Something so serious happens only in the dark and untold hours. How has the Louvre in Abu Dhabi been caught up in one of the biggest looted works trafficking scandals in decades? The investigation involves the person who was responsible for the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, Jean-Luc Martinez, who was also (until he was suspended) president of the scientific committee of the French Museum Agency (AFM, for its French acronym), which was in charge to authenticate the origin of the pieces. He is accused of alleged “complicity in organized fraud and money laundering.” Martinez denied these accusations in Art News in May.
It all starts in France, but ends at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. The AFM is responsible for selecting the works on the market and verifying their provenance before offering them to the rich franchise of the arenas. Although in 2020 —according to the newspaper Liberation— French investigators found in the AFM “authentic professional negligence” and “transgression of ethical rules”. Perhaps the urgency to “complete” the rooms weighed heavily.
In 2014, it acquired the funeral complex of the Egyptian princess Henuttawy for 4.5 million euros. Some experts warned that the sarcophagus had been preserved in an “indecent manner”. The Egyptologist Raphaële Meffre warned that it came from an area pillaged in the 1910s. Red lights. Darkness. It still belongs to the Abu Dhabi collection. However, the French Central Office against Illegal Traffic in Cultural Goods (OCBC) found that the dealers who sold the set, Christophe Kunicki and her husband, Richard Semper, allegedly falsified the export documents. In June 2020, both were arrested for illegal trafficking of hundreds of works from the Near and Middle East. The original supplier—arrested in March—was Roben Dib, a German-Lebanese trader. The three defend his innocence. But New York authorities in June seized four Egyptian antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum linked to Roben.
The Egyptian past is like moving great sarcophagi of memory. During 2013, Dib and Kunicki sold a funerary portrait of a man on a mummy fragment to the Phoenix Ancient Art gallery for €355,000. The work was bought a year later by the Swiss collector Jean-Claude Gandur for one million. Gandur —who declines to speak with El País Semanal— has filed a complaint. “Everything is fake, everything has been stolen; it’s terrifying,” he declared on Artnet. The Louvre is also not participating. In a note he seems to remember, between the lines, that art is oil and gas. “These recent events do not challenge the strong relationship of trust between the Louvre and Louvre Abu Dhabi.” The National Gallery in London does not attend the debate and the Californian Getty sends 11 pages with the museum’s policies. “The institution will thoroughly investigate the ownership history of any proposed antiquities acquisition,” he reads.
But not everything is drenched in this darkness. Italy has recovered three million looted pieces since 1969. Although the Getty should still give them back a bronze statue (Victorious Youth) of a naked man. The Los Angeles museum refuses because it maintains that it was found in international waters. Commitments navigate better on good intentions than on reality. Fed up that his heritage is the walls of other people’s houses. The country hardens its border. Attempting to remove a work -summarizes Laura Gaona, an art expert lawyer- by providing a false statement to the Export Office carries from 2022 two to eight years in prison and a fine of up to 80,000 euros. After half a century of effort, Italy has opened a Museum of Recovered Art in the Baths of Diocletian (Rome). Etruscan, Greek, Roman pieces. The origin of the world. Courbet was wrong.
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