A Roman marble portrait head of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes was sold at the Chicago salesroom Hindman Auctions last week despite claims by a leading forensic archaeologist that the valuable artifact may have links to a disgraced antiquities dealer.
The sale, which made $100,000, had been opposed by Christos Tsirogiannis, head of the Unesco working group on illicit antiquities trafficking, at Ionian University in Greece, who said the head may have been linked to Robin Symes, a dealer who has been linked to looted antiquities.
The bust was first recorded on the market in 1981, when it was sold at Sotheby’s New York. But the name of the consignor was never revealed. It then moved between collections in the US before Christie’s New York sold it in 2012.
The sale cast a spotlight on the illicit trade in rare and historic artifacts and a murky international world of illicit dealers and secretive collectors – a trade that some say may be reducing after a number of trafficking rings have been disrupted and stolen objects repatriated in recent years.
Tsirogiannis, an associate professor and research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Aarhus in Denmark, said Christie’s provenance for its sale included indications that it had been at Art Market, Zurich, in the eighties. Photographs of the head from that time bear the initials “R.S”, an indication that the head may once have been in the collection of Symes and his partner Christo Michaelides.
In 2005 Symes served a jail sentence for disregarding court orders over the sale of an Egyptian statue, with the judge dismissing his explanation as “a calculated deception”. Eleven years later, Italian and Swiss police recovered marble statues and other treasures stolen from Italy, which they said had been stored by Symes at the Geneva freeport in Switzerland. Symes has never faced any action from the authorities in relation to the haul and has remained out of the public eye.
But the forensic expert claims the photographs prove a link. “We cannot say that this object is a trafficked object for sure until we have the information about who was the consignor in the 1981 auction,” Tsirogiannis told the Guardian this week.
Hindman issued a statement to the Guardian: “The item in question has been offered at public auction multiple times and continues to be clear from all questions of lawful ownership. In fact, additional published provenance has come to light that shows this piece on the open market as early as 1968.”
But the sale came to light in the same week that a former director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, was charged in Paris with complicity in fraud and money laundering in connection with an investigation into trafficked Egyptian artifacts.
The charges against Martinez came from an investigation that originated in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. That probe had been investigating an antiquities smuggling ring that came to light after reality star Kim Kardashian was photographed next to a gold coffin of Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the ram-headed god Heryshef of Herakleopolis, at the Met Ball in 2018.
Kardashian, as it happened, was dressed in kind.
The photo of the coffin made its way to Manhattan assistant district attorney Matthew Bogdanos, the celebrated head of the Manhattan DA’s antiquities trafficking unit, via an anonymous tipster in the Middle East, who originally received the image from a gang of pillagers.
The informant, Bogdanos says, was irritated that they were never paid for unearthing the coffin, which dates back to the first century BC, even after it had been sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4m by using fake documents that claimed it had been legally exported from Egypt in 1971.
The subsequent investigation saw five people charged. The sixth, Martinez, France’s special ambassador for cooperation on cultural heritage, has been placed under judicial control.
“That was one smuggling ring, though a very well organized one,” said Bogdanos. “It’s been effectively dismantled and now we’re just scooping up people.”
The latest charges and allegations come amid increased activity against international antiquities trafficking.
Last month, an ancient Greek vase and a Roman cavalry helmet that had been due to hit the auction block at Christie’s in New York were withdrawn from sale. Authorities were alerted to the uncertain provenance of the two items by Tsirogiannis who, over past the 15 years has identified almost 1,600 looted antiquities within auction houses, museums, galleries and private collections.
The helmet, Tsirogiannis said, could be traced also through photographic archives to Robert Hecht, who in 1972 sold the important Euphronios Krater to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The spectacular item, a wine mixing bowl, was repatriated to Italy in 2006 and marked one of the most significant recoveries of the era.
Bogdanos, a retired US Marine colonel who has run the Manhattan DA’s antiquities unit since 2013, has long argued that antiquities are an important source of revenue for terrorists – a trade that western antiquities dealers are complicit in. He led the investigation into the looting of the Iraqi National Museum while serving in Iraq in 2003 and wrote about his experiences in his book, Thieves of Baghdad.
In 2017, Bogdanos ordered the seizure of 2,300 year-old vase known as the “Python Vessel” from the Met that had been displayed at the institution since 1989, when it was purchased from Sotheby’s for $90,000. Bogdanos was presented with evidence from Tsirogiannis that the vase was connected to well-known looter Giacomo Medici, who also had a role in the looting and trafficking of the Euphronios Krater.
One of Bogdanos’s biggest busts came in 2019 when the DA filed a criminal complaint against trafficker Subhash Kapoor. More than a dozen artifacts linked to Kapoor were seized from Yale’s art gallery by Homeland Security. Kapoor, jailed in India and facing a criminal complaint in the US, is estimated to trafficked thousands of stolen artifacts worth more than $145m over 30 years.
Bogdanos says that dealers, private collectors and museums lived for years on the fence on the subject of illicit antiquities. “They’d say, ‘oh it’s a little dodgy but who cares. Nobody’s looking.’ But people are looking, and they’re saying it’s not worth it.”
Over the past six years, Bogdanos’s office has convicted a dozen people of antiquities trafficking. “That’s unheard of. It used to be a gentlemen’s sport done by gentlemen for gentlemen. Now these gentlemen and gentlewomen of the trade are getting hand-cuffed.
People who have wings of museums named after them aren’t accustomed to being handcuffed and that has had an impact.”
Bogdanos says he’s amazed at the number of tip-offs his office is now receiving from institutions and people saying they no longer want looted art in their collections. The auction houses, however, have been slower to act.
“The auction houses have improved their practices, and some have gone out of their way to notify the Manhattan DA’s office if they see something dodgy,” Bogdanos says.
Tsirogiannis agrees the situation around illicit antiquity is improving – but with qualifications.
“Certainly it’s getting better but it’s a big fight and ongoing. It’s a long-term battle, and the results are coming slowly. But we see that museums are changing their guidelines for acquisitions, even if in practice the mentality is changing at a slower pace.”
• This article was amended on 1 June 2022 to clarify details about the working group on illicit antiquities trafficking.
