Chasing Aphrodite (24 page)

"She's wandering all over, speaking out on all these issues, but is she speaking her own opinion? Or is she speaking for the institution?" Gribbon asked Munitz. "Are we comfortable with how she's behaving? She's calling attention to us and making things uncomfortable. A lot of other museums think we're holier-than-thou."

True had to be reined in, Gribbon insisted.

Munitz tried on various occasions, calling the women together to hash things out. Invariably, True defended her position as the right thing to do. Gribbon countered that the antiquities curator was not a free agent and should not to be "proselytizing." The curator promised to tone it down, but it was often only a matter of weeks before Gribbon stuck her head inside Munitz's office to say, "She's doing it again."

Gribbon was not imagining things. Other museums that collected antiquities felt burned by the Getty's 1995 acquisition policy, which, by requiring an ownership history, had effectively ended the Getty's active collecting. Now True's gratuitous outspokenness was threatening to bring other museums legal trouble.

Few were angrier at True than Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met. Since succeeding Thomas Hoving in 1977, he had become the undisputed lion of the museum world and the longest-serving director of a major cultural institution. The descendant of French aristocracy and World War II resistance fighters, de Montebello had a master's degree from Harvard in European paintings, but his administrative shrewdness surpassed his scholarship. Whereas Hoving was a playfully self-obsessed populist, de Montebello was elitist and haughty. Constantly surrounded by people with much more money than he possessed, he never let them forget that he had the better family name.

Nothing galled de Montebello as much as the changing tide in the cultural patrimony debate, which cut to the core of his institution's identity. De Montebello was a hawk on the antiquities issue, a firm believer in museums' right to acquire what they wanted from the art market. He viewed demands by Italy, Greece, Turkey, and other source countries as naked nationalism, exercises in hypocrisy. The same cultural ministries had for decades ignored or winked at the antiquities trade, with their bureaucrats often benefiting directly from bribes. Now to cry foul and paint American collectors and museums as the bad guys offended de Montebello's sense of fairness. He was likewise disdainful of the "dirt archaeologists" who opposed the antiquities trade. If they had their way, he argued, they would lock up priceless artifacts in anonymous storage sheds or conservation labs, depriving the public of a chance to learn about them.

The Met's acquisition policy allowed the museum to acquire anything that had a documented hist ory going back ten years. It also made an exception for any object deemed of sufficient beauty or cultural significance—a huge loophole that angered archaeologists. Although most of his own staff favored the bright line offered by the 1970 UNESCO Convention, they knew better than to incur de Montebello's occasional wrath with suggestions to change the Met's antiquities acquisition policy. De Montebello's prominence and his resistance to reform set the tone for many major American museums. In the annual meetings of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the profession's most powerful group, de Montebello and others beat back an effort by younger museum directors to introduce a model policy that hewed closely to the UNESCO treaty. Now True's outspokenness represented a challenge to his authority.

De Montebello had another reason for being upset. Quietly, the Met had been fighting its own battles with Italy over claims of looted art. Besides the occasional noise the Itali ans made about the Euphronios krater, the Met had become locked in a tug of war over a collection of ancient silver vessels that it described as "some of the finest Hellenistic silver known from Magna Graecia."

The silver service, which included an ornate medallion of Scylla, a sea monster who threatened sailors with shipwreck, was acquired in two installments during the early 1980s for $2.74 million. Italian officials claimed that the hoard had been taken illegally from the ruins of an ancient house in Morgantina, then smuggled out of Sicily along with the marble hands, heads, and feet that were subsequently sold to Maurice Tempelsman. Indeed, these were the same silver vessels that Fausto Guarnieri, the art squad investigator, had learned about while investigating the Aphrodite.

In 1996, after General Conforti met Met president William Luers at a social event, he wrote a series of letters to the museum chief asking for the voluntary return of the hoard. He warned that Italian officials were prepared to file a formal judicial request with U.S. authorities if the museum didn't comply. Met general counsel Ashton Hawkins deflected Conforti's efforts several times, claiming that the silvers had been purchased from a Lebanese antiquities dealer and had a long history of previous ownership.

