Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  IN TIME THE TRUTH USUALLY prevails. Since 1981, DO’s Healing of the Blind Man relief has remained in deep storage. And as for that Sheikh Ibada dustup in Berlin in 1978, things turned out a bit differently. It was August 1983, just over five years after my scolding by Victor Elbern, when I received a letter from Hans-Georg Severin, who had taken over from Elbern at the Skulpturengalerie in Berlin. I had sort of lost interest in those naked boys with crosses by that time, but I did like what Severin had to say. He had found my letter of March 9, 1978, in the files of his predecessor “concerning the so-called Coptic sculptures in our museum.” And he went on to say, in nearly flawless English, that “I am very glad to see that we are unanimous in all essential points.” Bravo! And then he concluded by assuring me that all of those pieces of “Coptic” art in his galleries—all of those Hirshhorn look-alikes—“will be removed from the exhibition within the next few weeks, and will be published as forgeries, on the next occasion.”

  Chapter Five

  Seduced by Saint Peter

  I sensed right away that something was missing, but at first I couldn’t identify what it was. Susan Boyd and I had been admitted to a secure transit warehouse in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and were staring down at an enormous Byzantine icon of Saint Peter lying flat on a large wooden packing table that bore the marks of many slashes of box cutters. Packers and airport security stood back silently so we could perform my examination. And yes, I had a feeling that something was off.

  For a saint to be a saint in Byzantium, he must have a vita and an icon. His vita is his life story, which is typically an imaginative mix of fact and fiction authored by an acolyte. Its aim is to convince the faithful of the importance and healing power of the saint and, by extension, of his (or her) cult center or holy site—which would then become a destination for pilgrims and their votive gifts. The saint’s icon, by contrast, is how we recognize what he looks like. And, while the saint’s facial characteristics, clothing, and attributes (a book, a spear) remain constant, the material form of his icon can vary widely, from panel painting to ivory carving to cast bronze and to fresco or mosaic.

  Those saints whose appearance was not recorded during their lifetime are usually known through the expediency of a dream apparition to an artist. The saint’s image, for the first time then rendered in art, would be confirmed again and again as his “true image” by the faithful who, having already seen the saint’s icon, would inevitably see him with that same face in their own dreams. Finally, and most important for my story, the icon must be accompanied by the saint’s written name, usually in the form of an inscription flanking his head that almost invariably employs the Greek epithet Ho Hagios. . . . (“The Holy . . .”). That inscription connects the saint through his portrait and vita with the supplicant as he or she engages in the act of veneration.

  But something was wrong, something trivial to most people but for me profoundly disturbing: Saint Peter had no inscription—he had no name. At the time I could not account for this, but when I did figure out why the saint’s inscription was absent more than six months later, this missing piece to the icon supplied a missing piece to my disturbing scenario of how this extraordinary work of sacred art came to be in Amsterdam.

  It was the second week in October 1981, and I was on my way back to Dumbarton Oaks from the International Byzantine Congress in Vienna. I had presented a paper there on keys, seals, and weights in Byzantium, and curated a small exhibition in the Hofburg Palace on the same topic. Both were based on Dominique de Menil’s collection of small bronzes that I had encountered more than four years earlier in Marvin Ross’ bedroom. I had been asked by Director Giles Constable to change my return flight from Vienna so that I could visit this warehouse in the Amsterdam airport and examine this icon for possible purchase.

  It was my first face-to-face encounter with Saint Peter. I was overwhelmed by the panel’s size and by the power of its image, which seemed to capture the intensity and grittiness of this fisherman turned Disciple. It was as if Henry Adams were personally guiding me into Chartres. I recall being drawn especially to that explosive intersection between the eyes, offset by Peter’s bristling eyebrows, where his deeply furrowed brow intersects with his bulbous, seemingly muscular nose. I felt as if I were in the presence of the sacred, and at the same time invading this saint’s privacy and dignity as I came eye-to-eye with him lying prostrate and helpless there on that packing table.

