A number of public museums and universities in Germany have develop into embroiled in legal investigations into the widespread trafficking of Center Japanese antiquities, which have seen the seizure of a gold sarcophagus and 5 different works from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York and the indictment of seven sellers, collectors and curators in Paris, together with Jean-Luc Martinez, the previous president of the Musée du Louvre.
In accordance with sources near the investigation, each in France and Germany, the Parisian decide Jean-Michel Gentil has issued European arrest warrants towards 4 sellers based mostly in Hamburg: Roben Dib (now detained in Paris), Serop Simonian and two of Simonian’s youngsters. Simonian is known to have performed a vital function because the provider of the masterpieces bought to the Metropolitan Museum and Louvre Abu Dhabi, amongst others.
“The extradition process towards the daddy continues to be pending,” a spokesindividual for the Hamburg prosecutor instructed The Artwork Newspaper. “The arrest warrants towards the kids have been declined as a result of they are going to be prosecuted in Germany. At first, they selected to not reply any questions and to not seem at police interviews, though one in every of them has since denied all of the allegations via an legal professional.”
In 2020 in Hamburg, native police raided each the Dionysos gallery of Historical Cash and Antiquities, and the condominium of Simonian. Serop, now aged 80, is a member of an Armenian household of sellers, originating from Cairo, who has been energetic in Germany for many years. Questioned on the time by The Artwork Newspaper, each Simonian and Dib, the supervisor of his gallery, claimed that they had correct export and transport paperwork from Egypt courting from the Nineteen Seventies, a time when such a commerce was legally permitted. In addition they claimed that almost all of their items got here from Serop’s late brothers, Simon and Hagop Simonian. In accordance with their model of the story, Simon purchased the inventory of a Cairo supplier named Habib Tawadros and Hagop was accountable for the Assiut-based Pasha Khashaba Bey Assortment, which was bought and exported within the early Nineteen Seventies. Each additionally insisted that a number of of the objects below investigation couldn’t have been looted in the course of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, as alleged within the media, as a result of that they had been registered lengthy earlier than in German collections and museums.
In accordance with a sequence of latest statements collected by The Artwork Newspaper from curators throughout Germany this summer season, Serop Simonian had certainly sheltered his inventory in a number of museums for many years. Born in Cairo in 1942, Serop Ohan Simonian accomplished his PhD on adorned sarcophagi in 1973 in Göttingen, the place he established ties with future curators and students. Eleni Vassilika, who headed the Roemer & Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim from 2000 to 2005, after ten years because the keeper of antiquities on the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, says she was “shocked to study that Serop Simonian was preserving his inventory within the [German] museum’s warehouse”. For the primary time, she has agreed to speak to The Artwork Newspaper about this expertise.
Compensation bundle
Vassilika turned conscious of the state of affairs when she was offered with a doc for the acquisition of an alabaster vessel, a mannequin boat and a diadem from a “Hamburg collector” later recognized as Serop Simonian, for greater than €250,000. She says she was instructed that, below a contract signed with the town via the Roemer & Pelizaeus Museum’s former director, Arne Eggebrecht, the “collector” would lend works to the museum’s touring exhibitions and, as “compensation”, the town of Hildesheim would purchase a few of them for its museum. “In an exhibition arrange for 3 months in Taiwan, 30% of the objects have been owned by Simonian with out being labelled as such, at the same time as loans,” she says. She discovered that those proposed on the market to the museum had been “closely restored” and knowledgeable the board. The transaction was suspended (though Simonian obtained his fee later in courtroom).
As a lady of sturdy character and a foreigner, Vassilika was already at odds with some metropolis officers in Hildesheim and the native media. “All hell broke free,” she says, “I used to be lambasted within the press. They pretended I used to be accusing my predecessor of making an attempt to promote fakes, which was unfaithful.” Her evaluation was supported by the director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, Dietrich Wildung, who acknowledged that the three objects, having been restored with trendy components, had “misplaced their authenticity”. At the least one object was supposed to come back from the Khashaba Assortment, however in his affidavit, dated 29 Could 2001, the eminent Egyptologist identified that “a standard solution to cowl objects of unclear provenance was to say that they had come from this assortment”. The Khashaba Assortment is certainly solely documented by a partial stock, typed in 1931 with 48 images, which is stored in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Wildung additionally acknowledged that the three items have been “clearly overpriced”. They have been bought for €200,000, however within the museum’s database they have been valued at about €100,000, and, in an estimate requested by investigating police, Sotheby’s thought-about them to be price round €50,000.
Eggebrecht responded by saying that the objects had been vetted by Louise Gestermann and Ursula Rössler-Köhler from the College of Bonn, however solely on the idea of images and with out point out of the restoration. The American scholar Robert Bianchi printed an article in 2001 in Antike Welt praising the works and assessing such restorations as regular apply. “Dr Bob”, as Bianchi is nicknamed, had additionally offered works from Serop Simonian in exhibitions he curated in Madrid and within the US on behalf of the Hildesheim museum.
