by Gary Vikan
According to Bill Honan of the Times, Géza von Hapsburg said in an interview that he told Peg Goldberg that “the most graceful way out would be to find a donor who would purchase them (the mosaics) and donate them back Cyprus.” That had clearly been his aim in Houston in August. And I think this August encounter helps to explain why Walter was so eager to get his moral-high-ground sound bites in with that reporter from The Indianapolis Star—the sound bites that got the attention of the Goldberg defense team. Walter was venting, as usual. Petsopoulos and von Hapsburg had come to ask him to buy back a second batch of Cypriot plunder at a very high price when he was cash poor. And now, lo and behold, that very plunder was almost certainly going back to Cyprus where it belonged by way of a civil court action at no expense to anyone other than Peg Goldberg and her banker friend Nick Frenzel. Walter must have felt a bit smug about all of that, since he had already done his part for the poor Cypriot people.
Things could have turned out much differently. What if Peg hadn’t “fallen in love” with those photographs that Michel van Rijn pushed across the table over lunch in Amsterdam on July 1st? Or imagine if Nick Frenzel, in his pajamas over the phone with Peg, had balked at the $1.2 million loan idea. Imagine what might have happened if this little conspiratorial group of bottom-dwellers, van Rijn, Fitzgerald, and Goldberg, had not moved so quickly and successfully to extract the mosaics from Aydin Dikmen in those frantic seven days in July, just as the Lysi fresco drama was beginning to exit the stage. There was, I suspect, a much classier alternative team poised for action at pretty much the same time.
This, of course, was the group already in place from the Lysi fresco adventure of 1983. And by contrast, they were aristocrats. There was the suave Greek dealer, Yanni Petsopoulos, descendent of an esteemed Constantinopolitan publishing family, now abetted by the Archduke of Austria, Géza von Hapsburg. And close by were Constantine Leventis of the enormously successful, hugely philanthropic Cypriot business family, as well as Walter Hopps, the UCLA-educated museum director, and, of course, Dominique de Menil herself, a French aristocrat of wealth and sensibility. Focus on the two leading ladies, Dominique and Peg: one is a soft-spoken spiritual wisp, while the other is big, boney, and brash. Both “fell in love,” one to fix looted frescoes expertly and at great expense in order ultimately to give them back, and the other to fix looted mosaics hastily and poorly in order to resell them. One was perceptive, subtle, and generous of spirit, the other naive and greedy. But both were ultimately in cahoots with that same Turkish art smuggler in Munich.
So imagine it is the spring of 1988 and Aydin Dikmen is ready to part with those all-but-unsellable mosaics that have been moldering in his Munich apartment for years. And his price is $350,000. This figure is on scale with his price tag on the Lysi frescoes in 1983 which, when shown to me in April of that year by Yanni Petsopoulos, with his deal-maker’s markup, was $600,000. Imagine that order of magnitude and no Peg Goldberg with Nick Frenzel’s bank account to jack up the price, and then revisit that conversation in Houston in August 1988. The aristocrats might well have pulled off Dikmen chapter two with the elegance they pulled off chapter one. The mosaics would have been restored at Dominique’s expense and for a time they would have been shown in her new museum. But ultimately, and to much acclaim from all sides, they would make their way back to that tiny new Byzantine Museum in Nicosia to be installed beside the Lysi frescos she also paid for.
But that didn’t happen, because Michel van Rijn acted first. I have never met Michel van Rijn, but I think I know him—from his actions in this case, from Dan Hofstadter’s book, Goldberg’s Angel, in which he has plenty to say, and from his own self-serving confessional, Hot Art, Cold Cash. But most of all, I know Michel van Rijn from the bizarre rant of a steroid-driving website he posted until he was sued for libel and had to take it down. He was flat-out vicious on that website, using crude pet names for people he didn’t like, which was mostly everyone.
