Erin L. Thompson
@artcrimeprof
America’s only art crime professor, studying theft, repatriation, and general museum shenanigans. Forthcoming book: The Styrofoam Mummy (Norton), on fraud and forgery on the market for ancient treasures. She/her; queer. www.artcrimeprof.com
If you like art law - I mean, if you really like art law - head on down to Berkeley Law School this November for four jam-packed days with some top experts (and me): www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bus...
Thoroughly unglamorous shot of the NY Board of Elections warehouse where I spent hours this week to observe a recount. My friend won their race - by 15 votes! And boy oh boy is the work of democracy boring (complimentary).
This spring, the Met surrendered its Phoenix bust with the fake provenance to Turkey. (Noticing its disappearance from the gallery prompted me to write my article, after years of research.) What will happen to the rest of Phoenix's sales? And to every other treasure bought with shaky provenance?
...if you search for this auction date and lot number, another Middle Kingdom hippo emerges. This one’s on display in an English museum, to which it was donated by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who bought it at Sotheby’s in London in 1950. sainsburycentre.ac.uk/art-and-obje...
Phoenix's provenance says the hippo was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1950. That auction catalog indeed lists a Middle Kingdom hippopotamus statuette, glazed in greenish-blue and decorated with flowers. While there’s no accompanying photograph, the description lines up well enough. But...
It looks cute to us, but the Egyptians knew too well that hippopotami, with their immense appetites, short tempers, and sharp tusks, were dangerous. Such statuettes were put into tombs to protect their occupants, usually with a leg broken off to keep them in check.
Phoenix is offering this Egyptian Middle Kingdom statuette of a hippopotamus with line drawings of papyrus blossoms plastered to its sides, as if it had just emerged from the Nile: phoenixancientart.com/work-of-art/...
Swiss authorities eventually convicted Aboutaam for conspiring with Ansermet, Lagneau, and other dealers named Andrea Zabbeni, Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, and Emmanuel Koutoulakis to concoct backstories, complete with fake, backdated receipts like this one, that transformed loot into investment pieces.
Nor do these photographs and records include other pieces Phoenix sold supposedly from Sciclounoff's collection. Buyers just had to take André Lagneau's word for it. But now, Lagneau confessed that he had been cooking up fake provenances for Phoenix since the 1990s.
Sciclounoff, a lawyer who made his fortune advising clients how to hide their money, had a mansion stuffed with art, including Roman busts. But the Met’s bust didn’t appear in images of this much-photographed mansion, nor in the fragmentary records left by the deceased Sciclounoff.
For example, in 1998, Phoenix sold the Metropolitan Museum this Roman portrait bust, claiming that it had purchased it from the Swiss dealer André Lagneau, who had gotten it in 1977from the Geneva collector Pierre Sciclounoff: www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...
Aboutaam's storerooms even held artifacts stolen by armed thieves from Iraqi museums during the chaos of the Gulf War, including this piece of a magnificently blinged-out king of ancient Hatra (now reunited with his lower half back home!) www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/87879.pdf
In 2017, Aboutaam himself confessed, explaining that he had obtained this Sumerian stele from one of his regular suppliers, a Syrian merchant who lived in Beirut. He picked out purchases from photos the merchant texted him and then sent a smuggler to collect them and bring them to Geneva.
When they raided Haberkorn’s workshop, the police found antiquities crusted with dirt soaking in a bathtub, with a toothbrush at the ready to scrub them clean. Photographs from Haberkorn’s computer showed that he had cleaned and repaired many such filthy, fragmentary antiquities.
They filled it with antiquities packed in grocery store produce boxes with makeshift, taped-together lids and bubble wrap trailing from their sides. They were in such a hurry that they left the heaviest piece, a Roman marble bust, still tangled in a carrying sling cobbled together from Ikea bags.
Born in 1965, Aboutaam began working in his father’s antiquities business in Beirut as a teenager. He incorporated Phoenix in Geneva in 1995. Warned by the driver and Dib that an investigation seemed to be underway, Aboutaam grabbed some of the antiquities displayed in his apartment and took off.
It was more the kind of place where you’d stow your furniture in a hurry after a bad breakup. And even if Haberkorn wasn’t so picky about storage, what were his receipts doing in Phoenix’s car? The next morning, the authorities went to check the storage locker... and found it empty.
The search of the Land Rover had also turned up receipts for a locker at Flexbox Self Storage, rented in the name of Walter Haberkorn, an art restorer who sometimes worked for Phoenix. This was strange. Flexbox wasn’t a highly secured, carefully climate controlled art storage facility.
Finally, Swiss authorities launched an investigation. Pulling over the Land Rover was no mere spot check - the car and its driver, a Phoenix employee, had been under surveillance. In the car, officers found a bronze Byzantine lamp like this one, broken into dirt-incrusted pieces.
Observers had long been skeptical that Phoenix obtained such a steady supply of artifacts only from old, legal collections... especially since in many cases it seemed that no one had ever photographed, published, or even described these treasures. phoenixancientart.com/works-of-art/
The prices were justified by Phoenix's guarantees. "We will not transact in any antiquities in which we have any doubt about the legitimacy and provenance," the gallery trumpeted. No looted, smuggled pieces that could be seized by authorities here!
Phoenix opened galleries in Geneva and Manhattan in the 1990s and began to sell eye-poppingly expensive treasures to elite private collectors and renowned museums. (Screen recording from phoenixancientart.com/clients/)
The station, located in a Geneva suburb, was usually unmanned. This time, customs officers emerged as the SUV pulled away and waved it to a halt. The Land Rover was registered to Phoenix Ancient Art, which calls itself "the world's leading dealer in rare and expensive antiquities."
A few days before Christmas 2016, a grey Land Rover paused in front of a bank of mirrored windows at this checkpoint on the border between France and Switzerland. What happened next revealed just how looted art worms its way into museums. A 🧵 about my article: hyperallergic.com/why-do-so-ma...
The museum is keeping the tail - to match a fragment of the tail from the real sculpture they have in their collection!
Kids next to me are going home with the king. Historically accurate chokehold!