In his assertion, Wildung additionally discovered it “problematic {that a} supplier may shelter his inventory for such a very long time in a museum with none contract”. Vassilika says she found that Simonian “had been preserving dozens of crates within the museum’s warehouse, above a tyre storage. There was no formal stock entry, nor was any contract signed with the museum or the town. And, after all, no examine completed of any historic provenance.” She remembers a blue faience hippopotamus, which was bought in 2015 to Louvre Abu Dhabi for nearly €1m. Interviewed by the police, the conservation curator testified that solely Simonian and the previous director had entry to the crates, shifting and labelling objects on weekends or at evening. In February 2001 the district legal professional opened a legal investigation “for breach of belief and fraud” towards each Simonian and Eggebrecht.
In accordance with the recordsdata, on 9 November the chief investigator reported that “Eggebrecht may need benefited from monetary benefits from his good friend Simonian, via an account in Switzerland”, and sought a warrant to look his home and accounts. However the case was closed in December 2001 when Eggebrecht was struck down by terminal most cancers. In 2002 the town and the museum requested Simonian to take away his inventory, which was, in accordance with a number of curators, dispatched onwards to different establishments in Bonn, Trier and, later, Mannheim.
Obscure provenances
Wildung now tells The Artwork Newspaper that “Serop Simonian additionally supplied some works to the Egyptian State Museum in Munich which I used to be heading, about 40 years in the past. I lower brief any contact with him, due to their obscure provenances. And I heard that one in every of his brothers had issues with Egyptian antiquities. We have been all shocked to study that his assortment had landed in Mannheim.”
In an announcement to The Artwork Newspaper, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim says that “a part of the Simonian assortment was solely within the museum for a few months in 2012 till early 2013, for checking. Serop Simonian supplied a long-term show settlement, however it was declined as a result of he failed to offer dependable provenances and there have been even doubts as to the authenticity of a few of them.” Michael Höveler-Müller, an archaeologist who was answerable for the challenge, then resigned. The Mannheim museum says it offered final yr “all of the related data and documentation requested by the federal legal police”.
A part of Simonian’s inventory went to Bonn, the place Höveler-Müller turned the director of the College’s Egyptian Museum from 2009 to 2011. In accordance with statements offered by Serop Simonian, the Tutankhamun stele and the funerary set of a princess that have been bought to Louvre Abu Dhabi, in addition to one other stele seized in New York and returned to Egypt, had been saved on this museum in Bonn till 2010, together with 50 different works.
In Trier, in accordance with a number of curators, the contacts with Simonian began within the mid-Eighties when Günter Grimm, the top of the College Institute, opened a small Late Interval gallery within the Institute with the supplier’s properties. Different sources near the investigation say that the Trier institute held the fragments of the Guide of Exodus that was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum and which has now been seized by the New York District Lawyer, and the Artemidorus Papyrus, which was on the centre of an enormous scandal in Italy (see field). Grimm additionally signed a certificates of authenticity, together with Robert Bianchi, for the colossal head of Cleopatra bought in 2018 to Louvre Abu Dhabi for the astounding worth of €35m. Grimm died in 2012, and neither Bianchi nor Höveler-Müller wished to remark to The Artwork Newspaper on the matter.
In Hamburg the state prosecutor says:“Investigations regarding different folks or establishments haven’t but been initiated and should not meant in the intervening time.” However because the scandal continues to unfold, French and American investigators are questioning whether or not these public our bodies in Germany have, for a number of many years, unwittingly helped a supplier to retailer these main works with questionable provenances, switching them from one place to a different, whereas persevering with to run his enterprise. “At the least, when you think about the injury brought on by looting, it’s a aid {that a} mild can now be shed on a previous that has been lined up for thus lengthy,” says a distinguished nameless German Egyptologist.
The Notorious Papyrus
Eleni Vassilika had no concept she would cross the trail of Serop Simonian once more when she was appointed in 2005 because the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Only a few months earlier than, the inspiration for artwork and tradition of the Compagnia di San Paolo, a financial institution that was the museum’s sponsor, had acquired the so-called Artemidorus Papyrus. Attributed to the first-century BC geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus, the two.5m-long roll described in Greek the Iberian peninsula, with an unfinished map illustrated with 40 drawings of human physiognomies and animals, actual or incredible.
Paper path
The papyrus, it could seem, belonged to Simonian, who claimed it got here from the Khashaba Assortment. Its existence was revealed in 1998 in a research authored by Bärbel Kramer, the professor of papyrology in Trier, the place Serop stored a part of his inventory, and a Milanese colleague, Claudio Gallazzi. One other scholar, Salvatore Settis, tried to assist promote it to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1999, in accordance with authorized paperwork. Settis and Gallazzi persuaded the Compagnia di San Paolo to purchase it for a document €2.75m. However, when the financial institution exhibited it in 2006 within the Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin, for the Winter Olympic Video games, it was denounced as a faux.
Vassilika resisted the strain from the financial institution basis to exhibit it as a everlasting mortgage to the museum. She says that when she requested about its provenance, she was supplied with differing statements saying that it got here out of Egypt after the Second World Struggle, and in 1971. In 2009 the board of the museum and its scientific committee unanimously “refused to simply accept” such a controversial piece. For some students, it’s an outright forgery from the nineteenth century, for others, the piece may need been vintage however the drawings have been clearly trendy. Others identified an inconsistent restoration allegedly undertaken in Stuttgart. Dietrich Wildung staged an exhibition of the papyrus in 2008 in Berlin, and he tells us he nonetheless firmly believes in its authenticity.
In 2016 the Turin prosecutor charged Simonian with “aggravated fraud”, however in 2018 the case was closed due to the statute of limitation.