Certainly Michel van Rijn was and is always motivated by money, and he seems to enjoy lying, but there is an overriding pernicious streak in him that reminds me of that kid I knew as a child who liked to put salt on salamanders just to watch them squirm. I can image the adrenaline high of fixing the aristocratic asses of Yanni Petsopoulos, Walter Hopps, and Dominique de Menil all in one stroke by using that crude hammer of Peg Goldberg. And in the meantime, making on the deal more money than Aydin Dikmen by a factor of two. Therein, I think, lay the ultimate prime mover of the Kanakaria caper of 1988. It was a simple question of timing, and the most greedy and mean-spirited of all the players, Michel van Rijn, jumped first.
I SAW THE KANAKARIA MOSAICS only once. They were on display in a small exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I attended the opening on Friday, May 30, 1991, two years to the day after my first epiphany on the courtroom bench a few miles away. The Greek ambassador spoke, and everyone seemed happy. Insofar as I could tell, Peg Goldberg was not there. Peg and her legal team had appealed Judge Noland’s decision to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh District, in Chicago. (As she said at the time: “George [her business partner] and I have never been quitters, particularly when we believe we have been grievously wronged.”) Peg’s agenda was driven not by anything new and exculpatory in her story, which no one really contested, but rather by her passion to prove that the other guys had dirty hands too. Her appeal was an attempt to deny the Cypriots legal standing on grounds that they “sat on their rights.” That is, they had done next to nothing to find and get back the Kanakaria mosaics when they could have.
The appeal cited new evidence from a Yugoslav named Savo that cast further doubt on the integrity of the Cypriots’ due diligence. Specifically, Savo claimed that it was generally known that Dikmen, Leventis, Karageorghis, and Petsopoulos did business with one another, buying back looted Cypriot art, before that initial viewing of the Kanakaria mosaic in Dikmen’s apartment in June 1983. (Aydin Dikmen seemed to enjoy some magical immunity through all of this. No authorities went after him directly until 1998, when, ironically, or maybe not, Michel van Rijn played the key role in fingering him. More than fifty crates of art were seized.)
Savo’s testimony notwithstanding, Chief Judge Bauer upheld Noland’s decision in October 1990, in rapturous tones that followed upon the recitation of the opening lines of Lord Byron’s The Siege of Corinth. Not only the spirit but the letter of James Noland’s decision prevailed. An attempt was then made to get the attention of the Supreme Court, but in the spring of 1991 that was turned down. So finally, the trip back to Cyprus was scheduled for July 1991 after this Indianapolis exhibition.
The reception of the recovered plunder by the Cypriots was rapturous as well. Thousands turned out. The president spoke, Archbishop Chrysostomos spoke, Judge James Noland was lauded, Tom Kline was lauded, and maybe my name was mentioned. I do know that I got a signed card from the President of Cyprus, George Vassiliou, and his wife that Christmas. It had a photograph of the Kanakaria Archangel on the front. He said I should visit, but I never did.
Chapter Eleven
“Vomiting Blood!”
African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia was both cursed and a great triumph. The show was scheduled to open at the Walters in October 1993 and then travel over two years to seven US museums, four of which are devoted to African American culture. It was the first-ever exhibition focused on the Christian art of Ethiopia, and it had spectacular loans coming from remote monasteries all over the country.
Ethiopia is the Old Testament Cush, and its inhabitants are the descendants of Ham; it lays claim to the Arc of the Covenant by way of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. These “tall, handsome, and long-lived” people, as Herodotus described them, converted to Christianity in the early 4th century by way of two Syrian missionaries. Ethiopia’s Christianity has a unique admixture of the Judaism from which it sprang and co-existed with for seventeen centuries; it has dietary laws and observes the Sabbath on Saturday. Ethiopians built their gr
eatest churches around 1200 in Lalibela, as monoliths of volcanic rock carved down into the earth. Theirs is a unique manifestation of ancient black Christianity in the Horn of Africa; their sacred language, Ge’ez, is preserved to this day.
