Recent stories of note:
“How an Academic Uncovered One of the Biggest Museum Heists of All Time”
Max Colchester, The Wall Street Journal
Last week, this column discussed the un-meritocratic nature of the world of art thievery. This week, we turn to those responsible for catching these clumsy kleptos. A decade ago, the Danish collector Ittai Gradel first (unknowingly) purchased a piece stolen from the British Museum, a two-thousand-year-old Roman Medusa cameo he found priced at fifteen pounds on eBay. He then flipped the piece and made a profit of a few thousand pounds. The original seller, Gradel noticed, was listing egregiously underpriced items from antiquity every few months. Assuming that the source was simply an idiot, Gradel continued to purchase and flip items from the vendor for years—until one day in 2020 when he noticed that one of these relics matched perfectly an artifact in the British Museum’s collection. He quickly realized that the man on the other side of his eBay interactions was a thief. Max Colchester recounts in The Wall Street Journal the many twists and turns in Gradel’s effort to expose the pilfery to the light of day, as well as the efforts of those who tried to stop him.
“‘I’ve never unearthed anything this big in my life’: Assyrian sculpture with rich history dug up in northern Iraq”
Hadani Ditmars, The Art Newspaper
Some 2,700 years ago, the Assyrian King Sargon II commissioned his artists to create a thirteen-foot tall lamassu, a deity that promises protection in exchange for piety. But Sargon II apparently failed to live up to his end of the bargain with the god, and his son was killed shortly after the lamassu was built. This prompted the king to move his people to Nineveh, leaving the lamassu behind to be claimed by Iraq’s desert sands. In 1992, however, it was reclaimed from those sands by an archaeological dig. Its discovery was one of the century’s most exciting developments in antiquities. But three years later, the head was stolen by thieves, and, given the bubbling instability of the region, the archaeologists overseeing the site decided the best course of action would be to rebury the massive sculpture. It has thus lain in another slumber underneath the sand for the last three decades. But a group of Iraqi and French archaeologists recently decided that the time was right to reawaken the headless deity, and their efforts were successful: the lamassu was uncovered with no further damage.
“Pioneering Artist Robert Irwin, Who Reshaped Perception With Light and Space, Has Died”
Adam Schrader, Artnet News
In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot describes a “white light still and moving.” This contradiction, an attempt to capture the strange character of light itself, is more paradox than mere incongruity. The description has always reminded me of the work of the artist Robert Irwin, who died this last week. Irwin’s work takes a similar examination of light as its subject, and his pieces Slant/Light/Volume (1971) and Scrim V (1972) recreate visually the same paradox that Eliot constructed verbally: the installations consist of nearly transparent cloth that seems to ensnare light itself as something both “still and moving.” But description of these works must fail, as must photographs of it (Irwin long forbade his work from being photographed). Over nine decades, Irwin cultivated an oeuvre that demands to be experienced in person—a compulsion increasingly important at a time when so many are exposed to art exclusively via screen.