Nicolas Koutoulakis

When the heirs of Louis de Clercq gave part of his collection to the Louvre in 1967, the Louvre chose only a small share of the Cypriot ensemble, which Annie Caubet calls "of great quality". The rest, in her words, "was dispersed by the house of Koutoulakis"¹. That house was the Paris gallery of Nicolas Koutoulakis (1910-1996), a dealer whose main trade lay elsewhere.

The Segredakis shop

Koutoulakis was born in 1910, and his birthplace is not recorded³. His uncle, the Cretan Manolis Segredakis, founded the Galerie Segredakis in Paris. Dietrich von Bothmer, recalling the period in an oral history, says that Segredakis returned to Paris in 1945 and "selected a nephew whose name is Nicolas Koutoulakis to work for him and to run the store"; the uncle then died in Crete, and the nephew became the owner⁴. Pat Getz-Gentle puts the uncle's death in 1949 and says Koutoulakis ran the business from the Paris gallery and from his house in Geneva³. A Leiden museum record of a purchase made in 1952 names the shop as the Galerie Koutoulakis-Segredakis¹⁷.

According to Bothmer, Koutoulakis travelled to New York in 1948 with a list of his uncle's creditors, whom he repaid, and Ernest Brummer "took Koutoulakis under his wing". Bothmer adds that Koutoulakis introduced him by telephone to the vases of Christos G. Bastis⁴. This is Bothmer's memory, set down decades later.

A Cycladic dealer with Cypriot stock

Getz-Gentle calls him "the preeminent purveyor of Cycladic objects", selling directly to collectors and museums and supplying other dealers. Dominique de Menil, her son and her sister acquired their Cycladic pieces from him³. He also gave to museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists his gifts of a Pontic amphora in 1955 and a Roman glass skyphos in 1995¹⁴. A Roman bust of Antinous passed from De Clercq to the Boisgelin family, then to Koutoulakis and then to Robin Symes¹⁵.

The De Clercq remainder

The Cypriot link is the dispersal Caubet describes. An article on the Cypriot collections of the Musée d'Archéologie nationale names him directly: a limestone female statuette with a kekryphalos, published by De Ridder in 1908 and reputed to come from Idalion, was not chosen by the Louvre in 1967, reappeared on the market and was "dispersed with other pieces by Nicolas Koutoulakis". It is now in the Saint-Germain-en-Laye museum². The reputed Idalion findspot rests on no secure data, according to the same article.

Another De Clercq piece stayed with the family. A limestone head of a female votary, Archaic and 12 cm high, was offered at Christie's in London on 7 December 2022 as "Property from the Estate of Nicolas Koutoulakis". Its provenance reads De Clercq, then Koutoulakis in Paris and Geneva, "thence by descent", and it is published as De Ridder, volume V, no. 55⁹. A network analysis of museum acquisition data names Nanette B. Kelekian as his most frequent buyer⁶.

The Camera chart

In September 1995 Carabinieri raided the premises of Danilo Ziccho and recovered a handwritten chart drawn by Pasquale Camera. Mackenzie, Brodie and Yates describe it in Trafficking Culture as showing Robert Hecht linked to "Nikolas Koutoulakis, Eli Borowsky and Frieda Tchacos" and to George Ortiz⁵. The same book adds that by the late 1980s Giacomo Medici had commercial relations with Symes, Tchacos, Koutoulakis, Hecht and the Aboutaam brothers, citing Watson and Todeschini⁵. A chart is not evidence of a transaction, and the sources give no charge or conviction against Koutoulakis.

Koutoulakis died in 1996³. Christie's sold property from his estate in 2020 to 2022, and the Cypriot head of December 2022 was among those lots⁹.