Ethiopia’s sacred art dates mostly from the 15th through the 18th centuries. It looks a little like early Italian panel painting and a little like Byzantine icons, but is distinct from both. Its colors are much richer and more varied; its faces are clearly Semitic, with large, black, staring eyes; and its crosses elaborate wildly on the simple cruciform that defines crosses in rest of the Christian world. Ethiopia’s greatest painter, Fere Seyon, is a match for his two renowned 15th-century contemporaries, Rogier van der Weyden in the Netherlands and Fra Angelico in Italy. But despite my Princeton PhD and ten years at Dumbarton Oaks, before this exhibition I knew next to nothing about Ethiopia and its art.
The idea for the show was brought to me in 1986, during the International Byzantine Congress, by a brilliant St Andrews-trained scholar of early Christianity named Roderick Grierson. Striking in his stylish cowboy boots and fancy suit, Rod then ran a tiny nonprofit called InterCultura, whose scruffy office was above a dentist in a two-story commercial building in Fort Worth. As we stood in the Walters lobby, Rod quickly sketched out a vision for future collaborations that I immediately bought into. The idea was to bring the exotic flavors of Orthodoxy and its art to America through a series of exhibitions, and he picked the Walters as his preferred partner. I assumed this was because of the critical success of Silver Treasure from Early Byzantium, the attraction that August day for participants in the congress. Rod’s role would include the diplomatic negotiations and logistics, the scholarly team, and the catalogue; my role would be to create the exhibition and secure the venues for the national tour. The enormously successful Gates of Mystery was our first collaboration in 1992 and African Zion our second and last, as InterCultra imploded.
IN JUNE 1993, FOUR MONTHS BEFORE the exhibition opening, I learned that monks in the highlands around Tegre were vomiting blood. Or maybe it was just one monk. It made no difference; this was not stomach cancer or ulcers, it was a sign from God that they should not lend their sacred books to African Zion. And it seemed to be contagious; that divinely induced anti-lending sentiment was pervasive among the monks and priests not only in Tegre, but also in the Lake Tana region and around Lalibela. In fact, it was so pervasive that it looked as though we were going to lose two dozen loans. We had to do something fast. The Walters has a very small temporary exhibition space, but not so small that this reduced show wouldn’t look puny. We needed to fill a third of that space with something else. But what?
By good luck, a photographer for The New York Times named Chester Higgins, Jr. had a feature spread about that time in the Times Sunday Magazine on the diaspora Ethiopian Orthodox community in Yonkers. This is a vibrant group of Ethiopian immigrants whose images of Jesus are fully black—as the Ethiopian Jesus never is—and with a huge Afro. Not only that, they then had their own schismatic leader, Archbishop Abba Yesehaq, who had declared the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Western Hemisphere independent of the mother church—which put him in direct opposition to the recently-appointed Abune (“father” or Patriarch) Paulos in Addis Ababa.
I went to see Chester Higgins at his home in Brooklyn, and he was eager to do a show of those prints in the final third of our temporary exhibition space. We called it A Legacy of Faith: Ethiopian Orthodoxy in America. And by another piece of good luck, I learned of a New York dealer in African art named Joseph Knopfelmacher who had an excellent collection of Ethiopian works, and he was eager to lend. So I was cobbling things together and hoping for the best or, rather, hoping that the worst was behind me. Though on some level, I knew that if the religious forces energized by divine gastronomic distress far from Addis Ababa had the power to withdraw so many loans, then nothing in the show was safe. But for the moment, African Zion was back on track. Little did I know that the worst was yet to come—and his name was Paulos.
IF A WALTERS EXHIBITION HAD RELIGIOUS ART as its focus, like African Zion, we would invite the head of the National Church, who in this case was the Abune Paulos. And much to my amazement, the Abune decided to come, not only for the members preview but also for the press preview three days before. In fact, His Beatitude had built his week’s activities around the Walters, and it all looked very impressive. His itinerary, which was faxed “eyes only,” had him giving a speech before the UN on Monday and meeting with President Clinton on Friday, and then, tacked on after Baltimore, was an excursion to Georgia for a consulting session with President Jimmy Carter. As it turned out, none of those planned events ever took place.
