The thieves targeted a collection known as the Treasure of Benghazi.
It included more than 10,000 pieces, with coins dating back to Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic times, but also other treasures such as small statues and jewellery.
Most had been discovered during the Italian occupation of Libya and were taken out of the country.
They were then returned to Libya in 1961 after the country's independence.
The collection has been kept in the vault of the Commercial Bank of Benghazi ever since, waiting for the opening of a museum that was never built.
The coins were never photographed or documented and seemed to have been forgotten, according to Dr Saleh Algab, the chairman of the Tripoli Museum.
Although not the only collection of ancient coins in Libya, Mr Algab said they were a hugely valuable representation of the mosaic of Libyan history - an important reminder for Libya's sometimes fractious, at times antagonistic, regions and ethnic groups that they all belong in one Libya, he said.
Oct 31, 2011
Thousands of Antiquities Looted from Libyan Bank Vault
Thousands of antiquities are reported to have been stolen from a Benghazi bank vault in Libya. The objects are small, portable and very valuable. The collection has not been displayed for many years and has not been sufficiently documented. Chances for recovery would therefore be very remote.
BBC News - Looted Libyan treasure 'in Egypt':
Oct 28, 2011
Footnotes
The Statue of Liberty turns 125 today, pictured here under construction in Frederick Auguste Bartholdi's Paris workshop. |
- Another Pompeii wall collapse? I'm skeptical of English-language reporting of what happens in Italy generally, but doubly so after reading Mary Beard's account of a wall-collapse in Pompeii that didn't actually collapse. Berlusconi screws up enough with out inventing things right?
- Maxwell Anderson will be leaving Indianapolis for the Dallas Museum of Art.
- Recovered 90 years later: "Fisherman's Daughter" by Jules Breton, stolen during World War I, has been returned to France from New York.
- Probably not a good sign for his partner in crime: Jason Savedoff, the 24 year-old assistant to Barry Landau, has pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal valuable documents signed by Lincoln, Napoleon, and others.
- "Government. Arts. Agency."
- Deaccessioning art to another museum: The Atwater Kent Museum sold a work to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sounds like a reasonable solution to the slew of deaccessions.
- Serbia is the new haven for stolen art: two Picassos recovered there.
- The LCCHP is sponsoring an underwater cultural heritage conference Nov. 3 in Washington D.C.
- At the Menil in Houston on Nov. 3 there will be a roundtable discussion of cultural heritage and participatory stewardship.
- The Four Corners region antiquities investigation has produced a number of probation sentences, no prison sentences and 3 suicides. The assistant U.S. attorneys would have had a hard time making a stronger case with the suicide of the informant. SAFE argues the non-custodial sentences are an unjust result, arguing for stiffer penalties. But in the current era of austerity, when some authorities are under budget constraints, sometimes even making the baffling decision not to prosecute domestic violence cases, who will pay to prosecute the cases?
Oct 26, 2011
Art Cops: Overworked and Under-resourced
Over the weekend in the Baltimore Sun Tricia Bishop reports on the current state of heritage policing in the United States:
America is the largest consumer of artwork in the world, with a 40 percent share of the $200 billion global industry. It's also the scene of nearly half of the illegal art trade estimated to be worth another $7 billion worldwide.
Yet other countries pay far more attention to art fraud. Italy has several hundred detectives on its Carabinieri Art Squad, and Greece, France, Germany and Belgium all have national units working the detail.
In contrast, the FBI's Art Crime Team, co-founded by a Baltimore native whose father ran an antiques shop on Howard Street, is made up of one archaeologist and 13 agents, who work the beat on the side. And the Los Angeles Police Department's Art Theft Detail consists of just one investigator, a man who is delaying retirement because he's afraid the division will die if he leaves without a trained successor.The piece looks at three of the main groups tasked with art crimes in the United States: The Art Crime Team, the Archival Recovery Team, and Don Hrycyk at the LAPD. As I said in the piece, these folks have an essential job, and given the fact these crimes are still relegated to the status of non-violent property crimes in many cases, they don't rise to the level of illegal narcotics or terrorism or other priorities law enforcement must tackle. But there is a fundamental difference between property and historical objects and art, and more attention should be paid to them. America as a country might be thinking too much about owning and buying these objects, and not enough about acting as stewards.
