Bought, Borrowed or Stolen? A Talk at the Chappaqua Library

From Meryl Moss Media:

Gary Vikan Ph.D. recently retired as the director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. He’s an expert on late ancient and medieval art and has firsthand experience on how public policy relates to the international movement of cultural property in the time of war. He can discuss the downside of current public policy as legislated and as self-imposed on the U.S. art museum community, including how the embargo on artifacts from Syria and Iraq was an enormous boon to ISIS.

It’s the art world’s dirty little secret—the relics on their pedestals and paintings in their burnished frames that adorn museum walls are quite frequently stolen or forged. How often? According to the landmark report from London’s University Cambridge, Stealing History: The Illicit Trade in Cultural Material, more than $3 billion in stolen art and antiquities is traded each year. Bloomberg estimated in 2011that the black market deals in some $6.3 billion per year.

Now retired museum director and expert on Byzantine art, Gary Vikan Ph.D., rips the veil away from the hushed halls of the world’s great museums with his stunning and eye-opening memoir, STOLEN AND SACRED: Confessions of a Museum Director (SelectBooks: September 20, 2016).

Vikan, who led Baltimore’s Walters Museum for more than 28 years, has gone deep down the rabbit hole where the truth about the world’s treasures lie. From his beginnings at Princeton University to Harvard’s revered Dumbarton Oaks collection in Washington, DC to the Walters, Vikan has witnessed firsthand the hustle, shady dealings, bold-faced forgeries and outright theft that has placed treasures in art museums.

He is well-versed in why recent movements to return great works of art to their home countries have validity, including:

· China’s imperial treasures (currently in the United Kingdom)

· Iraqi Jewish artifacts (liberated from a flooded basement in Saddam Hussein’s royal palace

· Turkey’s Sion treasure (currently housed at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC)

· Bust of Queen Nefertiti (Egypt’s great beauty resides in the Neues Museum of Berlin)

· India’s Koh-i-Noor diamond (held in the Tower of London as part of the Queen Elizabeth’s crown)

· Egypt’s Rosetta stone (on display at the British Museum)

STOLEN AND SACRED is far more than an autobiography, it’s a thrilling adventure as Vikan navigated the highs and lows of academic art, including spotting that a famous statuary collection was forged, discovering what had become of the chopped up fresco from a Cypriot church, being swindled by official representatives of a n Eastern Bloc country and much more. It also looks into why we crave beauty and the illumination that goes beyond mere acquisition—to bring a sense of wonder and deep feeling to the public.

GARY VIKAN was director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1994 to 2013; from 1985 to 1994, he was the museum’s assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of medieval art. Before coming to Baltimore, Vikan was senior associate at Harvard’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. A native of Minnesota, he received his BA from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from Princeton University; he is a graduate of the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors and the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.

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