Of course, since I had invited the Abune I assumed that the Walters would have to pay. Too late to revisit that. And when I learned that His Beatitude was coming with six Archbishops, this had the makings of a financial catastrophe. But gradually I warmed up to the idea. After all, we’d have the publicity. This was great, but just as important, I was led to believe that those accompanying Archbishops were going to bring along a half dozen of our missing Ethiopian manuscripts from out there in the hinterlands. That would make them official couriers, which means I could expense them to InterCultura and the tour. What luck.
Plus, I saw the Abune’s CV and, wonder of wonders, he had done his PhD at the Princeton Theological Seminary in the same years that I was a PhD student in art history at Princeton University. Maybe I already knew him, but if not, we would surely hit it off since we had so much in common. So I decided to host a party for the Abune at my home on Friday, October 15th, the day before the members’ preview. What could be better than an Autocephalous Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in my house, in his flowing robes and ceremonial hat. I had a very good friend who was a caterer, and she would do an Ethiopian meal. It would be perfect.
Well, not so fast. I now recalled my brilliant idea for the last third of the show, the Chester Higgins photo essay on the schismatic Ethiopian church in Yonkers. I never expected that the “real” Abune would ever see the exhibition, so it never occurred to me that should he see it, he would certainly be profoundly insulted to discover that his nemesis, the rebel Abune, Archbishop Abba Yesehaq, was being celebrated. (Only later did I learn that Paulos and Yesehaq, by then arch enemies, had been boyhood friends and Princeton classmates.)
But not to worry; I could solve that. I knew that Chester Higgins had also taken a portrait photo of the Abune Paulos, so I asked if we could borrow it, and I put it prominently at the front of the exhibition. I made the assumption that the Abune would see the exhibition only in my company—this was how it worked with dignitaries—and therefore, I could take a large, folding room divider and block off the last third of the show so he would never figure out that it even existed. Brilliant. Another fire was put out.
I came into the Walters house, #5 West Mount Vernon Place, on the Monday preceding the Saturday members preview for African Zion when the Abune and I would be on the stage together at the Walters. Our receptionist told me that she had received many calls that day relating to the upcoming visit of the Abune Paulos. She said Howard White, our head of PR, was tracking them and wanted to see me right away. Fine, so much for the secret itinerary. In came Howard, and his story was so strange that I recall being initially irritated at him because I thought he might be making it up. More than sixty calls had come into the Walters switchboard, and they were all from angry Ethiopians living in the area. (By that time I knew that Washington, DC, had the largest Ethiopian community in the country.) They were all enraged at the Abune Paulos, a few to the point of threatening his life. They saw him as a puppet of the current repressive president, who had recently been associated with the massacre of more than a dozen worshippers in a church in Gondar Province.
This I knew nothing about, but I figured we had a problem. And to make things worse, we were without a director; Bob Bergman had gone to Cleveland in May and his successor, Michael Mezzatesta, had been welcome
d to Baltimore in late June but would only be official as Director at the end of November, which was six weeks off. The Acting Director was the Walters Director of Development, Kate Sellers. But this was my show; I was the one who invited the Abune and I saw this as my problem to fix. There was no graduate seminar on this at Princeton University.
This was a job for the State Department, I thought, and in no time, a young spokesman for the Bureau of African Affairs was sitting next to me at the conference table in the director’s office. His message was brutally simple: the State Department considers a threat against the head of the Ethiopian Church on a level of seriousness only a short rung below a threat against the president of the country. But no, the State Department does not provide protection, that’s the job of the Baltimore City Police. So the next thing I know, its Tuesday afternoon and I’m showing a Baltimore policeman around the museum and describing the threatening phone calls. His advice was also brutally simple: keep him away. And the reason was obvious. When the doors of the museum opened at 7:00 p.m. that Saturday evening for the members preview, we expected to receive more than 2,000 people in a matter of a few minutes. We had no metal detectors and no way to screen those many people.