The Founders of Hobby Lobby Are Suing Christie’s for Selling Them an Ancient Artifact That Pretty Much Everyone Now Agrees Was Stolen

A bitter three-way legal tangle between Christie’s, the US
government, and the family that runs the arts-and-crafts
chain-store Hobby Lobby has cast a dark shadow over the
antiquities trade.

The finger-pointing began last September, when the government
seized an ancient Mesopotamian artifact known as the Gilgamesh
Dream Tablet from the Museum of the Bible, which was founded by the
Hobby Lobby family in 2017. The family had purchased the
object through Christie’s in a private sale for $1.67 million
in 2014.

This week, the government announced that it was moving forward
to formally retain the ancient tablet, which was imported illegally
from Iraq sometime in the 2000s.

Now the family, through Hobby Lobby, is seeking to get its money
back from Christie’s, alleging that the auction house did not do
its due diligence in investigating the tablet’s legal status.

“This lawsuit seeks a recovery for our client based upon
promises made when the Gilgamesh Tablet was sold in 2014,” Michael
McCullough of Pearlstein & McCullough, the firm representing
Hobby Lobby, said in a press release.

“We will be joining our lawsuit with the government’s forfeiture
action and we are very confident that we will be successful in
recovering the purchase price from Christie’s.”

Falsified Records

Much of the complicated back-and-forth between the three parties
hinges on a falsified provenance dossier indicating that the
tablet first appeared in the US in 1981, when it supposedly sold at
the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house in San Francisco.
The provenance also falsely indicated that the tablet had been
deaccessioned by a small museum.

But according to the US government, the tablet has an altogether
different history. In legal papers, the US Attorney for the
Eastern District of New York says that an unidentified
antiquities dealer viewed the tablet in or prior to 2001 in the
London home of Jordanian antiquities dealer Ghassan
Rihani. Two years later, after acquiring the tablet and a
group of other objects for just over $50,000, the unidentified
dealer had the entire trove sent to the US illegally.

Then, in 2007, the dealer created the false provenance and
bogus auction record, omitting any mention of Rihani, and sold
the Gilgamesh tablet to another unidentified
party. (Complicating matters further, the tablet was also
later published in at least two dealer catalogues, indicating its
“clean” provenance and lending further credence to its legal
status.)

But while the government makes no claim that Christie’s ever
provided this false dossier to Hobby Lobby as proof of the tablet’s
good legal standing, the family behind the chain store says
otherwise, alleging in its lawsuit against the auction house that
the dossier was included with “a specially prepared
private sale catalogue.” The family now claims that the auction
house engaged in “deceitful and fraudulent conduct.”

Importantly, the government acknowledges that Christie’s had
access to the false provenance. District attorneys say that
when Christie’s—described only as “a major international auction
house” in government court papers—tried to verify the dossier with
the consigner prior to the 2014 private sale to the Hobby Lobby
family, the tablet’s owner recognized that the provenance “was not
verifiable and would not hold up to scrutiny in a public
auction.”

The government also says that Christie’s then-head of
antiquities told the consigner that the tablet “would not be
offered in a public auction, but a private sale,” suggesting that
the auction house may have been acting cautiously.

In a statement provided to Artnet News, a Christie’s
spokesperson said the Hobby Lobby lawsuit “is
linked to new information that has come to light regarding an
unidentified dealer’s admission to government authorities
that he illegally imported this item
then falsified documents over a
decade ago, in order to perpetrate an illegal sale and exploit the
legitimate market for ancient art.

“Now that we are informed of this
activity pre-dating Christie’s involvement, we are reviewing all
representations made to us by prior owners and will reserve
our rights in this matter. Assertions within the filing that
suggest Christie’s had knowledge of the original fraud or illegal
importation do not comport with
our investigation.”

This is not the first time that the Hobby Lobby family has been
embroiled in the looted antiquities trade.

In 2017, US government attorneys filed a civil action against
Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, outlining a years-long, willful pattern of
illicitly smuggling Iraqi artifacts into the US despite numerous
warnings, interceptions, and large-scale purchases that were
“fraught with red flags,” according to the government.

Thousands of smuggled objects were eventually
returned to Iraq and Hobby Lobby paid a $3 million fine.

Meanwhile, while legal mattrs are being sorted out, the
Gilgamesh tablet is being held in a Department of
Homeland Security warehouse in Queens, New York.

The post The Founders of Hobby Lobby Are Suing Christie’s
for Selling Them an Ancient Artifact That Pretty Much Everyone Now
Agrees Was Stolen appeared first on artnet News.