[MSN] Shelby White in Center Court at the Met

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    Shelby White in Center Court at the Met
    Collecting

BY KATE TAYLOR - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 1, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/53523

Shelby White, wearing a pale green suit and a slightly tense smile, 
welcomed a reporter to the Park Avenue offices of the Leon Levy 
Foundation for an interview about the antiquities collection that has 
made her famous. Choice pieces are now on view, amid 7,500 other works 
from institutional and private lenders and the museum's own collection, 
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Greek and Roman Galleries. The 
central atrium of the galleries, which opened this month, is named for 
Ms. White and her late husband, Leon Levy, in recognition of a $20 
million gift they made to the museum.

Ms. White has rarely granted interviews about her collection. In 
November, Italy asked Ms. White to return more than 20 objects that it 
claims were looted from Italian soil, according to the New York Times. 
Two objects from the Levy-White collection that the Italians have sought 
in the past — a Euphronios krater depicting Hercules slaying Cycnos and 
a krater attributed to the Eucharides Painter, which depicts Zeus and 
his cupbearer Ganymede — are currently on view at the Met.

The Met has not been the only recipient of the couple's philanthropy: 
Through the years, they sponsored excavations in Ashkelon, Israel, 
established a fund at Harvard to support archaeological publications, 
and donated $200 million to start an ancient studies institute at New 
York University, which recently named its first director. In the 
interview with The New York Sun — granted on the condition that her 
quotes had to be approved afterward by her and her spokesman, Fraser 
Seitel — Ms. White shared her thoughts about the Met opening and 
questioned the arguments of the archaeologists who have criticized her.

Asked when she became aware that standards of due diligence in the 
antiquities world were changing, Ms. White responded that it was hard to 
say. "In the '90s, there was talk about provenance, but that meant 
different things" to different people, she said. "Even today, what is 
considered an acceptable provenance is unclear and changing."

In a study published in 2000 in the American Journal of Archaeology, the 
journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, the British 
archaeologists David Gill and Christopher Chippindale found that of the 
works displayed at the Met in the 1990 exhibition "Glories of the Past: 
Ancient Art From the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection," 84% first 
surfaced after 1973. That was the year that the AIA adopted the 1970 
Unesco convention on preventing illicit trade in cultural property, and, 
at that point, Mr. Gill said in an e-mail, museums and collectors were 
on notice about the problem of looting in source countries.

Ms. White questioned the basis for using the Unesco convention as a 
benchmark of legality. Asked what date she would suggest as a cut-off 
for collectors or museums, she said she didn't really have an opinion. 
"You could choose a date today, but would that be appropriate in 30 
years? I don't know, I'm not a legal scholar."

The director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello, last year made a deal 
with Italy to return several disputed objects, including the Met's own 
Euphronios krater, in exchange for long-term loans of similar objects. 
But he seems to have done so reluctantly, and in his public comments, he 
has vigorously defended the right of museums to continue collecting 
antiquities. He emphasizes that museums make their collections available 
to many more people than governments do and that art is best seen as it 
is at the Met, in the context of many cultures. "We are a world museum 
with an international audience," he said last week, standing in the Leon 
Levy and Shelby White Court. "This is the patrimony of all of our visitors."

Some collectors and museum officials argue that if uncertain provenance 
had in recent decades kept them from purchasing works that were offered 
to them these objects would simply have been snatched up by other 
collectors, who had fewer moral qualms, and perhaps less interest in 
sharing their collections with the public.

The Princeton philosopher and author of "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a 
World of Strangers," Kwame Anthony Appiah, said this is a valid concern 
as, he said, is the argument of archaeologists that buying unprovenanced 
objects encourages further looting. "These are both genuine 
considerations: disincentivizing further looting and protecting objects 
that have already been looted," he said. "It's hard to do both; it's a 
complicated trade-off."

Now that the market for looted or unprovenanced cultural property in 
America has largely disappeared, Mr. Appiah said, "we have to accept 
that a lot of this stuff — say, in Iraq — is just going to go into 
Middle Eastern collections, or Japanese collections, or collections in 
other places where they don't have these scruples."

