Nicolas Koutoulakis and the De Clercq Collection: A Paris Dealer's Cypriot Stock

Nicolas Koutoulakis (1910–1996) was a Cretan-born antiquities dealer who worked from a gallery in Paris and a house in Geneva, and whose main business was the marble sculpture of the Early Cycladic islands. He never dug in Cyprus and was not a specialist in Cypriot material. His place in the Cypriot record rests on one documented event: when the heirs of the nineteenth-century collector Louis de Clercq gave the collection to the French state in 1967, the Louvre chose only a small part of the Cypriot pieces, and the rest, in the words of the curator Annie Caubet, "was dispersed through the house of Koutoulakis" [1, p. 13]. Those pieces had left Cyprus about a century earlier, bought for de Clercq at Beirut from the consular trade of the 1850s to the 1880s. A Cypriot object that carries the Koutoulakis name in its history therefore usually belongs to an old route out of the island, older than every modern rule on export, and has nothing to do with the looting that followed the Turkish invasion of 1974. This entry sets out that route, the objects on it, a misprint in a standard book that made Koutoulakis a Cypriot, and the reasons why his name is now read with caution in provenance lines elsewhere in the Mediterranean. His life and the wider story are told in the article The House of Koutoulakis; this page keeps to the Cypriot record.

A Cretan dealer in Paris and Geneva

Koutoulakis came into the trade through his family. His uncle, Manolis Segredakis, was the Cretan founder of an antiquities gallery in Paris under his own name. The Cycladic scholar Pat Getz-Gentle, who knew the business well, writes that on the death of his uncle in 1949 Koutoulakis "took over the gallery and soon became the preeminent purveyor of Cycladic objects"; he sold to collectors and museums and was, in her words, "the chief source of material for his fellow antiquities dealers and galleries of modern art" in Europe and the United States [6, p. 209]. He ran the business from the Paris gallery and from his house in Geneva [6, p. 209].

The family firm already had a small Cypriot connection before Koutoulakis inherited it. In 1934 Segredakis, a Paris dealer well known at the Musée d'Archéologie nationale at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, gave the museum a series of about forty copper-alloy dagger blades, spearheads and tools from Cyprus, probably in thanks for the purchases the museum had made through him [2, p. 14]. That gift is the only Cypriot transaction recorded for the gallery before the de Clercq dispersal.

Louis de Clercq and the Péretié purchases

Louis de Clercq (1836–1901), a French industrialist, traveller and photographer, built one of the largest private collections of Near Eastern antiquities of his century, "from Mesopotamian antiquities to Oriental glyptic", and its Cypriot section was, in Caubet's judgement, "of great quality" [1, p. 13]. He did not excavate it. The Cypriot core of the collection came from the purchase of the objects that Aimé Péretié, chancellor of the French consulate at Beirut, had gathered in the preceding years [3, p. 6]. Péretié, whose name the literature often gives as Antoine, was the antiquarian; his son Alfred was the later consul [4, p. 239].

The purchases were ordinary transactions in the trade of their time, and in one case the record gives the whole route with dates. Two inscribed Cypriot vases came from excavations made by Luigi Palma di Cesnola in Cyprus "in the years 1866 and following", passed into Péretié's collection at Beirut, where they were seen in November 1868, and were sold by Péretié to de Clercq in 1872 [4, p. 242]. De Clercq later claimed that from 1859 Péretié had dug only on his instructions and with his money; the study of Péretié rejects this as "going too far", since Péretié supplied several French collectors at once [4, p. 242]. In Ottoman Cyprus at that date, permission to dig was given by personal firman, and from 1869 a finder's rights on private land were set by regulation; the rules under which such material left the island are set out in firmans and partage. The village digging that fed the Larnaca buyers is described in tomb digging in Ottoman Cyprus.

After de Clercq's death the archaeologist André de Ridder catalogued and photographed the Cypriot pieces, published in 1908 as the fifth volume of the Collection De Clercq [5]. The plate at the head of this page, a limestone votary head with a tall floral diadem, is from that volume (plate XVI, no. 91). The 1908 catalogue is the document that matters most to the later market, because it fixes each object's existence in a named collection more than sixty years before the UNESCO Convention of 1970. The story of de Clercq himself, and of his photographs of Cyprus, is told in the article on Louis de Clercq.

The donation of 1967 and the dispersal

De Clercq left no direct heirs, and the collection passed to the Boisgelin family. In 1967 the comte Henri de Boisgelin, as heir of the collection, gave it to the Louvre and the Cabinet des Médailles, which between them took part of it [3, p. 6]. Caubet, writing of the Louvre's Cypriot collections, put the outcome in one sentence: "Unfortunately only a small part was chosen by the Louvre at the time of the donation by the heirs in 1967; the rest was dispersed through the house of Koutoulakis" [1, p. 13].