- Tricia Bishop, Art investigators: Saving the country’s cultural heritage, one recovered work at a time, Baltimore Sun, October 23, 2011, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-history-thieves-20111007,0,443863,full.story (last visited Oct 26, 2011).
Oct 24, 2011
My Piece on Property and Heritage
When writers discuss stolen art, repatriation or looting one of the threshold problems is how to classify these objects: either as property or as heritage. It seems to me both concepts are distinct, and in a piece which is now available from the Penn. State Law Review, I've argued both should be separated. Here's the abstract:
You can download the whole article here. I'd be most interested to hear any comments at derek.fincham "at" gmail.com
This piece takes up the competing concepts of property and heritage. Recent scholarship views property as a series of connections and obligations - rather than the traditional power to control, transfer or exclude. This new view of property may be safeguarding resources for future generations, but also imposes onerous obligations based on concerns over environmental protection, the protection of cultural resources, group rights, and even rights to digital property. Yet these obligations can also be imposed on subsequent generations, and certain obligations are imposed now based on the actions of past generations.This article examines the multigenerational aspects of property via a body of law which should be called heritage law. Heritage law now governs a wide range of activities some of which include: preventing destruction of works of art, preventing the theft of art and antiquities, preventing the illegal excavation of antiquities, preventing the mutilation and destruction of ancient structures and sites, creating a means for preserving sites and monuments, and even righting past wrongs. This piece justifies the new conceptualization in two ways. First, by showing that properly distinguishing property and heritage will allow us to better protect heritage with a richer, fuller understanding of the concept. And second by demonstrating how current definitions lead to imprecise analysis, which may produce troubling legal conclusions.
A growing body of heritage law has extended the limitations periods for certain cultural disputes. This has shifted the calculus for the long-term control of real, movable, and even digital property. This can be acutely seen with respect to cultural repatriation claims - specifically the claims of claimants to works of art forcibly taken during World War II; or the claims by Peru to certain anthropological objects now in the possession of Yale University which were removed by Hiram Bingham in the early part of the 20th Century.
You can download the whole article here. I'd be most interested to hear any comments at derek.fincham "at" gmail.com
Oct 21, 2011
A postscript to "Chasing Aphrodite"
la dea di Morgantina |
While Jason [Felch, his coauthor,] was reporting in Sicily, I went to Switzerland to interview Renzo Canavesi, who used to run a tobacco shop and cambia, or money-changing house, near Chiasso, just north of the Italian border. For decades the border region had been known for money-laundering and smuggling, mostly in cigarettes but also drugs, guns, diamonds, passports, credit cards—and art. It was there in March 1986 that the goddess statue first surfaced in the market, when Canavesi sold it for $400,000 to the London dealer who would offer it to the Getty.
The transaction had generated a receipt, a hand-printed note on Canavesi’s cambia stationery—the statue’s only shred of provenance. “I am the sole owner of this statue,” it read, “which has belonged to my family since 1939.” After the London dealer turned the receipt over to authorities in 1992, an Italian art squad investigator said he thought Canavesi’s statement was dubious: 1939 was the year Italy passed its patrimony law, making all artifacts discovered from then on property of the state. After a second lengthy investigation in Italy, Canavesi was convicted in absentia in 2001 of trafficking in looted art. But the conviction was overturned because the statute of limitations had expired.
- Ralph Frammolino, The Goddess Goes Home, Smithsonian, Nov. 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Goddess-Goes-Home.html?c=y&story=fullstory (last visited Oct 21, 2011).
Oct 10, 2011
$150 Million worth of art in the trash?