Another collector of antiquities, Michael Steinhardt, who is a friend of 
Ms. White's and a proprietor of this newspaper, said he believes Ms. 
White has been singled out by the Italians for two reasons: So much of 
her collection is published, allowing the Italians to check it against 
evidence they have gathered in criminal investigations into antiquities 
dealers, and she and her husband have been such major philanthropists.

"She and her husband, Leon, have been generous to a fault to all sorts 
of institutions" involved in study of the ancient world, he said. 
"Therefore she is a ripe target. Those people who are pursuing her don't 
seek justice; they seek victory." He added: "Further, I would say, 
Shelby has stood alone, and was not as strongly defended as she should 
have been by those very institutions to whom she had been a too-generous 
donor."

Mr. Steinhardt himself lost a legal battle over a gold phiale from the 
fourth century B.C.E. — a vessel used for pouring libations — which he 
bought for $1.2 million from the dealer Robert Hecht, who is now on 
trial in Rome for antiquities trafficking, along with the former curator 
at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Marion True. Italy claimed that the phiale 
was illegally exported, and eventually won its return, after American 
Customs seized it from Mr. Steinhardt's home.

In Mr. Steinhardt's view, the disproportionate targeting by source 
countries of American collectors and museums "reflects the weak and 
inept policy of the American government." American museums, for the most 
part, are not government-owned, as, say, French, Italian, and British 
museums are. Mr. Steinhardt said: "It seems to me that [the source 
countries] go after that place whose government is weakest and doesn't 
have the courage to stand up for its citizens. The U.S. State Department 
and the U.S. cultural policy professionals have really, I think, done a 
great disservice to the cultural institutions in this country."

A spokeswoman for the State Department said in an e-mail message that 
the department had no role in the litigation of Mr. Steinhardt's case. 
"As a State Party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention … it is the policy of 
the [U.S. Government] to assist countries that have a problem with 
looting and illicit trafficking of their cultural property," she 
continued. "The USG does not believe that the US should be a haven for 
looted or stolen artifacts from other countries." She also noted that 
current U.S. import restrictions "do permit the importation of the 
restricted antiquities if they carry valid documentation that 
demonstrates legitimate provenance" and that "[t]here are many 
documented collections in the world that can circulate without 
contributing to the contemporary looting of sites and from which U.S. 
institutions can continue to form collections."

Ms. White argued that the scrutiny of antiquities collectors has had 
unintended effects: "We thought it was very important to lend our 
objects, to publish and exhibit our collection," she said. "The 
unfortunate thing we're seeing now is that other collectors are not 
going to show their collections because they don't want problems. So 
you're seeing a lot more secrecy than 15 years ago."

***

Because the Levys have published their collection, the Italians have 
recently been able to learn quite a bit about it. According to the 
Times, the Italians have traced nine objects, including the Euphronios 
and the Eucharides kraters, to Giacomo Medici, a dealer who was 
convicted of antiquities trafficking by an Italian court in 2004. The 
Levys never bought directly from Medici, but, like other collectors and 
like museums including the Met and the J. Paul Getty Museum, they bought 
from dealers who did. In the Levys' case this particularly included the 
British dealer Robin Symes. (Asked about the Met's business with Symes, 
Mr. de Montebello said, "Every other museum around the world was buying 
from the same dealers.")

According to Peter Watson's "The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey 
of Looted Antiquities: From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest 
Museums," when the Italians raided Medici's warehouse in Switzerland, 
they found extensive records of his transactions, as well as thousands 
of photographs. The photographs often document a given object in several 
different states: first broken and covered with dirt, suggesting it was 
recently taken from the ground; then in various stages of restoration; 
then, in some cases, on display in a museum, with Medici standing by 
proudly. Some of the objects photographed in the initial, dirt-encrusted 
state are now in the Levy-White collection.

Asked if she was aware of Medici's role in the market and that Symes 
bought from him, Ms. White said, "I never met Giacomo Medici."

The Levys' generosity and the Met's displaying the objects in question 
arouse vigorous debates in the scholarly world. "Some people would say 
it's a problem because it's whitewashing the Levy-White name," a 
professor at DePaul University who specializes in law governing cultural 
property and a former president of the Archaeological Institute of 
America, Patricia Gerstenblith, said of the Met's putting the couple's 
names on a gallery. "It is certainly lending a major institutional 
backing to people who are widely known to have questions about their 
collection." The AIA has taken a strong stance against the acquisition 
of objects without known provenance prior to 1973. Its journal, the 
American Journal of Archaeology, refuses to publish the initial 
scholarly presentation of any object acquired by its owner after 1973, 
unless its existence is documented before that date or it was legally 
exported from its country of origin.

