Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite is a devastating description of how the Getty Museum indirectly, but knowingly, participated in the robbing of ancient sites in the Mediterranean for choice artefacts to conserve and display.
Chasing Aphrodite
Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, NY, 2011; xii + 364
ISBN: 978-0-151-01501-6
In his life John Paul Getty junior used his wealth to build up an extraordinary collection of fine art, sculpture and Greek and Roman antiques. These were partly on display in his houses and partly kept in stores. Before his death, however, he invested in a large museum in California which was a replica of a Roman villa on a large scale. When it opened to the public it had very little in the way of a reserve collection backing up what was on display that scholars could study. Jiri Frel, the first curator of antiquities realised that this was a major shortcoming of the museum and set about making it good. He used to buy items from dealers or individuals agreeing a priced and charging the museum rather more for the item. He used the surplus to buy in items to build up a substantial reserve collection of antiquities. What he almost certainly knew – as did other museum curators in America – that most, if not all, of the items he was buying had recently been looted from sites in Italy or Greece and sold through a series of dealers in Europe. The main ones were based either in Switzerland or London. Itwms coming from Italy were all documented as having been found before 1936 and kept by families in one country or another in Europe. Frel got into the habit of forging a lot of the paperwork relating to many of these items. He got his secretary to type up the documents on counterfeit papers. At least 800 objects had little or no documentation as a result. Eventually he was found out and was forced to leave the museum. Shortly after, all the documentation relating to his curatorship was removed from the museum.
His successor, Marion True, was determined to stop the acquisition of looted items by the museum. She began to insist on proper documentation showing the succession of ownership from removing the item from the soil to its present ownership. Other museums in America adopted a much laxer attitude to the ownership question. A number were only concerned with the previous ten years of ownership, while others were even more relaxed. At the same time the Greek and Italian governments began to become much stricter in allowing people to sell antiquities to overseas collectors and museums. Unfortunately for True, she had accepted a loan from a dealer to help her buy a holiday villa on Cyprus. When the Italian police began to explore all the dealings of one man who had died unexpectedly, there was evidence that she had had contact with him. And that nearly everything he had sold or was preparing to sell was looted. She and the Getty faced minutely detailed examination by the Italian police. They were able to establish that the Getty held a large number of objects that could be shown to have been recently looted. Other museums were being given the same message by the Italian Police. Moist retuned the looted objects more or less straight away. True, however, had been fired by the Getty. Nevertheless the museum continued to fight the Italians but, in the end, had to face the fact that they did hold looted objects some of which were the finest objects in their collections. The net result was that they were able to profit from loan exhibitions of magnificent objects in Italian museums that were not normally open to public viewing.
This book is a detailed expose of the collectors, dealers and looters. It details the changing policies of the Getty’s curators, directors and board over time. It shows how corrupt collecting by both individuals and museums was in the four decades after the ending of the Second World War war.
I really enjoyed reading a Christmas present from an Australian friend. It was a collection of short stories by RM Winn called Up a hollow log. Novels include Leslie Thomas's Other Times and Scott Spencer's Endless Love.
Endless Love
Scott Spencer
First published 1979,
Open Road Integrated Media edition, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0523-5; vi + 345pp
This is a sort of letter from one lover to another, except that they parted some time ago under difficult circumstances: she called the police who incarcerated him.
The story begins with David, whose parents and all their friends are avid communists. He regards their view of society as more or less normal until, as a teenager, he meets Jade and her family. They have a completely relaxed, attitude to society. More or less: if I let you do your thing, you let me do mine. They were well into drugs and explored them as a family. David became so attached to their ways that he ended up living with them. And in Jade’s bed. To start with they slept in her single bed, but later her mother bought them a double bed. Eventually her father decided that David and Jade’s relationship was getting too intense and they agreed that David would keep away from Jade and the house for thirty days. David struggled with this and, eventually, set fire to a pile of newspapers in the porch of their house. Everyone inside is so drugged up that he has to go inside to rescue them.
