tulane law school

235 Pages·2014·7.39 MB·English

TULANE LAW SCHOOL

The Tulane-Siena Institute for
International Law, Cultural Heritage &
the Arts

Siena, Italy
SUMMER, 2015

BEYOND THE LAW: THE ETHICS OF
COLLECTORS AND COLLECTIONS

Professor Holly Flora
Assistant Professor – Tulane Law School
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Beyond the Law: The Ethics of Collectors and Collections
Instructor: Holly Flora, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History, Tulane University,
[email protected]
Course Description

This course will explore the ever-changing ethical and legal issues surrounding the acquisition
of art by museums and collectors. What duty does a museum have to ensure that it is not
acquiring stolen property? When must property that is discovered to be stolen be returned to its
rightful owner – and what if that owner cannot be found? Is it ethical for a private collector to
purchase a masterpiece, and deny the public access to it? Taking advantage of resources in
Siena itself, the course will look at how and why art (in particular Italian works by seminal
figures in Sienese painting such as Duccio) was and is acquired by museums and collectors in
Italy and abroad. As a complement to the Core Course, this course will focus on ethics and
professional practices of collecting in museums today, but we will refer to the recent
agreements and laws in the U.S. and abroad, many of which are available for your review on
this website: http://culturalheritage.state.gov/.

Course Goals and Objectives
1. Students will be able to identify the various stakeholders in historical and contemporary
practices of art collecting and assess their values and interests in issues such as the acquisition,
treatment, ownership, and display of works of art and antiquities.
2. Students will be able to formulate and articulate educated opinions on current controversies in
art collecting through critical study and analysis of contemporary and past professional codes of
ethics in the field.
3. Students should be able to assess and evaluate contemporary issues of ethics and law in the
context of the modern professional practice of museums.
Assessment and Grading
1. Attendance and active class participation demonstrating that you have read the material and
can apply the readings is MANDATORY. Students are expected to have completed the assigned
readings prior to class.
2. Final exam (100%)

Course Structure and Schedule:

Part 1 (June 1): Collecting Ethics and Legal Issues Today: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum and their Battles for Italian Antiquities
Themes:
• History of Collections of Antiquities: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty
Villa
• The Met’s “Hot Pot” and Italian Repatriation
• The Getty Case of Marion True
• Responses of Museums: Current Acquisitions Policies at the Getty and Met
Readings:
Elisabetta Polvoledo, “Ancient Vase Comes Home to a Hero’s Welcome,” The New York Times,
January 19, 2008.
Hugh Eakin, “Treasure Hunt,” The New Yorker, December 17, 2007.
Jane Morris, “Looting or Liberation?” reviews of The Medici Conspiracy and Rescuing the Past,
The Guardian, August 26, 2006.
Marion True, “Neither Condemned nor Vindicated,” The Art Newspaper, January 2011.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art-Republic of Italy Agreement of February 21, 2006.
International Journal of Cultural Property v. 13 no. 4 (2006) p. 427-34.
The J. Paul Getty Museum Policy for Acquisitions—Approved by the Board of Trustees on
October 23, 2006. International Journal of Cultural Property Volume 13, Issue 4, November
2006, pp 423-425.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Policy for Acquisitions and Collections Management, updated
November 2008.
Randy Kennedy, “Collecting Antiquities, Cautiously, at the Getty,” The New York Times, June
26, 2007
Derek Fincham, “Transnational Forfeiture of the 'Getty' Bronze” (August 22, 2013). Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2238204 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2238204
Rachel Donadio, “Repatriated Works Back in Their Countries of Origin,” The New York Times,
April 17, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/arts/design/repatriated-works-back-in-their-countries-of-
origin.html
J. Paul Getty Museum Press Release: “Getty Returns Byzantine Manuscript to Greece,”
http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/byzantine-manu-to-greece.htm

Part 2 (June 3): Who Owns Culture? The Case of the Elgin Marbles
Themes:
• Issues of Title versus Ethics: 19th century archaeology and “looting”
• Art, Nationalism, and Identity
Readings:
In-class short film: “Treasure Wars: Parthenon Marbles Battle” National Geographic Films,
2008.
American Association of Museums, Standards Regarding Archaeological Material and Ancient
Art, revised July 2008.
American Association of Art Museum Directors, Standards Regarding Archaeological Material
and Ancient Art, revised 2013.
“The British Museum,” Chapter 9 in Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen
Treasures of the Ancient World (New York: Times Books, 2008), pp. 209-232.
“A Greek Tragedy,” Chapter 10 in Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures
of the Ancient World (New York: Times Books, 2008), pp. 233-251.
Michael Kimmelman, “Elgin Marble Arguments in a New Light,” The New York Times, June 24,
2009.
Michael Kimmelman, “Who Draws the Borders of Culture?” The New York Times, May 5, 2010.
Bernard Fricscher, “Museums Should Dig In,” The New York Times, December 22, 2010.
Martin Bailey, “Turkey Renews Claim for Long Lost Head,” The Art Newspaper, May 2, 2014.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Turkey-renews-claim-for-longlost-head/3258.
Hugh Eakin, “The Great Giveback,” The New York Times, January 26, 2013.
“The Conflict in Ukraine Spreads to its Museums,” The Economist, April 19, 2014
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21601043-conflict-ukraine-spreads-its-museums-history-lessons

