The Washington Post brings Marion True, the former Getty Museum Antiquities Curator who became the center of an international scandal, back into the public convsersation:
A decade after her downfall, True knows that she was singled out, with Hecht, by the Italians to strike fear in American museums. The strategy worked. The Getty and others, fearing prosecution, returned hundreds of objects worth millions of dollars.
True was never found guilty — the trial ended in 2010 without a judgment – and the curator maintains her innocence. But today, for the first time, she is talking openly about the way she and her museum world colleagues operated. Yes, she did recommend the Getty acquire works she knew had to have been looted. That statement, though, comes with a qualifier:
If she found out where a work had been dug up from, she pushed for its return. In contrast, many of her colleagues did little, if anything, to research a work’s source. None of them were put on trial.
The pursuit of True was aided by raids of dealers and a massive leak of internal Getty documents to a pair of Los Angeles Times reporters. That paper trail linked looted sites in Italy to the museum’s Malibu galleries.
Now retired Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri, reached recently, admits that he never imagined True going to jail.
“She was on trial for one reason,” he said. “To show an example of what Italy could do.”
One of the world’s most respected curators vanished from the art world. Now she wants to tell her story. (The Washington Post)
