Countering

Günther Wessel
claims to be the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art and antiques. It can
be used by collectors, the art trade and law enforcement agencies to research items. If an
art dealer sends an inquiry to the ALR, they must contact the police if the artwork was
reported stolen. If verification shows that the piece is not listed in the ALR database as
stolen, the dealer receives a certificate – an initial document that will suggest a sound
source for an antiquity object excavated illegally, and registered in no database. ‘This
way, a dealer can show without risk that they have exercised due diligence,’ says Michel
van Rijn, ‘and they obtain a nice document.’
Silvelie Karfeld, who works on illegal antiquities at the German Federal Criminal
Police Office, has another tip: ‘One can also offer such an item to a museum with only
a low level of risk, so that it is temporarily included in an exhibition as a loaned object.
Then it is published in the exhibition catalogue and thus obtains an apparently legal
background.’
Method three: Forging the paperwork
‘I have come by forged papers, especially in the Middle East,’ says Michel van Rijn.
‘Fanciful provenances are invented. You can always find a notary there to confirm them.’
Helmut Thoma agrees. His Syrian dealer told him that he would bring the large grave
to Switzerland, and there it would also acquire its papers, ‘because the only buyers
who really spent a lot of money on these items were American museums,’ he says,
‘and they wanted to see information about the origin, and so they were provided one:
so-and-so bought the piece 40, 50 or 70 years ago, and has had it in their possession ever
since, and now he’s selling it.’ The Americans were entirely satisfied with that. Christoph
Leon knows how to forge provenances: ‘It’s quite simple: you use old typewriters and
paper to try and write some sort of letter which somehow indicates the origin.’ This said,
‘you must be careful,’ former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oscar White
Muscarella forewarns, ‘really careful,’ he insists, and recounts the story of the so-called
Getty kouros.
The Getty kouros is a larger-than-life marble statue that in 1985 was acquired for
9 million dollars by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. It is not known
whether it is authentic or a fake, and the museum acknowledges this. For several years
the label next to the statue was: Greek, about 530 BC, or modern forgery. What matters
most is the provenance of the statue. It first appeared on the art market in 1983, offered
by the Basel art dealer Gianfranco Becchina, and supposedly came from the collection
of a Genevan doctor named Jean Lauffenberger, as Jiri Frel, curator of antiquities at the
Getty Museum, reported to the Board of Trustees. The doctor was said to have acquired
the piece in Greece circa 1930.
‘However, there was no record of the provenance and date of discovery of the kouros,
which eventually brought a little suspicion; all the more so when it became known that
no friends of Lauffenberger’s or his two ex-wives, had ever seen the statue over the half
decade or so it presumably was in his possession,’ Oscar White Muscarella recalls. ‘Just
as suspicion was waning among archaeologists, a couple of letters appeared as if from
nowhere, confirming the Lauffenberger provenance – luckily enough for Frel.’ One of
them was dated 15 March 1952 and sent from Ernst Langlotz, a German archaeologist
wherein Langlotz evoked the style of the kouros. Another letter from 1955, written
by A. E. Bigenwald, a Basel craftsman whom Lauffenberger had contacted, repairs to
the kouros. ‘This seemed to prove its origin,’ says Oscar White Muscarella, grinning in
anticipation of the twist he is about to tell, ‘but the forgers had been careless because
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