Sketch Artist 
Whose Art Is It, Anyway?
In February two stolen frescoes paid for and restored by Dominique de Menil will be unveiled in a new Eastern Orthodox chapel in Houston. The issue of whether they belong in Texas is controversial—but the story of how they ended up here is downright Byzantine.
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Because they had also had dealings with Dikmen, both Mrs. de Menil and Walter Hopps were deposed as part of the lawsuit. During the trial, it became public that Yanni Petsopoulos had tried to sell Dikmen’s two Byzantine frescoes to at least one other party before he ever spoke to Bertrand Davezac. Petsopoulos had approached Gary Vikan, who was then a senior associate at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C. The dealer had told Vikan, too, that the frescoes—for which he was asking $600,000—had been discovered accidentally at a construction site in Turkey, but Vikan didn’t buy the story. When he was called to the stand during the Goldberg trial, Vikan testified that he had found the frescoes’ documentation questionable and had told Petsopoulos that he wasn’t interested in doing business because he thought the objects being peddled were illicit antiquities. Reached by telephone at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, where he is now the director, Vikan explained why he didn’t pursue the deal. “This was archaeological stuff and I didn’t know where it came from,” he said. “It was different from a coin or a ring or an icon, which can wander the world over. This was part of a building, it had come from a certain place, and that place was unknown. That bothered me.”
Although Mrs. de Menil knew a lot about buying art, it seems that, initially at least, she was more gullible than Vikan, as she apparently thought the frescoes had come on the market legitimately when she first heard about them. Nevertheless, according to Tom Kline, an attorney now with the Houston-based law firm of Andrews and Kurth who represented Cyprus in its lawsuit against Peg Goldberg, there is no comparison between Goldberg’s purchase of the Kanakaria mosaics and Dominique de Menil’s purchase of the Lysi frescoes. “It’s night and day,” Kline said recently. “The de Menils always made the assumption that the frescoes were very valuable and could have been stolen, and it seems to me they did everything you would want them to do to find the true owners. Peg Goldberg’s efforts to determine where the Kanakaria mosaics came from were less than thorough.”
TO THE GREEK CYPRIOT RESIDENTS OF CYPRUS, the most disturbing thing about the looting of their island that took place after the Turkish invasion was the religious nature of the objects that were stolen; they believed that the artwork possessed spiritual powers. As Dan Hofstedter wrote in The New Yorker, icons were “traditional vehicles of contact with the Almighty.” For Greek Cypriot officials, the question of whether they would be able to recover objects stolen from their island once they appeared on the market was therefore a particularly sensitive one. According to the final agreement between the Menil Foundation and the Church of Cyprus, which was not signed until 1987, Mrs. de Menil does not legally own the frescoes, as one cannot obtain good title to a work of art that has been stolen. Instead, she acquired the frescoes on behalf of the Church of Cyprus, which retains its original claim to them. But Mrs. de Menil succeeded in persuading the church to allow the frescoes to reside in Houston—where the Menil Foundation would display them in a chapel consecrated as an Eastern Orthodox church—for an established period of time. The de Menils hope the chapel will be used by Houston’s sizable Greek immigrant community. “It’s much more a religious approach than a museum approach,” Mrs. de Menil explained. “A religious object in a museum loses its function. It becomes an object. So the principle I’ve applied is to restore religious art to its function.” After a lapse of twenty years, a period that began on January 1, 1992, the frescoes’ fate will be revisited. In other words, the question of whether the frescoes will return to Cyprus remains open. And the de Menils hope that returning them will not be necessary. “I think by that time the frescoes will have become part of the fabric of Houston,” said Francois. “We would want to keep them here, as long as the Church of Cyprus is willing.” The agreement also stipulates that the building and the land be deeded to the Church of Cyprus for as long as the frescoes are there. “So in a way it is as if the frescoes are on Cypriot soil,” Francois said.
Experts in Byzantine art take the view that Mrs. de Menil did a great service in purchasing the frescoes because it seems unlikely that otherwise the segments would ever have been reunited with such skill. “I can imagine fifteen pieces spread out in fifteen houses all across France and England and Germany,” said Gary Vikan. “I can imagine someone buying them lock, stock, and barrel, and then putting them in a barn for fifty years. Or buying them and putting them back together poorly.” According to Dan Hofstedter, however, the agreement between the Menil Foundation and the Church of Cyprus was viewed bitterly by some people in Cyprus. “A Cypriot civil servant who had negotiated with the Menil [Foundation] told me that ‘the dynamics of the conversations’ had left him with the feeling of ‘blackmail,’” he wrote in The New Yorker. “If Cyprus didn’t cave in to the Menil’s self-serving proposal, he felt, the foundation would pull out altogether, leaving the frescoes to their fate.”
Apparently the representatives of the Menil Foundation did convey some sense of threat during their talks, but it is possible that that was a mistake on their part rather than a deliberate tactic. “My impression is that the threats were coming from the smugglers and were simply passed on by the de Menils,” said attorney Tom Kline. “But maybe Cyprus didn’t know what was coming from the de Menils and what was coming from the smugglers.” Today, at any rate, the government of Cyprus clearly supports the construction of the chapel in Houston. Several Cypriot officials, including Ambassador Jacovides (along with Houston Rockets superstar Hakeem Olajuwon), now sit on the board of the Byzantine Fresco Foundation, which was formed to oversee the chapel’s finances and administration. The Cypriot government officials’ current goodwill may owe something to a favor the Menil group performed. While negotiations over the fate of the Lysi frescoes were still in progress, they served as intermediaries between Cypriot officials and Aydin Dikmen in an effort to recover additional stolen Cypriot artwork from the Turkish dealer. Dikmen had sold Peg Goldberg only some of the Kanakaria mosaics he possessed, and the Menil staff worked with Constantine Leventis, a wealthy philanthropist and the Republic of Cyprus’ ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, to force Dikmen to return two other sections of mosaic by refusing to release the money that had been put in the escrow account until he cooperated. “I believe that Constantine Leventis exerted some influence to slow down the transaction regarding the Lysi frescoes, and the de Menils helped him with that,” said Tom Kline. “I think it’s fair to say they assisted Constantine Leventis in getting some of the mosaics back.” In her deposition for the Goldberg case, Mrs. de Menil also said that the Menil Foundation paid to transport the mosaics back to Cyprus.
BY 1988 THE LYSI FRESCOES HAD BEEN fully restored and the negotiations with Cyprus had been completed, but because the project had strained the finances of the Menil Foundation, work on the chapel in Houston did not begin until 1995. (The acquisition and restoration of the frescoes, as well as the design and construction of the new chapel, have added up to more than $5 million.) In the meantime the frescoes were stored in the basement of the Menil Collection, a situation that apparently displeased His Beatitude Archbishop Chrysostomos of the Church of Cyprus. Archbishop Chrysostomos has his own museum in Nicosia, where the Kanakaria mosaics recovered from Goldberg and Dikmen now reside, and he probably felt that the Lysi frescoes belonged there as well, if they weren’t going to be put in a chapel in Houston as had been agreed. However, the archbishop’s concerns were apparently assuaged once the de Menils threw their energies into completing the project, which was facilitated by a large fund-raising effort, and he is expected to preside over the consecration of the chapel in May. Said Tom Kline: “Whatever bad feelings may have existed seem to have dissipated now that it’s clear they’re doing something that’s going to be world-class.”
The Byzantine Fresco Chapel is located at the corner of Branard and Yupon streets, a few blocks from the Menil Collection. The project has been the subject of a lot of talk in Houston, primarily because Mrs. de Menil kept the job in the family. “It’s a great way to make your son famous,” carped one local architect. “I wish my mother had that kind of money.” But the chapel has already won two architectural awards. Francois de Menil’s building is an attractive mélange of blue-gray stone, gray slabs of cast concrete, and a dark, pewter-colored metal. (The building’s exterior blends in with the Menil Collection and the surrounding houses, which are all painted a distinctive dark gray.) Initially, a London firm had designed a structure that was a replica of the church near Lysi, but Francois and others convinced his mother that putting a copy of a thirteenth-century building in the middle of modern-day Houston was not the right approach. “My son showed me that I was well on the way to building another Disneyland,” Mrs. de Menil said. “Next time I would build a little pagoda to present some Chinese relics.” Francois’ design refers to the Lysi chapel but does not attempt to replicate it. Inside a main hall that encloses a steel box, large translucent panels of glass are arranged in the outline of the little chapel. The glass panels don’t quite touch; Francois wants the broken outline to suggest the desecration that occurred in Lysi while simultaneously resurrecting the shape of the original building.
After touring the unfinished chapel with Francois, we went over to Richmond Hall, a part of the Menil Collection complex where the restored frescoes have been housed for the past year. The dome was standing face down on the floor, and Francois and several contractors were deciding what kind of black paint to use on the back of its fiberglass shell. The apse stood behind the dome, a thick plastic curtain taped over its front. It was frustrating to get so close to the frescoes and still be unable to view them, and I was wondering if I could ask to see them when one of the contractors suggested that we pull aside the plastic curtain covering the apse. Against a deep blue background, the Virgin Mary was painted in reds and browns and paler ocher colors. The work, which had an earthy quality, was riddled with ancient cracks and seams (while Morrocco had repaired the damage done by the thieves, he did not disguise the damage done by time). The Virgin’s face bore an expression of quiet serenity; her arms were spread out in welcome, and a veil was draped around her shoulders. According to Annemarie Weyl Carr, an art history professor at Southern Methodist University, Byzantine legend holds that the Virgin’s veil carries mysterious powers of protection—when carried into war, it is supposed to have thrown enemy armies into confusion.
In late November the apse and the dome were brought into the chapel and huge cranes and pulleys built into the structure were used to raise them into place over the glass panels. Francois’ gray-and-black chapel embraces the frescoes, and their vibrant colors and liveliness should leap out at viewers.
On February 8 the chapel will be formally opened to the public. Just inside the entrance, a panel of text will explain the story of how the frescoes came to be in Houston. “It’s an unusual building, and it’s an unusual circumstance,” said Francois. “You could just walk in and look at the frescoes, but we think it’s important to know the story—to understand the rape and the rescue of the frescoes.”
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