[MSN] Aboutaam is working with the Milken Institute, the economic research organization in Santa Monica, Calif., on a conference to be held in June to discuss the disparities in international treaties and laws affecting provenance and the antiquities market.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

March 18, 2007
Do You Know Where That Art Has Been? 
By RON STODGHILL
THE statue, Apollo the Lizard Slayer, was stunning. The five-foot-tall
bronze, created by the Greek artist Praxiteles as many as 2,350 years ago,
depicts the nude god poised to ambush a lizard. 

And the Cleveland Museum of Art wanted it. During a visit to Geneva in 2003,
Michael Bennett, the museum's curator of Greek and Roman art, noticed a
statue beneath a black cloth while browsing at Phoenix Ancient Art, an
exclusive antiquities gallery. After Hicham and Ali Aboutaam, the dapper
Lebanese brothers who owned the gallery, pulled off the cloth to reveal the
Apollo Sauroktonos, as it is also known, it did not take long for the museum
to buy it. 

It did so despite the Aboutaams' disclosure that the statue's ownership
history was dubious at best.

Although it is thought to be the very statue described by Pliny the Elder in
the first century, other details have been lost to time, along with one arm.
The statue was part of a private estate in the former East Germany, the
Aboutaams said, before it was discovered in pieces in 1990. The family who
reclaimed the estate after German reunification sold the work to an
undisclosed Dutchman in 1994. That person sold the statue to another
collector, who sold it to the Aboutaams in 2001 with the understanding that
he would remain anonymous. 

The museum's own experts spent a year investigating the provenance. Physical
evidence proved that the sculpture had been out of the ground for at least a
century, so its sale did not violate international laws and treaties aimed
at halting illicit trade in art and antiquities.

Nevertheless, last month, the Apollo's murky past returned to haunt the
Cleveland Museum of Art and the Aboutaams, who are among the world's most
powerful dealers of antiquities. The Louvre in Paris withdrew a request to
borrow the statue from the Cleveland museum for an exhibition after the
Greek government threatened a boycott. The Greek pressure on the Louvre drew
applause from many in the art world, particularly academics who have long
criticized antiquities trading as fraught with corruption. 

Hicham Aboutaam, 39, called the Louvre's decision unfortunate: "The Apollo
was proven to have been in circulation more than 100 years ago. The Greeks
are not saying that the Apollo shouldn't be here or that it was stolen. It
is just their way of scoring a P.R. coup." 

The Louvre's sudden case of cold feet was hardly surprising. Some of the
world's most prestigious museums have been sullied by accusations of
acquiring artwork that was believed to have once been looted or stolen. The
J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in Los Angeles agreed to return to Italy nearly
two dozen artworks whose provenance was in dispute, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York returned to Italy the Euphronios krater, a
2,500-year-old vessel for mixing water and wine that the Italian government
said had been looted by tomb raiders. 

As the provenance of antiquities and artworks is questioned, so is the
provenance of dealers themselves. 

The new wariness of collectors, both public and private, to buy or exhibit
works that do not have the most rigorously documented history jeopardizes
the business of even the most established dealers. So the Aboutaams are
remaking themselves and their business. In a trade that has been full of
grave robbers and forgers adding patina to new objects, they are busy
digging up documentation for everything they sell in an effort to polish
their reputation. 

"The world has changed for antiquities dealers," said Christopher A.
Marinello, general counsel for the Art Loss Register, an organization that
keeps a database of stolen artworks. "More than ever, they want to know
whether they may have acquired any illegal or stolen antiquities so they can
return it to the country of origin."

Joseph Coplin, co-owner of the 30-year-old Antiquarium Fine Ancient Arts
Gallery in Manhattan, put it another way: "These days I spend most of my
time pushing paper around trying to get provenances in order. It's a bit
like jaywalking - these laws have been on the books for years but until now
nobody paid attention to them."


