Chasing Aphrodite (12 page)

Most of their clients were private 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.

I
N 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.

T
HE 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 the 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?

The discussion marked a pivotal moment in American museum history. For generations, museums had acquired looted ancient art with no questions asked. Williams was now challenging the Getty to consider the morality of that practice and to decide whether it made sense to continue it. Few American museums at the time had confronted the issue as directly as the Getty was now doing.

Two days later, Williams and Walsh met again, joined by Bevan and True. Bevan outlined the proposed policy. The museum would buy antiquities no questions asked, relying instead on warranties from the dealers that the objects had been legally excavated and exported. Before buying important objects, the museum would notify the likely country of origin, giving foreign governments an opportunity to present any concrete evidence they had before the purchase was finalized. And lastly, the museum would publish all acquisitions, providing yet another opportunity for anyone to raise obj ections. If the museum was presented with substantial evidence that an object had been recently looted, it would give the piece back. But it would not aggressively seek out such information on its own. In effect, the policy shifted the burden of proof onto others.

Once again, Williams was concerned. How can we be good-faith buyers if we knowingly buy stolen goods, accept warranties from dealers we know to be liars, and choose not to investigate their claims? he asked. In his typically blunt way, he boiled the issue down to a simple question: "Are we willing to buy stolen property for some higher aim?"

With that question hanging in the air, Walsh retreated to his office and began working through the knots of the problem on his legal pad. The Getty could simply stop buying antiquities, but that would accomplish nothing. If the Getty didn't buy the objects, the looting would continue, and the objects would be bought by competing museums or slip into private collections, out of public view. Was this the moral high ground to take? The museum could investigate objects before acquiring them, as it had done with the kouros, but it might learn nothing. Worse, the inquiries might confirm that the object had indeed been looted. What then? Asking too many questions of dealers and curators also created an incentive for them to lie about an object's origins. The real moral approach to the problem, Walsh concluded, was to continue buying the objects regardless of their origins.

Walsh met with True to go over the proposal. The two drafted a memo that laid out the rationale for changing the current policy. Walsh and True framed the move as setting a brave and rigorous new standard, one that went far beyond that of any other major museum in America. "The policy we propose ... is far reaching in its ramifications," they wrote in a confidential memo to Williams on November 4, 1987. "We believe we should go beyond what is demanded by the law ... and abide by the highest possible ethical standards in our collection policy."

In fact, the policy paved the way for the Getty to ignore the law and continue to buy looted antiques.

N
OT EVERYONE INSIDE
the Getty considered the new policy an ethical improvement. Luis Monreal, the director of the Getty Conservation Institute, exploded over what he considered to be a bold hypocrisy. The Spanish-born, slightly built Monreal was an expert in antiquities conservation. He had served as secretary-general of the International Council of Museums, a UNESCO affiliate responsible for establishing museums and training curators in third-world countries. He had taken the helm of the Getty Conservation Institute in 1985, running a staff of forty-seven people from twenty different countries out of nondescript offices in Marina del Rey, about ten miles down the coast from Malibu. From the beginning, the museum's appetite for tainted antiquities was anathema to the Conservation Institute's mission of preserving and protecting cultural patrimony around the globe.

This institutional infighting at the Getty was exacerbated by the personalities of Walsh and Monreal. Though strong willed, Walsh was aloof and hard to read. Monreal, meanwhile, was flashy and incapable of keeping an opinion to himself. Like brooding siblings, they often clashed at directors meetings. They were technically equals on the Getty Trust's organizational chart, but the museum had a bigger budget than the institute and had always been favored by trustees. Still, Walsh knew that institutional courtesy called for running the proposed antiquities acquisition policy by his fellow program directors, so he set up a lunch meeting at an Itali an restaurant near the Santa Monica airport.