Artworks

The looting of ancient treasures from around the Mediterranean is nothing new, but this week's Artworks feature focuses on the most sensational of recent cases involving the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True.

Since Marion True was forced to resign from the Getty in October 2005, she's been hounded by both the Italian and Greek authorities on a variety of criminal-conspiracy charges relating to looted antiquities.

Julie Copeland speaks to Hugh Eakin, who wrote the New Yorker article about the Marion True case.

Transcript

Amanda Smith: The looting of ancient treasures from around the Mediterranean is nothing new, it's been going on for centuries, but in this week's Artworks feature, Julie Copeland is focusing on the most sensational of recent cases. It centres around the former curator of antiquities at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True. Marion True was forced to resign from the Getty in October 2005, and ever since she's been hounded by both the Italian and Greek authorities on a variety of criminal-conspiracy charges relating to looted antiquities. Here's Julie Copeland.

Julie Copeland: It's hard to get to the true story (forgive the pun), an amazing story involving Marion True, the ancient treasures she presided over at the Getty's Roman Villa in LA, a large cult statue of Aphrodite, networks of art dealers, patrons, tomb robbers, the mafia, the Italian and the Greek governments, and my favourite character, the former chief of Italy's art theft force, General Conforti. It will one day make a great movie, but in the meantime, here from New York is Hugh Eakin who has written the most wonderful account of the Marion True case in the New Yorker magazine. In fact he's the only journalist the former Getty antiquities curator has spoken to since her trials began, and that was when, as Hugh begins his article, 'One April afternoon in 1998, Marion True flew from Athens to address a conference in Rome to be met by a carabinieri officer who drove her to a hotel near Piazza Narvona, where in her room she found a giant bouquet from General Roberto Conforti.' An exquisitely Italian detail in a much bigger picture. Here's Hugh Eakin.

Hugh Eakin: This is one of the interesting things about this story, is that there's this kind of media story that we see every few months another museum...or objects being sent back, and then there's the courtroom story which has actually been quite difficult to follow, I think especially for American audiences used to a two-week trial with a jury and an intense day-by-day drama. This has played out over more than two years now and the actual hearings happen very sporadically. So you have a court date at most once a month and sometimes several months go by and there aren't any hearings. So despite a number of major developments, including a major deal reached with the Getty Museum involving many of the objects involved in the case, the case itself continues and is actually still in a prosecution phase.

Julie Copeland: And Marion True herself doesn't even appear, does she, she's not required to appear in court?

Hugh Eakin: She's not required to appear, and as far as I know she went to the opening hearing and I don't believe she's been since. So it's very bizarre thing. There isn't a lot necessarily that even involves her directly in some of the hearings.

Julie Copeland: And what about Robert Hecht himself, is he required to appear in court?

Hugh Eakin: He's a character and he's been a number of times, and he told me...he said he tries to go as often as he can.

Julie Copeland: Why?

Hugh Eakin: He has a different sort of perspective on the case. He's over...I believe it's 70 years old is the cut-off date in Italy, he can't actually go to jail, so he doesn't have a lot at stake here, and he's just enjoying himself. You hear him correct the prosecutor on art historical facts that come up in the case. So I think he doesn't see this as quite such the tragedy that it may appear.

Julie Copeland: Before we talk about the tragedy, you'd better just briefly explain Robert Hecht's role in all this, who he is.

Hugh Eakin: Bob Hecht is sort of the...I think one of the documents that came out in the case summed it up, he was the capo dei capi supposedly, according to this document, of the whole antiquities underworld. And to American museums he was one of the top, most well-connected dealers going back to the 60s. So he dealt with the Metropolitan, the Boston MFA, he was very knowledgeable, he was an old-school dealer who was often as knowledgeable as the curators he worked with. He really knew what he was selling and it was great stuff.

