ARCAblog subscriber Susan Rosenberg wrote in to recommend the 1966 comedy movie "How to Steal a Million" starring Peter O'Toole (1932 - 2013) and Audrey Hepburn (1929 - 1993). Ms. Hepburn portrays the daughter of a forger (played by Hugh Griffith) who tries to steal her father's work back from a museum in Paris. This movie was filmed on location in Paris.
In the movie, the two thieves rendezvous in the bar at the Ritz Hotel in Paris the day after committing the robbery: "We did it! Did you see the paper and the television? Did you hear the radio? It's the crime of the century, practically, and we did it!"
After my visit in Uşak, I took a four hour bus ride to Ankara where I spent the night and then left early the next morning for Boğazkale. After sitting on a hot bus for three hours watching daytime Turkish TV (the bus driver was a fan of soap operas), I arrived in Sungurlu, the closest major town to Boğazkale. Upon stepping off the bus, I was immediately befriended by a nice Turkish taxi driver who offered to take me to Boğazkale for an exorbitant fare. I politely declined and started the one mile trek towards the town center of Sungurlu in hopes that I could find a minibus headed for Boğazkale.
I eventually located the minibus station and sat down to wait. In Turkey, the minibus drivers don’t drive anywhere until their vehicle is full and unfortunately for me, it was noon and no one was interested in going to Boğazkale except for me. After waiting for a half hour, I decided that the 15 seater minivan was never going to fill up and decided to take a taxi.
Yard of Boğazkale museum (AH)
I finally arrived in the small town of Boğazkale and had the taxi drop me off outside the archaeology museum. It had a sizeable lawn and pavement area with a tall wrought iron fence surrounding the lot. Various archaeological artifacts were in the yard, but unlike the Uşak museum, these pieces were carefully displayed and labeled. A few of the larger pieces were even placed under wooden shelters to protect them from the elements.
Disputed sphinx (AH)
As I stepped into the museum, the first thing that caught my eye was the large pair of sphinxes flanking the doorway to the central gallery. The left sphinx had been the center of a heated debate between Turkey and Germany ever since the beginning of the 20th century when the statues had been discovered and sent to Berlin for repairs. Germany only sent back one of the sphinxes and the other remained in Berlin where it was built into the wall of the Pergamon Museum. Germany did not return the sphinx until 2011 after Turkey threatened to revoke Germany’s dig permit at Hattusha. The museum consisted of a couple of small rooms preceding a much larger central gallery. There were many text panels explaining the works displayed as well as information about the Hittites and other civilizations that inhabited the surrounding region. All of the works were well lit and beautifully displayed.
Main gallery (AH)
After passing between the sphinxes, I entered the main gallery which consisted of a ground floor and a second story balcony area. More archeological artifacts were displayed as well as replicas and explanations of the ancient city of Hattusha. The most arresting works on the ground floor were two tall ceremonial bull vases. There were fewer cameras than at Uşak, but the display cases appeared to be much more modern and secure than those at Uşak. Also, the visibility in the main gallery was excellent since it was just one main room and the guard had complete visibility of both the ground floor and the balcony level.
The bench outside the museum (AH)
After visiting the galleries, I sat on a bench outside the museum and chatted with the security guard. He spoke almost no English so we talked in Turkish. He told me that a guard was present at the museum 24/7 and that the cameras monitored both the interior of the museum as well as the surrounding yard. Each night, the fence gate as well as the main door’s outer iron grate are locked. There were also powerful motion detection lights on the exterior of the building that would turn on if a person approached the building at night.
Hattusha site (AH)
I left the museum and walked about twenty minutes to the Hattusha archaeological site where the ancient capital of the Hittites once stood. Near the entrance is a reconstruction of the city walls to give visitors an idea of how massive the walls and towers of the city were. I then spent the next three hours hiking around the ancient ruins by following the wide road that snakes its way throughout the ruined city. Except for the occasional Turkish family or group of backpackers, I had the place to myself. At the very top I found the gate where the two sphinxes had been originally discovered where a replica now stands. From the gate there was a spectacular view of the ruins and surrounding landscape.
Original site of sphinxes with replica
As the sun began to set, I made my way back into the town center of Boğazkale. On my way down the country road, I ran into the museum security guard taking an evening stroll with his family. He introduced me to his wife and young daughter and asked how I liked Hattusha. I told him that I was on my way back to Sungurlu and he warned me that it might be too late to take a taxi. I thanked him and we parted ways. As I continued walking, I thought about my chances of finding a taxi and decided that the odds were slim. So I stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked back to Sungurlu with a nice Turkish gentleman driving home from work. From there, I caught one of the last buses going back to Ankara where I wearily walked back to my hostel at midnight.
