Sacred and Stolen Read online

  Advance Praise for Sacred and Stolen

  “Not since Thomas Hoving made the mummies dance has there been such a lively and engaging look at the inner workings of a major museum. Based on Gary Vikan’s decades-long tenure at the helm of the Walters Art Museum, this book brings his exceptional flair for scholarship and pop culture—which has seen Graceland described as a contemporary Byzantium—to showing how to make a great collection come alive. Having played a minor role in some of Vikan’s adventures, I know at first hand that the work of a museum director is often more Raiders of the Lost Ark than Father Knows Best. Vikan’s autobiographical account is a welcome addition to the often bone-dry literature about modern museums.”

  James Bradburne, Director, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

  “The world of museums, art collectors, and trade in cultural heritage ranges from murky to opaque, though it is always intriguing. Gary Vikan’s wonderful, insightful memoir lifts the curtain and provides an invaluable, honest, and engaging glimpse behind the scenes of the museum world. A must-read for anyone interested in museums, curating, and collecting.”

  Dr. Noah Charney, best-selling author of The Art of Forgery

  “One-upping fictional art whodunits, Gary Vikan shares a variety of nerve-racking real life experiences to provide new insights into the world of art museum directors. Lurking behind all that Technicolor museum glamour are many shades of gray, a fascinating cast of characters, and lots of intrigue.”

  Tom Freudenheim, former Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Worcester Art Museum; former Assistant Secretary for Museums, Smithsonian Institution

  “In his fascinating memoir, Sacred and Stolen, Gary Vikan invites us into the mind of a leading American museum director as he wrestles with the issue of our day: whether or not to buy art that, by all indications, was looted. Vikan navigates the issue with humor, aplomb, and a common sense that is both reassuring and, at times, treacherous. You may not always agree with his decisions, but you’ll find him an able guide to one of the most confounding and controversial issues facing the art world today. Rarely have we had such a candid window into the thinking that guides America’s biggest cultural institutions.”

  Jason Felch, co-author of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities in the World’s Richest Museum

  “As a writer Gary Vikan has three virtues hardly ever found together. He genuinely loves art and is extraordinarily erudite on the subject; he cares about what’s right and wrong; and he is wonderfully alive to the human capacity for absurd behavior. Gary’s scholarship and professional ethics, combined with his impish sense of humor, make for delightful reading.”

  Dan Hofstadter, author of Goldberg’s Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade

  Angel, fresco, dome fragment looted from the Church of Saint Euphemianos, Lysi, northern Cyprus; Byzantine, 13th century. Now in the Byzantine Museum, Nicosia, Cyprus. (Photo courtesy the Menil Foundation, Houston)

  The photograph shows the partial removal of the clear paper facing attached by the looters.

  Copyright © 2016 by Gary Vikan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

  This edition published by SelectBooks, Inc.

  For information address SelectBooks, Inc., New York, New York.

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-59079-401-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vikan, Gary, author.

  Title: Sacred and stolen: confessions of a museum director / Gary Vikan.

  Other titles: Confessions of a museum director

  Description: First edition. | New York: SelectBooks, Inc., [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016006973

  Subjects: LCSH: Vikan, Gary. | Art museum directors--United

  States--Biography. | Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, Md.)--History. Classification: LCC N516.B42 V56 2016 | DDC 709.2 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20160069733

  Shown on the cover:

  Gary Vikan in the 18th-Century Gallery, the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, 2012. (Photography by Sam Holden)

  Picture frame photo: LiliGraphie/Shutterstock.com

  Jacket and book design by Janice Benight

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  DEDICATED TO

  Elana, Nicole, and Sonia

  My Most Enthusiastic Editors

  WITH A SPECIAL THANKS TO

  David Van Biema

  Contents

  Foreword by Arthur Houghton

  Introduction

  Chapter 1FINDING MY RELIGION

  Chapter 2SAILING TOWARD BYZANTIUM

  Chapter 3SAVING A GOLD KEY FROM THE TOILET

  Chapter 4TROUBLE WITH FAKES

  Chapter 5SEDUCED BY SAINT PETER

  Chapter 6“CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, PARIS TIME”