What the Met lawyer didn't tell Conforti was that U.S. Customs Service officials had already punched holes in the museum's story about how it had acquired the silvers. Investigators found no trace of the Lebanese dealer. Instead, the Customs Service learned that Robert Hecht had carried the pieces to the United States on a Swissair flight from Germany. The middleman's involvement and the Lebanese antiquities dealer cover story were reminiscent of the Euphronios krater scandal of the early 1970s. In the two decades between the cases, it seemed, the Met had not changed its way of doing business.

The exchange between Conforti and the Met soon spilled into public view. In 1998, the
Boston Globe
revealed the sordid tale of the silvers in a front-page story. The Met still refused to relent. Hecht would not comment, other than to say coyly, "Until someone proves this Euphronios vase or this silver treasure was excavated clandestinely and shows us the hole it came out of, it's as innocent as the Virgin Mary."

Morgantina archaeologist Malcolm Bell then joined the fight. Bell had first seen the silvers in 1987 and immediately connected the pieces to reports he had heard about a hoard looted from an ancient home on the outskirts of his dig site. But when he asked the Met for a closer look, the museum declined his request. That refusal stood for nearly twelve years, until 1999. By then, Bell had dug at the suspected find spot. He had found two holes in the ancient floor, a sign that the site had been sacked by looters, and a deed nearby identifying the residence as the home of a person named Epolemous. At the Met, Bell looked carefully at the display and found that one of the pieces bore this inscription: "From the house of Epolemo."

It was as close as an archaeologist could get to a smoking gun. Yet the Met still refused to budge.

I
N OCTOBER
1999, Italy brought its fight against the illicit antiquities trade to the U.S. government with a formal request to the State Department for strict import quotas under the U.S. Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act. The request wasn't the first to be considered under the 1983 law implementing UNESCO treaty protections. Canada, El Salvador, Cyprus, Guatemala, Peru, and Mali had already succeeded in getting similar quotas established. But Italy's request was by far the most important.

The country gushed ancient art from its dry riverbeds, construction projects, and farm fields. Italian officials now wanted to stop the flow by petitioning for sweeping protection of nearly everything originating from the eighth century
B.C.
to the fourth century
A.D.
They argued that demand from collectors in America and elsewhere had fueled the systematic plunder of hundreds of graves, temples, sanctuaries, villas, and public buildings. They cited statistics showing that between 1993 and 1997 alone, the Carabinieri had recovered more than 120,000 items from rings of tombaroli, which nibbled away at government-protected archaeological sites throughout their country.

The State Department's decision rested largely on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, an eleven-member panel of political appointees chosen to reflect all sides of the contentious antiquities issue—collectors, archaeologists, dealers, and the general public. The committee hearing on the matter was shaping up to be an epic fight. On October 12, 1999, more than fifty collectors, dealers, academics, lawyers, archaeologists, and journalists squeezed into a stuffy hearing room in Washington, D.C., to have it out.

The emotions and rhetoric ran high. Collectors and dealers went up to the microphone first, accusing Itali ans of being unreasonable and duplicitous. Frederick Schultz, a New York antiquities dealer and president of a national dealers association, said that Italy's request was motivated by its totalitarian past. He emphasized that Italy's 1939 patrimony law had been passed under Mussolini, the "same man who wrote the laws expropriating the property of and stripping national identity from Italian Jews."

Arielle Kozloff, former Cleveland Museum of Art antiquities curator turned private dealer, was even more direct. "Ladies and gentlemen, don't let Italy fool you," she told the committee. "She is a wolf in sheep's clothing. She is predatory. And if you support this application, the result will be the intellectual fleecing of America."

The archaeologists present fought back. Ricardo Elia led the committee through the results of his study showing that only 5 percent of the fourteen thousand southern Italian vases sold at auction or written up in scholarly catalogues had come from sanctioned excavations. The rest appeared on the market with no provenance and were presumably looted.