  I had been introduced to this magnificent work two months earlier by way of a book illustration. I was then Associate for Byzantine Art Studies, a job that allowed me to do pretty much anything I wanted to do under the broad umbrella of Byzantium. This included writing articles and presenting scholarly papers, teaching local college students, curating small exhibitions, and, with the Curator of DO’s Byzantine Collection, Susan Boyd, buying art.

  Giles had called Sue and me into his office in August and placed before us a big, glossy catalogue published in Amsterdam in 1980 with this Saint Peter icon on its cover. Neither of us had ever seen this publication or knew of this icon, which was very disconcerting. As historians of Byzantine art and museum professionals, we should have been aware of everything out there in the trade of any significance, and this icon was clearly very significant.

  The catalogue had been sent to Giles by John Langdon, an aspiring young Byzantine historian from Los Angeles, who had recently taken part in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer program at Dumbarton Oaks. John’s story was strange but turned out to be true. The catalogue had come to his attention by way of his friend Basil Jenkins, who was then Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Jenkins in turn had gotten it from a Dutch businessman named Dingeman Stoop, whom he had met shortly before by way an acquaintance, Louis Stoap (same name, Americanized spelling), who was Dingeman’s brother and a businessman in the San Gabriel Valley.

  Dingeman Stoop, who amassed a fortune in Starlift Elevators and was then President of the FC Amsterdam Soccer Club, had lent money to a Dutch art dealer named Michel van Rijn and held his inventory of Byzantine art as collateral. The publication, edited by van Rijn with an essay by my Princeton professor, Kurt Weitzman, was both a document of that collateral and a sales catalogue. Apparently Stoop had become impatient with van Rijn and was looking to sell his whole inventory as a single lot. But we were told he was willing to peel off its star piece, the Saint Peter icon, and sell it by itself for something on the order of $300,000.

  It was obvious in an instant, even from that small illustration, that this was not only a magnificent icon, on a par with the very best in the greatest repository of Byzantine icons in the world, the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, it would be by far the most impressive icon in the Western Hemisphere if only Dumbarton Oaks could snag it—which the three of us immediately and passionately wanted. After all, Dumbarton Oaks’ collection of Byzantine art, assembled from the ’30s through the ’60s by founders Robert and Mildred Bliss with advice from the leading Byzantinists of the time, was piece for piece the finest of its kind in the world. What it lacked was a large, commanding icon like this one. The kind that comes out of churches.

  As I stood over Saint Peter on that packing table in Schiphol Airport I realized I had the opportunity of a lifetime to be part of the purchase of a work of art unparalleled in any museum in the United States. This may seem odd, given that icons lie at the very heart of the spiritual identity of Byzantium, as the convergence of that great empire’s defining belief and its highest artistic achievement. And thousands of imposing medieval icons have survived to modern times. But there is a very good reason why big icons like Saint Peter are so rarely found in museums outside the Orthodox world. These are church icons as opposed to private icons.

  The latter are small and portable, and over the centuries may have travelled with their owners far from the place they were made. Portable icons in ivory, enamel, semi-precious stone, and precious metal have been sought by collectors for centuries and now form the core of
the great museum collections of Byzantine art in the United States, England, France, and Germany.

  By contrast, big icons painted on heavy wooden panels, like Saint Peter, were and are as much part of the fabric of the churches for which they were created as are the frescoes or mosaics on the walls—which are also extremely rare in museum collections of the West. Saint Peter and icons of its type were made specifically for the icon screen or iconostasis that sets off the altar and sanctuary from the laity in the nave.

  Because of its large size (nearly three feet tall), we know that Saint Peter was part of the eye-level row of icons that flank the Holy Door to the altar and form a visual prayer of intercession (or Deësis). Christ, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist are at the center, moving outward to Peter and Paul and perhaps other Apostles and ending with the saint to which the church is dedicated. If the church is still standing—and hundreds are—the icon screen with its icons will likely still be in place. And if over time these icons become very dirty or are damaged, they will simply be repaired or painted over with another, similar image. Such icons were not intended to move, and they rarely did move.