  Chapter 7WORKING THE NUMINOUS

  Chapter 8“I LOVED TO FONDLE IT”

  Chapter 9“ALL THE RED FLAGS ARE UP”

  Chapter 10THE MEN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

  Chapter 11“VOMITING BLOOD”

  Chapter 12MY FATHER’S OBIT

  Chapter 13READY TO EXPLODE

  Chapter 14GETTING BEAT UP WITH SHEVARDNADZE

  Chapter 15A MITZVAH ACQUISITION

  Chapter 16WORKING FOR THE PRESIDENT

  Chapter 17“THEY’LL SCARE AWAY THE RICH OLD LADIES”

  Chapter 18LIVING WITH LOOT

  Chapter 19THE MYSTERIOUS MR. EGRETTE

  Afterword

  Index

  About the Author

  Foreword

  It is impossible to read Gary Vikan’s Sacred and Stolen without gaining the sense that few professions can be as complex, rewarding, and frustrating as that of a museum director. John Coolidge, Director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum for twenty years, once remarked that the search committee that selected him was, in his words, looking for “Jesus Christ with a PhD.” But as Gary’s story unfolds, it’s clear that a museum director must be more and do more than that. Success rests on versatility and the ability to do and be many things.

  Sacred and Stolen is a romp, serious and hilarious at the same time, through events that capture the many things the author was required to be, as Senior Associate at Dumbarton Oaks, and as chief curator, then Director at the Walters Art Museum. We see Gary as connoisseur, art critic, and educator; Gary as instructor, who tells his readers a little more than less, no doubt in the hope they will come away more knowledgeable about art and human history. He is the sleuth, who uncovers the background of a stolen Renoir, a mysteriously returned silver bowl, and a remorseful museum superintendant infatuated with objects that connected him with the past. He is the straitlaced “Minnesota kid,” intolerant of hypocrisy, double standards, pretensions, and false piety, ever aware of people with too fancy dress, or tones too glib. He is the moralist, concerned, throughout, about doing the right thing (and resigning a presidential commission, on principle, in protest against the Iraq War).

  Gary Vikan is a storyteller, and Sacred and Stolen is a passage through stories that illustrate the sometimes bizarre situations that museum curators and directors encounter.

  His storytelling is at its best in his narrative about a set of Byzantine mosaics that were looted from the Church of Panagia Kanakaria in Turkish-occupied Cyprus, which turned up in the hands of an Indianapolis art dealer. Gary calls himself a “Kanakaria junkie,” and his story, which epitomizes the title of his book, exposes everything that is b
oth bad and good about the dark world of destruction and looting and the efforts made to have the mosaics returned to the government of Cyprus. Like all good stories, it has a hook to it, about men who knew too much to testify at trial, knowing that doing so might fatally compromise the case for return.

  And finally, there is Gary the confessor, who lays bare the close calls and outright mistakes he says he made in the course of his career. He blames himself for “heavy-handed scholarship” in describing an early exhibition he held at Princeton. He declares his tactlessness and the scolding he got when he exposed a group of sculptures as fakes (although years later he would be shown as being right). He confesses near calls and scrapes, one so grave that a foreign ambassador called to say he held Gary Vikan personally responsible for creating an international incident. He acknowledges making a costly error in promoting an exhibition of the art of Georgia that collapsed (even the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze, could not save it). And he almost confesses to accepting objects whose provenances were so ambiguous as to raise red flags about their legitimacy.

