by Peter Watson
And that’s it. These were objects of immense importance, yet they had no history before Symes or Tempelsman—and no one chose to ask questions . Not the Getty staff or the experts who inspected the material. Did no one ask where such important material came from and why the objects had not previously been published? Did no one ask Robin Symes where he had acquired such wonderful material? Had no one any idea where they probably came from? Were they frightened of the answer? Or, did they already know?
In many ways, Shelby White and Leon Levy parallel Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. As a rich couple, they have devoted their lives to the arts. As Fleischman served on a White House advisory committee in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, so Shelby White served on President Clinton’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee, albeit controversially. (Since the aim of the committee is to help stem the flow of ancient foreign artifacts into the hands of private collectors, Nancy Wilkie, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, said of Shelby White, “It’s like putting a fox in charge of the chicken coop.”) Just as the Fleischmans helped kick-start the Archives of American Art and supported many art institutions, so Shelby White and her late husband provided funds for a “Shelby White and Leon Levy Court for Roman and Etruscan Art” at the Metropolitan in New York. And just as the Fleischmans built a collection of ancient art, which went on display at the Getty and was then acquired by the museum, so the Levy-Whites acquired an equivalent collection, which was displayed in an exhibition with a title no less grand than the Fleischmans’: Glories of the Past ran from September 1990 to January 1991 at the Metropolitan Museum. Since 1999, some of the Levy-White objects have been on permanent display at the Met.
And, as with the Fleischmans, the Levy-White Collection is stuffed with loot.
In a way, this should not come as a surprise. Two of the items in the Fleischman Collection, two Pompeian frescoes, not only have their “twin” in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva, but actually fit together—like a jigsaw puzzle—with frescoes in the Levy-White Collection.g
Given all this, and what has gone before, it comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that Pellegrini’s familiar paper trail also leads from Geneva to the Levy-White Collection, just as it led to the Fleischman Collection and to the Tempelsman Collection. Besides the Polaroids in Corridor 17, showing many objects that would end up with the Levy-Whites—broken, dirty, just lying around—there was quite a bit of correspondence. There was, for example, a group of invoices sent from Robin Symes to Leon Levy; no doubt Symes had to copy Medici on his invoices to prove he was charging what he said he was charging. There were also invoices from, and correspondence about, the Aboutaams.
The Dossier section gives full details on ten valuable and important objects in the Levy-White Collection in which the documentation shows that they originated with Medici. In every case, the paper trail is familiar and comprehensive, and just three examples will illustrate the overall quality of the material.
A black-figure Attic amphora attributed to the Bucci Painter (540–530 BC), number 106 in the catalog for the Levy-White Collection, appears in the seized photographs and was also sold at the notorious Sotheby’s sale in London, on December 9, 1985. It is actually a vase the British Museum would have bid on, had it had a proper provenance.h
Pellegrini’s report draws particular attention to two Caeretan hydrie, water storage vases from Cerveteri. Pellegrini found it especially interesting that the two vases were used to explain an article in the journal Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum, volume six, for the year 2000. The two vases in the Levy-White Collection were very distinctive: One showed a panther and a lioness attacking a mule, and the second showed Ulysses and his companions fleeing from Polyphemus’s cavern (Polyphemus was the one-eyed giant in Homer’s Odyssey who refused hospitality to Ulysses and his cohort). Both these vases were shown in the seized photographs, where each is broken and in fragments, with sizable gaps. In this case, however, the photographs also consisted of a number of enlargements, showing the fragments close up. What struck Pellegrini was that, in the Getty article, in discussing their construction and method of manufacture, various drawings of the vases were used, and these show the vases with the original break lines as revealed in the seized photographs. In other words, Peggy Sanders, who made these drawings, must have seen the vases either in the stages of restoration, when the joins between fragments were still visible, or she must have seen the photographs of the fragments that were eventually seized in Geneva. Where did Getty personnel, not to mention Shelby White and Leon Levy, think that these vases, and the fragments that composed them, had come from?
