains," he added.

NYTimes: Matisse's Odalisque

BMG - discussing faking of Matisse's 'Odalisque in Red Pants', all manner of issues with authentication once fake discovered #artcrime

The theft of the painting was first discovered in late 2002, when the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas was contacted by a Miami gallery owner saying that someone had offered to sell it to him. Experts at the museum inspected the likeness and were shocked to find that it was a fake, and not a very good one, at that. Someone had removed the original painting from its frame and put the fake in its place, leaving it to be exhibited as if it were the real thing. And no one noticed. The fake painting appears to have been hanging in the museum for at least two years and perhaps longer. Marianela Balbi, a journalist who wrote a book about the theft, said that a photograph taken in September 2000 shows President Hugo Chávez standing in the museum in front of the fake Matisse. That is the earliest indication of the switch, she said. The next month the museum heard from a Matisse expert that someone was shopping the painting around, Ms. Balbi said. But it appears no one followed up, and the theft went undiscovered for an additional two years.

On May 26, 2014, the board of trustees of the Kunstmuseum Bern met for the first time in a special session to examine the situation in regard to Mr Cornelius Gurlitt naming the Kunstmuseum Bern as his unrestricted sole heir. The will has not been opened yet; once this is the case, the museum will have a deadline of six months in which it must decide on whether it will accept the inheritance. In this period the Kunstmuseum Bern will make an assessment of the situation by collecting as much material containing relevant information as possible. Thus the Kunstmuseum Bern does not yet have an inventory at its disposal, and it has not been able to inspect the art collection. On the occasion of a visit to Munich, the president of the board of trustees and the director communicated with the authorities there. The political authorities in Switzerland are being kept informed on a regular basis. It has been decided that the Kunstmuseum Bern will seek legal assistance; the name of our legal advisor will be made known publicly when he or she has been definitively appointed. The Kunstmuseum Bern will notify the media when relevant new information is available, at the earliest at the beginning of July.

It starts with the theft of a mysterious smile and ends with the unbuilt architectural wonders of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Rick Gekoski, a rare book dealer and writer, brings together the worlds of art and literature to explore their hidden pasts. Often kept separate when discussing the arts—the exception being illuminated manuscripts—in his book Gekoski groups them together in considering their dark and hidden pasts. There is, understandably, a bias towards literature in the text, but not enough to detract from the tales concerned with works of art. 

“I am anxious about the destruction of the historical record. We live, understand and accumulate a sense of ourselves as a culture through the preservation of the pieces of paper that record what we truly are, and have been.” (p 120) 

Rather than taking a purely academic and stiff approach to recounting the tales of his chosen works of both art and literature, Gekoski instead takes the more passionate and narrative approach of a storyteller chronicling his favourite stories. In this way, Gekoski’s book acts more like an anthology of crime stories rather than a diatribe concerning art crime. The story of each work of art and literature, ranging from the nearly infamous theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa by Vincenzo Perugia in 1911 to the almost non-existent poem Et Tu, Healy by a very young James Joyce, is told with the detail, suspense, and passion of a novel. Gekoski’s attention to detail and ability to bring each tale to life makes his book an easy and enjoyable read for readers with or without a background in art or literary crime. 

An additional intrigue to this book is Gekoski’s ability to look at the loss of literary works from the perspective of a book lover who is saddened by the cultural loss as well as the rare book dealer who can see the monetary loss of each work. This intriguing dual perspective adds an interesting twist to narratives that could have instead been dripping in patronizing rhetoric; instead, Gekoski’s narration brings both a practical and intimate nature to the tales he recounts. Each of the crimes he recounts carry both of these tones and draw the reader further into the tale.

The phenomenon “Monuments Men” has passed, at least cinematographically: it looks like the dust raised by the ‘in favor’ and ‘against’ factions has settled. Yet the topic of WWII restitutions is far from being settled: the Gurlitt trove and the multiple apartments holding a cache of looted art, which unfolded at the same time as the “Monuments Men” momentum, really showed how open and unsolved this issue is. All these cases made me revisit some of the books that I own on the topic, and my attention wandered to Lost Lives, Lost Art by Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow. 

This non-fiction book follows a coffee table format: bigger than a regular book, hardcover, glossy pages and profusely illustrated. The book’s main theme is to chronicle the lives of fifteen prominent Jewish art collectors and how their collections got dispersed during the ascent to power of the Nazi party, and during the war. However, the book does not stop here and depicts the fate of the works of art and the current owners of the pieces: as the reader can imagine, in most of the cases, the art never went back to their owners, and it the object of many legal cases. In that sense, the book has a similar vibe to Hector Feliciano’s The Lost Museum (1995), which one of its parts revolves around five particular cases (the Rothschild collection, the gallery of Paul Rosenberg, the Bernheim-Jeune collection, the David David-Weill collection and the Schloss collection).