Art Is Long, Tax Suits Short

A Greek odyssey

What is a beautiful, bronzed Greek youth who spent 1,800 years under the Adriatic Sea before wandering through Europe doing in a place like Denver? That is just what Italian legal authorities, international art dealers and American tax collectors are asking themselves.

The international fuss over the powerfully muscled youth, actually a 4th century B.C. sculpture from Greece's Golden Age, is not the usual art dispute over authenticity. The experts agree that the graceful figure is either the only existing original work by the master sculptor Lysippus or, at least, from his school. At issue is whether the statue was smuggled illegally out of Italy and whether California's J. Paul Getty Museum, which acquired the statue earlier this year in London for $3.9 million, must pay a California sales tax or a Colorado use tax --or neither--on the purchase.

The statue was dragged off a sandy seabed in the nets of surprised fishermen from the Italian port of Fano in 1963. A wily antique dealer and his two cousins from the nearby town of Gubbio bought it for $5,500, then kept it in a local priest's house, as they tried to peddle it secretly to European art dealers for $200,000. A Roman antique dealer tipped Italian officials off to the statue's existence. But when police raided the priest's house in 1964, the bronze was gone. In a lengthy court fight, the priest and the three cousins were acquitted of illegally receiving archaeological property belonging to the state. Italy's supreme court ruled that the statue may have been found in international waters and was therefore not necessarily state property.

The Greek youth's peregrinations between 1964 and 1972, when Getty Museum Curator Jiri Frel viewed him in Munich, are uncertain. By then, ownership was claimed by Artemis, a Luxembourg-based art consortium. Getty, the late oil billionaire, had begun a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities at his U.S. home in Malibu, Calif., and expressed interest in the statue. But even he balked at the asking price--about $5 million. After his death in 1976, officials at his museum continued the quest for the statue, finally arriving at a deal this year.

News of the purchase renewed Italian ire at the loss of yet another art masterpiece to the U.S. Sergio Matteini Chiari, a magistrate in Gubbio, filed a charge of clandestine export of an artwork against "unknown persons." Until he can fill in the names, however, the action has little force. Higher Italian officials are considering more effective moves, including complaints to Washington.

The Getty Museum is more worried about U.S. taxmen than Italian judges and diplomats. California sales-tax law exempts any work of art that has been displayed outside the state for at least six months, so the Getty people have broken the boy's westward passage with stopovers at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and, currently, at the Denver Art Museum. California tax officials have no hope of collecting $234,000 in sales tax, but various Colorado tax officials have filed use-tax claims of $300,000.

In Malibu, Getty Curator Frel insists that once the museum's lawyers dispose of the local and foreign challenges, the wandering Greek will finally have a safe home in California. Says he, in a comment unlikely to quiet the controversy: "It's much easier for the Italian government to make accusations that the Americans are raping them of their art treasures than it is for them to fix the leaky roofs of the museums of Rome." qed

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