PROLOGUE
Even before the Sotheby’s auctioneer started taking bids, Lot 6 was guaranteed to make history. Nothing of its kind—a twenty-five-hundred-year-old pot by the Greek artist Euphronios—had been sold to the public in more than a century. And this specimen was exceptional: not only was the dainty, earthen grail the earliest recorded work by a craftsman renowned as the Leonardo da Vinci of vases, but it was among the oldest known, signed artworks in history. And the cup’s larger match was already the world’s most famous bowl, the Euphronios krater, a centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.
Everyone agreed that Sotheby’s was about to sell the rarest type of pot on the planet. Scholars knew of just eight other vases painted and signed by Euphronios, and just five of those were even close to being intact. This one made six. So it was no surprise on that rainy evening of June 19, 1990, that nearly every dealer, collector, or curator concerned with art of the ancient world was crammed into the showroom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to learn what was going to happen to the Euphronios wine cup, known by its Greek name, kylix, or chalice.
After being lost for two millennia, the kylix had appeared without any records in the hands of a Hollywood producer who then sold it in 1979 to a Texas billionaire. The oilman, Bunker Hunt, had gone bankrupt and was selling his treasures to pay taxes. But mystery surrounded the cup. Nobody knew where it had come from. An old, secretive collection? A newly looted tomb? Hunt’s Hollywood supplier had never revealed the vase’s origin.
As the potential buyers shuffled into Sotheby’s from York Avenue, some Euphronios fans joined them in the auction hall just to catch a glimpse of the black-and-ocher-hued cup, painted with figures of Trojan War soldiers and deities. Others, including mutual-fund magnate Leon Levy, hoped they would be lucky or rich enough to actually take the kylix home. Reporters from the international press, from the New York Times to the Economist, readied their notebooks for a record-breaking sale. Sotheby’s executives prepared to mark a milestone: the first work signed by any ancient artist ever to be sold by the auction house. Among the museum curators, it was probably Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met’s chief of Greek and Roman art, who most coveted the cup as his prize: if the Met won the bidding, he’d reunite the kylix with its bigger twin, the Euphronios krater, which sat spotlighted under glass in the Met’s ground-floor galleries.
The similarities between the museum’s celebrated krater and the four-inch-high chalice were so striking that the auction drew the attention of another interested party: the Italian police.
The pots had surfaced at the same time, in the early 1970s, after decades without a single discovery of a new Euphronios. And both masterpieces depicted the identical scene: the death of Zeus’s son Sarpedon, who is carried Christ-like and bleeding from the battlefield, looking very much like another, more famous, son of God. All signs pointed to tomb robbers as the source of the kylix and krater, though Bunker Hunt’s dealer claimed to have legal title, and the Met’s supplier had produced paperwork tracing the pot to an old Lebanese collection. The odds were impossible that both the wine cup and the pot for mixing wine and water would emerge simultaneously from old, private collections. The Italians even had testimony from an admitted tomb robber—or tombarolo—who claimed he’d been part of the team that spent a week clearing out a treasure trove that included a pot shard with the image of a bleeding warrior. But his memory was too hazy for the police to make a case. For the moment. So the auction proceeded.
Around 7:00 P.M., the crowd filled the seats. American dealer Robert Hecht, dressed in a suit and tie, took a chair on the aisle. Hecht, an heir to the eponymous Baltimore department store chain, had a personal interest in Euphronios; he had sold the Met its krater for $1 million in 1972. London dealer Robin Symes, one of Hecht’s greatest rivals in supplying artifacts to museums and rich collectors, sat on the left side of the hall, away from his competition. Symes was a lanky Brit who favored tuxedos and ran a London gallery with his partner, the son of a Greek shipping tycoon. He’d all but dethroned Hecht as the king of top-end antiquities dealing, having wooed away Hecht’s biggest clients and his best underworld sources for artifacts.
Despite their rivalry, Hecht and Symes shared a secret. They each knew the identity of a man in a green Lacoste sweater who would become the auction’s anonymous star that day. Tanned and balding, sitting a few rows behind Hecht, the man in the Lacoste wasn’t a familiar face in New York’s art circles, and he liked keeping it that way.
With Sotheby’s chairman and chief auctioneer for North America, John L. Marion, brandishing the hammer, bidding got under way. Greek vases were to take up the first half of the sale, followed by Greek, Roman, and Etruscan bronze statues. The first lot, a Corinthian pot dating to 600 B.C., stirred little enthusiasm, failing to make the top of its estimated price range by selling for just $40,700. The next vase did better, topping estimates, but the room hadn’t yet built up the buzz worthy of what was to come. Then the man in the green Lacoste entered the fray. On Lot 3, he picked up an Athenian wine cup painted with a bust of the god Dionysus for $82,500, shy of the high estimate of $90,000. This was just his warm-up for Lot 6.