Stolen to order? Nature Mort au Chandelier, Fernand Léger, 1922 |
As a wise Museum Security Director once said: 'shit happens'. Lets hope this is the statement of a desperate defendant, and the paintings are still safe. This underscores the point that tracking down art thieves is a delicate proposition. They have a very big piece of collateral, in this case five important works of art. If you prosecute the thief too harshly, you run the risk of destroying what you were after. Of course the best way to prevent this destruction would have been better basic attention to security.Detectives said that while they remained sceptical about his account, they could not "totally rule out" this catastrophic scenario. The destruction of such landmark masterpieces would be a major blow to international art heritage. The first to be arrested was a Serb known only as Vrejan T, 43, nicknamed "Spiderman" and who was detained days after last year's heist over a separate art theft from a chic Paris apartment. Under questioning, the suspect reportedly recounted how he loosened screws in a window at the Art Deco Palais de Tokyo housing the museum, returned a few nights later to remove the frame and sliced through a padlock on an iron grille. He had initially gone there only to steal a Léger work to order, he said, but once inside, was "surprised" when the burglary alarm failed to sound. Being a "veritable art lover," the Serb told police he then wandered around for another hour, eluding 30 closed circuit cameras to cherry pick four other masterpieces. "He found the Modigliani the most beautiful of all," a judicial source told the JDD. Vrejan T reportedly told investigators he had stolen the Léger for Jean-Michel C, 56, an antiques dealer with a shop called Antiquités Bastille. He was arrested in May for selling other stolen art works.
- Henry Samuel, £100m masterpieces stolen from French museum “crushed by rubbish truck,” The Telegraph, October 9, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8816634/100m-masterpieces-stolen-from-French-museum-crushed-by-rubbish-truck.html (last visited Oct 10, 2011).
The other stolen works:
La Pastorale, Henri Matisse, 1906 |
L'Olivier pres de l'Estaque, Georges Braque, 1906 |
The Pigeon with Peas, Pablo Picasso, 1911-12
La femme a l'eventail, Amadeo Modigliani
Oct 7, 2011
Symposium on litigation and cultural property in Geneva
On November 11 at the University of Geneva the Art-Law Centre will organize a symposium titled "Litigation in cultural property: judicial and alternative means of international dispute resolution". The event boasts a prestigious array of speakers, I'm sorry I'll be teaching here in Houston. Here are the details:
Program 11.11.11(web)
Program 11.11.11(web)
Oct 6, 2011
Student Essay on NAGPRA and 'culturally unidentified' human remains
Matthew Birkhold has won the National native American Law Students Association's 10th annual writing competition with an assay published in the William Mitchell Law Review. From the Introduction:
In recent years, NAGPRA’s characteristic equilibrium has fallen out of balance. In an effort to restore the law’s equipoise, the Department of the Interior published a new final rule, effective May 14, 2010, delineating procedures for the disposition of culturally unidentified Native American human remains in the possession or control of museums and federal agencies. In this attempt, however, the new law swung too far. By evaluating the new rule’s impact on culturally unidentified human remains, this article interrogates the notion that the new regulation is an “important step toward fulfilling the intent of Congress as expressed in NAGPRA.” Because NAGPRA itself is silent on the appropriate disposition of culturally unidentified remains, the only guidance about the intent of the new law comes from the legislative history of the Act, the Department of the Interior, and the courts. Each source establishes NAGPRA as human rights legislation designed to protect Native Americans’ rights and demonstrate respect for remains while achieving an agreeable counterpoise between the competing interests of the Native American and scientific communities.
