GETTY LOSES BID TO DISMISS ART-RESTITUTION LAWSUIT
Los Angeles Times
Nov 4 2011
The J. Paul Getty Trust is squaring off against the Armenian Orthodox
Church in Los Angeles County Superior Court, and on Thursday the church
won the first important procedural round in its bid to reclaim eight
prized medieval manuscripts (a detail is pictured above) it contends
were stolen goods when the Getty bought them for $950,000 in 1994.
The Getty tried to have the suit dismissed on statute-of-limitations
grounds, arguing that church officials were aware of the manuscripts’
whereabouts by 1952 and should have sued at that time, when they were
owned by an Armenian-American family in Massachusetts — the heirs
of a man who had brought them out of the province of Cilicia as the
Ottoman Turks were expelling the province’s Armenian population during
the World War I-era Armenian genocide.
Superior Court Judge Abraham Khan denied the Getty’s motion, saying
that it was “not clear” that church officials knew what the Getty says
they knew when it says they knew it. He said the statute-of-limitations
law could come into play in a future hearing but that he would want
to hear evidence about the complicated path the 755-year-old pages
took starting in 1916, when they were separated from a larger bible
known as the Zeyt’un Gospels.
The Getty’s pages are lavishly illustrated Canon Tables — citations
of parallel verses from the four New Testament gospels, which served
as a kind of frontispiece for the bible created in 1256 by T’oros
Roslin, considered the greatest Armenian manuscript illuminator.
The church aims to make the Zeyt’un Gospels whole again by winning back
the missing pages from the Getty and sending them to the Matenadaran,
a major manuscript museum in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, which
has housed the rest of the Zeyt’un Gospels since the late 1960s.
Here’s the full story about the decision. It includes a rarity in the
controversy-shy, ultra-cautious art-museum world: Columba Stewart,
executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint
John’s University in Minnesota and a Benedictine monk, is openly
calling on the Getty to repatriate a contested masterpiece. Stewart
says the issue shouldn’t be decided by legalities, but by the ethical
imperative of turning a fragmented artwork into one that’s whole.
Under a California law that was passed last year and pertains
solely to allegedly stolen artworks owned by museums or art dealers,
plaintiffs have six years to sue after they discover a missing work’s
whereabouts. The Getty says the clock has long since run out because
the owner, the Lebanon-based branch of the Armenian Orthodox Church
known as the Holy See of Cilicia, knew where the missing pages were
by mid-century. Attorneys for the church dispute that, saying that
the church didn’t even realize until 2006 that the bible housed in
Yerevan was missing its front pages.
The new law greatly relaxes the statute of limitations, which had
started the clock running not when victimized former owners actually
knew where their allegedly stolen art was, but at the time when they
should have known if they were being reasonably vigilant about tracking
down what they’d lost.
Under the old standard, the clock (which at the time called for a
three-year deadline rather than six years) might well have begun
running in 1994. That’s when the Zeyt’un Gospels pages were loaned
anonymously to an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New
York and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Getty bought them
the same year.
In its motion to dismiss the suit, which Khan denied, the Getty also
contended that the new statute-of-limitations law is unconstitutional
because it singles out museums and art dealers and does not include
private owners of art. Arguing that displaying art is a form of free
speech protected under the 1st Amendment, the Getty said the new
law improperly penalizes museums and galleries for exercising their
free-speech rights.
Countering in court pleadings, the church’s attorneys wrote that
“exhibiting stolen property is not protected under the First
Amendment,” and argued that the California Legislature legitimately
can hold museums and art delears to a higher standard than the general
public when it comes to possession of stolen artworks.
The judge said the constitutional argument didn’t need to be addressed
in his ruling Thursday.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/11/getty-museum-armenian-orthodox-church-stolen-art.html