[MSN] Probe, smuggling allegations mar museum plans.

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Probe, smuggling allegations mar museum plans
Federal agents are investigating whether a curator, now deceased, knowingly
acquired looted artifacts from the Far East
By Mike Boehm

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Article Launched: 02/03/2008 03:09:44 AM PST

SANTA ANA -- For 15 years, the Bowers Museum has been trying to draw
attention to itself and prove that a modest $6-million-a-year Orange County
institution can compete in the major leagues of the exhibition world.

Some of the big names of world culture have found their way into its
galleries, including fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and an array of
ancient Egyptian mummies that have helped draw 150,000 paying visitors in
the past 12 months.

But it was the blue-clad federal agents knocking on the gates with a warrant
recently that drew national attention to the Bowers. In an affidavit the
agents filed to search the museum, they outlined a scheme by which its
senior curator, who died three years ago, allegedly acquired global cultural
artifacts that he knew had been smuggled.

Allegations involving the same smuggling suspect and a Los Angeles gallery
owner are being investigated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
Pasadena's Asia Pacific Museum and Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

As investigators continued their inquiry at the Bowers on Friday, President
Peter Keller and board Chairman Donald Kennedy both said that they were
miffed by the allegations but that the Bowers was cooperating fully. On the
phone from his office, Keller said that as soon as he had finished with the
government agents waiting outside his door, he would write a message for
board members and donors, updating them on a situation that, he and Kennedy
maintained, was ironic given the Bowers' history and its hopes.

Obscure objects

If the Bowers has stumbled, it was over objects that are of comparatively
little interest to the public: antiquities from Thailand and a ladles
unearthed from American Indian lands in New Mexico. They have scant value to
a museum that has virtually lost interest in adding to its collection of
about 100,000 artifacts and instead has staked its future on showcasing
treasures belonging to other museums.

The Bowers began as a repository for Orange County history after its
namesake, developer Charles Bowers, bequeathed his mansion to the city of
Santa Ana in 1936. Two curators were hired in the 1970s, and their interests
led to exhibitions and acquisitions, most of them donated, of works from
Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands and American Indians. The
museum also acquired a collection of California plein-air paintings.

Closed from 1986 to 1992 while Santa Ana officials and museum board members
debated a new direction and then amassed $12 million for an expansion, the
Bowers re-emerged with a much bigger facility, a curatorial staff increased
from two to three and a new leader in Keller, a geologist specializing in
gems.

As the '90s progressed, Kennedy said, financial pressures and a desire to
make a bigger mark on the Southern California landscape led to the museum's
decision to cut back on curatorial research and self-generated collections
and exhibitions.

Big-exhibit strategy

In 1999, the board resolved to bring in blockbusters that would attract
crowds. "It was a business decision, and 'Let's put ourselves on the map and
be better than Los Angeles,'" said Kennedy, chairman emeritus of First
American Title.

"We decided to focus on quality and be known for quality," Keller said.

A series of exclusives from China helped launch the Bowers toward the bigger
sphere it hoped to occupy. Its secret weapon was Taiwan-born Anne Shih, a
board member who loves Chinese art and was able to make inroads with museums
in Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing. She helped make the Bowers the U.S. point
of entry for traveling shows such as "Secret World of the Forbidden City:
Splendors From China's Imperial Palace" in 2000.

Keller said Shih was the point woman for raising the roughly $2 million
needed to underwrite "Terra Cotta Warriors," the latest in a series of
exhibitions sent by London's British Museum under an agreement with the
Bowers. It is scheduled to open in May.

By 2000, as the big exhibitions began to be staged, just one curator was
left, Armand Labbe, the department head who had arrived in 1978 and remained
until his death from brain cancer in 2005. He also kept collecting,
investigators say. He didn't receive much attention from higher-ups in the
museum, Kennedy said.

"He was stubborn, had been there forever and operated alone way before any
of us got on board," the chairman said. "God knows what he was doing."

The affidavit recounts Labbe's dealings with a federal undercover agent and
Robert Olson, an art smuggler, according to the affidavit. The curator
bought and accepted donations of objects from the ancient Ban Chiang culture
of Thailand while professing not to know whether acquiring them was legal,
the affidavit says.

Charges of looting

Keller insists he didn't know the items might have been looted. Labbe's
acquisitions of Ban Chiang finds were hardly a secret, he noted: The Bowers
had a 1985 exhibition, "Ban Chiang: Archeological Treasures of Prehistoric
Thailand," and the catalog by Labbe was widely distributed. In 2002, the
curator published a second book on the subject.

Given this exposure of what the Bowers had collected from ancient Thailand,
Keller said that if there was any illegality, "I was under the assumption
that somebody would have raised a red flag before now. It was an awfully
courageous thing for (Labbe) to do if he was doing it with stolen material."

What remains uncertain is what will happen now that the Bowers has garnered
some of the attention it has craved. Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido affirmed
his support: The city, which owns the museum, covers $1.9 million in
expenses annually.

It's another matter whether the donors Keller hopes to reassure will be
willing to write checks while there are ethical and legal questions in the
air.

"It certainly could frighten people off," he said. "I hope not."

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