  It was becoming increasingly obvious to me why there are so few large icons like Saint Peter in museum collections outside the Orthodox world. And I was becoming ever more worried by the puzzle of how this great icon got from a church somewhere in the former Byzantine Empire to Amsterdam. It was clear from its style that this icon was painted during the late Byzantine period, likely around 1300, and that it probably came from a region of the depleted empire still active in creating such panels, most likely the area around Thessaloniki in northern Greece. For us, Saint Peter’s size, quality, and rarity were both its attraction, and its liability. Where was this icon before 1980? How did it cross borders? Why was it unknown to us?

  Curators live by the cautionary dictum that they buy the work of art and not the story, which for extraordinary and puzzling works like this Saint Peter icon is, as often as not, concocted by the seller. Insofar as we could determine, Saint Peter had no story before 1979, when it was exhibited in Delft, and, as shown in the 1980 Amsterdam catalogue, was associated with the Dutch art dealer Michel van Rijn. In 1989 Michel van Rijn would be identified in Federal District Court in Indianapolis as the agent for the sale of the stolen Byzantine mosaics from the Church of Panagia Kanakaria in northern Cyprus. In 1981, though, I had to base my judgment of Michel van Rijn mostly on my own experience two years earlier with his Dutch collaborator in art dealing, Robert Roozemond. Roozemond had come to Dumbarton Oaks with his stylish wife, Hetty, offering to sell two cut-out pages from a rare Byzantine manuscript that had disappeared a half-century earlier from Constantinople.

  The two eagerly told me about Kesteel Wijenburg, the museum they ran in Echteld with Michel van Rijn, and about their ingenious business plan. Somewhere and somehow, not mentioned, they would get third-tier icons and small Byzantine artifacts like those in Marvin Ross’ bedroom safe and sell them to Dutch “collectors.” They would then pay young scholars like me to write an article on this newly sold merchandise, and that article would be printed in glossy color and slipped into an ever-growing “book” held together in a loose-leaf binder.

  Once these minor works were published by the likes of me, they were not so minor anymore, and the collectors would then get wonderfully inflated appraisals for their collections from friendly appraisers and then suddenly turn into “donors” to Kasteel de Wijenburg. This was so that they could get hefty tax deductions and so that Roozemond and van Rijn could sell the works a second time at much higher prices. And Robert proudly told me it was completely legal within the Dutch tax code.

  As we contemplated the Saint Peter purchase, we only knew this much for sure: The seller was a Dutch elevator builder who had no knowledge of and seemingly no concern about the origin of the collateral he was selling. He thus offered a “provenance firewall” for the real owner, Michel van Rijn, of whom we had good reason to be suspicious. The icon had turned up in Delft in 1979, but ultimately, we had to assume, it came out of a church in northern Greece or perhaps in the Macedonian part of (then) Yugoslavia just across the Greek border to the north. Naturally, we suspected this had happened fairly recently, as otherwise this magnificent icon would have already been known to us. The happy news—given our eagerness to buy—was that this border ambiguity allowed us to assume that Saint Peter could have come from either one of two countries and thus might not be claimed by either.

  In any event, Dumbarton Oaks did what was then the honorable thing to do: It made “private inquiries” to Greek and Yugoslav officials and to scholars knowledgeable about icons and later Byzantine art. These communications, that were in fact certified letters, indicated our intention to buy unless the recipient could come up with evidence as to where, exactly, the icon had come from. (In the meantime, the purchase cash was kept in an escrow account and would be returned to Dumbarton Oaks if bad news was forthcoming.) Not only did no one come up with such evidence within the time limit stipulated in the letters, but the most admired of all Greek Byzantinists, Manolis Chatzidakis, blessed the purchase. This made sense, given that he had written the catalogue entry on Saint Peter for van Rijn’s 1980 publication.

  So the purchase went forward, with funds raised through the sale of a Matisse and a Picasso that were part of the Bliss family collection. Saint Peter was quietly put on display shortly before Thanksgiving in 1982, and in late December it received a celebratory notice in The New York Times (“Dumbarton Oaks Acquires Rare Icon”) with the writer noting, though, that “most of the details of the transaction have been withheld . . . and no public announcement has been made of its acquisition.”