Oct 5, 2011
Student Note on Orphaned Works and Cultural History
Brianna Dahlberg has posted a student note on orphaned works and access to cultural history in the Southern California Review of Law & Social Justice. From the abstract:
Orphan works are copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or impossible to find. They include a vast number of old works in museums, archives and libraries that are not being commercially exploited by rights holders because they are out-of-print, unpublished or anonymous, but nonetheless have cultural or historical significance. However, if the institutions cannot locate the rights holders, they cannot publish or publicly display these works without risking a copyright infringement lawsuit should the rights holders come forward in the future. This Note addresses a new aspect of the orphan works problem: its disproportionate impact on works created by racial and religious minorities, women, Native Americans and other indigenous people, and the poor. Locating rights holders for early-twentieth century works by these groups tends to be especially difficult for a variety of reasons. Minority and poor white musicians were routinely excluded from performing rights organizations until the 1940s and were less likely to register their copyrights. Women and minority visual artists often created their works apart from the established gallery system, and their artworks tend to be less exhibited and well-known. The identifying information for folk art and traditional Native American art is often lost. As a result, many of these important works remain locked away in archives and inaccessible to the public. This Note proposes a solution to the orphan works problem with the goals of promoting broader cultural access and participation in mind. I evaluate four potential approaches, and conclude that the Nordic countries’ solution of extended collective licensing would best serve the goal of promoting access to cultural works of disadvantaged groups while fairly compensating rights holders who do come forward.
Oct 4, 2011
Three arrested in connection with thefts from Musee d'Art Moderne
In May 2010 five works were stolen from the Musee d'Art Moderne near the Eiffel tower. Now three individuals are being detained in connection with the thefts, though the works are still missing. From AFP:
The Pigeon with Peas, Pablo Picasso, 1911-12 |
The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said. A lone burglar sheared off a gate padlock and broke a window to get into the city-run Musee d'Art Moderne in the brazen operation during the night of May 19 last year. The paintings were found to be missing just as the museum, a major tourist attraction near the Eiffel Tower, was about to open. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe later said one of the museum's alarms had been "partly malfunctioning" since the end of March, and that it was still awaiting repair when the thieves struck.
Student Note on the Visual Artists Rights Act
A part of the installation under dispute between Mass. MoCA and Christopher Buchel |
In 2010, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit confronted the novel question of when moral rights protections vest under the Visual Artists Rights Act. In Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. v. Büchel, the First Circuit determined that the protections of the Visual Artists Rights Act begin when a work is “created” under the Copyright Act. This Note argues that this decision harms moral rights conceptually and is likely to result in unpredictable and inconsistent decisions. This Note proposes instead that these statutory protections should vest when an artist determines that his work is complete and presents it to the public. This standard is more consistent with the history of moral rights. Additionally, public access is necessary to justify a treatment of art different from that of other types of property, and it is a more essential component of moral rights than an artist’s feelings of connection to his work. Finally, the legislative intent behind the Visual Artists Rights Act and the reasoning in previous judicial decisions are more accurately reflected by a public disclosure standard. Utilizing “creation” as a vesting point for moral rights is not supported by the history of the Visual Artists Rights Act and will result in uncertainty and inconsistency in future decisions.
Oct 3, 2011
Institute of Art and Law Events in New York and London
The Institute of Art and Law will be putting together a panel in New York on art recovery and later a "Study Forum" on Art and Antiquities Law in London. Both are highly recommended, and well-worth the small fees. Here are the details:
New York – 16th November
New Dimensions in Art Recovery –
a joint conference
convened by IAL and Herrick Feinstein LLP
Claims against possessors of art continue to proliferate. The impulse to unravel transactions in stolen art has inspired new legal maneuvers and defenses. While museums are obvious front-line defendants, the legal risks and ethical pressures also affect private collectors, governments, recovery agencies and insurers. They also provide unprecedented opportunities for claimants.
The aim of this seminar is to inform practicing lawyers and museum staff about initiatives that are being taken to diversify the practice of art recovery in a trans-Atlantic context. Eminent practitioners from the US and the UK will report on approaches to litigation within each jurisdiction to highlight the differences and similarities between them.
London, Saturday 26th November 2011
At this Study Forum a panel of specialised speakers will examine aspects of the law relating to art and antiquities, including criminal law (theft, handling, money laundering, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act), contract (formation, exclusion and limitation clauses), international conventions.
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