Out of Egypt

Goneim dubbed the woman Ka-Nefer-Nefer: the Twice-Beautiful Ka.

So taken was Goneim with Ka-Nefer-Nefer (pronounced caw nef-er nef-er) that he would publish photographs of the mask in three subsequent books about the excavation. But amid the excitement of the dig in 1952, her fate was obscured. She would disappear from public view for nearly 50 years.

More precisely, until 1998, when the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased the mask for a half-million dollars from Phoenix Ancient Art, an antiquities dealership owned by the Lebanese brothers Hicham and Ali Aboutaam.

Today the artifact resides in a climate-controlled case marked with the unassuming label: "Mummy Mask, Egyptian, Dynasty 19."

But while the story of Ka-Nefer-Nefer's discovery is well known, her flight out of Egypt remains a mystery.

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As is typical when artworks or antiquities change hands, the sale of the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask was accompanied by a provenance, a document that attempts to trace an object's chain of ownership back to its creation or excavation.

Provenance research is an inherently murky field, and often no clear progression of ownership can be established. Many items, some several millennia old, came out of the ground centuries ago and passed into private collections, with no publicity or documentation. It's not unusual for such pieces to appear on the market with little or no known history.

"You can go online to Christie's or Sotheby's even — the most reputable auction houses — and look at their antiquities catalogs," says Patty Gerstenblith, director of the cultural heritage law program at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. "You'll see how many times they'll tell you provenance info: 'Property of a Swiss gentleman'; or 'Property of a European lady.' It's not good provenance, but it is a provenance."

Further complicating contemporary provenance research is the glut of looted antiquities on the market. The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that the stolen art market is worth $6 billion, and though antiquities trafficking represents only a portion of that figure, many of those familiar with the trade maintain that illegally excavated objects — laundered via false provenances — are its lifeblood.

Ka-Nefer-Nefer's provenance was vague. According to documents the seller supplied to the St. Louis museum, the mask was seen in 1952 at an antiquities dealer in Brussels, Belgium. Roughly ten years later, the provenance says, the object was bought by a private collector and then sold to an unnamed Swiss citizen, in whose private collection it would remain for 40 years. In 1997 the mask was purchased for an undisclosed sum by Phoenix Ancient Art, which sold it one year later to the Saint Louis Art Museum for $499,000.

The provenance bases the mask's Belgium stopover on the eyewitness declaration of a Swiss man named Charly Mathez, who in 1997 attested that he'd seen the Ka-Nefer-Nefer at a Brussels gallery 45 years earlier.

"I confirm that I saw this Egyptian piece...in an important antiquities dealership in Brussels, Belgium in 1952," reads Mathez's handwritten declaration, dated February 11, 1997. The declaration, written in French, continues: "I remember this date very well because I often traveled to Belgium on business during this time, and this piece interested one of my clients."

After buying the mask, Saint Louis Art Museum officials contacted Mathez in the hope that he might provide additional information that would bolster the provenance. "It's been a long time," Mathez replied in a letter dated October 5, 1999, conceding that he could not recall the name of the Brussels gallery and apologizing that he could be of no further assistance.

"He is a person who told us that he was in Brussels on business quite a lot in the 1950s. That's what we know," says Benjamin. "But we do have an address for him, and he wrote back to us directly."

How had Phoenix Ancient Art known to contact Mathez in the first place? "The relationship between the two? I don't know," says Benjamin, who came to the museum a year after the mask's purchase. "I'm not aware that that particular question was asked."

Hicham Aboutaam, who now runs Phoenix Ancient Art with his brother Ali, doesn't know either. "I really don't know [who Charly Mathez is]," Aboutaam says from his New York gallery. "I'd have to look at those documents. It's been, what, eight years now?"

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Art museum officials also asked an antiquities expert to evaluate the provenance. The scholar, who is not named in the copy of the provenance the museum supplied to Riverfront Times, asserted that the documentation "suggests that the mask was never displayed with the other excavated objects [from Saqqara] and was probably awarded to the excavator himself. This would correspond with its appearance on the European art market soon after its excavation."

Riverfront Times obtained a copy of the statement, which was authored by Peter Lacovara, curator of ancient art for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. In a breezy correspondence dated October 8, 1999, eighteen months after the museum bought the mask, Lacovara writes, "That is good news about it being on the art market in '52. Egyptian nationals were allowed to keep a share of their finds, much as Europeans were given divisions."