  Any museum director, indeed any collector, would be familiar with this story. The passion to acquire, which can border on mania, can at times be in direct conflict with one’s better judgment—the background voice that says, “No, no, look out. The dealer is giving you a false story. The thing’s directly out of the ground/church/rightful and legal possession of another country!” Pulled in different directions, a museum has no choice: its investigation of an object’s background must be diligent and complete. Secretly, one may hope to find enough ambiguity to suggest that the object one wants so badly may not be looted, or that its background is so clouded that it can be bought. And exactly such a thing happened with the acquisition by Gary for Dumbarton Oaks of a remarkable icon of Saint Peter, which examination after the fact showed to have had its surface painted over, almost certainly to disguise its passage from the Balkans. Was it stolen, then? Probably. But one could never know, and one could never know the icon’s true origin. One can imagine Gary’s sigh of relief. Not because he, and Dumbarton Oaks, had gotten away with something, but because an important work of art had been added to a great collection in an institution that would exhibit it, study it, and preserve it for the greater public good.

  In the end, serving the public is what museums and museum directors are supposed to do, and Gary makes clear that in his view, the collection and preservation of art by museums across the world is in the public good. He would certainly argue that a country’s cultural patrimony should not be looted. But he would argue also that art without a specific known origin should be given safe harbor and not driven underground, into the black market, dispersed among private collections, or, worse, forced to remain in countries where it will be destroyed. To Gary Vikan, the preservation and safekeeping of man’s cultural heritage is, in every way imaginable, the ultimate test of doing the right thing.

  —ARTHUR HOUGHTON

  Former curator of ancient art at the Getty, former appointee to the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee

  Introduction

  Our head of finance came into my office at the Walters Art Museum very early on Wednesday, June 10, 1998, with the cash—lots of cash—in strapped packets of $100 bills. A small group had gathered with me that morning, including our brilliant, hyper-kinetic Curator of Ancient Art, Ellen Reeder, and one of the contract staff she had found to help with the current exhibition, Gold of the Nomads. The contract person spoke Russian and Ukrainian, which was essential for the meeting that was to begin at 9:00 a.m. with Ivan Yavtuschenko, Deputy Director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kiev. Ivan was built like a small bear, always wore deeply tinted glasses, and smiled perpetually, even when he was cheating me and when I was insulting him. Also essential for that meeting was the $20,000 our CFO walked in with. I could tell that our moneyman was very upset; the previous afternoon our banker had grilled him about requesting that much cash, dropping broad hints about money laundering. Money laundering! I had enough to worry about already.

  There on my conference table next to the coffee and pastries was the pile of strapped $100 bills—unmarked old bills, as Ivan instructed. After some disingenuous greetings, as I marveled at the long, pea-green fingernails of the young redhead Ivan brought along, we went directly into the money transfer. (By then, Ivan’s son and translator, Orest, had eaten most of the pastries and had put all of the sugar packets and creamers into his briefcase.) I had an ingenious way to prove I had given Ivan the cash. It was a foolproof receipt, even for someone as devious as Ivan. I had bought a Kodak disposable camera, and I asked my secretary to take photographs of Ivan and me and the fanned-out money as we both held up the front page of that day’s edition of The Baltimore Sun. We captured the players, the day, and the cash on film. And we’re smiling like crazy. This, I thought, was straight out of James Bond.

  As we’re having a jolly time fanning the cash and taking pictures, the redhead with the long fingernails asked me for some water. I went out to get a Styrofoam cup and filled it with tap water and came back into my office. And there she was, behind my desk, sitting in my chair. No one ever sat in my chair except for me, so I reluctantly put the cup down just to her right. But instead of taking a drink, she dipped her fingers into the water and expertly began to count the bills in one of the four strapped bundles as if she worked at a casino, which maybe she did, I thought.

  Six weeks earlier, on May 1st, I had a tense meeting with Françoise Cachin, Director of French Museums, at her office just off the La Place des Pyramides in Paris. My goal was to get Gold of the Nomads into the exhibition hall of the Grand Palais in a partnership deal, and this entailed money and promises. My promise was to deliver a stunning selection of ancient gold from Ukraine, and the price to her government would be $200,000. This was fine, and after some haggling, I convinced her to commit as well to the $100,000 “loan fee” that our Ukrainian partner museums insisted would go to upgrade their galleries, although none of us believed this. I did not mention the $20,000 in cash for Ivan since I had decided to bury it elsewhere in the budget.

