Part 61

The rug was a sensation in Pueblo. Neighbors dropped by to see it. It was so large that it could not be used in any of the rooms in the Giltner home. For the best viewing, Mrs. Giltner had the rug hauled out into the back yard and strung over a clothes line. The exact measurements of the rug were 18 feet 11 inches by 8 feet. It was embroidered at the four corners and had a red felt backing.

Mrs. Giltner told neighbors, “It’s too pretty to walk on and too big for my living room. I don’t know what in the world we’ll do with it.”

The Giltners sent the rug to a local firm for cleaning and storage. They valued the rug at $25,000 and had it insured for $16,000. The Pueblo Star-Journal carried a picture of the rug with a pretty girl seated on it. The accompanying story said: “Owners of the rug are contacting museums and big-game hunters, with a view to selling it, since they feel it is too valuable for their use, and their home will not accommodate it.”

Denver’s Collector of Customs Harry A. Zinn saw the news story in the Pueblo paper. He thought it odd that an American sergeant should be sending back a $25,000 rug to the United States. He forwarded a copy of the clipping to the Supervising Customs Agent in Chicago, saying, “Enclosed is a newspaper clipping, the subject of which you may consider warrants some investigation.” The Customs agency certainly was interested in investigating the importation of a rug of such value.

At the same time, the Korean Consul General in New York, David Namkoong, was displaying interest in the report of the rug shipped from Seoul. Namkoong realized that the rug was one of the national treasures which had been stolen from the palace in Seoul at the outbreak of the Korean War. The rug had hung in the Chang Duk palace, the home of Queen Min. The palace had been made into a national museum where the Koreans displayed historical treasures of the ancient kingdom. Many of these treasures had been among the loot taken by Communists and civilians during the first invasion of Seoul. Mr. Namkoong told a reporter for The New York Times, “The rug is worth about $100,000, if such a priceless national treasure can have a price tag.”

The Korean government and the United States government took the view that young Giltner was an innocent purchaser of the rug and that he had knowingly violated no law in sending the rug home. A Customs agent hurried to Pueblo from Chicago to impound the rug. It was placed in storage for safekeeping in Denver pending its return to Korea. The Korean government reimbursed the Giltners for all the expenses involved in the shipment, cleaning, storage, and insuring of the rug. And thus the case of the souvenir-hunting sergeant and the leopard-skin rug ended on a note of international good will.

The case of the leopard-skin rug presented no difficulty for Customs in establishing the historic and artistic authenticity of the rug. But classification in the field of fine art is not always so simple. Customs has become embroiled in some hilarious and notable cases of this sort.

Early in this century, Congress decided in the interest of promoting culture to permit, free of duty, the importation of paintings, sculptures, and other art objects which could be classified as “fine arts.” It was when Congress began defining fine arts in legal language that the trouble began. For example, a sculpture was defined as something which is representative of an animate object in nature that is in its true proportion of length, breadth, and thickness. When this definition was written, members of Congress did not take into account the abstractionists and the modernists, who hardly view their subjects in their “true proportion of length, breadth, and thickness.”

With the passage of this law, Congress automatically converted every Customs appraiser in the United States into an active critic and judge of the arts. This was so because--whether the appraisers liked it or not--they had to decide whether an import was a work of fine art and thus free of duty. No shilly-shallying about it. It was or it was not subject to duty. Juries of eminent art critics might enjoy the luxury of disagreement; the Customs appraiser had to say yes or no.

This was the situation in 1927 when the distinguished sculptor Constantin Brancusi sent from Europe a highly polished bronze figure called “Bird in Flight.” The bronze was about 4 feet 6 inches high and stood on a cylindrical base about 6 inches in diameter and 6 inches in height.

In his effort to describe the sculpture, Justice Waite of the Customs Appeals Court would write: “The importation ... terminates at the top in a point which might be caused by the cutting of the piece diagonally across and upward until it terminates in an edge. It increases in size as it descends with a slight curve to the middle, from which point it decreases and terminates about ten inches from the pedestal, where it is cylindrical, and from that point it increases in size on a conical shaped base which rests upon a pedestal....

“The piece is characterized ... as a bird. Without the exercise of rather a vivid imagination, it bears no resemblance to a bird except, perchance, with such imagination it may be likened to the shape of the body of a bird. It has neither head nor feet nor feathers portrayed in the piece.... It is extremely smooth on its exterior which is a polished and burnished surface....”

When a Customs examiner first saw this objet d’art, he decided that it could not, from his viewpoint, be called even a reasonable facsimile of a bird. As he studied it further, he was unable to detect the “true proportions” which were necessary to meet the requirements of the law laid down by Congress for duty-free statuary.

His ruling that the famed “Bird in Flight” was not a work of fine art touched off a storm in the art world, with much derisive comment aimed at Customs. Edward Steichen, the importer of the Brancusi work, appealed the examiner’s ruling, and when the case came to trial in 1928, he was flanked by an imposing list of witnesses ready to testify that Brancusi had indeed produced a work of fine art in “Bird in Flight.”