In this case, that was not the end of the matter. Further awkward questions are raised by certain letters that were found among the documentation obtained from Corridor 17. This correspondence was between the Levy-Whites (in fact the curator of their collection) and a Dutch authority on Greek vases, Professor Dr. Jaap M. Hemelrijk, of Wanneperveen in Holland. Professor Hemelrijk was interested in publishing the hydrie and in the course of his letter asked if he could include the photos (which, from his phrasing, he had evidently seen) “taken before restoration of the vase.” Alongside this, someone has written in hand: “Aboutaam?” The date on this letter is May 16, 1995, just over a year after the Phoenix Ancient Art invoice to the Levy-Whites. In other words, it was obvious to everyone that these hydrie had only recently been put together.
One final, but very important object links the Levy-Whites with the Hunt brothers, whose collection is considered next. This was a fragmentary red-figure calyx krater signed by none other than Euphronios. This krater—at eighteen inches by twenty-two inches, a good bit smaller than the Met’s—was the star in the sale held at Sotheby’s in New York on June 19, 1990, which saw the dispersal of the collection of Greek and Roman vases and coins amassed by the Texan oil billionaires (or former billionaires), Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt.
The Hunts were in fact originally from Illinois, where their ancestors had moved after the Civil War. One son of these ancestors preferred to make his money by gambling on cards, and he was successful enough to start drilling for oil in Texas. He was dogged for years by rivals, who claimed he had cheated them, but he came out on top and his eldest son, Hassie, built on his fortune. However, Hassie developed a mental condition that necessitated a frontal lobotomy. Bunker, being the next oldest, took over. He extended the oil business into Pakistan and Libya, where the world’s largest oil field was discovered on the tract of land licensed to the Hunts. This was an oil prospector’s dream come true. In 1961, Bunker’s half interest in this tract was valued at about $7 billion, making him the richest private individual in the world—at age thirty-five. During the 1970s, the Hunts diversified, adding to oil an interest in real estate (5 million acres at one point), cattle, sugar, pizza parlors—and silver. Inflation was high in the 1970s and gold could not be held by private citizens at that time, so the Hunts began to buy silver in enormous quantities.
Prior to their bankruptcy in the early 1980s, the Hunts had built up extensive holdings in Greek and Roman coins and vases. The collection was cataloged in 1983 under the grand title, The Wealth of the Ancient World, but was dispersed in 1990 as part of their efforts to straighten out their affairs in the wake of their bankruptcy and subsequent conviction. At that June sale, the Hunts’ Euphronios kylix, albeit only one-fourth complete, became the first Euphronios to be sold at auction in the twentieth century and, fittingly, it fetched a record price for a Greek vase, outdoing even the Met’s krater, with a hammer price of $1.76 million. It was bought by Robin Symes, who was bidding on behalf of the Levy-Whites.
Now there were four notable features about the sale of this krater. In the first place, the Hunts’ collection of Greek vases and coins was acquired though the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles. The public face of Summa was a controversial figure in his own right: Bruce McNall. McNall is another of those colorful figures—like the Hunt brothers—who populate the edges of this stor
y. Born the son of a University of Southern California biochemistry professor in Los Angeles, McNall developed an early passion for ancient coins. This led him as a young man to the antiquities shops and bazaars of Turkey, Egypt, Italy, and Algeria. In 1974, he paid a record $420,000 at a Swiss auction for the world’s rarest coin, a fifth-century BC Athena decadrachm, and six years later he sold the world’s first $1-million coin. As he rose in a financial and social sense, McNall bought himself a hockey team, the Los Angeles Kings; and a football team, the Toronto Argonauts; and financed a number of films, including Blame It on Rio and The Fabulous Baker Boys. He owned a horse that won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and a stable with 100 thoroughbreds, and numbered among his friends Goldie Hawn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael J. Fox, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In 1974, he formed a partnership with Robert E. Hecht, who became the éminence grise in McNall’s Summa Gallery, located prominently on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. Widely ridiculed for embellishing his background (he invented bogus graduate work at Oxford, England, and a partnership with J. Paul Getty), McNall was twice forced to return antiquities to Turkey because they had been illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country. One involved a Roman sarcophagus that had been stripped by thieves of a series of carved scenes depicting the labors of Hercules, concerning which some of the panels were recovered in Turkey—and the matching ones turned up at Summa. The second involved eight marble sculptures stolen from the famous Roman city of Aphrodisias; and here, too, four turned up at Summa.