A second curator, writing in the same journal about the Cypriot collection at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, gives a dated example. In November 2011 the museum bought a limestone head of a woman wearing a kekryphalos, a cloth hair-bag, which had certainly been in the de Clercq collection and had been published and photographed by de Ridder in 1908. It was not chosen in 1967, "which explains how it later turned up on the art market, dispersed with other pieces by Nicolas Koutoulakis" [2, pp. 14–15]. The same author adds that the head's reputed find-spot, Idalion, "rests on no secure evidence" [2, p. 15]. The head shows both sides of the de Clercq material: a secure collection history from the 1880s or earlier, and no reliable record of where in Cyprus it came out of the ground.

Where the de Clercq pieces went

The dispersal took decades, and objects from it are still being sold. The records below are those that name both de Clercq and Koutoulakis, with the date at which each line can be checked.

Three points follow from the table. First, every object in it is a piece of Cypriot limestone sanctuary sculpture, the kind of material that dominated de Clercq's Cypriot holdings. Second, the de Clercq name and the 1908 catalogue number are what carry the price: the London head of 2015 made £158,500, one of the highest prices paid for a Cypriot antiquity since 1996, a result discussed in heirs and old collections on the market [10]. Third, the Metropolitan Museum accepted the head in its own collection by bequest in 2020 with Koutoulakis in its history, because the de Clercq line before him is documented [7].

Koutoulakis's other Cypriot stock

Not every Cypriot object he sold came from de Clercq. In 1951, sixteen years before the donation, the Metropolitan Museum bought from him two small Chalcolithic figures carved in picrolite, and in 1971 two miniature terracottas of the eighth century BC, an amphora and a jug [7]. Joan Mertens published the picrolite figures in 1975 as rare additions to the museum's Cypriot holdings after Cesnola's founding collection [8, pp. 5–8]. These pieces have no recorded history before Koutoulakis. Their Cypriot origin is read from their type, and nothing in the record says where or when they were found. The purchase was made long before 1970, but the record cannot show when or by which route the figures left the island.

That makes two kinds of Koutoulakis history for a Cypriot object. One runs back through de Clercq and de Ridder's catalogue to the nineteenth-century purchases at Beirut. The other begins with Koutoulakis himself, at a date that the museum or sale catalogue records, and is only as good as that date. Most of the Cypriot pieces in the published record are of the first kind.

A Cretan, not a Greek Cypriot

The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, the standard narrative of the Italian investigations of the 1990s, describes Koutoulakis in its account of a seized chart of the Italian trade as "a Greek-Cypriot resident in Paris (now dead)" [13]. The description is wrong. He was born in Crete, and the same book elsewhere calls him "a Cretan dealer" [13]; Getz-Gentle and the trade's own provenance lines agree on his Cretan origin and on his dates [6, p. 209]. The Cypriot objects documented as passing through his hands are the de Clercq residue and the small group of older stock described above.

The evidence on the other side

Koutoulakis's name is now read as a warning. A hand-drawn chart of the Italian illicit trade, seized by the Carabinieri in September 1995, includes him among the dealers linked to the American dealer Robert Hecht [12]. The archaeologist David Gill, in the one study that takes Koutoulakis as its subject, lists objects he sold to museums in the United States and Europe that were later returned to Greece and Turkey, and argues that museums holding several objects from such a supplier should review the whole group [12, pp. 71–78]. On this page, that record is stated only as far as the seizure and the returns themselves; the general method it implies for reading a dealer's name is set out in lawful and illicit in the record.

The de Clercq material has a weakness of its own, and it is older than Koutoulakis. Péretié bought in a market where village diggers and consuls' agents opened tombs and sanctuaries with little or no record, and the Saint-Germain head is typical in having only a reputed find-spot [2, p. 15]. Left the island lawfully, in the sense of title and export, is a different matter from coming out of the ground under record, and for the de Clercq pieces only the first can be shown. The Péretié study also shows that de Clercq's own account of how his collection was formed was overstated [4, p. 242]. These points concern the nineteenth-century trade. They say nothing about the looting that followed 1974, which in the occupied north was mainly a trade in church art handled by other people, told in pages such as the Kanakaria mosaics. Koutoulakis died in 1996, and his name does not appear in the court records or official statements of any of those cases.

Timeline

What a Koutoulakis history means on the market today

A Cypriot object with Koutoulakis in its history should be read in two steps. The first is whether the line before him names de Clercq and can be matched to a number and plate in de Ridder's catalogue of 1908 [5]. If it can, the object left Cyprus in the nineteenth century, was published before the First World War, and passed through Koutoulakis in the dispersal after 1967; that is a pre-1970 history of the strongest kind, and both major salerooms and the Metropolitan Museum have accepted it [7][10][11]. The second step applies where the history begins with Koutoulakis. Then the date at which he is first recorded with the object is the whole of its documented past, as with the Met's picrolite figures of 1951, and it should be checked like any other dealer's record, with the caution that Gill's study recommends for his name in general [12]. Neither kind is evidence of post-1974 looting, and no court or official statement links Koutoulakis to Cypriot material taken after the invasion. What the record cannot supply, for either kind, is the place where the object was found. How a lawful history is documented and checked is set out in documenting a lawful history, and the presumption that the market now applies to undocumented Cypriot objects in the 1974 presumption.