IF Phoenix Ancient Art and other dealers ignore the shifting standards in
the antiquities market, it will be at their peril, Hicham Aboutaam said.

"It's a moment of clarification in the field," he said. "We're still
figuring out what can be acquired and sold without problems, as opposed to
40 or 50 years ago, when people were much more careless about ownership
history. The question to me now is, where do we draw the line? What if a
piece was already in circulation before these new standards? The
archaeologists don't have an answer to that. They don't say throw it out,
and they don't encourage you to buy it. What are we supposed to do?" 

For the Aboutaams, whose father started the gallery in Beirut in the 1960s,
the makeover will require not only overhauling some of its business
practices, but also restoring a public image dogged by legal and ethical
questions. 

In 2004, after an investigation by the United States Bureau of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in
connection with his importing and selling for $950,000 a silver ceremonial
drinking vessel that at the time was alleged to be part of the plundered
Iranian Western Cave Treasure. He paid a $5,000 fine.

That same year, an Egyptian court sentenced Ali Aboutaam in absentia to 15
years in prison after he was accused of smuggling artifacts from Egypt to
Switzerland. The charges against him were later dropped by the Egyptian
court due to a lack of evidence. 

Such run-ins with the law have made big museums nervous even when nothing
may appear untoward. In 2001, the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth returned
a 2600 B.C. Sumerian statue it had bought from the brothers for $2.7 million
for a refund. Hicham Aboutaam said that questions surrounding the taxes on
his parents' estate unraveled the deal.

Such accusations come from jealous rivals, said Hicham Aboutaam, who sells
the objects that his 41-year-old brother, who works in the Geneva office,
finds. "We can't control the gossip and fabrications about us," Mr. Aboutaam
said. "It's a question of statistics: how many cases have we had against us
and how many pieces have we sold? We've had very few cases and thousands of
pieces. You do the math."

There is much for rivals to envy about Phoenix Ancient Art. It is a closely
held company whose long list of clients has ranged from the Wall Street
financier Michael H. Steinhardt to the late designer Bill Blass, and the
Aboutaams declined to disclose the gallery's sales. But people in the
industry said the company's New York and Geneva galleries generate higher
annual revenues than what the auction houses Sotheby's and Christies bring
in selling antiquities, which is less than $40 million. 

Sitting recently in the small, appointment-only gallery on the Upper East
Side of Manhattan that houses Phoenix Ancient Art, Hicham Aboutaam cradled
in his hands a basalt sculpture of a Phoenician god. He offered a quick art
history lesson by pointing out its unique blend of styles characteristic of
two ancient civilizations, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

"This is the most important Phoenician head in the world," Mr. Aboutaam
said. Intricately carved and dating back to about 1800 B.C., the god wears a
horned crown and its eyes, now hollowed out, were once bejeweled with white
stone and black glass, most likely obsidian, Mr. Aboutaam said. "We have
been watching this work for a very long time," he said. "My father wanted it
in the 1970s and couldn't get it because at the time the collector wouldn't
sell it." 

The opportunity to acquire the sculpture came a few months ago, when Ali
Aboutaam, who had spent years nurturing a relationship with the late
collector's son, a French archaeology expert, finally persuaded the man to
sell the sculpture to help defray the cost of an extensive renovation of his
Paris home. Of course, the Aboutaams do not plan to own the sculpture for
long. Later this week, the Phoenician head will be exhibited at the
International Asian Art Fair in New York, where Hicham Aboutaam said he
expects the work to fetch a price "in the low seven figures" from one of two
collectors he has told about the piece. 

Magda Grigorian, a spokeswoman for the fair, which begins Friday, said that
Phoenix Ancient Art was the only antiquities dealer invited, and that a
"group of antiquities specialists from a larger committee of art experts"
had reviewed the Aboutaams' sculpture and the provenance they provided. 

"The perception of antiquity dealers these days is a little bit cloak and
dagger," Ms. Grigorian said. "But in the case of Phoenix, we give them
credit for working hard to change that perception." 