Part 3 (June 4): Collecting Ethics Past and Present, Museums and Early Italian
Renaissance Paintings
Themes and case studies:
• Codes of Ethics for Museums, Dealers, and Collectors
• Duccio’s Maestà: its history, removal and dispersal
• American and British collecting of early Italian paintings in the 18th and 19th centuries:
ethical issues of the past and how they have changed today
• Acquisition of Duccio’s “Stroganoff” or “Stoclet” Madonna by the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2005
• Acquisition of Cimabue’s Virgin and Child Enthroned by the National Gallery of Art,
London (2000)
Readings:
Peter Marks, "The Ethics of Art Dealing," International Journal of Cultural Property 7 (1998),
pp. 116–127.
American Association of Museums, Code of Ethics for Museums (2000).
ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums—As approved by the 21st General Assembly of ICOM in
Seoul, Republic of Korea, 8 October 2004, International Journal of Cultural Property, Volume
13, Issue 04, November 2006, pp 393-408
Shelby White, "A Collector’s Odyssey," International Journal of Cultural Property 7 (1998):
170–176.
James Ede, "Ethics, the Antiquities Trade, and Archaeology," International Journal of Cultural
Property 7 (1998): 128-131.
Carl Strehlke, “Carpentry and Connoisseurship: The Disassembly of Altarpieces and the Rise in
Interest in Early Italian Art,” in Rediscovering Fra Angelico: A Fragmentary History, ed. Clay
Dean (Yale University Art Gallery, 2001), pp. 41-58.
Calvin Tomkins, “The Missing Madonna: The Story of the Met’s Most Expensive Acquisition,”
The New Yorker, July 11, 2005.
Nicholas Fox Weber, “Found in a Country House: A `Curator’s Dream,” The New York Times,
March 4, 2001.
Dillian Gordon, “The Virgin and Child by Cimabue at the National Gallery,” Apollo 157 (2003),
pp. 32-36.
Tom Mashberg, “No Quick Answers in Fights Over Art,” The New York Times, July 1, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/arts/design/museums-property-claims-are-not-simply-about-
evidence.html?src=rec&recp=10&mabReward=RI:2
Final Exam: You will be asked to write essays in response to hypothetical situations
addressing ethical and legal issues faced by museums. Open book.

List of Useful Websites
http://www.archaeological.org Official site of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the
professional organization of classical archaeologists.
http://www.saa.org/
Official site of the Society for American Archaeology, the professional organization of
archaeologists who study the material record of the American past.
http://www.sha.org/
Official site of the Society for Historical Archaeology, the professional organization of
archaeologists who work on cultures dating after ca. 1400 CE.
http://www.rpanet.org
Site of the Register of Professional Archaeologists, which is “focused solely on the promotion
and maintenance of professional standards in archaeology.”
http://www.aamd.org/
Official site of the Association of Art Museum Directors, an organization formed by large-scale
art museums in North America.
http://www.savingantiquities.org/
Official site of Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE), a non-profit organization founded in the
wake of the National Museum of Iraq looting of 2003.
http://www.international.icomos.org/home.htm
Official site of the International Council on Museums and Sites, an NGO concerned with
preserving sites of cultural heritage.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
The World Heritage List, created by UNESCO to denote sites of particular cultural or natural
significance.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/158/
The World Heritage in Danger list is designed to draw attention to World Heritage sites that are
in danger of being destroyed.
http://exchanges.state.gov/culprop/committee.html
Site of the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee
The New York Times
January 19, 2008
Ancient Vase Comes Home to a Hero’s Welcome
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME — As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the
heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the
Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.

When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of
nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that
it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for information on its
provenance.

This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one of 21 treasures turned over
by the Met under the terms of a pathbreaking 2006 accord.

As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the state attorney’s office, Italy’s
culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from Homer’s “Iliad” illustrated on
the vase’s main panel. The Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received
in the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) bear him home.

