Following growing levels of protest, Christies has put on hold the sale of a 4,500 year old Bronze Age statuette, thought to be worth over $1 million.

Sardinian politician Mauro Pili has led the campaign, asking the Auction House to provide more details of who the vendor is, and requesting that the seller proves that they are the legitimate owner of the artefact.

Disputed “mother goddess” icon from Sardinia

From:
Independent

Mother Goddess auction: Christie’s halts sale of ‘stolen’ $1m Bronze Age pagan icon after Sardinia campaigns for its return
Michael Day
Rome – Tuesday 02 December 2014

A campaign in Sardinia to reclaim a 4,500-year-old pagan idol from a US auction house is gathering pace ahead of its scheduled sale next week, as Italy steps up the fight against the theft of its precious cultural patrimony.

Christie’s in New York had listed the marble religious artefact Dea Madre, or Mother Goddess, dating from about 2500BC, for sale on 11 December. Auctioneers hoped to sell the Bronze Age statuette for as much as $1.2m (£770,000). But campaigners claimed an initial victory today after hearing that the sale had been put on hold.
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This case intrigues me for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the level of the fine is tiny – considering the crime involved & the value of the artefacts, it counts somewhat lower than a slap on the wrist in the overall scheme of things.

Secondly, the auction house (In this case Christies, although in my past experience, none of the big auction houses have a particularly good reputation when it comes to looted artefacts) takes the moral high ground, making a point about how their due diligence is responsible for bringing about this case. Now, unless I’m misunderstanding the article completely (or the article is incorrect), the sequence of events is rather different to this.

Firstly, Christies lists the looted artefacts. Then, the true origin of the artefacts is spotted by Marcel Marée, a curator at the British Museum, who goes on to alert Christies of this. Finally, Christies contacts the Metropolitan Police’s Arts and Antiques Unit. I see nothing here that really makes me confident in Christies due diligence – the only reason the items didn’t end up at auction was because they happened to be spotted by someone who was entirely independent of the Auction House, who then took their own effort to alert them.

The fact also needs to be noted that the items were smuggled from Egypt in a suitcase on a flight – more needs to be done by countries to protect the egress of looted artefacts through their borders, helping to stop the trade by making it much more difficult for international buyers.

Lot 61 An Egyptian painted limestone relief fragment 1550.1069 B.C

From:
Ahram Online

Briton fined £500 by UK court for attempted sale of smuggled Egypt antiquities
Amer Sultan in London
Tuesday 15 Apr 2014

A UK court has fined a British citizen £500 after he admitted having attempted to sell a number of ill-gotten Egyptian antiquities.

Neil Kingsbury, who had previously worked on BBC documentary series about the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and other early archaeological adventures, was arrested after six items were identified in Christie’s London antiquities sale last year.
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This story highlights a number of issues with the global trade in antiquities.

Firstly, there is the fact, that the international art market is a murky world full of forgeries, items lacking provenance & other artefacts that aren’t quite what they first appear to be. Next, is the issue of checking the status of the artefacts against a single register, that is not in any way authoritative. It is a voluntary register, and as such is far from comprehensive. My final issue though is that the auction house acts as though this is pretty much acceptable. They were selling forged artefacts & really only made the most cursory of checks to see whether they were authentic or not. Its almost as though they are worried about asking too many questions, as they’ll uncover stuff they didn’t want to know and then no longer be able to sell it.

From:
Art Newspaper

Guilty plea over antiquities
Suspect admits falsifying provenance of Egyptian items offered for auction in London

By Martin Bailey and Melanie Gerlis. News, Issue 249, September 2013
Published online: 05 September 2013

Neil Kingsbury, of Northwood, London, has pleaded guilty to charges relating to the provenance of Egyptian antiquities that were consigned to Bonhams and Christie’s.

Kingsbury was arrested after misrepresented items were identified in Christie’s London antiquities sale of 2 May. Marcel Marée, a curator at the British Museum, saw the published catalogue a week earlier and spotted that a relief fragment of a Nubian prisoner appeared to come from the Amenhotep III temple in Thebes, across the Nile from Luxor. He contacted Hourig Sourouzian, the site’s conservation director, who confirmed that the relief was missing. It was excavated a decade ago and had been kept in storage.
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Christies is auctioning plaster casts of various panels from the Parthenon Frieze. From the information given, it is unclear whether these are a first generation cast (or more probably a second or third generation cast) of the originals.

You can view more details on page 79 of the e-catalog for the auction (linked to from this page). There are also copies of some sculptures from the Acropolis that I noticed in the catalogue.

