Word: calyx
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...museums was originally pirated by foreign powers or smuggled out. Today the countries of the world officially operate on more elevated principles-but art thievery thrives as never before. It is a multimillion-dollar business that gets amphetamine shots from events like the Met's $ 1,000,000 calyx krater purchase. Tragically, it is also leading to the wholesale destruction of archaeological treasures, and occasionally murder along with theft...
...graced a Grecian banquet table and held perhaps seven gallons of wine. So proud were its makers, the painter Euphronios and the potter Euxitheos, that each signed his name boldly on the front. Even now, 2,500 years later, the calyx krater is not merely the best Greek vase in existence. It is the costliest, having been bought last summer by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for $1,000,000. As of last week, it was also by far the most controversial...
...north of Rome in 1971 and illegally sold to an expatriate American named Robert E. Hecht Jr. He in turn, so the story went, smuggled the vase out of Italy and sold it to the Met. In 1970 UNESCO adopted a draft prohibiting illicit traffic in art objects. The calyx krater would come under that provision, and both the U.S. and Italy have signed the pact...
...London." Offered earlier and more willingly, that evidence might have settled things. But by now charges and countercharges were shooting back and forth across the Atlantic. Reporters were pursuing Hecht, Sarrafian, Met Director Thomas Moving and a restorer in Zurich named Fritz Buerki, who had expertly repaired the calyx krater for Hecht...
Reporters who reached Sarrafian, 68, found him a little vague. "My interest is in coins," he said in Beirut. "I care little for vases." He had really paid little attention to the calyx krater. The pieces had been in a hatbox from 1926, when his father died, until 1970, when he consigned the box to Hecht. There were some odd discrepancies in his story. The Met had said that Hecht only got an agent's 10% of the price. Sarrafian suggested otherwise. The Met said the vase had no missing parts. Sarrafian said there were pieces missing, some...