  The details of the purchase, such as we knew them, would continue to be withheld beyond the reference to a “Dutch businessman.” But I had some really big plans, at least by the standards of Dumbarton Oaks, for Saint Peter’s coming out party in April 1983. I envisioned a highly selective exhibition of icons modeled on the thematic shows I had already organized at DO, beginning in 1979 with Security in Byzantium. There would be an elegant wine and cheese opening for scholars, collectors, dealers, and various VIPs of the sort that inaugurated Illuminated Greek Manuscripts at Princeton in 1973.

  Kurt Weitmann would write a short book on our Saint Peter icon and give the opening lecture. There was then a buzz in the air surrounding all things connecting icons and Byzantium, fueled by an active collecting community and by the amazing coincidence that the British Museum was just then also buying its first large Byzantine icon, that by an even more amazing coincidence happened also to be a Saint Peter of the late Byzantine period.

  Everyone who we hoped would show up for our April 27th opening did, from as far away as London and San Francisco. It was an unusually warm and humid evening, and it was clear to me that there were different camps of dealers and collectors gathered with their drinks there in the magnificent gardens of Dumbarton Oaks who would not likely intersect socially closer to home.

  And everyone was trying to avoid contact with that truly odd Russian, Vladimir Teteriatnikov, who, by virtue of being the husband of the head of photographic resources at Dumbarton Oaks, came down from his home in New York City for the festivities. The reason Teteriatnikov, who trained as a conservator in Moscow and worked for at time at the Tretyakov Gallery, was to be shunned was that two years earlier he had privately published a book wherein he challenged the authenticity of many of the icons from the collection of George Hann, which was sold through Christie’s in New York in 1980. There was nothing worse for the burgeoning icon trade than the uncertainty created by a seeming authority calling out as fakes the icons just sold from a high-profile collection.

  In any event, the opening all went according to plan, and unlike my earlier exhibitions, this one got plenty of national attention, including a half page in The New York Times on Sunday, May 22nd by the newspaper’s leading art critic, John Russell. He characterized this display of just twelve icons as “One of th
e more distinguished exhibitions of the year. . . .” What could be better?

  In a word, plenty. Plenty could have been better. In the eighteen months since my introduction to the Saint Peter icon in the Amsterdam airport, I had experienced two unexpected and unwelcomed moments of insight, one relating to Saint Peter and the other relating to three of the icons I had chosen to exhibit in his honor.

  And now, as I think back on the group of dealers and collectors gathered on the lawn at Dumbarton Oaks that evening, I’m pretty sure that at least a few of them knew what I by then had come to realize, and probably much more. The only hint, though, that something might be amiss was an off-hand comment from someone that evening whom I trusted that the icon collector from San Francisco was “playing it fast and loose.” And then there was my brief encounter in the mail room earlier that week with a senior Byzantinist I very much admired, Speros Vryonis, who happened also to be a tough Greek-American from Memphis. According to Speros, “people like van Rijn eat people like you, Vikan, for breakfast.” I had never heard that expression before.

  Had Giles Constable been willing to commit $10,000 for my Saint Peter epiphany exhibition, permitting loans of icons from Greece, I may have remained in the dark much longer, but he did not, and I’m pretty certain I never asked. Since there were very few Byzantine icons of any size to borrow from American museum collections, I looked for loans from among the main icon collectors in London and the United States through their dealers, taking care to avoid direct contact with either van Rijn or Roozemond.

  I found, or rather was found by, the two leading London icon dealers of the day: the spiritual Zen one, Dick Temple of the Temple Gallery, whom I had met years earlier at Princeton when he came to solicit KW’s opinion about an icon, and the suave Greek deal maker, Yanni Petsopoulos of AXIA Islamic and Byzantine Art. This was all great fun, since with the sale of the two large Saint Peters, icon dealing was hot, and both the dealers and the collectors they cultivated (who might themselves turn into dealers) were eager to befriend me and help in any way they could with my welcoming party for Saint Peter, at no cost.