Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Looting would continue even if the Getty stopped buying, Houghton said. It was an argument that, he acknowledged, "can seem to be little more than a facile rationalization for the unrestrained acquisition of archeological material."

  Ultimately, the ethical question comes down to this: will the acquisition of an object do more to destroy the past or preserve it? Houghton argued that buying antiquities—even those that have been recently looted—does greater good than harm.

  The museum's acquisition policy—which required notifying foreign governments of objects it intended to purchase—was already more rigorous than those of most other American museums. Harvard's Fogg Museum, one of the strictest, required just a "reasonable assurance" that an antiquity had left its country of origin before the 1970 UNESCO Convention. The Met did not require any documentation to support the fact, while the Boston MFA's policy made no mention of the country of origin, instead relying on a dealer's word that an object had entered the United States legally. "They are concerned with not being seen to encourage the unauthorized excavation and export of ancient material from its country of origin," Houghton explained, "...while permitting maximum freedom of action in regard to the determination of what type of material should be bought."

  As for the legal ramifications, the law was in a state of flux, according to Houghton. President Ronald Reagan had recently signed the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act, finally adopting parts of the UNESCO treaty as American law. Under the act, a source country could ask the United States to place restrictions on the importation of antiquities if it could prove that American demand was fueling looting. Of greater concern, however, was an emerging legal interpretation of the National Stolen Property Act, passed in 1934. American courts were beginning to consider looted antiquities in the same light as hot cars and stolen securities. Under a precedent set in a 1977 case against a Texas art dealer, the feds in some jurisdictions could now seize an object and even bring criminal charges if they could prove that the museum had "certain knowledge" that the antiquity was illicit.

  Williams was still uneasy about the legal situation. Given what Getty officials had learned about Frel's behavior, Williams had also begun to suspect that the curator might have arranged to get a sizable kickback in the deal. He asked Bruce Bevan, the Getty's outside counsel, to investigate the museum's legal exposure if the Greeks demanded the kouros back.

  The precaution frustrated Houghton, who was blunt with Bevan in making a case for the acquisition. "The reality is that 95% of the antiquities on the market have been found in the last three years," Houghton told the Getty attorney. "The only way one obtains them is if you do not ask the specific question that would elicit the specific answer about provenance that made the material unbuyable ... Is Frel getting a cut? I don't know. But I'm prepared to make the strongest case possible for the kouros, even if it involves a payment to Frel. It's simply worth the price."

  Houghton's recommendation was not to stop buying looted art, but to devise a strategy that would defuse the legal risks. The Getty should create the appearance that the objects it was acquiring had been carefully vetted, but at the same time avoid "certain knowledge" of where they were actually coming from. He called the approach "optical due diligence."

  It was a surprisingly cynical position for Houghton to take, given his moral outrage at Frel's transgressions. But in his mind, tax fraud and forgery were entirely different from breaking the export laws of a neglectful foreign country, especially when the goal was to educate and enlighten Americans. Houghton knew that most of what the museum was buying was freshly excavated. But as long as the object was authentic, neither he nor most American curators saw the issue as a major concern at the time.

  Houghton's advice, with its focus on optics over substance, would shape the thinking of Getty officials for years, providing an intellectual foundation for the unbridled acquisition of looted art over the next decade.

  THAT WAS THE BACKDROP for Getty officials as the board gathered to see the kouros that day in the conservation lab. Now Zeri's outburst had added a new, more basic worry: was the kouros authentic?

  The Getty turned to science for an answer. The geological age of a stone generally told curators nothing about when it had been carved. But a geochemist working as a visiting scientist at the Getty suggested the natural chemical breakdown of the statue's surface might indicate how long it had been exposed to the environment. The museum's conservation lab tested the kouros and found that it was covered with a thin layer of calcite. Forgers routinely used acid baths, tea bags, cow dung, and other tricks to create the weathered skin of ancient marble. But, the Getty concluded, there was no way forgers could fake calcite, which forms over thousands of years. The kouros must be ancient.

