I have been a collector of ancient art for many years and a dealer in antiquities since 1999.
I fear for the future of ancient art collecting and wish to discuss all aspects of the subject with others who are interested.
eBay has grown into a huge international market place for antiquities and a number of allegedly knowledgeable individuals have expressed opimions which range from the sublime to the rediculous: On one extreme some say that all antiquities on eBay are fake! At the other extreme some accuse eBay of facilitating the loss of important UK heritage to North America and elsewhere...
Whilst all this is going on museum staff seem to think that all those who collect and deal in ancient art must be doing something illegal!
Not helping matters is the fact that the professional dealer associations both in the UK and US have not done much credit to themselves - some prominent members have even served jail sentences! This has left dealers and collectors alike vulnerable to what is often unfair criticism.....
What a Mess!!!
What do you think is the way forward for those of us who care??!
Please feel free to express your opinion.
All sensible contributions will be published following approval - no bad language or potentially libelous comments please!
Look forward to hearing from you,
Best wishes,
Eftis Paraskevaides.
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I believe that dealers should develop a Code of Responsibility or Ethics that require them to use due diligence and to obtain full documentation relating back to 1970 with respect to the antiquity that they wish to purchase. And, even if the provenance can be established back to 1970, if there is suspicion that the artifact may have been looted or stolen from the country of origin prior to 1970, no purchase should be made until there is sufficient documentation proving that the artifact had been legally removed or legally exported from the country of origin. Certainly if all dealers exercised this type of due diligence, the trade in objects of antiquities becomes more transparent insuring that only licit artifacts will be appearing on the antiquities market.
ReplyDeleteTheoretically what you say is quite correct. However, even with "legitimate" antiquities this is not always possible. The older collectors in particular, often saw no reason to hold such meticulous records. The result has been that strong provenance has often been lost through complacency..even though legal tender is clearly present. We need to find a sensible way of dealing with this. Unfortunately some archaeologists equate the absence of a detailed provenance with looting! This is not necessarily true and serves to exacerbate the problem and create hostility between the various parties...
ReplyDeleteThe general absence of any documentable provenance is also true for ancient coins, even when they have been in private collections outside their country of origin for decades. I regularly purchased ancient coins from older collectors who could tell me which auction or dealer list they purchased the coins from, often 20-30 years earlier, but had no paperwork beyond a small or note on the coin's collection tag to document it. In most cases, specific coins were not illustrated in these older auction and fixed price sales catalogs (only the high value coins were typically illustrated prior to desktop publishing in recent years) so it is now impossible to prove the provenance. The vast majority of the millions of ancient coins in private collections today lack any paperwork to trace their provenance. To imply that these millions of ancient coins are somehow illicit due to the absence of a paper trail for at least the past 39 years is a transparent ploy by the enemies of private collecting to paint all coins in private collections as illicit.
ReplyDeleteEftis - you must also be familiar with the thousands of Egyptian artifacts that were deaccessioned by the EES and museums in Britain over the years. I frequently visited several antiquities dealers around London in the early 1990s, several of whom had boxes of small Egyptian antiquities that they had purchased from sales at the EES or one of several museums. All of these antiquities were legally exported from Egypt as the excavators' share of excavation finds and later sold to the public. It would be an important contribution to the debate regarding private ownership of antiquities if these deaccession sales could be documented -- which institutions held them, when they were held, approximately how many antiquities were sold to the public and whether an export permit from Egypt was provided to the purchasers of each antiquity. Maybe the EES and the museums that held these sales would be able to provide this data. Or maybe some of those who attended the sales could provide information based on their best recollections. This information would clearly document that thousands upon thousands of Egyptian antiquities in private collections today were legally exported from Egypt but do not have an Egyptian export permit or other documentable paper trail.
Yes, I agree with virtually everything you say. I still think the best way forward is a general amnesty - for coins as well as antiquities. There is no doubt that there are massive numbers of both in collections, which have been legitimately acquired and firmly belong where they are...
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