He is committed to a psychiatric hospital where he spends three years. When he is released he goes back to his parents’ house. He is required to make no attempt whatsoever to contact Jade or her family; to attend the local university; to get a job; to see a psychiatrist twice a week and to visit his parole officer at regular intervals. After a time he manages to move into a flat of his own. But then he decides to find Jade. So he starts to ring all the people he can find with her surname. Finally, he finds her mother and leans that she has divorced Hugh and that the family is spread out all over America. They start to correspond, writing long letters to each other, though Ann doesn’t let slip anything about Jade.
He breaks parole and goes to New York where he stays in a hotel. Then he knocks on Ann’s door and, after some conversation, they go out together for a meal. He spends the night on her couch, even though she offers him her bed. They spend the next day together as well and seem to enjoy one another’s company. The next day, David sees Jade’s father in the street. He is with his new girlfriend. Hugh starts to cross the road to reach David but gets run over by a taxi and dies.
He and Ann view the corpse. The children all gather at Ann’s flat for the funeral. Afterwards, in the gathering at the flat, David is forced by one of the children to leave. He meets Jade just arriving in New York. They have a meal and then go to his hotel where they continue talking. They are reacquainting themselves with their old love for one another. Eventually they make love again and again and again during the night. They leave New York and go to live in the house she shares with other university students. While she is at university, he works at various jobs.
Their life is pretty good until Jade finds out that her father died because he didn’t look before crossing the road to confront David. She blames him for this and locks him out of the house. She informs the police that he is being a nuisance. They remove him and find out that he has broken parole. So he goes back to the psychiatric hospital he was in before. He spends some time there during which Jade marries a Frenchman and goes to France and his father dies. He also has sex with two women and fails to form a relationship with a third. Eventually his mother has no more money for the hospital and so he is committed to a State run one. There he is visited by Ann, Jade’s mother, who manages to get him released.
And so he writes this book for Jade telling of their joint lives. It’s a really good read with quite a few unexpected twists. I can thoroughly recommend it.
Finally, there is the fantasy novel by Jules Wellesley called The Mask of the River King.
The Mask of the River King
Jules Wellesley
Smashwords Edition, 2009. 165pp
This is a fantasy novel and contains all the things I hate about fantasy fiction. There are multitudes of strange characters - for want of a better word – who are, somehow, able to communicate with one another. Each set of these characters has its own appearance, laws, customs and language. They all seem to be at odds with one another, resulting in quite serious fighting and battles from time to time. Or torture. Or both. Having these elements on just one planet would be bad enough, but the heroes of our story are able to escape one lot of trouble for another by using a ‘nexus’ or ‘vortex’ to reach another planet and time and a new set of characters. And while they travel through the nexus they themselves can change shape and size. It’s like 3-D Lord of the Rings. Or a bit like some of the more sophisticated computer games. Nevertheless, you carry on reading to find out if the four heroes do finally get to the end and triumph. Oh – and did I say that it’s good versus evil. And that our four heroes are the ones on the good side.
OK. So we start in a world where everyone/thing is in thrall to an evil overlord. Frey is one of his slaves who was found as a baby beside a spring in a cave. He has grown up as one of the slaves. A group of travellers appears who are most unwelcome. They are led by Niran who is patently good. He rides an Umsu which can talk to him. Frey manages to escape with them when they leave. A female character called Rana also escapes this world with them. And basically that’s the core heroes. They encounter all sorts of strange worlds and beings and win out over each one. Sometimes it’s a simple escape, other times they have to fight for it with friends they pick up for the occasion. We learn a little more about each character in each world they visit. It turns out that Niran has magic powers through his ability to manipulate soulstones. This means that he is one of a small group of optifexes. Soulstones are used for a multitude of purposes because they throw energy beams for want of a better word. I suppose they are the equivalent of the old ray guns of primitive science fiction.
As the group pass through different worlds, thee battles they have to fight in one way or another get fiercer. Frey and Rana fall in love with one another. Predictable, you might say. But they supply the only love interest in this story. And by the end she is pregnant. Towards the end Frey gets separated from the others and seems to travel in a different world from them. He meets a group of optifexes and is trained and initiated as one of them, having already received considerable training from Niran. The two groups unite and Frey finally meets the ultimately evil one in this strange universe. After a lengthy battle, he wins over the evil one and starts to rule the universe with Rana at his side, even though she has her doubts about his final appearance.
At the end of the day this is a good adventure story which is well-written. It is also one of those un-put-downable books once you have got into the story.
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