Out of Egypt

"I understand that the sale of the mask was handled almost entirely by their late father about ten years ago," confirms Henry Bergman, an attorney for Phoenix Ancient Art. "So for all intents and purposes the only thing of substance anyone at Phoenix can tell you today about the transaction is old news based on what is in the company's files. Of course, no matter what the circumstance Phoenix stands behind what it sells and fully honors its warranties."

For his part, Hicham Aboutaam adds that Phoenix Ancient Art's business practices conform to modern legal standards. "We exercise more due diligence than we did twenty years ago or ten years ago," Aboutaam says. "We focus on the licit market; this is where our activities take place. By 'licit' we mean we ask many questions before we purchase a piece — in terms of where it has been, any documents related to its existence in a private collection and for how long. [We do so] much more than years ago."

The provenance Phoenix Ancient Art provided to the Saint Louis Art Museum has the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask arriving in Europe in 1952. Recently, however, an alternate history has emerged on Web sites and e-mail lists devoted to the recovery of plundered art.

Some now maintain that the mask was never given to Goneim but spent the bulk of the latter portion of the twentieth century locked away in a Saqqara storeroom.

Adding intrigue to the allegations is the fact that they originate from an infamous Dutch art smuggler-cum-sleuth named Michel van Rijn. Via his Web site, www.michelvanrijn.nl, the bombastic van Rijn asserts that the Ka-Nefer-Nefer was looted from its Saqqara storeroom in the late 1980s.

"The revered mask of a mummy, was stolen to order," van Rijn alleges on his Web site. "[It was] subsequently sold by the Aboutaams in 1998 to the Saint Louis Art Museum, where it remains to this day, a hostage against the prevailing laws on cultural patrimony."

To back his claim, van Rijn points to a supporting e-mail from Maarten Raven, who as Egyptian curator for the National Museum of Antiquities in the Netherlands has traveled annually to Egypt for three decades and has dug extensively near the site of Goneim's historic find.

"The finds of [Goneim's] excavation should be on storage in the so-called Sekhemkhet [storage facility]," van Rijn quotes Raven's e-mail. "This storeroom, which also served as a repository for numerous finds from our own excavations [...] has been entered by force and plundered at the end of the '80s. It is unknown to me whether the Egyptian authorities have communicated this theft at the time. I myself have seen an object from the said storeroom circulating on the Dutch art market in the '90s. I would not be surprised if various institutions or private collectors have purchased objects from this storeroom in that period."

A dentist's son, van Rijn commenced his career smuggling religious icons out of Russia, before cultivating a profitable, if illicit, relationship with the Japanese. In one famous exploit, van Rijn took advantage of the fact that he shares the surname of Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, when he approached a group of Japanese collectors regarding the sale of a valuable Rembrandt self-portrait that had recently come on the market.

After an elaborate series of preparations, van Rijn sealed the deal with the Japanese at a vacant Dutch chateau he'd gussied up and claimed was Rembrandt's ancestral home. "There with the sunlight glinting on its heavily gilded frame, stood the self-portrait, looking for all the world as if it really had hung on that wall since the seventeenth century,'" the con man would recount in his 1993 autobiography, Hot Art, Cold Cash. Among other exploits, the book also chronicles his notorious forgery of a Barbarian treasure.

Though it merits nary a mention in Hot Art, Cold Cash, the Dutchman's path eventually led him to St. Louis, where in 1992 he wowed the natives by taking up residence in a mansion off Lindell Boulevard in the fashionable Central West End and hiring an Ethiopian domestic staff. When not dining at Balaban's, he could be spotted tooling around town in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

Van Rijn's St. Louis sojourn — marked by the purchase of a $25,000 personal gym, lavish Champagne-and-caviar parties at his white-columned manse, frequent expeditions to the antique shops on Euclid Avenue and a buying spree that saw him purchase the city's supply of Mickey Mouse paraphernalia — ended after six months, with a U.S. Customs Service investigation into a burgeoning heap of debts.

The Customs Service probe was prompted by a complaint from local defense attorney Scott Rosenblum, to whose client, well-to-do area businessman Ray Niemeyer, van Rijn had attempted to sell alleged forgeries of works by El Greco and Rembrandt.

"We'd like to talk to him, but we've got to find him first," then-Customs Service agent Allan Severson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1992. "This guy is pretty slick. He seems to have the modus operandi of going into a place, doing his business and slipping away."

Reached for comment for this story, van Rijn discounts accusations of wrongdoing in the Gateway City: "Everything was cleared, everything was paid," he writes in an ellipsis-pocked e-mail. "The most hurting was a guy who said I didn't pay for my gymnasium... Poor soul... His fifteen minutes."