Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  When True's public statements filtered back to Houghton, now living on the East Coast, he was outraged. He had personally warned Walsh and True against publicly referring to the forgeries Frel had supplied. Now they had done so, blatantly lying about something that could easily be exposed. Houghton placed a call to Harold Williams.

  "Harold, those documents that were provided with the kouros were forged, just junk, and the museum shouldn't be making statements which, with a little scruffing around, could be shown to be no more than a public lie," he said.

  "I understand," Williams answered. "We shouldn't be digging a hole deeper than the one we're in."

  Two months earlier, Walsh and True had convinced Williams that there was no need to dig deeper. Now that the statue had been purchased, asking questions about it would only lead to trouble, they had argued. True, in particular, had been concerned that word of their inquiries would leak out. There was no escaping the awkwardness of the Getty investigating the provenance of a piece it had already purchased and defended publicly as authentic. But now Williams believed that the museum needed to know whether the kouros documents had been forged, and if so, why. He asked Walsh and True to revisit the documents, a highly unusual step given the already intense scrutiny of the piece.

  True reluctantly picked up where Houghton had left off. He had already tracked down an authentic copy of Langlotz's signature, which confirmed what he had suspected—both of the Langlotz signatures in the Getty's files were poor forgeries. There was only one other person alive who claimed to have seen the kouros in the basement of the Swiss family's home—Jacques Chamay, the curator of classical art at Geneva's Musées d'Art et d'Histoire. During the Getty's first review, attorney Bruce Bevan had been convinced that Chamay was beginning to waver on his story. Since then, no one had talked to the Swiss curator. Was Chamay still credible? Could he be trusted?

  Before traveling to Switzerland to find out, True learned what she could in Los Angeles. Renate Dolin, Frel's former secretary, recalled that Frel had been especially distracted and secretive when it came to the kouros. He had shooed her away from the office so that he could have long phone conversations with Gianfranco Becchina, the dealer. At one point, he had had her pull documents from the Getty's files signed by Langlotz and another dealer and asked her to forge a letter to the museum from one of them. Dolin had refused—this was not just an appraisal for a small gift, but fraud involving the museum's most expensive acquisition. Frustrated, Frel had taken all the kouros files home, then reappeared with them the day they were to be presented to the board.

  Faya Causey, the curator's ex-wife, told True that she had caught her husband trying to create fake letterhead, which she presumed was for the kouros. "I told him, 'You're crazy if you think a scheme like that would work,'" she said, adding that Becchina himself had complained to her that he didn't like "any of the provenance stories that Jiri had come up with."

  Armed with these statements, True traveled to Geneva in November and met with Chamay. She noted that he was extremely nervous as he recalled his visit to the Swiss doctor's house outside the city, where he had seen "in the basement a large, partially opened crate with a piece of archaic sculpture inside." He said he believed it was the kouros, then quickly added that he wasn't an expert in Greek sculpture. When True probed further, Chamay faltered on the details of his visit.

  Three days later, True met with Becchina and his wife, Rosie, at their Geneva apartment. If anyone could solve the mystery, it was Becchina. The Getty had already signed a sales contract for the kouros and had begun making payments on the $9.55 million purchase. But the dealer remained on the hook for the warranty until the object was fully paid off. He refused to say anything until the final payment was made and angrily expressed his displeasure about the Getty's continuing investigation.

  "Look, I'm tired of this whole thing, too," True snapped. "This kouros mess has cost me an enormous amount of time—time that I would have preferred to use on research and more constructive activities for the collection. I did my best to defend the kouros in print, all without any help from the people who should have been able to help me—namely you. And Frel."

  True's last hope was George Ortiz, a pixyish Bolivian tin magnate based in Switzerland. He was widely known as one of the antiquities world's richest collectors and an occasional dealer. He was also one of Becchina's loyal customers and closest friends. But when True showed up at Ortiz's Geneva mansion, the collector said that even he couldn't pry any details out of his friend. "It's omerta," Ortiz explained, referring to the Sicilian code of silence.

  Back in Malibu, True drafted a confidential report to Bruce Bevan detailing her conclusions. "I believe Jiri was, in truth, behind the creation of at least some of these documents and Becchina accepted Frel's advice in order to facilitate the acquisition," she wrote.

  She also complained that the investigation had led to unintended consequences. Many people now knew that the Getty was having second thoughts about the provenance of the piece. Word was bound to get out.

  Sure enough, starting on Friday, February 13, 1987, Thomas Hoving began publishing a series of devastating investigative articles revealing the Getty's secrets. The first, whose headline "Huge Tax Fraud Uncovered at Getty Museum" was splashed across the front page of the Times of London, revealed Frel's donation scheme and the Getty's attempted cover-up. Hoving and his reporting partner, Times arts reporter Geraldine Norman, had used the Getty's tax records to piece together the decadelong fraud. The article called it "the biggest financial scandal in museum history." When the reporters tracked Frel down at his apartment in Rome, the curator said darkly, "It was bigger than they know." Indeed, a few months later, Hoving published an article in Connoisseur denouncing the kouros as a fake.

  The Getty was forced to admit that Frel had been put on leave two years before he resigned in 1986. The trust would not comment on the donation scheme, other than to say there was no evidence that Frel had benefited personally. Getty officials went to great lengths to dismiss Hoving as a washed-up crank with a grudge against Walsh, his old rival from the Met. But the revelations triggered follow-up stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as outcries in the archaeological community. For months, the Getty was embroiled in a painful public scandal as its secrets spilled into public view.

  For Getty CEO Harold Williams, the onslaught of negative press underscored his concerns about antiquities collecting at the museum. For True and Walsh, the museum's frustrated quest for the truth, which they had opposed from the start, now made them look silly and only exacerbated the Getty's dilemma.

  6. THE WINDBLOWN GODDESS

  IN JUNE 1986, while Marion True was in Europe investigating the kouros, she paid a visit to the London boutique of Robin Symes, the world's premier dealer of ancient art.

  Symes was a fair, round-faced Brit, reserved by nature but possessed of an exceptional ability to sell to high-end clients. His lover and business partner was Christo Michaelides, a lean, swarthy risk taker with a keen eye for quality antiquities, whose sister had married into a wealthy Greek shipping family. Symes and Michaelides had fallen in love years earlier after Michaelides had wandered into Symes's shop in Ormond Yard. Symes was married at the time but left his wife soon after. Their nickname in the trade was "the Dioskouroi," Greek for the constellation Gemini, the Twins. Together they changed the tenor of the antiquities business by catering to elite collectors. They sold ancient art but specialized in attitude, tooling around London in a maroon Bentley or a silver Rolls-Royce. Their London house—actually two residences joined to make one—featured an indoor swimming pool surrounded by backlighted alcoves framing columns topped with ancient busts. Their Manhattan townhouse had been converted by architect Philip Johnson in 1949 for the wife of John D. Rockefeller III. They also owned apartments in Athens and a summer compound on the Greek island of Schinoussa. Much of the energy between them came from putting other people down.

  Most of their clients were priv
ate collectors; few museums could afford their prices. But Symes held a special status at the Getty, having sold directly to the founder himself years before. The oil tycoon had often visited Symes's shop, where the two engaged in good-natured arguments over who was the greatest, Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Getty argued for Caesar, but Symes eventually won the billionaire over and sold him a bust of the Macedonian conqueror. Since those early days, Symes had built his business into the most successful antiquities dealership in the world.

  True knew that her relationship with Symes could be pivotal to her success as a curator. He dealt only in the highest end of the trade, the very objects the Getty would need to make its collection stand apart. Symes knew that True, as the newly appointed curator of the world's richest museum, could be just as valuable to him.

  So it wasn't surprising that on True's first official visit as curator, Symes said that he had something special to show her. He took her to Battersea, a rundown section of London filled with aging industrial plants, and entered a dark warehouse. Standing alone, illuminated from above, was a huge limestone and marble statue of a Greek goddess.

  Rising seven and a half feet high, the figure was a cult statue—a larger-than-life object of worship that would have served as the centerpiece of an ancient Greek temple. The goddess's delicately carved, windblown dress hugged her wide, voluptuous body, giving her a sense of mass and majesty. Her legs were slightly bent, the right foot in front of the left, as if she were walking through a storm. Her body was made of limestone, while her head and right arm and hand were of milky marble. The combination of limestone and marble made the figure a rare "acrolith," the kind found in Greek colonies of southern Italy or Sicily, where fine marble was extremely expensive to import. Archaeologists had recovered only fragments of such statues. The goddess in Symes's warehouse was almost intact. With its sense of movement and grace, it seemed to be an exemplary fifth-century B.c. Greek sculpture, representing the ideals of form and balance from the height of Greek culture.

  The precise identity of the goddess was difficult to fix. The statue was missing its headdress, which would have been a telltale sign. It was also missing its left arm, and the fingers of the right hand were broken at the knuckles, as if something it had been holding had been ripped away. Its size and matronly figure suggested Hera, the wife of Zeus. But it also could be Demeter, the goddess of fertility and agriculture, who was widely worshiped in the ancient Greek settlements of southern Italy and Sicily. True, however, noted that the statue's voluptuousness and clinging gown suggested another deity—Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sexual rapture.

  True immediately recognized the statue for two things. First, unlike the kouros, it was unquestionably authentic. There was nothing similar upon which a fake could be based, and it still had traces of its original pink, deep red, and blue paint clinging to the folds of the limestone dress. Second, if the Getty could acquire this statue—an acquisition that would be more significant than the Getty Bronze—it would instantly catapult the museum into the top ranks of world cultural institutions and erase the searing embarrassment caused by the kouros.

  But a third thing was just as apparent: the partially reconstructed statue bore clear signs of looting. The torso had been broken into three nearly equal parts, a tactic used by smugglers to transport large objects. The edges of those breaks were sharp and the surfaces clean, indicating that they were relatively recent, not made in antiquity. The statue was also dirty. It had sandy clay in the folds, and the rest of the surface was covered with a thin rind of minerals and dirt.

  True asked Symes how he had come by the statue. He would say only that he had bought it from a collector in Chiasso, a Swiss town just north of the Italian border known as a smuggling hub. The statue had been in the collector's family since 1939, Symes said. There were no documents to support the claim, and the date conveniently coincided with the year Italy had passed its cultural patrimony law banning the export of archaeological objects without government permission.

  Symes was sketching the kind of fanciful story that accompanied many of the best objects that appeared on the market seemingly out of nowhere. Something as important as this cult statue would have been difficult to hide from generations of nosy scholars and dealers. But Symes said that he was willing to sign a warranty vouching that the statue had been legally exported from Switzerland. The Getty would have only his word to rely on.

  For the moment, however, the most disturbing thing about the Aphrodite was its price tag: $24 million, more than twice the cost of the kouros and far more than had ever been paid for a work of ancient art.

  IN THE MONTHS following True's visit, John Walsh traveled to London to see the statue in person, as did Jerry Podany, the museum's antiquities conservator, who conducted a detailed study of the piece. In late July 1987, the museum asked its law firm in Rome to try to find out whether the Italian Ministry of Culture was aware of the statue. The firm sent the ministry photos of the Aphrodite, accompanied by a cryptic note saying that "an important foreign institution might be interested in buying it." Did the government have any information or objections?

  The query arrived at the ministry shortly before Ferragosto, the mid-August holiday when Rome shuts down and people flee to the coasts to escape the heat. It was not passed along to regional archaeology directors until well after the break. Some of them later claimed that it never arrived.

  True, meanwhile, asked four leading scholars to come to London and give their opinions of the Aphrodite. After examining the statue in the warehouse, the two British and two Greek experts agreed that it was undoubtedly authentic and probably found recently in southern Italy or Sicily. One of the experts, Nicolaos Yalouris, the former director general of the Greek Archaeological Service, asked True whether the statue had been illegally removed from its country of origin. "Not to worry," she assured him. "It's legal."

  True also showed black-and-white photos of the Aphrodite to Iris Love, a well-known American archaeologist. Love had often warned True away from objects that were so rare as to invite unfriendly scrutiny by foreign governments. Less important items would likely never be noticed, but major pieces were a different story. The Aphrodite was so exceptional, Love warned, that it would almost certainly kindle the ire of Italian officials.

  "Couldn't it have come from Greece?" True asked. "Or Libya, where acroliths have also been found?"

  "Anybody who knows about southern Italian sculpture is going to know it came from Italy," Love replied. "This is really dangerous, Marion. Italy doesn't have a statue of this size and of this style, and there aren't any statues in any European or American museum like it. How are you going to explain this? I beg you, don't buy it. You will only have troubles and problems."

  True simply nodded her head.

  THE GETTY'S EXISTING acquisition policy prohibited the purchase of suspect objects. It stated that the museum would abide by all U.S. and international laws and pledged that the Getty would not purchase anything "suspected of being illegally exported." The policy also committed the museum to "inquire into the provenance" of any antiquities acquisition. As the kouros affair had so painfully shown, such an inquiry into the Aphrodite was almost certain to turn up more troubling information.

  Walsh disagreed with much of the policy. He had long felt that collecting first-rate classical antiquities was at the heart of what museums like the Getty did, more fundamental to its mission than the preservation, exhibition, or interpretation of the works. The Getty could not afford to turn down such objects. When the Getty Villa in Malibu became solely occupied by the antiquities collection, it would become the country's first museum dedicated exclusively to classical antiquities. Filling it with the country's finest ancient art would finally make the Getty an institution worthy of Getty's generous legacy.

  In a memo to Harold Williams, Walsh proposed a solution: a new acquisition policy specifically for antiquities, one that would take into account the realities of the market while providing th
e museum with the necessary legal protections. A new policy also would prevent another self-defeating investigation like the one the museum had done for the kouros. In fact, Walsh was proposing that the museum not investigate its antiquities acquisitions at all.

  The idea made Williams, a lawyer by training, nervous. On September 2, 1987, he asked Walsh to come to his Century City office to mull over the Getty's dilemma. The discussion took place as the museum was weighing its decision about the Aphrodite. The statue would be a test case for Walsh's proposed new policy. As Walsh jotted notes on a legal pad, the two discussed the various legal risks of adopting a "no questions asked" policy for buying antiquities.

  "We are saying we won't look into the provenance," Williams said. "We know it's stolen ... We know Symes is a fence."

  Williams was being provocative, but not without reason. As he had learned in the kouros episode, it was widely known that the Getty's antiquities dealers routinely peddled looted art.

  What would happen if a foreign government challenged the provenance of an object? If the dealer didn't defend it, would the Getty have to surrender it? Could the Getty be held liable under the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act if bribes were paid to foreign officials? Williams suggested that Bruce Bevan, the Getty's outside counsel, review the UNESCO Convention and the statutes of limitations relating to American laws governing the receipt of stolen goods.

  They agreed that Walsh would discuss the new acquisition policy with Bevan, then meet with Bevan and True to go over it. In the meantime, Williams asked Walsh to consider two big-picture issues: First, legalisms aside, what was the appropriate moral position? And second, what would the Getty say publicly about such acquisitions? In other words, how would it look on the front page of the New York Times?