"It sends the clear message that the Metropolitan feels comfortable with 
the relationship of the Levy-Whites to illegal antiquities and to the 
continued destruction of archaeological sites in the Mediterranean 
world," a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania 
and the former director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of 
Archaeology and Anthropology, Richard Leventhal, said.

Mr. Gill was more emphatic. "The Met is honoring two of the greatest 
collectors of looted antiquities from the late 20th century," he wrote 
in an e-mail message. "It would be like naming the Kenyan safari park 
after the poacher who had bagged the largest number of elephant tusks."

Read these comments, the Met spokesman, Harold Holzer, responded with 
indignation. "This image that her critics have created of Shelby White 
in a pith helmet destroying archeological sites is the most fantastic, 
ridiculous, really obscene misrepresentation that can be imagined," he 
said. "Shelby White and Leon Levy bought things in good faith from 
dealers and auction houses," he continued. "Unlike many collectors, 
they've consistently exhibited their work, published their collection, 
supported archeological research, and lent their work to museums to 
round out exhibitions or fill out gaps in collections — putting their 
private works on public view for examination and scrutiny and study. 
They have been model collectors and museum benefactors."

The Levy-White publication fund at Harvard poses a quandary for 
scholars, because such funding is in short supply. Some classics and 
archaeology departments, including those at Bryn Mawr College and the 
University of Cincinnati, have adopted policies of not applying for or 
accepting money from the fund.

"We felt that, as admirable as it was for them to want to support 
archaeological publication, we didn't want to give our name and our 
reputation to them by accepting funds," the chairman of the classical 
and Near Eastern archaeology department at Bryn Mawr, James Wright, said.

The department does not have similar policies on working with the Met, 
or with the Cycladic Art Foundation, of which Ms. White is the 
chairwoman. Students regularly do summer internships with the 
foundation's Cycladic Art Museum in Greece, and Mr. Wright said he 
frequently writes recommendations for his students to intern at the Met. 
Several alumni of the department work at the Met, including the chief 
curator of Greek and Roman art, Carlos Picón.

"We're not such Puritans," Mr. Wright said. The Met's collection, he 
said, is "a tremendous resource," and the department would never 
discourage students from working with it or with the Getty's collection. 
"What we do require is that our students abide by ethics code of the 
AIA," he said. But, he added, "especially in this day and age, when so 
many students are interested in museum careers, we do what we can to 
promote them, and we simply make them aware of the ethical issues, and 
then they can decide for themselves."

The Getty recently adopted a new policy: The museum will not acquire an 
object unless there is documentation of its having been in America 
before 1970; its having been out of its original country before 1970, 
and legally imported into America, or its having been legally exported 
from its original country and legally imported into America after 1970. 
Mr. de Montebello has implied that the Met will not follow the Getty's 
lead. In a lecture last fall on the history of antiquities collecting, 
he showed a slide of a beautiful classical torso and said: "Frankly, the 
refusal to acquire and thus bring into the public domain such a 
masterpiece simply as a matter of principle or ideology … is 
unacceptable." If a museum declined such a sculpture, he warned, "it 
would be driven underground — and I do not mean, by some miracle, to the 
place from which it came."

While Ms. White is being honored in New York, the Italians and Greeks 
appear to be deciding whether to charge Symes, a dealer from whom she 
bought frequently through the years, with antiquities trafficking. In 
"The Medici Conspiracy," Mr. Watson reports that the Italian 
investigators who searched Medici's warehouse found documentation of a 
close business relationship between Medici and Symes; for some period, 
the two even shared an administrative address in Geneva. And Mr. Watson 
said in an interview that the Italian prosecutor, Paolo Ferri, has said 
repeatedly that he intends to charge Symes.

A lawyer who is pursuing Symes in an unrelated case and is also the 
London counsel for the Getty, Ludovic de Walden said: "Symes is next on 
the [Italians'] list. That's what I've been told."