Julie Copeland: Marion True herself is very knowledgeable and people have paid tribute to her knowledge and work that she's put in, in fact building the Getty collection particularly from what was a pretty mediocre collection of antiquities to the glories of today, even if they have now had to give some of them back.

Hugh Eakin: That's true, and there's an important distinction here that as a curator representing the museum profession, she is the only person from that side that has been implicated in this case. And it's less surprising to have charges filed against the dealer but the real innovation here was they were charging an American museum curator with criminal conspiracy. So this was quite serious, and against that all these developments of other museums begin to come into relief. You have many other museums buying from the same dealers, all in some way perhaps legally exposed to the same potential fallout.

Julie Copeland: There's another character involved, Giacomo Medici. He's very much part of this story, the connections through connections with the people that Marion True had been dealing with, including Hecht.

Hugh Eakin: That's right, in fact he is really the centre of the case. Or as one Italian told me, he's l'anima nera, the...I'm not sure how this translates...

Julie Copeland: 'The black soul' or...

Hugh Eakin: Yes, sort of the black soul of the case, in the sense that he actually has already been tried and convicted in 2004, although he's appealing his conviction.

Julie Copeland: And what was he charged with?

Hugh Eakin: He was charged with, on a similar sort of set of charges, of conspiracy, but in his case much of the most damning evidence in the True-Hecht case all came from the Medici investigation. He was this Italian dealer who operated out of Geneva, and his storerooms were raided in the late 90s, and as it happened he had taken a picture of every object he ever sold, and this photographic archive became one of the key caches of evidence in the case. Many of these objects ended up at the Getty, many of them were sold through Bob Hecht to other museums as well. So you had the makings of what the prosecutors are arguing is a kind of network that was essentially conspiring to traffic material out of Italy.

Julie Copeland: Now enters the other major Italian character, General Conforti. I've interviewed General Conforti too, and he is quite a character. He's often, as you say, called simply El Generali and renowned on the international circuit as the...well, he was the chief of the art loot police in Italy but of course very well known internationally.

Hugh Eakin: Yes, that's right, he's testified in British parliament, and he has essentially brought this game to where it is. The antiquities police existed in Italy before he took over but he really turned them into a formidable army, and it is quite astonishing. Because they're not within the Culture Ministry, I think they're a joint unit of the actual military carabinieri and the Culture Ministry, it means they have all the resources they need; helicopters, speed boats, paratroopers, whatever.

Julie Copeland: Indeed, and when you meet him in his office...he's now retired, but where the office is placed in Rome, it certainly gives that impression of a military...he himself has a military presence with his big moustache and his uniform. You do feel you're entering a military barracks, in a very fine old building, I must say.

Hugh Eakin: Yes, I think it's a Jesuit building. The interesting thing about the carabinieri (and here is where it gets very interesting) is that there have been several arms in Italy that are engaging with American museums and other museums around the world, and often the Culture Ministry has had the diplomatic relations. And so suddenly now you have the carabinieri in the 1990s beginning to take a very much more muscular approach to the same issues, and Getty was very much caught in those two different approaches.

Julie Copeland: When a few years back I visited the carabinieri offices in that fine Baroque building in Rome, the impressive General Conforti, addressed here as El Colonnello, was obsessed with the most notorious art theft at that time; a Caravaggio stolen from a church in Palermo in 1969, which unsurprisingly, given the Sicilian code of silence, has never been found. But Conforti and his art theft squad was also on the hunt for the thousands of antiquities looted from Italy, a daunting task given that Italian museum directors claim Italy still loses about the equivalent of a museum every year. Indeed, Italy is one open museum.

General Roberto Conforti: [translated] Italy is an open museum. Each corner has a thing, it's an art, an expression of art. Thanks to the media, the public opinion feels the importance of that huge heritage that we have in Italy.

Julie Copeland: But given that Italy has so much...as we've said Italy is one big museum, and if you include the archaeological work and the works in the churches, how can you police it? You have said before, Colonnello, that there's still a lot of artworks that are not even archived, that you don't even have records of. It's an impossible job.

