Another government attempt to halt the sale of cultural artefacts offered for sale at auction failed this week.

Angry petitions by representatives from Mexico and Guatemala, supported by a plea from UNESCO, failed to prevent the auction of 120 valuable religious and cultural pre-Columbian items being sold by the elite French auction house Millon at Drouot in Paris on Wednesday (18 September). 

Reuters reports that Mexico’s Foreign Ministry claim that 95 of the items at this auction appear to be from Mexican cultures and may have been looted. Another 23 may be recent copies. Mexico demanded the auction was cancelled, insisting the items are part of Mexico’s cultural heritage and selling them at auction is ‘illegal’. 

Meanwhile, Alexandre Millon defended his decision to press ahead with the auction, claiming the collection, put together by Manichak and Jean Aurance offered ‘part of the last French collections [of pre-Columbian art] in the post-war period….. remarkable in terms of its origin and prestige’. 

In the absence of either Mexico or Guatemala taking formal legal action, Millon felt there were no grounds for postponing or cancelling the auction.

Extensive provenance information was submitted for only one of the items scheduled in the sale – a fragment of a Mayan stele showing the head of a king wearing a mask in the form of a bird of prey and crowned by the glyph of the metropolis of Teotihuacan. The stele had been discovered at the Mayan site of Piedras Negras in 1899 but this fragment was removed and smuggled out of Guatemala in the early 1960s. The Aurances purchased the relief fragment from a gallery in Los Angeles. 

A demand in August for its restitution resulted in the item being withdrawn from the auction and the prospect of the fragment being reunited with other pieces of the stele. However, almost every other item found a buyer, helping to raise a sale total of €1.2 million, more than double its original estimate. 

Mexico has placed the recovery of its looted heritage as a priority, but rarely has it succeeded with demands for the return of items sold at public auction. They continue to maintain that auctions such as these violate not only Mexican law but also international law.

In this case, the absence of more provenance information stymied their ability to persuade the French authorities to halt the sale.

"This type of trade encourages pillage, illegal trafficking and counterfeiting practised by organised transnational crime networks", lamented Mexico’s ambassador to France, Juan Manuel Gomez Robledo.

Photo: Volcanic stone carved and polished figure of the Aztec goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, 1350-1521.  From the collection of Manichak and Jean Aurance 

Courtesy of Drouot