Mar 26, 2022

Looted antiquities and false provenances

DAigrignyForgererWanderingJew

Looted Art Newsflash 26 May 2022 Former Louvre Director Jean-Luc Martinez Has Been Charged With Money Laundering Over Ties to Alleged Antiquities Trafficking Ring Jo Lawson-Tancred Artnet News

Looted Art Newsflash 25 May 2022 Jean-Luc Martinez, ancien patron du Louvre, mis en examen dans une affaire de trafic d’antiquités Il est soupçonné de blanchiment et complicité d’escroquerie en bande organisée. En cause, une stèle gravée au nom de Toutânkhamon exposée au Louvre Abu Dhabi, qui pourrait avoir été pillée. Par Roxana Azimi Le Monde


March 26, 2022

The arrest of Roben Dib is a good reminder of the central role played by false provenances in the trafficking of looted art.

According to The Art Newspaper, "Dib has been charged for gang fraud and money laundering by the Paris judge Jean-Michel Gentil and is being held in detention following his arrest last week".


Kunicki sold a golden sarcophagus to the Met in 2017 for €3.5m. In 2019, the museum apologised and returned it to Egypt, after a criminal investigation exposed serious flaws in the Egyptian department’s provenance check. In his report, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, stated that the sarcophagus came from the German-Lebanese dealer Roben Dib and the Simonian brothers, with a "forged" provenance.


As always, the question arises (or should arise) as to not only who is falsifying provenance documents for looted object, but also who is taking the process to the next level and inserting these false provenances into the historical record?  

As with fake news, it's not enough simply to make something up. Someone has to disseminate the false information through trusted networks.

For more news articles on the lack of provenance or the falsification of provenance documents in the looted antiquities trade please see:


Treasure Hunt: The downfall of the Getty curator Marion True. By Hugh Eakin December 10, 2007, The New Yorker
"Symes claimed that it had belonged to the family of a Swiss grocery magnate since the nineteen-thirties, yet it had never been on exhibit or studied by scholars, and its origin was unknown."

"The Times’s art critic John Canaday noted that the treasures dated to the sixth century B.C. and had reportedly been bought for about $500,000 by the Madison Avenue dealer John J. Klejman and sold to the museum in 1966, 1967, and 1968.The New York Post weighed in at this time, too, and asked Dietrich von Bothmer, the curator of the Greek and Roman department (where the pieces were kept), where the treasures came from. “You should ask Mr. J. J. Klejman that,” retorted von Bothmer."

Hobby Lobby Purchased Thousands of Ancient Artifacts Smuggled Out of Iraq

"The members of the Green family, which owns the Hobby Lobby chain, are committed evangelical Christians who are probably most famous for their participation in a 2014 Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which helped dismantle certain birth-control-coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The Greens are big collectors of ancient antiquities; they’re also the primary visionaries and contributors behind the Museum of the Bible opening in Washington, D.C., this fall." 

A New Museum in Lebanon Raises Questions About Archaeological Looting

"Experts believe that the clay tablets from Iri-Sagrig and other tablets in the Nabu Museum are stolen, smuggled and acquired illegally from their motherland. Some of the items have suffered damage caused by poor storage and handling, which reflects the ignorance of thieves and smugglers.  This region and neighboring areas became subject to heavy looting after international sanctions were imposed on Iraq in the 1990s."

Antiquities Dealer Charged With Trafficking In Looted Cambodian Artifacts

"Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Peter C. Fitzhugh, the Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), announced today the unsealing of an indictment charging antiquities dealer DOUGLAS LATCHFORD, a/k/a “Pakpong Kriangsak”— with wire fraud, smuggling, conspiracy and related charges pertaining to his trafficking in stolen and looted Cambodian antiquities.  LATCHFORD remains at large, residing in Thailand."

Metropolitan Museum Repatriates Gilded Coffin to Egypt

"According to an Ahram Online report, New York City's Metropolitan Museum handed over an ancient gilded coffin to the Antiquities Repatriation Department at Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities after an investigation conducted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office concluded it had left Egypt illegally and should be returned. "

Conversations: Museums on Trial Volume 59 Number 2, March/April 2006 How will a highly charged trial affect shady museum-acquisition practices?

"As ARCHAEOLOGY went to press, Marion True, former antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and art dealer Robert Hecht were on trial in Italy and facing possible jail time, charged with conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities. Their partner Giacomo Medici, convicted in 2004 on similar charges, is currently appealing his 10-year sentence."

Sherloc Case Law Database [A] and [B]1995-2008

Switzerland had to appear the “country” of provenance of the objects, which instead had recently been illicitly excavated, taken out of Italy and sent abroad thanks to [A]and Gianfranco Becchina, in so much as they were the reference point for thieves and/or Italian tombaroli and other people connected to them. From Switzerland the goods were then fictitiously attributed as being the property of other companies (see the above mentioned list), which acted as “clearing and laundering-house”, and which then sent the archaeological goods mostly to England, Germany, the U.S. and even to Japan or Australia. The brokering and triangulation had one only aim: that of rendering the purchases credible and unchallengeable for the buyers.

On distinguished art dealers and false provenances

Oral history interview with Barbara G. Fleischman, 2011 Dec. 27-2012 Jan. 23, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

"BARBARA FLEISCHMAN: Oh, they were distinguished dealers. And they knew, and they got wonderful things. And we just—nobody ever asked—you were told—"Well, where did this come?" "Well, this was in a great Swiss collection," or "This was—came from here." It never came out of the soil. Never, never. There was always—it had been owned by so-and-so. And I guess you could say that it was prevarication.

AVIS BERMAN: In American art a lot of times, as you know, you have to present these sheets with all the provenance. Did they have all of that?

BARBARA FLEISCHMAN: Yes. I have records upstairs that tell where everything, seemingly, came from. Now, of course, in hindsight Larry and I realize that we were probably lied to. Everybody."

On false provenance in selling fakes please see:

Scumbag Descending a Staircase, John Connolly, Nick Rosen, October 1992, Spy Magazine

"Panicali offered the work to Klaus Perls, an eminent multimillionaire dealer in his seventies whose speciality is the School of Paris, which includes Modigliani, Chagall and Picasso. Just before Panicali contacted Perls, Quatrochi took a young Museum of Modern Art researcher to lunch several times and gave her a photograph of the sculpture to be placed in the MoMa archives. If someone was skeptical about the work, they could now look it up in the MoMa library."

Widespread forgery of avant-garde artist exposed at Russian Art Week Expert says nearly 95% of Natalia Goncharova’s 1901-13 oil paintings are fake, Claudia Barbieri Childs, 7 January 2016, The Art Newspaper

"In 2011, Vakar and others publicly challenged the English art historian Anthony Parton and the French catalogue compiler Denise Bazetoux over their publications on Goncharova. Parton and Bazetoux are both members of the International Chamber of Russian Modernism, a Paris-based group of art historians. Butterwick’s comments were the latest in a series of challenges since 2011, when Bazetoux published the first volume of a planned three-part catalogue raisonné and was attacked in the Russian art press as having falsely authenticated multiple alleged forgeries."

Fraudsters Duped Sotheby's Into Selling Fake Art, Suit Alleges


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