Later on in his career, McNall admitted his role in the widespread smuggling of illegally excavated coins and antiquities (80 percent of the ancient coins on the market, he said, are “fresh,” meaning fresh out of the ground), but by then his association with the Hunts was long over. They had met in 1978, at the Santa Anita Race Track, when Hunt had asked McNall two questions. First, “What was the relationship between gold and silver in the ancient world?” McNall had replied, “Twenty-four to one, about.” And second, “What would it take to form the biggest coin collection in the world?” Hunt was, of course, then in the middle of trying to corner the silver market, but over the next few years he and his brother used McNall, and the Summa Gallery, to acquire not just coins but antiquities as well. McNall later told journalist Bryan Burrough that he charged “close to a million” for a Euphronios cup that was “probably bought from the same tomb robbers who allegedly supplied Hecht’s Euphronios vase.”
The second noteworthy aspect about the smaller krater by Euphronios is that it wasn’t the only Euphronios vase in the Hunt sale. There was another, a kylix, that was bought for close to $800,000, by none other than Giacomo Medici. It was this kylix that was discovered during the first raid on Corridor 17, on September 13, 1995, and then dropped and broken by a Swiss policeman.i
The third noteworthy aspect about both the Leon Levy-Shelby White Euphronios and the one found in Giacomo Medici’s possession in Geneva was that both featured Hercules in the iconography. This one showed Hercules straining and struggling, locked in battle with Cycnos, one of the primordial Titans, son of Ares, the Greek god of war.
The fourth noteworthy aspect of the Levy-White krater was that Polaroid photographs of it, dirty and in separate fragments, before it was put together as a vase, were found among Medici’s documentation in the Geneva Freeport. In other words, the full route of this Euphronios was: Medici to Hecht to Summa Gallery to the Hunt brothers to Robin Symes to the Levy-Whites.
Nor was this all. In 1991, some months after they bought the smaller Euphronios krater, the Levy-Whites sent it to the Getty Museum conservation department to have the vase examined and re-restored. The ostensible reason for this was that the Levy-Whites had two extra fragments that were allegedly by Euphronios and formed part of the krater, and they wanted the Getty conservation people to add the new fragments. The documentation unearthed by the Italian public prosecutor showed three relevant points about this episode.
In the first place, it turned out that the two fragments did not fit with the krater. Second, an addendum to a letter written by Dr. Anne Leinster Windham, curator of the Levy-White Collection, to Maya Elston of the Getty’s Antiquities Conservation Department contains the following: “2 fragments (probably not numbered) are in Livingroom. Case A. They were thought to fit with krater, but don’t. Fred Schultz told me (6/95) that he had owned them, and given them to Hecht as a ‘gesture of good faith.’ Then Hecht turned around and sold them! . . . Date purchased: 06–25–90.” In other words, the Levy-Whites acquired the fragments six days after they bought the vase at auction. This is the very same date as Robin Symes’s invoice to Leon Levy for buying the krater at Sotheby’s.
Finally, here are some excerpts from the examination of the krater by Maya Elston, of the Getty Conservation Department, written on July 23, 1991.