Asked in an e-mail message whether he plans to charge Symes, Mr. Ferri 
replied that it would be premature to comment on his intentions.

Last April, the Greek police raided a villa on the island of Schinoussa, 
in the Cyclades, that used to belong to Symes and his partner, Christo 
Michaelides, and now belongs to Christo's sister, Despina Papadimitriou, 
and her children. In an e-mail, the head of the section of the police 
that handles antiquities smuggling, George Gligoris, confirmed that he 
has been conducting an investigation of Symes, focused particularly on a 
marble torso of a young woman that, according to the Los Angeles Times, 
Symes sold to the Getty for $3.3 million.

For many years, Symes and Michaelides shared a globe-trotting lifestyle. 
In addition to the villa on Schinoussa, they owned a Philip 
Johnson-designed townhouse in New York filled with art nouveau furniture 
and a house in London with an indoor pool surrounded by ancient busts. 
They drove a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley. In 1999, however, Michaelides 
died in a freak accident. Part-way through a dinner given by the Levys 
at a home they had rented in Tuscany, he got up from the table and 
disappeared. Later, he was discovered, having fallen down some steps and 
hit his head against a portable radiator. He died in a hospital the next 
day.

Michaelides was from a wealthy Greek family, and his sister Despina had 
married into an even wealthier one. At several points, she had provided 
loan guarantees or cash for Symes and Michaelides's antiquities 
business. In the wake of Michaelides's death, she and the rest of his 
family believed that they had inherited his half of the dealership. 
Symes disagreed. At first, he claimed that Michaelides was not his 
business partner, but merely an employee. Later, he changed his 
argument, asserting that because they were life partners, like a husband 
and wife, he had inherited all of Michaelides's assets, including his 
half of the business and the villa on Schinoussa. (Symes simultaneously 
maintains that although he and Michaelides lived together for three 
decades and were accepted by all of their friends as a couple, their 
relationship was platonic.)

The dispute landed in court, and the ensuing legal battle revealed a 
good deal about Symes's business practices. Because the Papadimitrious 
believed that Symes was not disclosing all his inventory, they hired 
detectives to trail him all over the world. With the help of their 
legwork, Mr. Watson says, the Papadimitrious' lawyer, Mr. de Walden, 
discovered that Symes was storing his inventory at 33 different sites.

At this point, Symes was supposed to be conducting business only with 
permission of the court, but Mr. de Walden discovered he had lied about 
two major sales, saying he had sold an Egyptian statue for only $1.6 
million, when he sold it for $4.5 million, and that he sold some Eileen 
Gray furniture for $4 million, when in fact it was $14 million. The 
British judge, Justice Peter Smith, charged him with contempt of court 
and handed him a two-year prison sentence, of which he served eight 
months. About the same time, Symes went bankrupt, and Levy — who, 
according to Mr. Watson, was supporting him financially — died.

The Greek raid on Schinoussa led to a new twist in the 
Symes-Papadimitriou case. The police found more than 100 undeclared 
antiquities in the villa, in addition to photographs that Mr. Gligoris 
is now using in his investigation.

At the time of the raid, Despina Papadimitriou said she inherited the 
objects from her brother and that she would cooperate in the 
investigation. But, in November, a Greek prosecutor charged her and her 
three children with illegal possession of antiquities. Mr. Watson 
suggested to the Sun that this may be a tactical move to pressure the 
family to collaborate further in gathering evidence against Symes.

***

Ms. White described what has befallen Symes as "a great tragedy." She 
said, "He lost his lifetime partner. He has suffered tremendous 
financial and health problems."

Several messages left on Symes's cell phone, as well as ones passed 
through his agents in bankruptcy and a dealer he stayed with 
temporarily, went unreturned. At one point, someone answered Symes's 
cell phone but, when a reporter identified herself, said that Symes was 
out of the country. Asked who he was, he gave his name only as Peter.

Ms. White declined to comment on her negotiations with the Italians, 
except to say they are "amicable." Until this point Ms. White has 
defended her and her husband's buying practices with the fierceness and 
the pertinacity of a Roman general, but the negotiations may end with 
her conceding at least some of the requested objects.

"Have standards of collecting changed?" she said. "Of course. Nobody 
wants to buy something ripped off the wall."