All photos taken by Aaron Haines.
Aaron Haines is a senior majoring in art history at Brigham Young University and traveled to Turkey this summer using grant moneys from the BYU Office of Research and Creative Activities to observe the security of four archaeology museums. He visited the archaeology museums in Uşak, Boğazkale, Ankara, and Istanbul each of which houses artifacts that have been recently repatriated by Turkey from other countries. Aaron has a special interest in cultural property law and preservation as it applies to Italy and Turkey and speaks Italian and some Turkish. He recently returned from an internship at the American Embassy in Rome and is currently interning with the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Heritage Center.
I rubbed my sleep-deprived eyes and stared across the abandoned parking lot at the rusty minivan that was supposedly my “shuttle” into town. It was six in the morning and the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon of Uşak, a small city in the center of western Turkey. Most bus companies don’t travel to Uşak and the few that do only offer one or two bus rides from Istanbul each day. I had left Istanbul the previous night at eight and spent the next ten hours on a bus in order to see Uşak’s most famous possession: the Lydian Hoard. I walked up to the minivan, squeezed onto the front bench, and told the driver I needed to go the archaeology museum. The rest of the passengers stared me as if wondering what a young American backpacker was doing so far from any of Turkey’s usual tourist destinations. We soon reached the city center and the driver told me in Turkish that the museum was just down the street.
Photo by A. Haines
The museum did not open for another couple of hours so I took my time observing the building’s exterior. It was a small building situated on an awkward triangular corner plot of land where two streets merged. It was surrounded by a low wrought iron fence that was about three to four feet in height. The building’s small yard was littered with archaeological artifacts from various civilizations and time periods; Byzantine, Hittite, Roman, and others. The placement of these objects was haphazard, but it was clear every square inch of the yard could be surveyed by the small army of security cameras that pointed in every direction. Also, none of the objects were small enough to be lifted by hand and would have required either machinery or several people to move them. There was an abundance of exterior lighting indicating that the museum and archaeological artifacts could be sufficiently monitored at night. The museum was an older building, but fulfilled its intended purpose. The windows were single paned and old, but all well protected by the iron bars covering them. Despite the early hour, I noticed a man standing inside the museum watching me, indicating that a security guard was present at the museum both day and night.
At eight when the museum opened, I stepped inside and was greeted by the security guard. I pulled out my wallet to purchase a ticket, but the guard was already leaving his desk and leading me into the museum’s only gallery. I expected him to then return to his desk while I toured the small collection, but instead he simply followed me around. I got the feeling that not many people came into the museum. The lighting and presentation of the museum’s collection were excellent and there were many text panels explaining the significance of the objects as well as where they had been found in the surrounding countryside.
Photo of Lydian Hoard by A. Haines
I was eager to see the Lydian Hoard and quickly found it in a room in the very back of the gallery. The pieces of the collection were displayed on simple but elegant cloth with good lighting. The hippocampus still occupied its own display case, but the text panel gave no indication that the original had been stolen or that the current piece on display was a copy of the original. I noticed that the previous simple lock had been replaced by a lock, seal, and slip of paper. On this slip of paper were the signatures of four different archaeologists indicating that each had verified that the work was the legitimate original.
Photo of documented lock by A. Haines
The museum guard was still shadowing me so I decided to strike up a conversation with him. He did not speak much English so we conversed in Turkish. He explained to me that a guard was at the museum twenty four hours a day and that there was video surveillance of the entire building and the surrounding yard of antiquities. When I asked him how many patrons visited the museum, he told me that during the summer, they averaged about one hundred every day. This surprised since Uşak is a smaller city and quite far from any major tourist attractions. I asked again about the museum attendance and he repeated that they indeed averaged around one hundred patrons a day during the summer time. He explained that during the winter, attendance drops due to the decrease in tourism. He went on to explain that the city was currently constructing a new museum that is supposed to be completed next year. The new three story building will have much more storage and administration space as well as an upgraded security system.
Copy of hippocampus in Uşak (A. Haines)
We returned to the subject of the Lydian Hoard and after I asked a couple of questions about the hippocampus, he stopped and stared at me for a couple of seconds. He then asked if I wanted to know something and leaned in to quietly tell me that the original work had been stolen. I feigned surprise and he motioned for me to walk back over to the display case. He then told me the story about the hippocampus and confided in me that the brooch in the case was actually a fake. Thanks to Sharon Waxman’s 2008 book Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (Times Books), I already knew this, but I doubted that most patrons to the museum did. There was no explanation of it in the text panels or in any of the other materials on display. Most patrons assumed that they were viewing the original.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Ankara, the capitol of Turkey, just a couple of days later and saw the same hippocampus on display in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. My immediate thought was that I had now seen two copies of the same stolen work.
Recovered hippocampus temporarily
housed in Ankara (Photo by A. Haines)
I approached two security guards chatting nearby and explained to them that I had just seen this same work in Uşak. They replied that I had seen a copy in Uşak and that the object in Ankara was the original brooch. I asked them how this could be since the work had been stolen and they explained that it had been recently recovered. Supposedly it was only on temporary display in Ankara and will be moved to Uşak next year when the new Uşak museum is complete.
Aaron Haines is a senior majoring in art history at Brigham Young University and traveled to Turkey this summer using grant moneys from the BYU Office of Research and Creative Activities to observe the security of four archaeology museums. He visited the archaeology museums in Uşak, Boğazkale, Ankara, and Istanbul each of which houses artifacts that have been recently repatriated by Turkey from other countries. Aaron has a special interest in cultural property law and preservation as it applies to Italy and Turkey and speaks Italian and some Turkish. He recently returned from an internship at the American Embassy in Rome and is currently interning with the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Heritage Center.
Constanze Letsche in Istanbul reported for The Guardian in "King Croesus' golden brooch to be returned to Turkey" that German government officials have agreed to return the Hippocampus brooch of the Lydian Hoard ("Karun Treasure"), allegedly sold by the director of the museum in Uşak and replaced with a copy sometime between 1993 and 2006.
Although details of the brooch's latest recovery are unclear, Turkish officials are delighted. "I am very happy to hear that the piece will finally return home," said a culture and tourism official, Serif Aritürk, who is responsible for the museum in Usak. "Since I was in office in 2005 and 2006 I felt personally responsible for the theft; our directorate came under a lot of pressure." He added that he had never doubted the brooch would reappear. "No collector would have dared to acquire such a well-known artefact, it was clear that the thieves would not find a buyer easily."
The Hippocampus brooch was found in Germany.
HereThe History Blog provides backstory on the recovery and theft of this object.
This month's repatriation of a 10th century footless sandstone statue looted from an archaeological site in Cambodia has a backstory going back a few years. In an academic article published in July 2011, Tess Davis, then assistant director of Heritage Watch, wrote that Sotheby's Auction House had listed 377 Khmer pieces for sale between 1988 and 2010:
Seventy-one percent of the antiquities had no published provenance, or ownership history, meaning they could not be traced to previous collections, exhibitions, sales, or publications. Most of the provenances were weak, such as anonymous private collections, or even prior Sotheby’s sales. None established that any of the artifacts had entered the market legally, that is, that they initially came from archaeological excavations, colonial collections, or the Cambodian state and its institutions. While these statistics are alarming, in and of themselves, fluctuations in the sale of the unprovenanced pieces can also be linked to events that would affect the number of looted antiquities exiting Cambodia and entering the United States. This correlation suggests an illegal origin for much of the Khmer material put on the auction block by Sotheby’s
In the summer of 2011, Jane Levine of Sotheby's objected to Ms. Davis' article and demanded a retraction. About six months later, Cambodia asked that Ms. Levine be removed from a cultural panel based on perceived ethical conflicts.
Carpaccio's 1515 "Young Knight in a
Landscape", Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Investigative journalist Fabio Isman's article "Scoperto chi è il “Cavaliere Thyssen” di Carpaccio" discusses the work of scholar Augusto Gentili who has identified the mystery man in Vittorio Carpaccio's painting "Young Knight in a Landscape" (1515) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Gentili, a lecturer at Ca'Foscari di Venezia until his retirement, has identified the painting as a portrait of the Venetian captain Marco Gabriel decapitated by the Turks in 1501 during wartime.
Here Mar Borobia for the museum describes the difficulty in identifying painting as either a fictional knight or a portrait which would be "the first known example in which the sitter is depicted full-length":
It has been suggested that this new format can be explained if this image were a posthumous portrait of a soldier, in which case the figure would be similar to funerary images of a comparable type and date. The landscape around this enigmatic young man is as mysterious and troubling as he is, combining as it does flowers and animals that refer both to good and evil, purity and corruption.
Isman reports that Professor Gentili linked the portrait to Marco Gabriel and to Venice's Hotel Gabrielli. The English translation of Gentili's analysis will be published in The Burlington Magazine.
Here's a link to Radio New Zealand's interview last summer with Penny Jackson, director of the Tauranga Art Gallery and a New Zealand art crime expert. Ms. Jackson was kind enough to provide a list of some of the names of artists and institutions she mentions in this podcast:
Edward Bullmore
James Jacques Joseph Tissot
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Arrowtown
Rotorua Museum
Waiouru Museum
Kermadec exhibition/John Reynolds
Dowse Art Museum
C F Goldie
University of Auckland
Karl Sim
Urewera Mural by Colin McCahon and borrowed by Tama Iti
Sarah Hillary
Dame Jenny Gibbs
Gottfried Lindauer
Waikato Trust
Tainui
Whanau
Robert McDougall Art Gallery
Heather Straka
Ms. Jackson plans to attend the 2014 ARCA conference.
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCAblog Editor-in-Chief
Santa left a tantalizing art book under my Christmas tree, Selling Russia's Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art 1917-1938 edited by Natalya Semyonova and Nicolas V. Iljine, (MTA Publishing, November 2013), which is of particular interest to me as one of the artworks mentioned is the "Adam" and "Eve" diptych by Lucas Cranach the Elder that resides within a 15-minute walk of my home. This work is the subject of litigation in Marei Von Saher vs. The Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, which can be heard here from a court hearing in August 2013. These two paintings, purchased by the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker at an Lepke auction in 1931 and 'purchased' by Herman Göring in 1940 were returned to an heir of the Stroganoff family after World War II and subsequently sold to Norton Simon in 1971. Did Cranach's "Adam" and "Eve" ever belong to the well-documented Stroganov Collection? According to Selling Russia's Treasures:
In addition to paintings from the Stroganov collection, the Lepke auction of May 12-13, 1931, featured two Lucas Cranach paired canvases, Adam and Eve, from the Art Museum of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences in Kiev.
Cranach paintings often included Adam and Eve, but the existence of the canvases put up for the 1931 auction was unknown well into the late 1920s. The paintings had been found under a staircase in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kiev in 1927, then moved to the museum of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (monastery); in 1928, on the initiative of Prof. S. O. Gilyarov, the paintings were given to the Academy museum in Kiev (in 1929 Gilyarov published an article in Ukrainian about the paintings; it included a brief synopsis in French). The newly discovered Adam and Eve were sold in 1931 to Dutch collector Jacques Goudstikker, whose remarkable personal collection numbered more than a thousand old master paintings and about a hundred old master sculptures.
On Saturday the 21st of December the Gävle-Goat was again found in flames after unknown men engaged in a 4 a.m. torching session of this enormous straw creation. The men have yet to be found but the police are searching vigorously for the culprits. If found they would be charged with inflicting gross damage to property.
The burning of the Gävle-goat is a ritual reaching back to 1966, the year when Stig Galvén prompted the first straw goat to be erected in Slottstorget in Gävle, central Sweden. The Yule time straw goat has a long tradition in the Scandinavian culture. It reaches back to pre-Christian days when the god of War, Thor, was said to have a carriage pulled by two goats; Tanngnjost and Tanngrisner.[1] The goat has long been associated with fertility and farming, as such the last wheat sheaf of the year was thought to embody the harvest spirit. As such it could be formed into a goat to boost next year’s crops.[2] As the Nordic countries were converted to Christianity, the goat became increasingly associated with darker powers. None-the-less the Yule goat maintained a prominent role in the Swedish Christmas celebrations. Long before Santa Clause’s arrival at the Swedish shore it was the Yule-Goat who was in charge of distributing gifts to children during the yuletide. He, however, was not quite as jovial as the present day Santa, and parents often threatened unruly children with the Yule-Goat.[3] As late as the end of the 19th Century when Santa Clause finally managed to navigate to the northern countries, it was the Yule-Goat who pulled his sledge. Nowadays there is little left to remind us of the goat but the straw Yule-Goats found in most Swedish homes.
When the Gävle-Goat first appeared in 1966, it was then a symbol recognisable to all Swedes, however its scale was something quite new. The goat was 13 meters (42.6 feet) high and 7 meters (23 feet) long, weighing an impressive 3 tonnes. Since then every year a gigantic straw goat has been installed on Slottstorget around the first of advent. On New Years Eve of 1966, Galvén’s goat was the first of many to feel the power of the flame.[4] As opposed to most other vandals, the first one was caught and charged with inflicting gross damage to property. This was followed by two years of peace for the goat after which it again was torched on New Years Eve 1969. Whilst many forms of vandalism have afflicted the Goat throughout the years the most common by far is arson. When the goat burnt on the 21st of Dec 2013, it was the 27th time the poor beast has met its end by the torch.
In 1985 the goat met with a new level of fame when it was included in The Guinness Book of World Records for its impressive 12.5 meter height, which was later beaten by the 1993 goat, which towered 16 meters above ground. Since 1986 two Yule-Goats have been found in Gävle, as two competing associations have been building them: the Southern Merchants (constructing the Gävle-Goat, the bigger goat, usually targeted by arsonists) and Natural Science Club of the School of Vasa (Constructing the Yule-Goat). Only two years later, the goat had met such repute that English bookmakers took up the challenge of the goat burning and ever since it has been possible to bet on whether or not the goat will burn. As the renown of the goat rose so did the police efforts to secure it. Whilst in 1990 volunteers had guarded the goat, by 1996 the first web cameras had been installed and it was now possible to follow the destiny of the goat online. The fame of the goat was such that in 2001, an American from New Orleans, having taken the burnings of the goat as a permitted tradition decided to torch it. A civilian caught him almost immediately and the police had to rescue him from the wrath of the people of Gävle.[5] The man later received a fine of 100 000 Swedish crowns (approx. $15,000) and a month in jail.[6]
Apart from the attempts at destruction by fire the most notable attack on the goat came in 2010, when two unknown men offered the goat’s guard 50 000 Swedish crowns (approx. $7,500) to leave the goat for a few minutes. The plan was to kidnap the goat and by helicopter bring it to Stureplan in Stockholm.[7]
Whilst flame-retardants have been used for some years, including this year, the goat has burnt to the ground for the last three years. In the Facebook group ‘Vi som vill bränna Gävle-bocken’ ('We who want to burn the Gävle-goat'), a comment appeared just a day before its destruction. “All who have guessed that the goat would burn today, maybe it is time to take matters into your own hands?”[8] A few hours later the goat was in flames. From its twitter account the Gävle-Goat announced “I'm so sad my friends that I have to leave you now! Thank you for this year! Take care and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”[9]
Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis interviews Marc Balcells in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime:
Dear Reader,
I would like to introduce you to my colleague at ARCA, the new co-editor the Journal of Art Crime, Marc Balcells.
Marc started paying attention to art and cultural heritage crimes in 2009, when he moved to New York City, thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship. Never, in his wildest dreams, he would have imagined that, as a criminologist, his research interests would have led him there. However, the more Marc reflects about how things unfolded in his career, the more he realizes it were meant to happen.
First of all, Marc studied Law in his city, Barcelona. In the several Criminal Law courses he took there was no mention to art crimes whatsoever, even though the Spanish Criminal Code punishes this form of crime in several of its articles. By 2001, after four years of law school, and being twenty one, he specialized in Criminal Law, but again, there was no mention of cultural heritage crimes in that Masters program. No art thieves in his list of prosecutions, either.
Christos Tsirogiannis is a Greek forensic archaeologist. He studied archaeology and history of art in the University of Athens, then worked for the Greek Ministry of Culture from 1994 to 2008, excavating throughout Greece and recording antiquities in private hands. He voluntarily cooperated with the Greek police Art Squad on a daily basis (August 2004 - December 2008) and was a member of the Greek Task Force Team that repatriated looted, smuggled and stolen antiquities from the Getty Museum, the Shelby White/Leon Levy collection, the Jean-David Cahn AG galleries, and others. Since 2007, Tsirogiannis has been identifying antiquities in museums, galleries, auction houses, private collections and museums, depicted in the confiscated Medici, Becchina and Symes-Michaelides archives, notifying public prosecutor Dr. Paolo Giorgio Ferri and the Greek authorities. He received his Ph.D. last October at the University of Cambridge, on the international illicit antiquities network viewed through the Robin Symes-Christos Michaelides archive.
You may finish reading this interview in the Fall 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime. 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).
art theft in film,Audrey Hepburn,Peter O'Toole
No comments
art theft in film,Audrey Hepburn,Peter O'Toole
No comments