Elia was followed by Bell, who had ghostwritten the Italian request. Soft-spoken yet blunt, the director of the Morgantina dig ticked off a litany of looting horrors, saying that the illicit trade had become so lucrative that the local Mafia in the region of Campania had begun using illegal immigrants from North Africa and Albania to dig for artifacts. "It is a dirty business, quite analogous to the trade in illegal drugs, or to prostitution," Bell said.

While the battle raged, representatives of museum groups were conspicuously quiet. They had already antagonized Italian officials by backing Michael Steinhardt, the Met trustee, in his unsuccessful court battle with Italy to keep his golden libation bowl. Fearful of offending Italy's cultural officials even more, they sat back and let the dealers mount the attack. Yet one museum official did rise to speak during the marathon public meeting.

Marion True stepped to the microphone late in the day. She wore a sky blue scarf wrapped around her neck and draped over one shoulder, making her blue eyes stand out even more than usual. Despite the wilting stuffiness of the room, her blond hair remained perfectly coifed. As she started to talk, people stopped shuffling papers and looked up.

Saying that she spoke with the Getty's blessing, True strongly defended the Italian request. She deemed "improper" the suggestions of some that it was better to have illicit antiquities on well-tended American shelves than to let the careless Italians keep them in dusty exhibits. American museums were just as careless with their objects, True said. Many still didn't have updated inventories or pictures of their own items. As for those who, like Schultz and Kozloff, accused the Italians of being cultural "retentionists," True noted that Italy was becoming more generous with loans of ancient art. Policies that expected Italy to be able to document objects that had been looted, like the one the Getty used to rely on, were irretrievably flawed. The Italians couldn't be expected to identify looted objects if they didn't know they had been looted in the first place.

The curator went even further in her written remarks submitted to the committee, exposing the museum world's dirty little secrets. She wrote that the illicit trade had thrived because "museum curators like myself and private collectors have profited greatly" from a mishmash of international laws that permitted the flow of undocumented material to American institutions. Museums had "readily ignored" the UNESCO Convention's ideals as well as their own ethical codes to snap up headline-grabbing antiquities. And she conceded that the old saw about items coming from unnamed "established collections" was, in fact, a convenient fiction. True concluded that approving the Italian request would lead to "a decrease in the illicit excavation and traffic in antiquities, and a cleaner art market that is free of the kind of sordid associations that have sullied it for the last three decades."

True's frank assessment had an impact on some of the committee members. Although they were already leaning toward the Italian request, the fact that one of the country's leading antiquities curators was for it helped to solidify their position. The committee eventually recommended approval, prompting the State Department to impose the requested import restrictions. The tide had turned.

F
OR MUNITZ, THE
activities of his antiquities curator were of little concern compared to the challenge he faced making sweeping changes in the Getty's structure, politics, and culture.

He had inherited an institutional flow chart from Williams that had each arm of the trust reporting independently to the CEO, like children competing for their father's attention. Each program was operating in its own little world. The programs had secretive budgets and jealous turf fights that included exclusive passkeys to their own buildings at the Getty Center, where togetherness was an unfulfilled notion. There was no system of centralized control over spending, leaving each division on its own to order supplies as it pleased. "The org chart is like Versailles under Louis XIV," Munitz complained to his friends.

Munitz also did little to hide his jealousy over the residual loyalty employees showed toward Williams, who, to the new CEO's horror, refused to go away. In retirement, Williams continued to draw a large pension and occupy an office at the center.

But Munitz lost little time in making his own mark. Days after taking office in January 1998, he met with the trust's top one hundred managers and declared a new "dimension of reality." The days of spending without a care were over, he warned. The endowment, which was tied to the stock market, was not going to grow forever. It was time people at the Getty started thinking about how to raise money, as other cultural institutions had to do. He also attacked the practice of "aesthetic obfuscation," in which managers handed in phony budgets to hide from one another what they were really doing. Pulling out a list of staff members ranked by seniority, Munitz said that the Getty needed new blood. He pointedly encouraged so-called Getty babies—those who had been at the institution from internship through management—to consider other work. Word raced through employee lunchrooms that when someone asked where, Munitz had facetiously suggested Starbucks.