  Encouraged by the scientific verdict, the Getty then asked leading art historians and archaeologists to weigh in. One expert on classical sculpture refused to participate on moral grounds. Providing her opinion, she said, would only encourage the illicit market, from which the kouros had no doubt come. Most others, however, were eager to see the important and controversial new piece.

  In all, thirty-one experts said that they believed the statue was authentic and praised its beauty and unprecedented state of preservation. Only a few echoed Zeri's obj ections, calling the object an improbable hodgepodge of styles that spanned a large geographic area and more than a hundred years. Boston MFA antiquities curator Cornelius Vermeule (the husband of Emily Vermeule) dismissed the scientific tests, saying that skilled forgers could fake any patina. "They read the technical literature too, John," he told Walsh over the phone. With his curatorial staff giggling in the background, Vermeule said that the statue's hair "looked like spaghetti," its ears "belonged to Mr. Spock" from Star Trek, and its arms looked like "a hack job." Pico Cellini, an Italian restorer and expert on Italian forgeries, called the provenance presented by Frel "a fairy tale."

  Walsh then contacted Dietrich von Bothmer, antiquities curator at the Met and a leading authority on Greek sculpture. Initially, von Bothmer had been skeptical about the statue's authenticity, but Walsh's follow-up found that the crusty curator had changed his mind. Von Bothmer said that he had had a cryptic conversation with Becchina, the Sicilian dealer, about the kouros. Speaking in confidence, Becchina had cautioned von Bothmer to ignore the cover story about the statue coming from Greece or being in the family of a Swiss doctor. He suggested instead that the statue had been found recently in Sicily, an origin that would explain many of the stylistic anomalies that had initially troubled him. It also suggested that the piece was freshly excavated and, by extension, authentic. The statue's suspiciously voluminous ownership history must have been forged to cover the kouros's illicit origins.

  Bolstered by the new information pointing to authenticity, Walsh once again recommended the purchase of the kouros. He sent a confidential binder of information to board members describing the object as "among the most important achievements in the entire history of art" and described how the staff's exhaustive research had shown the kouros to be "genuine beyond all doubt."

  Zeri remained unconvinced. Outnumbered by his colleagues, he vented his frustration about the dubious kouros in an interview with Italian television. Without naming the Getty, Zeri described a sculpture that "is one of the most colossal jokes of all times" and said that each time he saw it, "it seems to be uglier and faker." Marion True, the Getty's assistant curator, learned about the interview, got hold of a transcript, and gave it to her superiors. Williams seized on the comments to demand Zeri's resignation for violating the trust's confidentiality clause. With that, the leading critic of the kouros was gone.

  Meanwhile, the Getty's Swiss attorneys sent a fax to the Greek embassy in Bern inquiring whether the government had any information about the provenance of six antiquities, including the kouros. The attorneys didn't name their client and gave the Greeks six weeks to respond. The lawyers did not contact Italy, the suspected source country of the kouros.

>   The Getty didn't bother to wait for an answer from Greece. With Zeri gone and the museum's optical due diligence satisfied, the board voted in January 1985 to buy the kouros for a record $9.5 million.

  A MONTH AFTER purchasing the kouros, the Getty continued its buying spree, paying $16 million to acquire eleven Greek antiquities from the private collection of New York diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman.

  Tempelsman had been forced to liquidate his antiquities collection because of a divorce prompted by his open affair with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Tempelsman had left his wife and children to move into the Stanhope Hotel, just down the block from Onassis's Fifth Avenue apartment, and was often seen walking arm in arm with her through Central Park.

  In talks with the Getty, Tempelsman proved to be urbane, charming, and a fierce negotiator, one accustomed to haggling over multimillion-dollar diamond sales on the back streets of Africa. Over two years, Houghton had shaved down Tempelsman's $45 million asking price by focusing on only his most choice objects. The deal for the eleven pieces came with a caveat: Tempelsman would need to provide the Getty with a letter of credit for the full amount in case "anything unexpected came up." The step would protect the Getty during the three-year window within which a foreign country could make a patrimony claim.

