Many antique dealers are upset by the fact that they import what appears to be a legitimate antique only to find that it does not qualify for free entry because it has been tampered with at some time in the past. For example, one importer brought into the country a very old Oriental panel which had been made into a modern coffee table. He declared the table was entitled to free entry because the panel was an antique. Customs did not agree with the dealer’s viewpoint. While the panel alone would have been permitted to enter free of duty, once it became a part of a modern piece of furniture then it no longer met the legal requirements. This meant that the importer not only had to pay the regular rate of duty but also a penalty of 25 per cent—a penalty which is used by the government to discourage the practice of mislabelling imports.
In the eighteenth century in England it was common practice to use a pole screen while sitting in front of an open fire. The pole screen, sometimes made of painted wood and sometimes of fabric, stood on a tripod base and was placed in front of a person to shield his face from the fire. The top part was adjustable and could be raised or lowered as the person wished while toasting his legs.
Dealers in later years got the idea of converting the pole screens to other uses. They cut the screen from the pole and used the tripod as a base so that the old pole screen became a coffee table. While all the parts actually were antiques in themselves, Customs held that it did not qualify for free entry because the character of the article had been changed over the years. It was not being imported in the same form in which it originated and for which it was primarily intended. The fact that the parts were antique did not qualify it for free entry any more than the table fashioned from an Oriental panel.
Even the best and most reputable of dealers sometimes make mistakes in judging the age of art objects. There was one case in which such a misjudgment cost the dealer $6,300 in duties. A New York art gallery in 1953 paid $4,300 for porcelain vases which it believed to be early eighteenth-century Chinese. They were purchased from importers, who had bought them from a corporation which was disposing of several art objects for an estate. The vases originally had been owned by the royal family of Russia and had been brought to this country after the Russian revolution.
The gallery sold the vases for $9,000 to a woman who maintained her residence in Paris. One evening she boasted to her dinner guests that the vases were early eighteenth-century discoveries which once had reposed in the palace of the late Czar of Russia. One of her guests, an antiquarian, suggested discreetly to her later that possibly her purchases were not eighteenth-century Chinese but were from the nineteenth century.
The woman indignantly demanded an explanation from the gallery, which replied that they would gladly refund her money if she were dissatisfied, but they could not admit that a mistake had been made in dating the vases. The woman shipped the vases back to the United States labelled as antiques, free of duty, and valued at $9,000. When the vases arrived at Customs in New York, one of the Bureau’s experts studied them and declared that the vases were not Chinese eighteenth-century vases, but in fact had been made in France in the nineteenth century.
The Customs examiner’s judgment was upheld by other authorities in this field. The gallery was required to pay duty of $6,300. The tariff law states “if any article ... is detected as unauthentic in ... the antiquity claimed as a basis for free entry, there shall be imposed, collected, and paid ... a duty of 25 per cent of the value ... in addition to any other duty.” And in this case the “other duty” amounted to 45 per cent of the value.
Cultural growth can hardly be reduced to statistics, but Customs’ statistics are at least persuasive in support of the argument that the United States is now enjoying a cultural boom. Ten years ago American collectors were purchasing original paintings at the rate of $8.5 million a year. The purchases have increased to $33 million a year, with indications that the country is on a prolonged art-buying binge. It has been a profitable investment for many, as the values of the modernists’ paintings—particularly popular in this country—have spiralled.
The increase of interest in art has created a problem for Customs because—with the huge sums of money involved—there have emerged in Europe several “factories” producing bogus paintings in Paris, Amsterdam and Rome.
The appearance of the forgeries moved the Customs Bureau to issue this warning in its monthly bulletin: