Crime of the art: judge explains the big picture
Most theft is less urbane and more mundane, says expert
Stealing beautiful art is an ugly business.
That’s according to Judge Arthur Tompkins who, by day, presides over cases in the District Court — everything from criminal to civil suits — but, in his spare time, turns his attention to art. More specifically, art crime.
In the past decade, Tompkins has become an authority on crimes involving art masterpieces. He co-founded the NZ Art Crime Research Trust, travels to Italy each June to teach the Art in War component of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) annual postgraduate programme and has contributed to and edited books about art crime.
His own book, Plundering Beauty, will be launched in New Zealand this month. It’s subtitled A History of Art Crime During War, reflecting his area of interest. Based on his lecture notes, the book covers 2000 years of wartime art crimes, from classical antiquity to contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In many conflicts — the Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and World I and II — art has been stolen or destroyed, becoming a weapon in the wider fight for hearts and minds.
Tompkins says art is part of the shared heritage of humankind and to take it, then desecrate or destroy it — as the Taliban did with the Buddhas of Bamiyan — is to strike at the very heart of a culture and what it may hold sacred. “When you destroy something, it can be a signal to go ahead and destroy a whole culture.”
Outside wartime, he says, a belief has developed that the perpetrators of art crime are urbane thieves interested in masterpieces because of their beauty. In fact, art is frequently damaged when it’s stolen by thieves looking for something that’s relatively easy to transport, often to use as collateral for loans to buy drugs or weapons.
Tompkins says though art might be easily transportable, it’s not easy to sell legitimately and more opportunistic thieves, realising what they’ve taken is so recognisable, may instead seek a ransom.
“When you hear news stories about a missing masterpiece the police find in a bus station locker, you have to wonder how they knew to look there and it’s probably because a ransom has been paid.”
A year after two rare $1 million paintings by Gottfried Lindauer were stolen during a ram-raid at Parnell’s International Art Centre, Tompkins has no idea why these artworks were stolen or what could have happened to them.
“It could cover the whole spectrum [of why art is stolen] between an opportunistic theft to a commissioned one,” he says, adding that there’s probably a lot more art crime in New Zealand than we realise.
The opportunity to research art crime and teach followed a chance meeting in a Parisian bar
10 years ago. It wasn’t just any old bar but the bar at Interpol’s General Secretariat in Lyon, France whereTompkins was at a conference on forensic DNA.
He struck up a conversation at the bar, thinking that he was talking to a fellow conference attendee, but the man worked for Interpol’s Stolen Art Unit.
“I had no idea Interpol had such a thing, but was fascinated by the stories he told.” On the flight home, Tompkins realised that several of the issues he was working with Interpol on — cross-border laws and the interaction between different countries’ legal systems — were relevant to stolen art. Waiting for a jury to return at Kaikohe District Court, he looked up more on Interpol’s website about art crime, and learned of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. Contacting its founder, Noah Charney, he was invited to write a chapter for a book of art crime essays Charney was editing.
The following year, Tompkins was visiting England and figured he might as well travel to Umbria, where ARCA’s first Art Crime Conference was on. There, he got an invitation to return in 2010 to teach the Art in War course and has been back every year since.
“It’s a tough thing, having to abandon a New Zealand winter for an Umbrian summer each June…”