stolen art met with public yawn

NEW YORK -- It's Friday date night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Great Hall is jammed with swirling crowds meeting for music, drinks, fine cuisine, even a little art-viewing.

Only steps away from the revelry, the Greek and Roman Art galleries are as hushed as a church and almost as empty, except for the guard standing next to a single display case holding a large painted pot.

Now and then, someone approaches to peer at the pot. A middle-aged couple whisper to each other: Is that it? After 30 seconds they move away, the woman taking a backward glance. One last look.

One last look, indeed. After 2008, this 2,500-year-old vessel, known as the Euphronios krater (aka "the hot pot"), won't be here, in this museum or in the USA. It will be back in Italy from whence it came more than 30 years ago. Going with it will be 20 other ancient works the Metropolitan has been forced to return, despite decades of denial and defiance, because it turns out -- surprise! -- they're stolen goods.

Looted from archaeological sites by Italian tomb robbers, they were sold to the Met by middlemen art dealers with false stories about how they were acquired. The most benign explanation: The Met was snookered. Or, the cynical explanation offered by critics: The museum was so overcome with lust for spectacular objects that it ignored clear signs of nefarious doings.

And the Euphronios krater (a vessel for mixing water and wine, sort of an ancient Greek punch bowl) certainly is a spectacular object, one of few signed works by Euphronios. It is in the top five most important artworks ever acquired by the Met. It arguably is an outstanding piece, not just in Greek antiquities but in all categories of art.

And yet, as it is about to leave these shores, it seems as if hardly anyone in New York, let alone the rest of the USA, really cares.

Well, except for Harry Brent.

It's personal for Brent, an English professor at Baruch College here. Every year since 1988, he has sent his students to see the Euphronios and write an essay about the scenes it depicts from Homer's Iliad. He says returning it may be the ethical and legally correct thing to do, but he's inconsolable.

"Where do we stop?" he despairs. "Must we put every mummy back in its tomb? Museums will become empty shells."

Of course, it's not that nobody cares. Archaeologists, lawyers and prosecutors care. Museum directors, art scholars and connoisseurs, international art dealers, millionaire art collectors and social-climbing museum donors all care. But they make up an elite gaggle who mostly talk to -- or in some cases, snipe at -- each other.

Not a clue

Meanwhile, a few museum-goers are starting to ask questions about the antiquities in their museums: How did they end up here, despite being considered stolen property under U.S. law, foreign law and the 1970 UNESCO treaty protecting cultural heritage? In many cases, the museums don't know for sure -- or aren't saying.

"Ordinary museum-goers have no idea most of these antiquities were looted, and they're shocked when they hear it," says Roger Atwood, author of Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World.

On a recent Friday night, a dozen New Yorkers showed up for an insider's tour of the Met organized by Saving Antiquities for Everyone, a group that campaigns against looting. Led by Oscar White Muscarella, an archaeologist and dissident Met staffer who passionately opposes looting, the group moved among display cases in the Near Eastern Art galleries as Muscarella pointed out various objects: a carved stone statue of a Mesopotamian king here, a copper bust of an Akkadian (maybe) ruler over there. Muscarella rails that little is known about many objects because they weren't excavated scientifically.

"We don't know where these things came from," he growls. "Who made them? Why were they made? How were they used? What was the context in which they were found?"

Most in the group are riveted. "It's fascinating. It's a new angle to think about, whether you're looking at it for its beauty or its history," says Lynn Rollins, a state employee who joined the tour with a friend out of curiosity. "Lots of times you walk through the museum and you don't hear anything" about how the objects came to be in New York.

The group's president, Cindy Ho, who started the organization after being shocked by looting of the Baghdad museum after the U.S. invasion in 2003, acknowledges that, so far, most ordinary people are not paying attention to the looting debate, but she aims to change that. One way is to press museums to make full disclosure about how they came to own antiquities. "The tours are an opportunity to make the point that this actually has a lot to do with you."

But so far there's not a lot of angst among ordinary New Yorkers in the way there might be if, say, prized Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter were about to be traded. "It's probably a low priority on the list of things people worry about," another tour taker, advertising writer Phyllis Halterman, says.

"Why would they care?" scoffs Tom Hoving, the provocative former director of the Metropolitan and the man who bought the Euphronios krater for a record-setting $1 million in 1972 after, he says, a dealer presented a supposedly legitimate provenance.

"This is a very arcane (art category). You've got to know a lot about classical mythology that the common person or the TV-watching audience isn't going to know," Hoving says. "Now if Claude Monet had done it, you bet you'd have a crowd around it."

It's too bad, because attention should be paid, he says. In agreeing to return antiquities, the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, last month signed a historic accord with Italy that calls for some disputed antiquities to be repatriated over the next few years in return for long-term loans from Italy of antiquities of similar beauty and importance.

Setting a precedent

In his public statements since, Montebello has been by turns mournful and peevish about the agreement; now he's not talking at all. In earlier interviews, he blamed "radical archaeologists" and "misplaced patriotism" by the Italians for his predicament. He even told The New York Times he hopes he's not remembered just for returning disputed objects.

Still, the accord is likely to stand as a model for other U.S. museums with disputed antiquities. "This is a really big deal," Hoving says. "Philippe doesn't want to be remembered for it, but I wish I had done it. It atones for their miserable work -- for my miserable work."

'Ripped out of the ground'

Indeed, the accord could usher in a new era of heightened scrupulousness in collecting, now that museums know they are in the legal cross hairs. Armed with serendipitously discovered new evidence, including thousands of Polaroids of looted artifacts, some with the dirt still on them, Italy has suddenly turned aggressive in pursuing its pilfered patrimony. It is prosecuting Marion True, the former antiquities curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and American dealer Robert Hecht, who sold the Euphronios krater to the Met, for allegedly trafficking in looted objects.

Italy has recovered a handful of disputed objects from the Getty and has approached other museums, including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. And other countries, such as Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Peru, have been emboldened to start demanding repatriation of their disputed antiquities.

Richard Leventhal, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, says museums have to change not just their policies but their attitudes. They can no longer argue that most of what can be known about an artifact comes from the aesthetic qualities of the object itself and only a fraction from its archaeological context.

"The basis of a great, universal museum is understanding how objects fit together to represent a culture, and context is crucial to understanding the relationship between objects," he says. "Buying objects ripped out of the ground denies the context."

It also reflects badly on how Americans see other cultures. "If we feel that we can at any time step on any law to purchase these objects from another culture, what does that say about our role in the world today?"

But archaeologists have been saying this for years, and thus far it has fallen on deaf ears. Even after the Met's Italy deal, Montebello and his fellow museum directors continue to vigorously deny that museums abet illegal trafficking in antiquities, arguing millions of such objects are in American museums, and so far only a relative handful have been called into question.

Given that these views are widely shared, Atwood says, it's hard for archaeologists to be entirely optimistic. "There is a huge amount of information already lost and sites destroyed to feed this trade, and it's going to keep on happening."

Unless, he says, the museum-going public starts paying attention.

Euphronios krater

Country of origin: Italy

The 2,500-year-old vessel was dug out by grave robbers in 1971, then sold to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met has agreed to return it in exchange for loans of other Italian treasures.

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