General Roberto Conforti: [translated] It is difficult but we must do the work. It's hard...art theft, it's not only the way of stealing a thing to a person, art theft hurts the soul of a nation, of a population. It can break the identity of a nation. And we must work to reconstruct this good. And it is not only Italian but it is for each us, not only for the Italians.

Julie Copeland: And indeed Italy's cultural heritage enriches us all. In Rome, General Roberto Conforti, the high-profile former head of Italy's art police, whose database cataloguing more than two million subjects of stolen art is called Leonardo.

So back to Marion True, and whether she was indeed just a scapegoat at a time both Italy and Greece were looking to showcase someone to pin something on. So what better target than one of the most prominent figures in the antiquities business, working for an American institution which is the envy of every museum or private collector in the world? At last count, the J Paul Getty trust is worth around $US6.5 billion. Also in her dealings with the likes of Giacomo Medici who, as you heard, is now appealing against being convicted of illegal antiquities trading, I can't help but think that good old Italian chauvinism comes into play; a blond, in gamba, foreign female, who I gather doesn't speak much Italian or Greek. So was Marion True something of a patsy? Hugh Eakin.

Hugh Eakin: What makes her so interesting as a kind of protagonist in this is that you talk to Italians who knew her in the early 90s or Greeks who worked with her when she was a young curator, they saw her as this very outspoken thoughtful curator who was quite aware of these problems and the whole problem with the acquisitiveness of American museums in the face of foreign countries which didn't allow any sale of ancient art from their territory. So she was very active in various archaeological meetings, talking about looted antiquities and proposing various solutions. So it's very interesting to see her now caught up in this case.

Julie Copeland: And what an irony, yes, that the Getty was, when she was there as head of the antiquities department, probably one of the first to even start talking about the issues involved.

Hugh Eakin: You'll find a reluctance now for the Getty today to talk about her legacy so much, as they're sort of turning over a new leaf now and they've made this new diplomatic agreement with Italy and they're getting loans of art in return for returning pieces, and they've tightened their acquisition policy. All of these things had precedence in her and she really led the way there, she revised the Getty's earlier...it didn't really have a policy at all when she started, and she spoke out when no other museum curator in America would be seen defending Italy.

Julie Copeland: And once she was charged with being in the possession of illegal or looted antiquities, the Getty kind of abandoned her. They didn't seem to support her in any way.

Hugh Eakin: The institutional story of the Getty during a crucial phase of her trial, when this was all getting underway, is something that has been a lot in the papers. Of course there was a big scandal with the former chairman who resigned, the director resigned...

Julie Copeland: This is Barry Munitz.

Hugh Eakin: Yes, Barry Munitz. And what was sort of lost in all of that was the kind of total lack of effort that we can see to actually stand up for her, or to reasonably negotiate what might have been more of a Met solution, as Philippe de Montebello artfully managed to pull off.

Julie Copeland: This is at the Met?

Hugh Eakin: At the Met. I think there's a really interesting parallel because the Met and the Getty are probably the two most common institutions and both have very serious issues in play with Italy. You had the Met intransigent throughout the 90s; 'we're not going to get into returning art and we're not going into old claims for the Euphronios vase,' which was bought back in the 70s. And suddenly when things get really hot, the Met makes a very wise...a kind of pre-emptive agreement with Italy in which it comes out smelling like roses.

Julie Copeland: That Euphronios vase, of course it's considered by many to be one of the most beautiful artworks in the world, or certainly one of the most beautiful artworks from antiquity, the perfect vase. But yes, I suppose the Met doesn't have this back-story that the Getty has of terrible problems within its own administration. Part of the Marion True revolution at the Getty was her attitude that perhaps has affected some of the trouble they're in over the provenance of antiquities within their collection, that rather than the historical relevance it was more to do with aesthetics. You know, the way she was thought to be very good at curating and presenting exhibitions, which brought about something of a revolution within the exhibition spaces of the museum, where objects were arranged on aesthetic grounds rather than the historic relevance of these objects.

