[MSN] Jiri Frel, 82; Colorful Curator Who Left Getty Under a Cloud

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Jiri Frel, 82; Colorful Curator Who Left Getty Under a Cloud
By Ralph Frammolino, Times Staff Writer
May 13, 2006 


Jiri Frel, a Czechoslovakian refugee whose eccentricities and professional
controversies marked his tenure as the J. Paul Getty Museum's first
antiquities curator, has died. He was 82.

Frel was buried Thursday in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, according
to family friends and Getty officials. Family members could not be reached
for details on his death but friends said he had been in failing health for
some time. 

 Frel's determination to collect hundreds of ancient Greek and Roman vases,
statues and pottery shards helped transform the Getty from a rich man's
boutique into a considerable cultural force during the late 1970s and early
1980s.

But his activities also spawned two of the museum's earliest scandals. He
was responsible for acquiring some of the museum's most problematic pieces -
among them the Getty kouros, a statue widely believed to be a fake. Frel was
demoted in 1984 after revelations that he engineered a tax manipulation
scheme to drastically expand the collection. He resigned two years later.

Frel was also responsible for hiring Marion True, who eventually took over
the antiquities department after Frel's messy departure. Now True, who
resigned under pressure last year, is on trial in a Rome court on charges
that she conspired to traffic in illicit artifacts.

Frel "was the Dr. Strangelove of the antiquities game," said Thomas Hoving,
the former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Frel
worked briefly before coming to the Getty.

Frel kept a relatively low profile since departing the Getty, friends and
former colleagues say. He reportedly was a consultant for wealthy European
collectors, taught some classes and shuttled between residences in Budapest
and Rome. 

Yet among a shrinking circle of contemporaries, his legend continued to loom
large, in part because of his close identification with the Getty's
formative institutional years, when it outgrew its rooms in the late
oilman's home and moved into the Romanesque villa in Pacific Palisades
overlooking the Pacific.

"Frel was a passionate, extravagant guy, every inch the wily emigre from
Cold War Eastern Europe," former Getty Museum Director John Walsh said
Friday.

Walsh said Frel "deserves credit for creating the antiquities department."

Considered a brilliant academic with an expertise in ancient Greek
tombstones and Attic pottery, Frel was credited with opening the Getty's
collection to visiting scholars and taking time to encourage younger
students to pursue studies in Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities.

A Bohemian figure, Frel wore oversized black-framed glasses and sandals. He
was notorious for his continental ways with the ladies. He was married and
divorced three times, maybe four - friends aren't sure - and left ex-wives
and grown children in Czechoslovakia, New York and California.

"He had this incredible effervescence and European charm," Hoving said.
"It's the hand-kiss, the funny stories and the longing look in the eyes. He
spoke . with all sorts of references to French and Italian, Dante, and the
right quote out of the New Testament."

Frel could also be intimidating and volatile. 

Former London antiquities dealer Robin Symes remembered when Frel stormed
into his high-end gallery and, without a word, threw his coat down and began
stamping on it.

Recalling Frel's occasional outbursts, one former Getty official said "it
was never clear to me that they were entirely authentic. Sometimes they
might have been staged to achieve an effect."

"He had a tendency to intimidate those around him and certainly many of
those who worked under him," said the official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity. "He basically was able to browbeat the administration of the
Getty Museum."

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1923, Frel went on to study at the Sorbonne in
Paris before returning to his homeland after World War II to earn a
doctorate from Charles University in Prague. He stayed to teach in the Greek
and Roman art department until 1969, when he fled Czechoslovakia a year
after the Soviet takeover.

After brief teaching stints at Princeton University and the University of
Genoa, Frel was hired as an associate curator of Greek and Roman art at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York City. He set his sights on the Getty and was
personally hired by J. Paul Getty as the first antiquities curator in 1973.

Frel quickly made a splash, pointing out several pieces that he declared to
be forgeries - an ironic twist, given what eventually occurred. He also
indulged an enormous curatorial appetite for any and all antiquities that
would round out and expand Getty's hodgepodge collection.

While eager to snag showpieces for exhibition, he was also intent on
building up the museum's less glamorous study collection with less
distinguished items and pottery shards for scholars to pore over.

Frustrated that Getty trustees sniffed at anything less than stellar, the
anti-authoritarian Frel set out to beat the system by recruiting collectors
to donate their own items.

 "He cried for them; he whined for them," David Swingler, a prominent local
collector, was quoted as saying in a 1987 Los Angeles Times story about
Frel.

"He would say, 'Please, we have a Roman villa, we need things to fill it
up.' He was constantly asking for knickknacky things for the study
collection." 

Wanting even more, Frel pushed the curatorial envelope.

At times, he would engage in reverse negotiations - asking dealers to
increase their price on items and have them throw in extras the Getty board
wouldn't have approved.

The most brazen scheme was the tax manipulation orchestrated with Bruce
McNall, the former owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey franchise who once
had a gallery on Rodeo Drive.

When a piece that Frel liked came into the gallery, McNall went looking for
a "donor" among his wealthy clients or friends who needed tax deductions.

A donor paid McNall his cost plus 10%, the antiquity went to the Getty and
Frel arranged a third-party appraisal for the donor setting the object's
value as much as 10 times the original price.

Many of the "gifts" were essentially paper transactions involving art the
donors never saw.

Getty officials learned of the scheme in 1984, and farmed Frel out to Europe
as a full-paid researcher. 

He resigned two years later about the time Hoving, by then retired from the
Met, and a journalist publicly revealed the scam in Connoisseur magazine.

Hoving said they confronted Frel as he stepped outside of his Roman
apartment and invited him to dine at a restaurant near the Trevi Fountain.

"The last time I saw Jiri Frel he tried to kill me," said Hoving, who added
that the curator became enraged at a question of whether he had taken any
money personally.

Hoving said that Frel yelled, "They don't know the half of it!" picked up a
huge bottle of mineral water and struck him on the shoulder before waiters
and patrons intervened.

The tax scheme wasn't the last of the Getty's Frel-related fallout.

In the years after his departure, they discovered the curator had forked
over large sums for some embarrassing forgeries, the most problematic being
the kouros.

Frel persuaded the museum to buy the remarkably preserved statue of a Greek
youth for nearly $10 million. 

After its 1986 unveiling, however, a growing chorus of experts declared the
kouros a fraud.

Documents show that an internal Getty investigation by True concluded that
Frel had probably fabricated documents pertaining to the object's ownership
history. 

The Getty now identifies the kouros as either dating to 530 B.C. or a modern
fake. 

http://www.latimes.com/