The black art market will be systematically fought

The scandalous story of the investigation into the ex-director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, who was convicted of fraud, money laundering and trafficking in antiquities, did not go unnoticed. The French Ministry of Culture organized a commission whose task was to prepare a systematic proposal on how to protect museum funds from stolen and fake exhibits. It is already clear that “thanks” to Martinez’s accomplices, the largest museums in the world (not only the Louvre, but also the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and several serious German collections) have “enriched themselves” with dubious exhibits with forged documents. But not only the ex-director of the Louvre supplied things with a foggy provenance to the first museums in the world. “MK” read the report of the Ministry of Culture of France and evaluated the proposed system for the protection of museum collections.

The problem is really systemic and concerns not only France. The art market is full of fakes and objects with a dubious biography – stolen from temples, tombs, from excavations. The scale of “pollution” of museum funds is difficult to assess, but we are talking about purchases worth tens, if not hundreds, of millions of euros. In June of this year, the French Ministry commissioned museum and art market experts Christian Giacomotto, Marie-Christine Labourdette and Arnaud Oseredchuk to analyze the problem, and their 80-page report came out the other day. The document entitled “Improving the security of acquisitions in national museums” proposes to tighten the system for acquiring new exhibits, to make this process more transparent and open.

A systemic problem requires a systematic approach. First, the experts proposed the creation of a special unit under the French Ministry of Culture, which would centrally manage a network of organizations to verify the origin of exhibits purchased by museums. Secondly, the decision on especially valuable acquisitions should be made by a special interdepartmental commission, which will be created for such cases. Finally, an electronic database should appear, where all museum acquisitions are archived, accessible to specialists and the police. And most importantly, it is necessary to unify the requirements for the origin of works of art and historical artifacts. This is not only about items that go directly to museums, but also about auction sales. It is proposed to fix all major transactions automatically in a common database. And at the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the exhibit, both art experts and the police will be involved in the case. In addition, it is necessary to strengthen education in the field of expertise – already now to train personnel who will join the network in the future.

The offer is reasonable and justified. Long overdue. However, its implementation will require huge financial injections. Does France have such opportunities in this turbulent time? A couple of weeks ago, Altares, a company intelligence agency, reported that nearly 9,000 companies in France had filed for bankruptcy in the third quarter of 2022, the highest number in 25 years. The general economic downturn will inevitably affect the financing of culture. Therefore, it is difficult to say when the country’s Ministry of Culture will be able to bring the idea to life, but there is obviously such a desire. And this system should be implemented not only at the national, but also at the international level.

Just in the last month, stunning facts have been made public that speak of the urgent need to reform the system of museum purchases in the West. So, in early November, a number of dubious exhibits worth more than $ 3 million were seized from the Metropolitan Museum. As a result of an investigation, a Paris court issued an arrest warrant for four Hamburg dealers: Robin Deeb, Serop Simonyan and his two children. It turned out that a native of Cairo, Egyptologist and collector Simonyan, who had long settled in Germany, had been supplying artifacts with foggy provenance to Europe and the USA since the 1970s. The stele of Pharaoh Tutankhamen also passed through his hands, which in 2016 was bought for €8.5 million by the Louvre in Abu Dhabi with the encouragement of Jean-Luc Martinez. Then the director of the Louvre turned a blind eye to the memorandum of experts who doubted the authenticity of the stele. Now the investigation is looking into why. Simonyan had a scheme to legalize “artifacts”. He often gave items from his collection for storage to various museums, which showed them at exhibitions, thereby dubious exhibits received a worthy provenance, and false documents of authenticity added weight to them. And after that, large museums bought items into their own collection. The investigation into Martinez, Simonyan and other members of the criminal network continues. However, this is far from the first high-profile case in the western expanses.

At the same time, an investigation is ongoing into 72-year-old art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who was recently sentenced in one of the cases – a New York art dealer of Indian origin received 10 years in prison for illegally exporting 19 items from India to the United States. However, since his arrest in 2011, more than 2,600 exhibits have already been discovered, which, according to the investigation, were stolen by accomplices from temples and archaeological sites in the Middle East and Southeast Asia for subsequent sale. Many of them later ended up in American and European museums.

There is also a story with fake works of the Russian avant-garde, which were exhibited by art dealer Igor Toporovsky at the Museum of Fine Arts in Belgian Ghent. Then experts from different countries were outraged and wrote an open letter in which they questioned the authenticity of the submitted 24 works. Among the authors were the first names of Russian art – Alexandra Exter, El Lissitzky, Natalya Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, etc. For some reason, the museum management did not consider it necessary to involve independent art historians to check the collection at the stage of preparing the exhibition in 2017. As a result of the scandal, the exhibition was closed ahead of schedule. True, only two years later, Igor Toporovsky was arrested on suspicion of fraud, money laundering and trafficking in stolen goods. The decision is still pending, but since 2020, the art dealer has been held in prison (due to violations of the conditions under which he was previously released on bail).

And these are just a few examples of the black art market emerging from the shadows, exposing secret criminal schemes. Experts find it difficult to assess the scale of the problem: according to various assumptions, the Western art market is filled with dubious exhibits by 30%, or even 70%.

“It is strange that the proposal of the French commission was not made earlier: everyone knew perfectly well what was happening in the field of art,” Vladimir Roshchin, the publisher of catalogs of fakes and works of art that are wanted, says to MK. – In my opinion, such a system will be effective. The art market in general, and in the state collections of the world’s leading museums in particular, have enough dubious things. The so-called inaccuracies in expert assessments of objects, which in the end turn out to be fakes or stolen, turn into damage for museums, amounting to astronomical sums. It is worth tightening the responsibility for experts, then there will be less manipulation on the art market.

In Russia, the problem is also acute, but on a smaller scale, because the amount of funding for museum purchases is much smaller. Under the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation there is a special commission that gives or does not give the go-ahead to the replenishment of state collections: every year each museum submits lists of desired acquisitions. A common electronic database and a more open system for tracking purchases would not hurt us either.