Hugh Eakin: That's right. This is one of the other...I mean, there are so many ironies about this, but that you look at the Getty Villa which opened in 2006, I believe, this was the project of her career. She spent her entire career redesigning this villa to house their Greek and Roman collection, and it's immaculate, it's the epitome of the aesthetic museum.

Julie Copeland: And it kind of erases any questions of location, of provenance, where these objects come from. You just look at these beautiful objects in a beautiful setting.

Hugh Eakin: That's right, and one of the interesting things Marion True told me when I interviewed her is she said when she started going to Italy as a curator that she realised that the role of curator doesn't really exist there, and collections aren't for curating, they study them scientifically, archaeologically, they classify them and they often keep them very near the sites where the material is found. But the whole idea of a beautiful presentation, it doesn't hold the same place as it does here.

Julie Copeland: No, and it does also mark the contrast between the state museums and these private collections. If you think of the kind of attack-dog mentality of connoisseurship, it's obvious; if you're a private collector you're going to buy it because you like it, because it's beautiful, without worrying too much about where it comes from.

Hugh Eakin: Yes. There's a funny story about that and it's when the Met was negotiating its agreement with Italy, and I think this must have been a point where the Met got its way in the final wording of the agreement, but of course the Euphronios vase is to go back in exchange for a kind of continuous series of loans. The loans are defined as objects of...I believe the phrase is 'equivalent beauty and importance'...

Julie Copeland: And who is going to decide that?

Hugh Eakin: Well, that raises a whole other question, but the idea that even the criteria...they're not asking for another Attic vase that would be associated with Euphronios or from that generation of vase painters, they're asking for an equivalent object of equivalent beauty, which I thought said a huge amount about how the Met...this sort of self-conception of the museum whereas talking to one of the Italian lawyers involved in that negotiation, he told me, 'Well, we really wanted to offer them a whole tomb context of what we had found in one of the Etruscan tombs,' this room of all kinds of odds and ends that would be in an Etruscan tomb, along with, perhaps, the Euphronios vase, and they would loan that to the Met. But the Met wasn't interested in these sorts of tomb finds. They wanted the beautiful object.

Julie Copeland: That's a wonderful story. And of course when you look at the Metropolitan's new extraordinarily expensive lavish wing...it's a whole new museum really, to house their antiquities collection, you could understand why they wanted something spectacular that they could showcase in that space.

Hugh Eakin: That's right, and it's yet another paradox of this moment, is that at the moment when all of the whole idea of collecting antiquities has reached a kind of crisis, we have two of the most beautiful and important spaces for that kind of material opening, with the Getty Villa on the west coast and then the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, which are really, as Philippe de Montebello describes them, a museum within a museum. It's a huge space. So suddenly you have the continued tension that museum-goers are going to see all this stuff and it is beautiful, and yet what we're reading about in the papers is; what is the context? Where does this come from? Is it stolen? So it's a very interesting moment.

Julie Copeland: And if you're intrigued by this amazing tale of art loot, I recommend you beg, borrow or hunt up Hugh Eakin's article, titled 'Treasure Hunt'. And there's more. High has just sent me an update on Marion True who, although there's little evidence, has now been charged by the Greek government with trafficking in stolen cultural property, namely two sculptures she'd acquired 15 years ago for the Getty and which the museum had voluntarily returned to Greece at the time Italian authorities were pressuring American museums with their claims.

The Greek police raid on True's house on the island of Paros had come sensationally into the story when they found several unregistered antiquities, many of which were fragments of no value. So according to Hugh Eakin, the trial in Athens, due for next month, over pieces the Greeks have already got back looks like Greek grandstanding to get in on the repatriation game, with the subtext, as always, of building support for the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles. The same old story.

Further Information

The New Yorker

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Copeland

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