Antiquities used to be a relatively sleepy segment of the art market, until about a decade ago when art galleries and auction houses started mixing 20th-century paintings with ancient artifacts. Agnes Martin’s minimalist paintings and Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist works, after all, made reference to classical Greek and Roman statues, so there was a certain logic to displaying them together.
Emanuela Tarizzo, the new director of Frieze Masters, which opens this month in London (Oct. 16-19), said that trend in both exhibitions and in interior design started attracting a new generation of collectors in their 30s and 40s to all sorts of antiquities.
“You’re not just talking about giant Roman statues, which might have a significant price,” she said. “But also fragments, which are beautiful, or small craters like Greek or Egyptian vessels, or even Roman glass.”
These items, she said, can range from $5,000 to $15,000.
“That’s part of why younger audiences are drawn to it,” Tarizzo added. “They say: This is very reasonably priced, it’s 2,000 years old with a very interesting history and it has a certain mystique to it, too.”
There are good reasons to be drawn to antiquities, but also many reasons to hesitate before buying. Ancient objects have been looted from conflict zones like Iraq and Syria, and illegally excavated from Egypt, Athens and Rome. Other items have been stolen from museum showcases, sold with phony documentation, and often copied or faked.
The 1970 UNESCO Convention, which set rules for the import, export and sale of antiquities, emphasized the need for cracking down on illicit trade. But ancient objects are frequently trafficked across borders and sometimes end up at art fairs, as well as in auctions and museums.
Beware danger zones
If you are interested in buying ancient artifacts and artworks, experts say it makes sense to do your homework, ask informed questions and get sound legal advice before diving in.
This year, Frieze Masters is presenting seven antiquities galleries, including Kallos Gallery, Rupert Wace and Charles Ede, all from London, as well as Belgium’s Axel Vervoordt gallery, which is known for combining modern art and design with assorted antiquities.
At Frieze Masters, Tarizzo said, antiquities encompass art and artifacts from the ancient world around the Mediterranean basin, including Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, which extended in places north of the Alps.
It is wise for collectors to familiarize themselves with the danger zones around the globe where heritage is under threat. The International Council on Museums compiles Red Lists of cultural heritage objects vulnerable to illicit trafficking, which include photos and are published in several languages. UNESCO maintains a “List of World Heritage in Danger,” which currently contains 53 places where ancient sites are under attack.
When buying at a fair like Frieze, collectors can expect that the objects on sale have gone through at least one vetting process. All the stands at Frieze are checked by the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that helps find and recover stolen art and maintains a database of more than 700,000 missing objects, Tarizzo said.
Olivia Whitting, the head of cultural heritage for the group, which handles antiquities, said the vetting does turn up problematic objects.
“We have at least one every fair,” she said — often, she noted, a work that is being exhibited for the first time. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, the person who is holding it has no idea of the issue,” she added.
All Frieze Masters dealers must provide the Art Loss Register with documented provenance or a list of all known previous owners before the year 2000.
“The need for vetting and the type of vetting changes each year depending on the risks associated with different types of items and different rules,” Whitting said.
Some galleries at Frieze pay an additional fee for a more comprehensive check, which includes searches of Interpol databases and police databases in the relevant country. Objects that pass that check receive an Art Loss Register Certificate. If a gallery does not have one, a buyer can request one for $110.
A certificate cannot fully protect a buyer from future problems, Whitting said, but it is the best option available. “It’s evidence at the time of purchase of the best level of due diligence,” she said. “If, later on, a claim is made on the piece, the collector can show that they did their due diligence, and the documentation provided passed our checks.”
Ask the dealer
If an ancient-looking artwork catches your eye, don’t simply rely on a certificate, said Fionnuala Rogers, a cultural heritage property lawyer with the firm Canvas Art Law, in London.
“Ask the dealer how much research they’ve done on the object and whether they have verified the provenance themselves,” she said.
Even as a private citizen, you can also seek information from European law enforcement agencies, usually free of charge. The Italian Carabinieri maintains a database of stolen cultural heritage, as does Greece’s Hellenic Police, in collaboration with Interpol.
In spite of a great deal of vetting, even highly regarded galleries and art institutions sometimes find themselves with illicit goods, said Deborah Lehr, the founder of the Antiquities Coalition, a New York-based advocacy group that works to combat cultural racketeering.
“Overwhelmingly, we’ve found that dealers are not intending to deal with illicit antiquities,” she said, “but it can cost a lot of money and require a lot of time to inquire into the backgrounds of these objects, and even major organizations that have those resources have been taken in, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
In 2019, the Met in New York had to return the gilded sarcophagus of Nedjemankh and other ancient gold artifacts to Egypt after investigators found that they had been plundered in 2011 and sold to the museum with phony provenance documents.
Christos Tsirogiannis, a Cambridge-based forensic archaeologist, has found hundreds of illegally excavated antiquities at galleries, auction houses and museums in the last two decades. In 2017, he identified two 4th-century B.C. Greek marble funerary vases at Frieze Masters that had been illicitly traded, and repatriated them to Greece last year.
Tsirogiannis, the head of UNESCO’s illicit antiquities research at Ionian University, said private individuals should independently verify any documentation a gallery provides, including information about its background.
“Your research should also involve a lot of research on the gallery from which you plan to shop,” he said.
New buyers of antiquities do not need to be experts, but they should find an expert to advise and protect them from losses, he said. Over time, they will learn how to conduct research, avoid traps and protect their investments and reputations.
In a hurry?
What if a collector spots a dazzling object and wants to purchase it on the spot? Leila Amineddoleh, the chair of the Art Law Group at the New York law firm Tarter Krinsky & Drogin, advised signing a contract with the dealer that allows time for due diligence.
“If you really want that piece, at least ask for a 24-hour agreement, or a 48-hour agreement that allows you to conduct your research,” she said.
It also helps to add language to the agreement for an option to return the object and rescind the sale — within a few months — if any problems arise with title or customs documents.
“An extra paragraph or two in the contract will be much less costly than a potential problem you might have along the way,” she said.
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