Sotheby’s expected the Euphronios cup depicting Sarpedon’s death to go for somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000, a bargain only made possible by a looming recession in 1990 that pushed the art market into a slump. As bidding began, the man in the Lacoste launched a bidding war against one of the few people in the room who recognized him, Robin Symes. But the British dealer wasn’t going to give up easily, for he was doing the bidding of a very important client: the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met curator, von Bothmer, had had a chance to buy the kylix in 1973 from one of the museum’s best overseas suppliers, but it slipped through his hands. The price had been just $70,000 then, but the museum’s director at the time, Thomas Hoving, had believed that any Euphronios acquisition would have been radioactive, coming so soon after his controversial purchase of the matching, million-dollar krater. Capturing the krater had been the pinnacle of von Bothmer’s career, but archaeologists and the Italian police said the vase was the product of an illicit dig north of Rome; Hoving turned down von Bothmer’s request to buy the Sarpedon cup.
Seventeen years later, the controversy had passed (or so it seemed), and the German-born, Oxford-educated curator had a second chance. If von Bothmer won, the chalice would end up on public display with its bigger twin at the Met. He could rescue the cup from obscurity. This was his chance at redemption.
It became clear as the bids mounted that this would be a contest between the Met, fronted by Symes, and the man in the Lacoste sweater, who took the early lead. The casually dressed bidder had no intention of losing, for reasons only one other person in the room could fully grasp. Was he determined to invest in a masterpiece during a slump in the art market? Or was he driven by some other personal affinity for the kylix—a connection that went back much further in history?
First the two bidders doubled the low estimate, and then they approached three-quarters of a million dollars, an unheard-of sum at the time for a tiny, clay cup. As Symes reached his client’s price limit, it became clear that the kylix would not journey across town to the Met and be reunited with the krater. The man in the Lacoste kept raising his paddle, and at $742,500, he captured his prize. And then, as other lots came up, he kept buying. By the end of the evening, he’d scooped up not just the Euphronios kylix, but a handful of ancient vases. In one day, he became the owner of one of the finest collections of Greek pots to be found outside a museum—and had spent just $1.29 million.
In the following days, the Met’s von Bothmer would use back channels to try to wrangle the kylix for the Fifth Avenue temple to the arts. He relayed an offer to the man in the Lacoste sweater, promising him an instant profit. But the anonymous new owner sent back his apologies to the Met. The chalice was not for sale. Von Bothmer was crushed, and he would be haunted for the rest of his career by the one that got away.
“You do not regret pieces you acquire, but only those you do not acquire,” he said years later.
A few months after the auction, curators at the Louvre in Paris, which has one of the six rare pots Euphronios signed as painter, tried to convince the kylix’s new owner to loan the piece for a temporary exhibit in September 1990. Again, the man in the Lacoste said no.
The kylix was slipping away from public view. Reporters who asked Sotheby’s the identity of the winning bidder had no luck. In the auction house’s after-sale report, Sotheby’s listed the buyer only as “European Dealer,” a smokescreen that would obscure the cup’s path and frustrate scholars, police, and prosecutors who tried to track the masterpiece.
Some twenty-five hundred years earlier, Euphronios had used fine lines and vivid colors to show the death of a hero who couldn’t be saved by his father, the greatest god on Olympus. Now, as quickly and mysteriously as the chalice had surfaced, an anonymous dealer in green golf gear was dragging it back into hiding.
The tale of how a humble wine cup arrived at Sotheby’s that day, and the quest to find where it’s been since is the story of the whole modern antiquities trade writ small: it shines light on the dealings of tomb robbers, smugglers, wealthy collectors, ambitious archaeologists, and corrupt curators. It’s also a stunning tale of how the world’s most powerful and prestigious institutions—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Oxford University to Sotheby’s—have knowingly enmeshed themselves in the shadowy trade.
But mostly it’s about the epic life of a cup, its famous twin, and the smuggler who set in motion their modern journeys.
Since June 19, 1990, nobody has seen the chalice in public. The Sarpedon cup is the only Euphronios vase listed with an unknown location by Oxford’s Beazley Archive database, the standard reference for Greek vessels. Its whereabouts are an art world mystery.
Until now.