FOR the Aboutaams, that perception dates back to 1968 when their father,
Sleiman, founded Phoenix Ancient Art in the living room of his Beirut home.
A worldly, well-connected Lebanese businessman who had amassed a fortune
through an exclusive contract to supply general merchandise to oil tankers
in the Kuwaiti port of Al Ahmadi, the elder Mr. Aboutaam was also a history
buff whose penchant for collecting rare coins led to acquiring rare
antiquities.

His younger son recalls his father as obsessed with ancient objects, filling
his home virtually every week with a new lot of them.

"My mother would tell my father, 'It's time to go sleep. Would you please
remove that head from our bed?,' " Hicham Aboutaam said. His father also
infused the boys with the same passion for antiquities, showing them
catalogs of ancient coins and quizzing them about Greek rulers and Roman
emperors and empresses and, of course, teaching them how to assess the value
of the coins based on their style, quality and condition.

Often with his toddlers in tow, Sleiman Aboutaam was soon exporting
antiquities to Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan.

Over the next decade, the Aboutaams' antiquities business flourished. Hicham
Aboutaam studied art history at the University of Michigan with plans to
become an architect, while his older brother completed a civil engineering
degree at the Jesuit University of Beirut. But their career plans changed
suddenly in September 1998, when their parents died on Swissair Flight 111
when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia.

"We thought it would be best to liquidate the inventory," Hicham Aboutaam
said. "But then we made the decision to continue." He said they could not
just sell everything off, not after what their father had taught them. "The
trouble was, my father lived by the philosophy that whoever loved an
antiquity the most should own it," he said. "In a sense, we inherited much
of that legacy." 

At times, the late founder's patrimony has been a Pandora's Box. Its
inventory has often put his sons at odds with governments, museums and
collectors. In a world of shifting political climates, the father's
decisions still affect the business nearly a decade after his death. For
instance, Mr. Aboutaam said that he clashed with Christies over its refusal
to accept a Sumerian weapon owned by Phoenix Ancient Art. It was acquired by
his father from the auction house in 1994. But its origins in Iraq make it
subject to international oversight that is complicated by the turmoil in
that country. "They sold it to us, and now they won't even touch it," he
said. "That seems crazy to me."

A Christies spokeswoman, Bendetta Roux, said: "No one has approached
Christies with this item, and we have not seen it since we sold it in 1994."


Antiquities experts say the mood in the art world turned sharply with the
2002 conviction of the prominent New York art dealer Frederick Schultz. He
was found guilty of violating the 1934 National Stolen Property Act by
conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities.

The case highlighted the dealer's underhanded techniques. Jonathan
Tokeley-Parry, a British restorer, testified against Mr. Schultz about an
elaborate scheme in which Mr. Tokeley-Parry would buy freshly unearthed
Egyptian antiquities and disguise them as cheap souvenirs by coating them in
plastic and paint. He would then export them from Egypt to Mr. Schultz, who
would create a fake provenance for the items and sell them in his Manhattan
gallery.

Among the tricks that surfaced during the investigation was an admission by
Mr. Tokeley-Parry to baking the labels of the antiquities in an oven and
dabbing them with moist tea bags to create an aged appearance.

The Schultz scandal created a cloud of distrust under which antiquities
dealers still operate. Ali Aboutaam said a French dealer recently offered to
sell him a beautiful red Greek vase from the late fifth century B.C. "The
piece was quite important, really," Ali Aboutaam said. The dealer said it
had come from a 1960s collection, but Mr. Aboutaam said he could see that
the restoration was of a technique used in the last 10 years. 

"I was not convinced of its provenance, and had to leave it behind," he
said. "I figured it probably, at some point, came from an illegal
excavation." 

He added: "So many people bring me legitimate works that there is no reason
to acquire something that I am doubtful about."