  Because it was a bribe—or, as I prefer to call it, a cash incentive, given to Ivan for pressing our case and obtaining for our show the astonishingly beautiful Golden Grivna (“breastplate”) with its scenes of animal combat and Scythian daily life. This precious and ponderous ornament is to ancient jewelry what the Parthenon is to architecture; there is nothing else like it in the world. How did we hit on $20,000? That was the cost in those days of a Toyota van Ivan wanted, and I was pretty sure it was so his son Orest could set up a taxi business in Kiev. This, I suppose, made me a start-up investor.

  Gary Vikan presenting $20,000 in strapped $100 bills to Ivan Yavtuschenko, Deputy Director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kiev. The director’s office, the Walters Art Museum, June 10, 1998.

  I flew later that day to London to meet up with a group of my trustees who had come to celebrate the opening of a Walters exhibition at the National Gallery called Masters of Light. We stayed at Claridges with the director and trustees of our partner museum in San Francisco, the Legion of Honor. On the evening before the public opening, we were toasted at a lavish dinner in the Sainsbury Wing by Director Neil McGregor. Many pictures were taken and we were happy and proud. The following afternoon I was off to Tbilisi, Georgia, to negotiate an exhibition of national treasures, called The Land of Myth and Fire, with representatives of President Eduard Shevardnadze. It was a dazzling and glamorous time for me as a museum director, and I loved it.

  But it was also a messy time. The bribe to Ivan did no good; we waited but never got the Golden Grivna. And fifteen months after that trip to Tbilisi, the Georgian show went down in flames, very publicly, all over the newspapers. The head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, was fiercely opposed to us. He claimed that we would make copies of their sacred works of art, send back the copies, and keep the originals.

&nbs
p; Most Georgians believed him, and I was told a curse had been placed on my family and me by some dangerous people “up north,” in the Caucasus—the land of revenge and black magic. Finally, President Eduard Shevardnadze caved in and canceled our show, just ten weeks before the opening. Yet even then, I can’t say that I despaired. After all, this was just part of the game. And I was a player.

  THE ART MUSEUM PORTRAYED IN Sacred and Stolen is not one of the crowded press conference and the fancy donor dinner at the National Gallery for the opening of Masters of Light. That is the orderly part of this world; it is already familiar, and it is often little more than elegant theatre. This book is set backstage amid the messiness of museum life the public doesn’t see, but should. We are, after all, public institutions spending public funds. Mine is a world of looted antiquities, crooked dealers, deluded collectors, fakes, thefts by museum staff—and a world of bribes that don’t work and exhibitions that fail. This is a world where people like you and me fall in love with art they shouldn’t fall in love with, and then do some very stupid things. It’s a white-water world where controlled chaos often reigns right up to the moment of the ribbon cutting.

  As I look back over the four decades of my professional life, I imagine myself as a bobbing cork swept along by powerful currents that were sometimes totally beyond my control. I was often bemused, occasionally exasperated, but always entertained. And from the beginning, I was on a sacred quest. I wanted to create for museum visitors a sense of awe before great works of art matching what we feel as we enter a Gothic cathedral—a sense of the divine, of the “numinous.” And I was an evangelist of the aesthetic: I wanted to make it free to all.

  It turned out to be both an opportune and a treacherous moment to pursue my ambitions. Just as I was beginning my museum career, the international art market was flooded with Byzantine art stolen from the churches of northern Cyprus in the aftermath of the 1974 Turkish invasion. The art of Byzantium is my specialty; this meant that through much of the ’80s, as I struggled to capture the numinous, I was becoming increasingly entangled in the sinister world of illegal art trafficking. And this eventually landed me in the witness box of a federal courthouse in Indianapolis and, later on, it led to an appointment by President Clinton to serve on his Cultural Property Advisory Committee.