From:
Country Life

Take a piece of the Parthenon home
Friday, 5 October 2012
Kate Green

Christie’s is selling more than 350 items from James Perkins’ collection at Aynhoe Park, including a piece from the Parthenon in Athens

Eclectic artefacts amassed on ‘a modern grand tour’ will be sold at Christie’s South Kensington on October 9, when James Perkins, owner of Aynhoe Park, sells more than 350 items to make room for more pieces in his constantly evolving collection. There’s everything from an armadillo-shell helmet (estimated at £600-£900) to a stuffed walrus head, plus furniture and photography, but pride of sale is the magnificent Classical plaster sculpture.
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The Koh-i-Noor diamond might be the artefacts from India that grabs the most headlines, but there are many other artefacts from the country also located in museums & private collections abroad.

From:
Times of India

National treasures scattered across the world
Reema Gehi, Mumbai Mirror Mar 19, 2011, 12.48pm IST

As the Pearl Canopy of Baroda goes up for auction soon, we take a look at other such national treasures scattered across the world

The remarkable objet d’art — Pearl Canopy of Baroda — will soon be auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York. It is estimated to fetch $5 million (about Rs 22.51 crore).
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Despite significant coverage of looting of antiquities, the same antiquities often re-surface a few years later at auctions, or appear in museums. In some cases, this is because some parties choose not to ask too many questions when buying artefacts, but in many other cases, it is merely because the scale of the international art market is so huge, that it is almost impossible to track & catalogue every item accurately & thereby trace their true provenance.

From:
Washington Post

Reputable auction houses try to get all (arti)facts before selling antiquities
By Brian Vastag
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 1, 2011; 8:10 PM

The first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” offers many a scene to make archaeologists wince, but none more so than a quiet moment early on when the intrepid Professor Jones sells plundered artifacts to Marcus Brody, director of the fictional National Museum in Washington.

“The museum will buy them as usual,” Brody says with a wink. “No questions asked.”
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Both of the major auction houses dealing with fine art seem to be equally comfortable about selling looted & disputed artefacts. In many cases however, subsequent public outcry has led to postponement of the sale. In this case, Christies in Hong Kong is selling yet more artefacts that came from Beijing’s Summer Palace. This looting during the ransacking of the Summer Palace is particularly relevant of course, as it took place under the instruction of the Eighth Earl of Elgin – the son of Lord Elgin who removed the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens.

From:
Artinfo

Looted Imperial Treasure Hits the Block at Christie’s Hong Kong

HONG KONG— There were just three lots in the sale of imperial treasures from the Fonthill Collection at Christie’s Hong Kong on December 1, but they attracted intense interest and raked in a total of HK$226.3 million ($29 million). The reason? Their links to one of the most infamous acts of foreign plunder inflicted on 19th-century imperial China.

The Fonthill Collection was the creation of a passionate collector by the name of Alfred Morrison (1821-1897). The Chinese works in the Christie’s sale came to him via one Lord Loch of Drylaw, who served as private secretary to Lord Elgin on the latter’s fateful mission to China at the end of the Second Opium War. Lord Loch acquired the plundered items after the 1860 destruction and looting by French and British troops of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
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Much of Italy’s recent success in restitution claims against institutions in the USA stems from the raids on the Geneva warehouse of Giacomo Medici. It now seems that other artefacts seen in photographs seized in the raids are now coming up for auction.

From:
New York Observer

Digging Up the Past
By Michael H. Miller
May 25, 2010 | 3:17 p.m

In June 1964, a group of fishermen off the northern Adriatic coast pulled a dull gray mass, shaped like a man, covered in barnacles, out of the water. It was the statue now known as Victorious Youth, believed to be the work of Lysippus-Alexander the Great’s personal sculptor. The fishermen took the statue ashore and sold it, cheap. It changed hands many times after that, quietly, until 1977, when the J. Paul Getty Trust purchased it for a then-record sum of $4 million from a Munich art dealer. In February 2010, Italy won a lawsuit in Italian court against the Los Angeles museum, demanding the statue’s return. The Getty, appealing, has yet to comply, arguing it was a Greek statue found in international waters.
Victorious Youth is far from the only masterpiece in limbo-or in court. As million-dollar antiquities auctions (and a controversy surrounding them) kick off in in New York the week of June 6, never has the tension between collector, dealer and so-called “source” nation been higher. Late last week, Germany’s Foreign Minister formally spurned Egypt’s request for the return of the 3,000-year-old Bust of Nefertiti that sits in a Berlin Museum; three months ago Egypt hosted an international conference demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, which has had it for 200 years. There are ongoing legal battles and new, or louder, claims from Turkey, China and Greece for the return of items. But Italy has been the most aggressive, successfully demanding the return of objects from both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty. (The Getty has returned 39 disputed objects to Italy since 2006, and isn’t finished, according to the museum’s general counsel, Stephen Clark.) Such disputes have pulled in collectors and chilled the climate for buying certain works, regardless of quality, dealers and auctioneers report. Now, three pricey ancient Greek items up for sale at Christie’s next month threaten to become a part of the messy, murky issues clouding the market.
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Among the vast numbers of disputed artefacts in museums & galleries, some have a high profile, whilst others are barely known. Time Magazine has attempted to draw up a list of what they feel are some of the most currently significant cases.