  The acquisition included some of the most stunning pieces of Greek art ever found, including a remarkably preserved statue of Apollo and a two-foot-wide marble lekanis, or ceremonial basin. The basin, adorned with the scene in Homer's Iliad where sea nymphs bring Achilles his magical armor in preparation for the Trojan War, still bore vivid crimson, blue, and ocher paint—a rarity for ancient art.

  The most arresting piece, however, was a marble sculpture of two mythical griffins ripping into a fallen doe. The scene was carved from a single block of marble and had been used as a table support. It, too, had traces of its original paint, with sky blue on the feathered wings of the griffins and red blood spilling from their prey. Nothing like it had ever been found.

  For the debut of the Tempelsman items, the Getty asked Cornelius Vermeule to write a study of the three central objects. He submitted a manuscript arguing that they were likely part of a group made by the same workshop. But Houghton was skeptical of the thesis and decided to check it out. After asking around, he got in touch with the man said to have been the source of the objects, an Italian middleman named Giacomo Medici.

  For years, Medici had quietly supplied many of the major dealers in the field with first-rate material recently smuggled out of Italy. His debut as a dealer came in 1982, when he dramatically outbid a wealthy Swiss collector to buy an exquisite Etruscan vase depicting Hercules's struggle with the Hydra. Putting it in a place of honor in his new Geneva showroom, Medici turned away offers to buy it from all over the world until he got the one he wanted: the Getty's. After all, having the richest museum in the world as a client was the dream of every looter and middleman across the Mediterranean.

  Frel had acquired the vase for $400,000 but had been careful not to put Medici's name on any of the official documents. He had made clear to Houghton that it should be kept out of all Getty records. Medici was a low-level Italian gangster who had made good, Frel had said. His objects, like those from Hecht, would have to be purchased through other dealers or private collectors.

  Inside the Getty, Medici's name was still mentioned only in a whisper. Yet the dealer's growing significance as a middleman made him an unparalleled source of information. Like most leading curators and collectors around the world, Houghton had once made the pilgrimage to Medici's warehouse in Geneva for a preview of what would be coming on the market. "Two things are important if we're going to do business," Medici had told Houghton. "First, the Getty should say nothing about buying objects from me. I buy and sell thousands of pieces, and if it is known that I sold two to the Getty, it would make the other 998 difficult to sell ... Second, we should not compete against each other at auctions. There is no reason to go to war when there is business to be done."

  Now Houghton called on Medici again with his doubts about Vermeule's theory: was it true that the Apollo, the basin, and the griffins had all come from the same source? Medici said that he had purchased all three from Itali an looters in 1975 or 1976. The basin and the Apollo had been found in the same tomb, in some ruins just outside Taranto, a thriving center of art in ancient times. The griffins had been found in the ruins of a villa some 150 to 200 meters away. The objects had passed from the looters to Medici to Robert Hecht and then to the leading British antiquities dealer, Robin Symes, before landing in Tempelsman's collection. Hecht confirmed Medici's account and added specifics: the objects had been looted from a productive site near Orta Nova, a town to the northwest of Taranto, near the Adriatic.

  Houghton detailed his discovery in a memo to Deborah "Debbie" Gribbon, the Getty Museum's assistant director: "It had still seemed possible to go back through the chain of individuals through whom the material passed to try to find out exactly where all three originated. It was. At the beginning of this month I had a chance to discuss the matter with the dealer who had bought all three objects from the excavators ... Giacomo Medici."

  At the time, the issue was merely academic for Houghton and Gribbon—Vermeule's theory would have to be revisited for the publication. The fact that senior Getty officials now had what approached "certain knowledge" that three of the Getty's new acquisitions had been looted and smuggled out of southern Italy caused no concern.

  Houghton's memo was filed away and forgotten.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1985, John Walsh made a surprising announcement to the Getty staff: "The Getty Museum passed a milestone today. Jiri Frel, after twelve years of service as Curator of Antiquities, ended a sabbatical leave and assumed the title of Senior Research Curator. He will continue for some months to come to work in Paris on various publications." Walsh praised Frel's scholarship, his efforts to connect the Getty to a community of classical scholars around the world, and his role in building the Getty's collection, in particular the museum's "vast trove of important study material."

