Countering

Searching for Traces
In the spring of 2015, I came upon precisely such a fabricated origin a small auction
house in Berlin offered – among the hundreds of items in its catalogue – seven finds
from excavations in North Africa and the Middle East. Five items originally came from
Egypt (all of them, according to the information, were roughly 3,000 years old), one
from Afghanistan, and one from Iran (both roughly 2,000 years old). All the objects,
according to the catalogue, ‘were the property of an English colonial officer. When I made
enquiries at the auction house, I was assured that the objects have long been in the
family’s possession. They have been brought in by an Englishman whose grandfather had
travelled the world and returned with things from where he had been. Unfortunately, no
paperwork existed. Some of the pieces (two objects remain unsold) attain astonishingly
high prices above their estimated value, and the new owner is satisfied with their fine
provenance: private English collection prior to 1970, acquired (in good faith) at auction in
2015.
Let us take another example. In the summer of 2014, the Egyptologist Johannes
Auenmüller was preparing an exhibition at the Egyptian Museum of the University
of Bonn entitled From Antiquity to Modern Times: Animal Representations from Four
millennia in the Preuss Collection. The exhibition is filled with numerous, mostly ancient
Egyptian objects. Auenmüller studies these works of art, including the fragment of a
mural that depicts two men bringing gifts for a celebration for the dead (approx. 40
by 30 cm). What an amazing discovery he would make comparing the artefacts with
illustrations in old catalogues! One ancient photograph of excavations in Thebes
(Luxor) shows a wall from which the mural fragment seems to originate. More careful
comparisons confirm the suspicion: the 3,500-year-old mural does come from the grave
of Sobekhotep the Treasurer and was removed from the wall around 1980 for loot.
The following press release by the University of Bonn states that ‘[t]he piece with
the false provenance old English ownership inexplicably found its way onto the German
antiquities market and at the end of 1986 it was acquired in good faith by Mr. and Mrs
Preuss in a renowned Cologne art gallery.’ The renowned art gallery belonged to the
art dealer Alois Faust, Karl-Heinz Preuss specified as I enquired. The art dealership no
longer exists today. He is certain that Faust did not knowingly provide a false provenance.
Method two: Circular sale
‘A little patience is needed,’ says former art dealer Christoph Leon as he explains how a
rather clear and somewhat verifiable provenance can be obtained. ‘You keep the newly
acquired item for a certain period and then put it on sale on the market with a provenance
stating Private collection ca. 1970, – which cannot be verified by auctionneers and
therefore remains unchecked. Then you buy it at auction yourself, either anonymously
or through “front men”, and you have an antiquity with an unequivocal invoice: acquired
in the auction house at such-and-such auction. In addition, you acquire authentication
since many auction houses guarantee the authenticity of the items they sell. After that,
you bring the antiquity with this apparently legal background to one of the larger
auctions either in this country or elsewhere. The costs of this kind of procedure are
relatively modest. De facto you only pay the auctioneers’ commission – as seller and as
buyer. And one reason why it works so well is because auction houses always keep the
identities of both the sellers and the buyers confidential. Of course, you can also engage
in multiple circular sales and use “front men”’.
Moreover, an (overall) fine system such as the Art Loss Register (ALR) can be used
to back up a false provenance. The ALR lists around 300,000 missing works of art and
7