The witnesses who came to the defense of Brancusi were Sculptor Jacob Epstein, Forbes Watson, editor of the Arts magazine, Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

After hearing all the evidence, the court conceded that “under the earlier (court) decisions, this importation would have been rejected as a work of art, or, to be more accurate, as a work within the classification of high art.” However, it noted that opinions of what constituted high art had undergone changes under the influence of modern schools of art.

Finally the court said of the statue: “It is beautiful and symmetrical in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental, and as we hold under the evidence that it is the original production of a professional sculptor and is in fact a piece of sculpture and a work of art according to the authorities above referred to, we sustain the protest and find that it is entitled to free entry....”

The storm kicked up over the Brancusi bird created little more uproar than the arrival in New York in May, 1955, of an abstract painting by the European artist Dr. Alberto Burri. It was a most unusual work of art, as it consisted of several pieces of burlap sewn together and affixed to a board, stencilled with letters, and decorated with birds painted in oils. The artist said the effect of the whole was to convey a spiritual sense of the order in life. He valued his work at $450.

However the Customs examiner, failing to perceive the artist’s message, ruled that the importation was not a work of art. He held that it was a manufactured object whose chief value was in the vegetable fiber, or burlap sacking. Under this ruling, the import was dutiable at 20 per cent of the value placed upon it by the artist.

The examiner’s ruling posed an unusual problem. Art experts agreed that Dr. Burri’s work was not a painting--but a collage. And Congress had failed to mention collages in the categories of art held to be duty free, an oversight thought by some to reflect no credit on the Congressional artistic sense.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of museum collections of the Museum of Modern Art, and Leo Castelli, owner of a New York art gallery, were among those who came to Dr. Burri’s defense in court. They agreed his collage was an original work of free fine art and they described Dr. Burri as one of the first half-dozen artists to emerge in postwar Italy with a world-wide reputation. His works had been exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Allbright Gallery in Buffalo and other well-known museums.

The court reluctantly held, however, that since Congress had failed to include collages in the free fine arts, an import duty of 20 per cent would have to be paid--a ruling which later led to Congress amending the law to permit collages to be imported free of duty.

These cases and others moved leaders in the world of art to petition Congress to change the tariff laws governing the entry of works of art, and to remove the absurdly restrictive language which had caused so much embarrassment not only to the artists and to museums, but also to Customs and the government itself. As a result of these petitions, Senators Jacob Javits of New York and Paul Douglas of Illinois introduced in 1959 a bill to amend the tariff laws to permit free duty for all fine art and to eliminate the old definitions which had bemused Customs examiners. The bill was passed by Congress.

Actually, the slings and arrows hurled at the Bureau in the disputes over abstract art obscured the fact that over the years the Bureau had developed a good many experts whose opinions were valued highly by museums and leaders in the world of art. The Bureau also has some of the country’s leading experts on appraisals of a wide range of imports. It even boasts that it has a man who can look at a hog’s bristle and tell whether the hog was raised on the China slope of the Himalayas or the Indian side of the mountain, a bit of esoteric knowledge which is not as useless as it might seem. Little is heard of the fact that almost daily these men protect American dealers, collectors, and the buying public from forgeries, fraud, and unfair trade practices.

Thirty years ago the country was being flooded with fake antique silverware from England. In many cases an old hallmark--authentic in itself and perhaps 200 years old--would appear on a beautiful teapot. To all outward appearances the teapot was an authentic antique 200 years old. But what had happened was that an expert silversmith had lifted the hallmark from an inexpensive spoon and then soldered it into the teapot so smoothly that only an expert could detect the fakery.

There is little chance for such fraud today, even though dealers and collectors import each year more than $2 million worth of antique silver and old Sheffield, largely from England. Much of the credit for this protection is due to a dapper little man named Nathan Nathanson, who is one of the world’s leading experts on silverware. Nathanson is a small, bouncing man with a bristling black moustache and an infectious enthusiasm for his work. He was reared in Brooklyn and as a boy served as a jeweler’s apprentice. He became fascinated with metals and gems. The youth haunted museums, art galleries, antique dealers’ showrooms, and libraries, studying everything he could find on the subject of silver and old jewelry. He pursued his interests with study at Columbia University and then joined the Customs Bureau, where he quickly became recognized as an authority in his field. As a result of these years of study, Nathanson usually can tell within five years when an antique piece of silverware was made, the name of the artisan who made it, the city in which it was made, and the original owner of the piece. This he is able to do through his knowledge of the hallmarks on the silver--the symbols which were first stamped into silver pieces by the ancient guilds of England during the reign of King Edward I in the year 1300.

During the last 200 years, hallmarks have been an important guide to those versed in the lore of old silver. But of equal importance is a knowledge of the patina of old silver--that mellow coloration which is given to silver only by time and which no one yet has been able to duplicate. The expert must also know the distinctive designs from each period.

Unscrupulous silversmiths have several methods of faking antique silver. The most commonly used fraud is the transfer of a famous hallmark from a small piece of silver to a large tray, coffee pot or teapot, a process known as “sweating.”