The event was held at the attorney’s office to underscore the persistence of the Italian lawyers
who have lobbied for the return of antiquities from American museums, dealers and private
collectors over the last three years.

“In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate something positive,” said Italy’s
attorney general, Oscar Fiumara. (The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this
week: the justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an appearance at
Rome’s main university; and Naples is submerged in trash.)

In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in Los Angeles, Boston and
Princeton, N.J., and with the private collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this
week transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with other institutions in the
United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr. Rutelli said on Friday.

But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special place, symbolizing the war
against clandestine tomb-robbing and illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony. So the
general mood was victorious.

“The Italian state has won,” said Rocco Buttiglione, the former culture minister who initiated the
talks with the Met just over two years ago and took part in the ceremony. “This is a success story.”

The vessel is to go on view on Saturday at the Quirinale, or presidential palace, where 68 other
artifacts recovered from museums through similar accords are grouped in an exhibition titled
“Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces.” (Nostoi is ancient Greek for homecoming.)

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Fewer than 30 vases by Euphronios, one of the greatest artists of ancient Greece, are known to
have survived. The krater returned by the Met dates from around 515 B.C. and is considered one
of his finest achievements.

Italian archaeologists have traced most of the existing Euphronios vases to Cerveteri, known as
Caere in Etruscan times, an area of steep slopes and raised tomb chambers.

Caere was also “a privileged market for red-figure production, and Euphronios in particular,” said
Maria Antonietta Rizzo, an archaeologist whose research on Euphronios persuaded the J. Paul
Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return a rare kylix, or drinking cup, by that artist in 1999. That
piece is signed by Euphronios as the potter, and by his protégé Onesimos as the painter.

Italian court records based on a state investigation say the Met krater was dug up in the Greppe
Sant’Angelo area, near Cerveteri, in December 1971 by a gang of tomb robbers. After that, the
records say, it passed through the hands of a convicted Italian antiquities dealer and then was sold
to the Met by the American dealer Robert Hecht, who is on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring
to traffic in looted antiquities. He denies the charges.

If a memoir seized by law enforcement officials during a 2001 raid on Mr. Hecht’s Paris apartment
is to be believed, the krater arrived in style in New York in 1972, in its own first-class seat on a
TWA flight from Zurich. (Mr. Hecht now discounts that memoir as fiction.)

It returned to Italy on Thursday in somewhat more modest circumstances: a blue box in the cargo
hold labeled “Handle With Care.” A few hours after Friday’s ceremony, the krater was transported
to the state television network, RAI, and paraded on an evening broadcast, with the culture
minister and a news anchor sitting proudly nearby.

“Euphronios could never have imagined that one day he’d find himself featured” on the 8 o’clock
news, Mr. Rutelli said on live television. “We are proud to be at the forefront of the battle to fight
looted antiquities.”
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TREASURE HUNT. By: Eakin, Hugh, New Yorker, 0028792X, 12/17/2007, Vol. 83, Issue 40

A REPORTER AT LARGE

One afternoon in April, 1998, Marion True, the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum,
in Los Angeles, took a flight from Athens to Rome. When she got off the plane, a carabinieri officer
was waiting for her. "He actually picked me up before passport control, just to show how
important I was," she recalls. The officer drove her to the Raphael Hotel, near Piazza Navona; in
her room, she found a giant bouquet from General Roberto Conforti, then the head of the
carabinieri's cultural-heritage-protection force. Conforti had invited her to address an
international police conference that he was hosting, on the circulation of stolen art. "This was his
courting phase," True told me.

Now retired, General Conforti - often called simply Il Generale - is renowned in the international
circle of beat cops, private detectives, insurance executives, customs agents, and state prosecutors
involved in the recovery of stolen art. In the nineteen-nineties, he built up his squad into the
largest of its kind in the world; he also set out to combat what he considered the most intractable
problem in art crime. "It wasn't Picassos, and it wasn't Caravaggios," Conforti, who wears a
mustache and speaks in a gravelly basso profundo, said when I met him in Rome, this fall. "It was
antiquities." Freshly looted artifacts have no documented history, he pointed out, and criminal
organizations were putting them on the international market with impunity; quality pieces could
sell for seven or even eight figures. In 1995, True had persuaded the Getty to adopt ethical
standards requiring objects proposed for acquisition to have been documented and written about
by scholars, and Conforti hoped to enlist her in his efforts to retrieve improperly obtained Italian
antiquities from the Getty and other American museums. "We thought the Getty was ready to
work with us," Conforti said.