Initially the body and the lips were thrown as one piece, while the foot and the handle were made separately.... The krater has been previously restored. 75 fragments comprise the preserved one quarter of the original. Most of them are located on side A [the principal scene], whilst the rest are dispersed over the entire surface.... STRUCTURAL CONDITION OF THE TWO ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS. . . . Partial cleaning had been carried out although encrustation and soil deposits are still dispersed over the surface, mostly located on the broken edges . . . In addition to [the] initial damage in antiquity, some fresh surface damage can be observed on the larger shard (perhaps these are traces from an excavation tool . . . ). (italics added)
This vase too is among the Polaroids in Medici’s Geneva warehouse. Indisputably, both these Euphronios vases started out with him. This, of course, is not without significance in regard to the provenance of the Metropolitan’s Euphronios krater. Finding fresh tool marks on the fragments, did conservator Elston not ask herself what was going on?
Quite apart from the two vases by Euphronios, Pellegrini found two other objects of very great value that were once in the Hunt Collection and which were sold in the great sale of their collection at Sotheby’s in 1990. These were a black-figure Attic kylix and a red-figure Attic stamnos (a large amphora with handles on the shoulder) showing figures bathing in a fountain. The documentation showed that both of these had passed through a gallery and an auction house: They had both been first sold at the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles and then been put on auction at Sotheby’s in 1990.
However, in Medici’s warehouse, besides the kylix and the stamnos themselves, he also found photographs of both objects, but, in both cases, they were fragmented, dirty with soil, “summarily reassembled” but with many gaps and altogether in the state normally associated with recently excavated material. There were three photographs of the stamnos, “with clearly evident missing parts,” though its provenance from Italian territory was made obvious by the fact that under the foot of the vase there was some writing, partly in Greek and partly in the Etruscan alphabet (the letters HE were in Greek, the letters CA in Etruscan).
So, a new but simple question arises. How could Medici have bought the kylix and the stamnos at the Hunt sale in 1990 and have in his archive photographs of these self-same objects before they were restored? The answer was that he acquired them as soon as they came out of the ground, had them restored, passed them on to Hecht, for sale at the Summa Gallery, and then he bought them back. Why? To manipulate the market for his business.
Another six objects—all part of the Hunt Collection—appear in the seized photographs. Two were red-figure Attic amphorae, one was a black-figure Attic amphora, each shown in the photographs as “recomposed” in a preliminary way, with many gaps between the fragments and with the photographs evidently taken in a house. By the time they were sold, in the Sotheby’s sale in New York, each was in perfect condition, with the gaps filled in and properly colored.
The pattern is wearily familiar.
In January 1994, the Royal Academy in London hosted an exhibition with a grand title, In Pursuit of the Absolute: Art of the Ancient World.
This was in fact the George Ortiz Collection. The lack of provenance of many of the objects in the exhibition was criticized by archaeologists on BBC TV a few days after the show opened. Ortiz defended himself robustly, arguing that 85 percent of all antiquities on the market are “chance finds.” On the same program, Professor Colin Renfrew disagreed.
Ortiz was one of the names in Pasquale Camera’s organigram. He himself has admitted that he bought much of his material from Gianfranco Becchina and from Koutoulakis, other names in the organigram. But he clearly didn’t buy everything from them, because in one of the boxes of documentation seized in Geneva, among photographs depicting archaeological material “taken during or immediately after their removal from their original context,” Pellegrini came upon a Polaroid photograph of a sculpture in nefro. Nefro is a form of stone specific to the Vulci area of Italy. The photographs Pellegrini found had clearly been taken on the site where this sculpture was discovered, “still dirty with earth and not yet restored.” It depicted a horse with rider and was typical of Etruria, in particular the markers used for Vulci burials. This horse and rider, shown in a farmyard in the Geneva photographs, was identical with one displayed in the Royal Academy exhibition. Pellegrini adds: “We must point out that in the catalogue file there is no mention whatsoever regarding the acquisition of the piece, evidently recent and through Medici, who had a copy of the [Royal Academy] volume in his small Geneva library.”