Getty to Return 3 Acquisitions to Italy

The J. Paul Getty Museum announced Wednesday that it will give three objects from its collection of antiquities to the Italian government because the works may at some time have been stolen from Italy. Although the artworks--an important Greek vase illustrating the Trojan War, a torso of the Persian god Mithra and a Roman head of an athlete--were acquired individually in good faith by the Getty over the last 17 years, museum officials have determined, through their own investigations, that the vase was illegally excavated, the torso was stolen from a private collection and the Roman head was taken from the storeroom of a scientific excavation. The Getty would not reveal the value of the artworks.

In announcing the move, museum officials said they are acting on their own initiative, unprompted by the Italian government. Circumstances of the artworks’ history and travels remain uncertain at best, and Getty officials said they are taking the action because of persuasive information recently compiled by the museum’s staff or presented by independent scholars.

Questions about the rightful ownership of cultural property have become increasingly urgent during the last few years, whether the issue is artifacts stolen by peasants from grave sites or Old Masters paintings confiscated by the Nazis. But the museum’s decision to remove three works from its collection is a graphic illustration of the Getty’s continuing attempt to position itself as a model of ethical behavior in the notoriously shady world of collecting antiquities.

“I admire the Getty for taking this progressive stance,” said Guy Hedreen, a specialist in Athenian vase painting who is head of the art department at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. “The [Getty’s vase] is one of the most important Greek vases I’ve ever seen. For the Getty to return that is a courageous move.”

The museum’s action is also likely to ease tension in a field in which scholars despair over artworks acquired with no documented histories, Hedreen said. “The Getty is a lot more than a museum that acquires art and puts it on display. It’s the most important institution of its kind in the United States; it has become a big player in academia.”

As an unusually wealthy, high-profile institution, the museum has often been accused of harboring fakes and stolen objects. Studies of a few of the 40,000 pieces in the museum’s antiquities collection have proved them to be modern copies or left their authenticity open to question, but the museum has never been found guilty of knowingly acquiring stolen or illegally exported property.

In fact--perhaps because of its visibility--the museum has repeatedly responded to charges of impropriety by laying all the facts on the table, regularly convening scholarly conferences to air differences of opinion, initiating consultations with foreign cultural ministries and conducting its own investigations about material in its collections.

“For many years now we have been examining our policy on acquiring antiquities because that is a particularly difficult area in which to collect,” said Deborah Gribbon, deputy director of the museum. “In 1995 we established a formal policy of not acquiring material that did not have a provenance.

” . . . If it seems to us, upon careful consideration and consultation with other scholars, that an object should be returned to its country of origin, we feel we should do that without having to be forced to that position.”

The most important piece designated for return to Italy is a large (18 3/8 inches by 8 inches) terra cotta kylix--a vase or drinking cup--that has been prominently displayed at the museum and featured in its illustrated handbook of highlights from the collection. Made in 480 BC by the potter Euphronious, the piece is decorated with scenes of the Trojan War attributed to the painter Onesimos.

“The kylix is one of the great vases in our collection,” said Marion True, curator of antiquities. “It is not a minor thing.” But it is believed to have been illegally excavated from Cerveteri, an Etruscan grave site north of Rome.

The Getty acquired the main portion of the kylix from a European dealer in 1983, at a time when few museums conducted rigorous investigations of the history of acquisitions, True said. The kylix arrived with no provenance, True said, and the trail of the object has become even more difficult to follow as additional fragments have been acquired from private collectors and dealers over the years and attached to the original segment.

Articles in the Italian press have occasionally charged that the kylix was illicitly excavated, but no evidence of wrongdoing was ever presented to the Getty. However, the issue was raised at a conference last year, when an Italian scholar made an impassioned plea for the return of the piece and claimed to have information proving that it had come from Cerveteri.

True, who was in the audience, requested a dossier from the Italian ministry of culture and eventually received some sketchy paperwork, but nothing supporting the claim, she said. However, she decided to make an investigation on her own, and eventually concluded that the piece came from Cerveteri.

“Reliable sources in the market confirmed the allegations to be true,” she said, declining to reveal details of her investigation. “And once I had that information, I felt the best thing was to return it,” she said.

The torso, from a marble statue of the god Mithra made in the 2nd century, has been in the Getty’s collection since 1982. It was purchased from a European dealer who said the sculpture had been in an old English private collection for many years. But as the Getty determined recently, the work was actually stolen from an Italian private collection.

The sculpture was documented in the 18th century as part of the collection of the Giustiniani family. But it was taken from the collection at an unknown date, and its appendages were removed--probably so that it could be taken out of Italy and sold as a different piece, True said.

Recently, when a graduate student researching a paper on the sculpture at the Getty found a fuzzy photograph of the piece with all its limbs, True decided to try to find out if the Getty fragment was part of the sculpture pictured. When the Italian keepers of the Giustiniani collection tried to find the sculpture at her behest, they discovered it was gone.

The third object being returned is a 2nd century Roman copy of the head of the athlete Diadoumenos by sculptor Polykleitos. The marble head was added to the Getty’s holdings in 1996 through a combination gift and purchase of the collection of two New York-based art patrons.

By that time, the Getty had become more vigilant about acquisitions, but inquiries to the International Foundation for Art Research in New York, which maintains a database of stolen artworks, turned up no problems with the head, True said. The piece was included by the Getty Museum in a 1994 catalog. Two years later, in an Italian publication on an excavation at Venosa, a German scholar of Polykleitos noticed a reference to the same piece and brought it to True’s attention. She followed up with inquiries to the Italian cultural ministers and determined that the piece had been stolen from the storeroom of the excavation.

The loss of the head is regrettable, True said, because is it “a beautiful piece” that would have been prominently displayed upon the Getty Malibu Villa’s reopening as an antiquities museum, projected for 2002.

True said that removing the three pieces is part of the process of preparing catalogs for the collection, which is currently in storage. “Like other museums, we are trying to determine the history of objects where there may be potential problems. But you can’t predict them. We didn’t have a clue with the [Roman head]. With the Giustiniani piece, we had to sort through the fact that we had a completely different history. If you are told it was in an English collection, you don’t go looking at Italian collections. And in some of these famous old collections, it can be very difficult to establish what is missing.”