For the rescuer of an ancient shipwreck, trouble arrived in the mail
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, December 5, 2024


For the rescuer of an ancient shipwreck, trouble arrived in the mail
Michael Katzev, an archaeologist, in 1974 with jars that had been recovered from the Kyrenia shipwreck. Much of the ship’s cargo also survived its sinking, possibly at the hand of pirates. (Steven V. Roberts/The New York Times)

by Graham Bowley and Seamus Hughes



NEW YORK, NY.- In the 1960s, Susan Womer Katzev, a marine illustrator, and her husband, archaeologist Michael L. Katzev, spent two summers diving with a team beneath the lapping waves of the Mediterranean off Cyprus.

Their quarry was an ancient shipwreck on the sandy ocean floor discovered just years earlier by a man foraging for sponge. It would become a startling find.

Before it sank in the third century B.C., the Kyrenia had traded food, iron and millstones out of its home port, thought to be the island of Rhodes. After more than 2,000 years underwater, much of its hull and cargo — old plates, coins, amphoras that once held wine and others that still held almonds — were remarkably intact.

Susan Katzev’s drawings and photographs helped document a discovery that revealed not only ancient trading behaviors but a wealth of information about how the Greeks built ships. For decades, her and her husband’s efforts have been heralded for their central role in establishing nautical archaeology as a field.

This year, about two decades after her husband’s death, Susan Katzev and a co-editor won plaudits for a definitive account of the ship’s excavation, a 421-page first volume that won a major award in January from the Archaeological Institute of America.

Few knew at the time, though, that federal investigators had just months before been to Susan Katzev’s house in Maine, searching for evidence of looted items among artifacts she had collected in recent decades. Customs inspectors had found suspect items in five packages mailed to her by a dealer, according to court papers. The investigators returned to her home in May, unannounced, and seized 62 items from her collection, asserting they had probably been stolen from Iran and Iraq.

“Probable cause exists to believe,” an investigator wrote in an affidavit this April, that the seized items “were, or may have been, imported into the United States in violation of the law.”

Susan Katzev, now 84, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But the cloud over some of her artifacts has cast a shadow over a life spent on efforts to broaden our understanding of the ancient world. She defended her collecting in a recent interview, saying she had no clue there was any question about the objects that were seized, nearly all of which are listed in the court papers as having come from the same dealer in London.

“I thought these were imported properly, legally, in the correct way,” she said. “I would not have bought something knowing it had been looted.”

She asked if it was reasonable to expect collectors such as herself to fully determine whether objects had been stolen. “You would spend the rest of your life trying to check each of your pieces,” she said. “That’s asking a lot from the buyer.”

A Life Devoted to Ancient Treasures

Antiquities collecting today is, indeed, not for the faint of heart.

After decades in which artifacts arrived at galleries, and at times museums, with sparse details about where they had come from, antiquities have for years now become the sort of thing that cannot just show up in an auction catalog with a name, a date and a price. Countries display increasing concern for the return of their patrimony. Law enforcement officials enforce stricter policies against looting. Museums employ in-house experts to help spot suspect items among the many objects they own.

Investigators have shown that in some cases wealthy collectors displayed little concern for the slim provenance of items that they bought and later surrendered because of evidence they were stolen. Friends of Susan Katzev’s say she is not that kind of collector.

Rather, they argue, she is someone who focused on the beauty of ancient objects, rather than their origins.

Trained as a sculptor, she is drawn, they say, to their offbeat, unusual, even quirky forms, and that she enjoys imagining the lives of the artists who fashioned them.

Gordon Moore, a friend and professor at Harvard Medical School, described her as a meticulous collector, who affixed notes to items with all the information she had about them and their purchase, but did not necessarily press to know exactly where they had come from.

“Her collecting was a tremendously important, emotionally, socially, intellectually rigorous activity for her,” he said.

She said she has been interested in ancient art all her life. Her parents collected it, she said, and she remembers being intrigued during a visit to the Middle East with her parents when her mother bought an ancient wine carrier.

Her interest in the ancient world led her to assist in the 1960s in the underwater excavations of Roman and Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey. There, she met Katzev, and together they helped to rescue the Kyrenia, diving deep to explore the single-masted merchant ship that sank around 280 B.C., possibly because it had been holed by pirates.

“My husband and I went down, and honestly, it was for both of us probably the most beautiful thing we had ever experienced and seen,” she said in the interview.