This article was published a few months ago, but I only recently came across it – explaining the fact that the information on the Louvre’s Egyptian Frescos is already out of date.

From:
Time

Top 10 Plundered Artifacts
History is big business. Plundered art and antiquities trade to the tune of at least $3 billion a year, much to the chagrin of nations struggling to reclaim their lost artifacts. In honor of a recent spat between the Egyptian government and the Louvre museum in Paris over the fate of fresco fragments, TIME examines 10 plundered antiquities and the conflicts they’ve created.

The Louvre’s Egyptian Frescos

A set of ancient fresco fragments is at the center of a nasty feud between Paris’s Louvre Museum and the Egyptian government. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s antiquities department, claims the Louvre bought the fragments last year despite knowing they were taken from a tomb in Egypt’s storied Valley of the Kings in the 1980s, a prime spot for grave-robbers. Egypt, which has made reclaiming ancient art taken from its country a top priority, said they would sever cooperation with the Louvre unless the fragments were returned. A museum representative claimed on Oct. 7 that the Louvre was unaware the fragments were stolen, and said the museum would consider sending the fresco pieces back to Egypt.
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In an increasingly globalised economy, auction houses are finding themselves caught in the middle of disputes over cultural property.
This is not something that they can easily ignore though, as te disputes often involve countries as well as individuals – countries that these same auction houses also want to operate within.

From:
The Independent

Auctioneers ‘hit in China bronzes row’
By James Pomfret and Ben Blanchard, Reuters
Tuesday, 10 March 2009

The heated row over Christie’s sale of looted Chinese bronze animal heads in Paris is being closely watched by key art market players for possible signs of a broader fallout.

Since Christie’s ignored protests from Beijing and last month auctioned off a pair of bronze rat and rabbit heads which were stolen from the Old Summer Palace in 1860, Chinese authorities have slapped strict checks on all future imports and exports by Christie’s, making it potentially more difficult to source top relics.
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Two recent auctions of disputed cultural property have drawn media attention to items that few people knew about previously. In both cases though, an added dimension has been created by attempts by the selling party to agree some sort of conditions under which they might be able to solve the dispute. This could be seen as an implicit acknowledgement that the restitution claims carry a level of validity, but in each case it has been used as a means to try & push a political agenda.

Standing back from the cases & temporarily setting aside the way in which the artefacts were acquired, it comes across as artefacts being taken, but then they can be returned to the original owners if they meet certain conditions. One has to ask, whether it is right for these selling parties to try & grab some small chunk of moral high ground (that they are prepared to negotiate – return the artefacts) where in reality they are holding the pieces to ransom as a means of trying to resolve other entirely unrelated issues. Whether or not the issues need to be resolved should not be the question & the setting of arduous preconditions to negotiations is merely a means of avoiding discussions that the sellers were never really interested in in the first place. The British Museum has in the past tried to attach similar preconditions to entering negotiations on the Elgin Marbles – as a barrier to prevent any sort of negotiations taking place.

From:
MSNBC

Chinese bronzes, Gandhi’s glasses in art tussle
updated 8:47 p.m. ET March 8, 2009
Art auctions becoming battlegrounds over rights to world’s culture

LONDON – A bronze rabbit’s head was the first to go under the hammer, then came Mohandas Gandhi’s glasses and sandals.

Auctions are becoming a new battleground for art dealers, activists and aggrieved countries dueling for plundered antiquities and lost pieces of heritage.
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Many disputed artefacts only appear above the radar during the rare moments when they change hands. As a result, it is hardly surprising, that the relatively light regulation of auction houses is also brought to the fore when various parties are making claims that they are dealing in potentially stolen property.

From:
The Times

March 7, 2009
Richard Morrison on art auctions
Chinese sabotage at Christie’s is a warning to every owner of antiquities

One man’s terrorist, it’s often said, is another man’s freedom-fighter. Happily, there was no violence at Christie’s “auction of the century” in Paris last week. But the fury of the reactions to an act of sabotage by an incensed Chinese bidder has rocked the arts world.

The sale was of the late Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. It went for a cool £330 million. But £28 million of that won’t be paid. It was the winning bid for two 18th-century bronzes, once part of a set of 12 animal figureheads on a water-clock in the Summer Palace outside Beijing. The fountain must have been rather cute in its prime. Each animal in turn spouted water for two hours a day. Then at noon all 12 would effusively spray in aquatic unison.
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