  Walsh's memo concluded, "As collector, mentor and source of inspiration he has had few equals in his field. When Jiri is back in California we will find ways to salute his achievement."

  Houghton was thunderstruck. Since Frel's sudden departure a year earlier, word of his activities had trickled back from contacts in the antiquities trade. Still on the Getty payroll, Frel had left Paris and moved in for a time with Gianfranco Becchina in the dealer's hometown of Castelvetrano, Sicily. After a few months there, Frel bought an apartment in central Rome on the top floor of a vine-covered apartment building not far from the Pantheon. (Where he got the considerable money needed to do so was not clear.) He divorced Faya and married a young woman who was now pregnant. He was putting his knowledge to work as a fixer in the antiquities trade. Dealers were routinely paying Frel five-figure commissions for his help selling objects.

  Now Walsh appeared ready to bring Frel back to the Getty. When Houghton raised his concerns, Walsh turned the tables on the acting curator, saying that he was increasingly worried about Hought on's obsessive focus on Frel's "fiddling." Walsh was growing impatient with what he saw as Houghton's determination to seek out problems for the Getty. "He sometimes focuses excessively on side issues, and rather than clarifying a situation, may complicate it," Walsh wrote in Houghton's end-of-year performance review. "I don't know if this stems from an excess of zeal with details or with a lack of clear judgment about what is important."

  Houghton had long been expected to succeed Frel as antiquities curator, but now Walsh made it clear that was no longer likely: "I would not judge Arthur's potential for advancement at the Getty Museum to be high, despite his many abilities."

  IN EARLY 1986, as the Getty prepared to reveal its acquisition of the kouros to the public, Houghton once again showed his zeal. He knew that Walsh intended to explain the statue's origins using Frel's documents about the supposed Geneva physician. But given W
alsh's conviction that the statue actually came from Italy, those documents were likely bogus. Should the Getty even be talking about them?

  He sent a memo to Walsh suggesting that the Getty rethink making any reference to the documents. "Do we believe them? We imply that we do. Yet ... no check was completed on the letters' authenticity ... Both experience and prudence suggest that we should not only seem to be certain of these documents, but that we are in fact certain of them."

  The memo was out of character for Houghton, who had long insisted on optics over substance, but his experience at the Getty had begun to change him. The stakes had gotten higher for him, and optical due diligence, his brainchild, was no longer enough.

  Houghton walked downstairs to his old office to show the memo to Marion True. She read it silently, then turned to Houghton and said flatly, "The kouros documents are fake."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "I'm certain."

  True refused to elaborate, but it appeared that she knew more than she was letting on.

  Houghton went back to his office. Ernst Langlotz, a German antiquities expert, had signed one of the kouros letters. The name had come up again recently, while Houghton was reviewing another of Frel's major purchases—an allegedly archaic relief bought in 1982 for $2.3 million. The museum and several outside experts had since concluded it was a fake. Houghton pulled the file for the relief and compared the Langlotz signature there to the one in the kouros file. They were completely different.

  Which signature was real? Or had both been forged? Had Frel cooked up the ownership histories of both the archaic relief and the kouros?

  IN MARCH 1986, Thomas Hoving showed up at the Getty Villa and began asking his own uncomfortable questions about the kouros.

  After ten years as director of the Met, where he survived the Euphronios krater scandal and introduced blockbuster exhibits such as King Tut, Hoving left the venerable museum in 1977 and eventually reinvented himself as a muckraking arts journalist. His favorite target was the Getty. As the arts and entertainment correspondent for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20, he had reported in 1979 that the Getty had acquired the Getty Bronze against J. Paul Getty's express wishes—and, possibly, in violation of Italian export law. After leaving 20/20 to become editor in chief of Connoisseur, a high-end arts magazine, Hoving had caught wind of the story behind Frel's quiet departure and of the kouros's dubious authenticity. While at the museum to write an article about what the Getty had done with its wealth, he asked Houghton if he could peek at the statue, which had still not been put on public display.