At the time, True was a frequent participant in Italian archeology conferences, where she talked
about the "brutally direct evidence" of looting and about her efforts to change the Getty's image as
the "most aggressively acquiring institution in the world." (The endowment of the J. Paul Getty
Trust is $6.4 billion.) Paola Pelagatti, who is one of Italy's leading classical archeologists, says of
True, "She made a big impression. She was extremely conscientious - direct in that strong
American way." True, who is fair and has striking blue eyes, was also known for her elegant New
England manners and her classic wardrobe. "She was very Waspish, very Bostonian," Mario
Bondioli-Osio, an Italian diplomat who in the nineties ran a government commission on art
recovery, says. "She kind of fit the Italian ideal of elegance, of the well-turned-out lady," says John
Papadopoulos, a professor of archeology at U.C.L.A. and a former associate curator at the Getty,
who travelled with her to Italy on several occasions.

At Conforti's conference, True addressed a group that included representatives of Scotland Yard,
Interpol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Gendarmerie Nationale. "Among the things I talked
about was a big cult statue, the Aphrodite," True says. Depicting a Greek goddess clad in billowing
drapery, the statue was seven and a half feet tall and had been, as True said in her presentation,
"one of the museum's most controversial acquisitions" when it was bought by the Getty from a
London dealer, in 1988, for eighteen million dollars. A rare surviving example of late-fifth-century-
B.C. sculpture, it had been created in an unusual manner: the covered body was limestone; the
exposed head, arms, and feet were white marble. Its provenance was unknown, but reports had
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circulated in the American and the Italian press that it had been excavated recently at Morgantina,
a frequently looted site in central Sicily.

"Despite the best efforts of the press, no evidence has come forward to this day to substantiate its
suggested provenance of Morgantina," True said at the conference. "However, the statue does
represent an important document in the history of monumental sculpture." She continued, "It is
most certainly a product of a workshop in the western Greek colonies. For this reason, the
museum has agreed to work with Italian colleagues on a complete technical study of the statue." In
an effort to determine the Aphrodite's origin, True had sent limestone samples to geologists in
Palermo. (The samples matched limestone found in Sicily, but the geologists could not identify a
specific site.) In her presentation, True also mentioned several objects that the Getty had
voluntarily repatriated after the museum determined that they had been stolen or illegally
exported. Her lecture was applauded. "She spoke well," Conforti recalls.

Today, True, who is fifty-nine, is best known as the target of a sprawling carabinieri investigation
of American museums and the illegal antiquities market. In April, 2005, she was indicted in Rome,
charged with conspiracy to traffic in tens of millions of dollars' worth of looted Greek vases,
Etruscan bronzes, terracottas, and other objects. True allegedly obtained these artifacts through
an international network run by the American antiquities dealer Robert E. Hecht, Jr., who is a co-
defendant in her case, and by an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici, who was convicted of
trafficking in 2004, and who was described in his sentencing documents as perpetrating "one of
the greatest thefts against the Italian state ever recorded." According to the prosecution, the
conspiracy involved top dealers and private collectors in London and New York, along with art
restorers in Zurich, middlemen in Geneva, and tomb robbers and smugglers in Italy. True denies
any wrongdoing.

"Marion True had a double nature," Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the state prosecutor in the Italian case,
says. "Not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but very similar." Weeks before the trial began, in the fall of
2005, True lost her job at the Getty, after she disclosed that she had taken a loan from Lawrence
Fleischman, a well-known antiquities collector based in New York, to help pay for a vacation home
on the Greek island of Paros; she obtained the loan just days after Fleischman's collection, which
he had amassed with his wife, Barbara, was acquired by the museum, in a deal worth sixty million
dollars. In March and April, 2006, Greek police conducted a series of raids on the Paros house, and
confiscated ancient stone objects and architectural fragments that they found on the premises.
True was subsequently indicted in Athens on charges of trafficking three Greek antiquities owned
by the Getty, including a fourth-century-B.C. gold wreath; the Getty has returned all three to
Greece.

At the center of these investigations is the Aphrodite, which, like True, has been transformed from
pristine goddess to corrupting siren - a symbol of the cupidity and lawlessness of American
museums in the face of exquisite loot. Italian officials have presented the story of the cult statue -
its passage from Switzerland to London and then Los Angeles, the exorbitant price the Getty paid
for it, and the persistent rumors that it was looted from Morgantina - as typical of the Getty's
corrupt practices during True's tenure. And although the Getty's administration recently entered a
détente with the Italian government, the criminal trial of True and Hecht continues, and True
could face a maximum prison term of twenty years if the conspiracy charges are upheld. (Hecht,
who also maintains his innocence, is eighty-eight, and cannot be sentenced to jail, under Italian
law, because of his age.)
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