But the newfound wariness has been a boon to some dealers. It has bolstered
the value of antiquities that have a solid ownership history, the Aboutaams
say. During an auction at Sotheby's London in 1973, for example, a
well-documented Egyptian banded alabaster jar created during the dynasty of
King Neco II in about 600 B.C. sold for $8,910. In 2004, the Aboutaams
acquired the jar at Sotheby's New York for $224,000. That meant a compounded
annual rate of return of about 11 percent, but it is appreciating even
faster these days. "Because of the jar's high quality and exceptional
provenance, I could sell it for $400,000 today," Hicham Aboutaam said. 

Indeed, if countries ban the exportation of excavated antiquities, the
restricted supply will force prices higher. Those dealers with an inventory
and a network of clients will prosper while new dealers will have trouble
establishing themselves.

So it is not surprising that Hicham Aboutaam has begun supporting the bans.
He envisions that the market for antiquities, which he says are currently
undervalued, will resemble that of old masters or Impressionist paintings,
which have increased sharply in value of late. 

"The more questionable works entering the antiquities market, the less their
value and the larger the dark cloud that hangs over the field," Mr. Aboutaam
said. "That affects prices negatively. I think we could put an end to the
new supply, and work comfortably with what we have." 

Under such a moratorium, the Aboutaams and other established antiquities
dealers would enjoy a significant advantage over newer competitors. Dealers
in other periods of art are also feeling the same pressures. Already, works
looted from Jewish family collections during the Nazi era, along with fakes
and other stolen pieces, have rocked the art world. Just last month, the
director Steven Spielberg discovered that he had purchased a 1967 oil on
canvas by Norman Rockwell called Russian Schoolroom, which the Federal
Bureau of Investigation asserts was stolen from a gallery in the 1970s. 

Federal officials say they have no evidence that Mr. Spielberg, who bought
that painting in 1989, was aware that the work had been stolen. 

"Although the specific issues vary across the art categories, the need to
know where something has been is always important," said Judith Mann, a
curator at the St. Louis Art Museum, whose specialty is old masters. "But
very seldom are we fortunate enough to track down the history of an object
to the moment it was made."

Mr. Aboutaam has also been repositioning Phoenix Ancient Art as a kind of
activist among antiquities dealers. Works acquired by the gallery are now
published in glossy bound journals, with color photographs and detailed
descriptions of their artistic significance and provenance. Phoenix Ancient
Art, which has added two provenance research assistants to its staff, has
also begun building a database of antiquities to be located in a public
antiquities research center it plans to open next year in Geneva, Mr.
Aboutaam said.

"When all those things happened at the Getty and Met, people assumed, 'This
is end of the antiquities trade because antiquities are evil,' " Mr.
Aboutaam said. "But I think what happened has been good for the whole
field."

Mr. Aboutaam is working with the Milken Institute, the economic research
organization in Santa Monica, Calif., on a conference to be held in June to
discuss the disparities in international treaties and laws affecting
provenance and the antiquities market. Jared Carney, director of marketing
and program development at the institute, said that discussing the woes of
the art market is not standard fare for the organization.

"But what is right down the middle for us is looking at issues of social
capital and the challenges of protecting intellectual property, and
protecting assets and the pressure to preserve heritage," Mr. Carney said.
"You've got to give it to Hicham for trying to get a brand new take on
things and coming at his challenges in a different way." 

IN the end, Mr. Aboutaam said his efforts were simply to preserve the past
for a world that should have access to it through beautiful cultural
objects. At the moment he is excited about a statuette of Hera, the wife of
Zeus. He is making sure that the history of the piece is rock solid. 

Considered one of the finest classical statuettes in existence, it was found
in Athens in the mid-19th century and owned by a series of French families,
the last of which held it for 120 years. The Aboutaams acquired the work in
Paris in 2005, and are currently negotiating with a potential buyer, "an
East Coast museum," Mr. Aboutaam said. 

"She will certainly be missed," he said of Hera. "But in the end, we are all
temporary custodians." 


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