In “With Captain Sailors Three,” a documentary she wrote and directed about the excavation, she described the excitement of her work. “In each of us, there is an expectancy, wondering that day what may turn up on the bottom, and it’s a terrific thrill to be the first person to handle, or just see a glimpse of a piece of pottery,” she said.

The hull was also rescued, and after years of restoration was exhibited at a museum in Cyprus. Its timbers served as the blueprint for a replica vessel, Kyrenia II, that helped to illustrate what ancient seafaring had looked like. In 1986, during centennial celebrations for the Statue of Liberty, the replica sailed in New York’s parade of ships and her husband was on board.

Sturt Manning, a Cornell University professor whose research team recently clarified the date when the original Kyrenia sunk, said it was hard to overstate the significance of the work that the Katzevs took part in.

“This was the first time we started to get rich information about an amazingly preserved ship,” he said. “It is like a mini-Pompeii.”

Untruths in Packaging

Susan Katzev first came to the attention of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations in July 2022 when a package addressed to her arrived at a FedEx facility at Indianapolis International Airport. Customs and border officials, trained to scan for illicit cultural artifacts, reviewed the package, which had been shipped to Susan Katzev by a dealer in Britain.

The paperwork said it held an “Antique Stone Vase” valued at $150. But inside was a small, dark-colored bowl decorated with eagles and dragons, and it was more “ancient” than “antique.” Experts thought it to be 4,000 years old and probably made in an area of the Middle East where ancient graveyards were plundered, beginning in 2000.

It was also not worth $150, as represented on the paperwork. The dealer’s own online catalog had listed the bowl with a price of $4,500.

“The overall conclusion from the experts,” Special Agent David C. Fife of Homeland Security Investigations later wrote in court papers, “was that the piece most likely originated from modern-day Iran and had likely been looted.”

The package was seized.

Two months later, investigators intercepted a second package addressed to her at a mail sorting facility in Maine, not far from her home. Like the first, it had come from Artemission, an online gallery based in London that is a member of the Association of International Antiquities Dealers. The gallery, which also operates as Atticart Ltd., specializes in “authentic ancient art from Egypt, the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and Islamic Art,” according to its website.

The packaging described the contents as an “Antique Amulet over 250 years old,” with a declared value of $150. Inside, however, was a carved stone ram seal thought to be 5,000 years old. An invoice inside listed the value at $792, according to court papers.

A third package was seized weeks later. Again, the packaging described an object younger and less valuable than what was inside: a bronze ibex figurine, which experts dated to the first millennium B.C. and that an invoice inside said was valued at $2,464.

According to court papers, experts said that all three artifacts were from Iran or Iraq, two nations that Americans are restricted from importing antiquities from under either national patrimony law or U.S. law. (Iraq suffered rampant looting during a period of political turmoil after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.)

Fife said in court papers that Artemission was vague in discussing the artifacts it sold. He said a gallery representative, asked about the origins of one item, told him it had been acquired “in the 1980s and 1990s,” when provenance paperwork for such items was “not required.”

In some cases, the investigator reported, the business had told Katzev that pieces she bought had previously been the property of a “prince” or other unnamed British “aristocrats,” a premise he described as seemingly implausible.

Artemission did not return calls for comment for this article. In total, investigators seized five packages destined for Katzev, according to court papers. Then they began showing up at her home with search warrants.

During their first visit, investigators confiscated papers associated with Katzev’s antiquities purchases and, while there, showed images over their phone of artifacts in her house to experts from the Smithsonian Institution and Rutgers University. During the second visit, they seized items, some of which had been bought as far back as 2006.

Katzev’s friends view her as someone swept up in the shifting tide of attitudes toward antiquity collecting, someone whose passion for protecting the past is evident and who would never be a willing participant in the black market.

Moore said Katzev has been caught up in a somewhat painful fashion in what in the end is a necessary reform in the antiquities collecting world.

“I think,” he said, “when there is change in the world, oftentimes it happens with very broad rules and it means that innocent or irrelevant stuff will be swept in. It’s part of the learning process.”

But of her innocence, he had no question.

“She is a very ethical person in all domains, politics, art, and I would be shocked if she had been dealing to get these things knowingly,” Moore said.

“She does not collect for show,” he added. “She does not collect for money. She collects for love.”

Katzev has donated many items she has collected. Bowdoin College, nearby in Maine, has received more than 90 gifts from her and her husband, primarily more modern lithographs, etchings and drawings. She said in the interview that she has also decided to donate the rest of her collection to museums.

