Countering

Günther Wessel
Dealers and Collectors, Provenances and Rights:
Searching for Traces
In the summer of 2014, I wrote to several antiquities dealers in Germany to discuss the
trade in archaeological finds, both legal and illegal. In my letter, I observed that ‘serious
accusations – especially by archaeologists – are relentlessly levelled against the trade in
antiquities and the dealers: a large proportion of the business is thought to be based on
the sale of illicit objects from excavations. There is talk of handling stolen objects that
have been looted, of indirect incitement to looting, obscured provenances, smuggling
and exploitation of legal grey areas.’ Few were those who responded: just as most of the
dealers ignored my enquiry – in one instance the answer came through his lawyer – so
too did the auction houses remain utterly silent. The only person willing to talk to me
was Ursula Kampmann.
Ursula Kampmann is the spokesperson of the International Association of Dealers
in Ancient Art (IADAA), an association of antiquities dealers from Europe and the
U.S.A and, at the same time, a lobby organization founded in 1993. Quoted below is the
opening sentence of the IADAA ‘statement’, which can be found online:
IADAA stands firstly for the right of the trade, collectors and museums to legally acquire, own, sell
and donate antiquities from the ancient world encompassed by the Mediterranean, Europe and the
Near East.
Ursula Kampmann’s enthusiasm for collecting is manifest as she evokes the fascination
collectors nurture for history. ‘No journey back into the past could ever be so direct and
concrete an experience as that of collecting,’ she says. But what is the provenance of the
antiquities for sale in auction catalogues and proposed by art dealers? ‘Well,’ she explains,
‘History makes clear that collecting is an old activity, for people have been collecting
since the Middle Ages, but it was during the Renaissance that the occupation flourished.’
She evokes the cultural exchanges between the Humanists, their unwavering curiosity
for the past – a time when the first major collections of ancient art came into being. ‘The
life of goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini illustrates this passion well. He used
to stand on the edge of Rome’s city walls, and intercept farmers who came in from their
fields and would buy the objects they had found plowing. The greatest collectors had
tens of thousands of objects in their collections.’ Is that where the antiquities come from?
Michael Müller-Karpe, an archaeologist working at the Römisch-Germanisches
Zentralmuseum in Mainz, shakes his head before such a discourse. ‘That is a some wornout
fairytale,’ he says, admitting that old collections have indeed existed – “curiosities”
seamlessly collected by aristocrats for hundreds of years. Müller-Karpe remarks, however,
that the number of objects from such collections is negligible compared with what the
market offers. Furthermore, he continues, insofar as these old pieces had been part of
these collections for centuries, they had most likely been documented previously, and
in many places: diaries, copper engravings for the earliest sources, newspaper articles or
other types of publication in more recent times. ‘Unrecorded objects were deemed so
worthless that heirs discarded them systematically,’ he explains.
Glasgow archaeologist and crime researcher Neil Brodie observes that ‘only very,
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