[CPProt.net] Italy: Met Is Seeking Dialogue on 'Hot Pot'

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

November 9, 2005

Met Is Seeking Dialogue on 'Hot Pot'
BY Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 9, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/22720

The Metropolitan Museum is facing threats from Italian authorities who claim
that the Euphronios Krater, a fifth century B.C.E. vase that the museum
acquired in 1971, was looted. The provenance of the work has long been the
subject of controversy. But Italian prosecutors say that evidence currently
being used to prosecute a former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum could
also prove that the vase was exported illegally.

In a series of recent articles, the Los Angeles Times has outlined how a
case recently brought in Italy against the curator, Marion True, and an
American art dealer, Robert Hecht Jr., for allegedly conspiring to acquire
looted antiquities may affect other American museums. Mr. Hecht is the
dealer who sold the Met the vase.

Prosecutors have used Polaroid photos seized in 1995 from convicted dealer
Giacomo Medici to call into question 42 works currently in Getty's
collection. Similar Polaroids seem to link eight objects to the Met,
according to the Times.

Other museums with works the Italian authorities are questioning include the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Princeton University Art Museum, the
Toledo Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Italian authorities have not contacted the Met regarding the new evidence,
and museum officials refused to comment on the prosecution of Ms. True or to
elaborate beyond a statement saying that in February it contacted the
Italian Ministry of Culture "requesting a full discussion of works in the
Metropolitan's collection that were the subject of the Ministry's concern."
The museum said it has "reiterated its request for a meeting," but one has
not yet been scheduled.

The same vase was the subject of an investigation in the late 1970s by the
office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Reached by
phone late last evening, Mr. Morgenthau would not comment on the matter.

Accounts of how the museum came to acquire the vase are contradictory.
Evidence from Mr. Hecht's diary, seized in 2001, seems to indicate that he
bought the Euphronius Krater in 1971 from Medici. But Mr. Hecht has denied
his own account.

Thomas Hoving, the director of the museum when it purchased the work, long
believed Mr. Hecht's account of how he obtained the vase, but has since come
to believe it was, as he famously put it, a "hot pot." Nevertheless, in a
long account of the controversies written for the artnet Web site last year,
he concluded: "Should it go back to Italy? Hell, no. Despite our suspicions,
we bought it in good faith and it arrived legally to U.S. customs."