The court papers do not portray Katzev as sympathetically as her friends do. An affidavit by Fife notes that in the Katzev home investigators found articles about, and a book by, Matthew Bogdanos, chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office whose work has led to multiple seizures of looted antiquities.

He also noted that Susan Katzev expressed frustration when told that some of her objects may need to be returned if found to have been looted. She noted, the affidavit said, the difficulty of applying precise standards to objects that often do not have a clear provenance.

“Katzev responded in exasperation that, ‘everything is looted, it’s all looted,’” Fife wrote in court papers. He said he believed Katzev was “referencing the generalized argument that much of the cultural property found throughout the world was at one point taken from the original culture by nameless invaders, occupiers, or smugglers.”

Michael McCullough, an art market lawyer who has represented collectors, said: “There are two ways of looking at it. The law is the law. They had reason to believe she had stolen property and they had the right to go in and take it. The other side of the coin is she is an 80-year-old person and these are antiquities. They are not importing arms.”

James Higginbotham, a professor and curator at Bowdoin who has reviewed much of Katzev’s collection, described her as a person of great integrity whose collecting instincts were honed in an era when gaps in provenance were not uncommon. “When she began to acquire ancient art in particular,” he said, “the attitudes were different and they evolved over time.”

Investigators said they could not comment further on the case while their review is continuing, but noted that the seized objects are being examined to determine whether they should be returned to countries of origin.

Katzev declined to comment beyond what she had said in the initial interview.

Instead, she released a statement.

“I’m in my 80s, and have memory issues,” she said. “I plan to donate everything I’ve collected to museums. I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of art and artifacts.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

August 13, 2024

For the rescuer of an ancient shipwreck, trouble arrived in the mail

Briggs Auction to offer important George Washington letter

Morphy's chosen to auction the celebrated Wayne Edens fishing lure collection

New public art rides the rails in Chicago, timed to the convention

Hurricane cleanup effort reaps 'treasure': A 1945 letter in a bottle

A Nazi villa so tainted Berlin can't give it away

A jazz DJ's lifetime of knowledge leaves Queens for a new Nashville home

The National Gallery of Art acquires a painting by Karin Bergöö Larsson

A selection of works by Olga de Amaral highlights the dynamic appeal of fiber art

Behind the scenes of the 'treasure hunt' for Olympic history

Chazen Museum of Art opens "Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century"

Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel opens "Paisagem Selvagem", Leda Catunda's new solo show at Carpintaria

After a 16-month break, the Rieckhallen at Hamburger Bahnhof will reopen for exhibitions

GR Gallery announces a solo exhibition by Kila Cheung

The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art announces "Crossroads: The Paintings of John Mellencamp"

Bob Tischler, who helped revive 'Saturday Night Live,' dies at 78

George Eastman Museum recently added a print documenting the aftermath of the fires in Lahaina

ROSEGALLERY to open an exhibition of works by John Chiara

"Alfred Jacob Miller: Revisiting the Rendezvous in Scotland and Today" spotlights American West

Sutton Foster and Michael Urie reunite in the zany 'Once Upon a Mattress'

Calvin Royal creates a ballet festival with intention and care

An unexpected bright spot in theater? Look to Wisconsin.

Shelby Lynne meets her moment, again

MCA Australia announces the next generation of young Australian artists for Primavera 2024

How to Care for Your Stamp Collection

Home Remodeling and Bathroom Remodeling: A Comprehensive Guide to Transforming Your Space

5 Points on Mommy Makeover in Turkey: Why It is Preferred

What to Know Before You Go: Urgent Care Chicago

Why Hair Transplant in Turkey is Preferred

Zirconium Crowns Turkey: A Look at Cosmetic Dentistry

When Is the Best Time to Book Your Car Rental?

Refining Beauty: How Modern Aesthetic Treatments Are Shaping the Future of Cosmetic Injectables, Laser Care, and Tattoo

Unlocking Healthier Living Down Under: A Closer Look into Australian Vitamin K2 and CoQ10

Maximising Your Ute's Potential: A Guide to Custom Canopies, Essential Accessories, and Pet Transport Solutions

Maximizing Your Ute's Utility: Essential Aluminium Add-Ons for the Practical Outdoorsman

Unlocking Potential: How Personalized English Tutoring Can Transform High School Education in Sydney and Online

Enlightening Landscapes: The Integral Trio of Lighting, Fabric, and Drainage Solutions

Essential Retail Store Supplies: Elevating the Shopping Experience with Quality Tissue Paper, Clothes Racks, and Hangers

Water Damage Restoration 101: What to Do When Disaster Strikes




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful