Chasing Aphrodite Read Online Free PDF

unanimously to acquire the statue for $3.95 million, the very price Getty had recently refused to pay. And no permission was sought from Italian authorities, as Getty had once demanded.
    Although Getty family members were challenging the will, the court agreed to advance enough of the estate to the museum to make the purchase. The bronze was shipped from London to Boston and then quietly parked in an exhibit hall in the Denver Art Museum for seven months to avoid paying California taxes. When the statue arrived in Malibu in mid-November 1977, the Getty formally announced its acquisition, enshrining it in its own humidity-controlled room at the new museum. As a final tribute to the founder, the board of trustees dubbed it "the Getty Bronze."

2. A PERFECT SCHEME
    A MONG THOSE WHO gathered to toast the death of J. Paul Getty was Jiri Frel, the museum's roguish antiquities curator.

    Frel had been hired by Getty four years earlier while he was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant curator under Dietrich von Bothmer. He was a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1969 after a twenty-year career as a noted classics professor and expert in Greek art at Charles University in Prague. He came to the United States under a fellowship from Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies and brought with him a refugee's state of mind: keen survival instincts and a healthy disregard for the rules.
    Frel cultivated a closer relationship with Getty than most of his colleagues at the Malibu museum. The two met as Getty was pursuing the bronze athlete, an object that inspired awe in both men. Frel's guile served him well in convincing his stingy benefactor to purchase expensive antiquities. Mindful of Getty's fear of death, Frel presented an ancient tombstone to Getty as an "archaic relief." He once manipulated the old man into purchasing a stone Roman chair by having it delivered to Sutton Place and set before Getty, whom he gently pushed into the seat. The fit was so preternaturally comfortable that Getty approved the purchase on the spot.
    Not long after their first meeting, Getty offered Frel a job. Frel broke his three-year contract with the Met to become the Getty Museum's first antiquities curator. Garrett and Fredericksen, Frel's nominal bosses, gave the imperious Czech a wide berth. They knew of his tendencies. Frel had casually mentioned to Fredericksen that the Met had paid off a Lebanese dealer to help concoct a cover story about the provenance of the Met's famous Greek vase, the Euphronios krater. When Fredericksen expressed shock, Frel shook his head and said condescendingly, "You Americans are so naive."
    With wild gray hair, oversize black glasses, and a pathological confidence in his own opinion, the fiftysomething Czech paraded around the museum grounds like an emperor. When not bullying people with his intellect, he was delighting them with his old-world charm. He wore rumpled suits with flapped pockets and open-toed sandals over socks. He hugged colleagues and playfully bumped heads with strangers. A polymath, Frel played the violin, was an accomplished mathematician, and was fluent in six modern languages and Latin. Around him, no conversation was dead for long. Frel was always ready with a Shakespearean quote or the saucy story about why the Lansdowne Herakles, one of the antiquity collection's centerpieces, was missing its penis: Getty had been too cheap to buy the member, which Lady Lansdowne had chiseled off and discreetly hidden away.
    While living under Communist rule, Frel had learned to be a charming manipulator, all things to all people. When speaking with Jews, he was quick to pull out the Star of David he carried with him, "in solidarity" with those persecuted in World War II, he would say. Frel spewed vitriol about Eastern Europe totalitarianism but once revealed in an interview with the FBI that he had tried unsuccessfully to join the Communist Party when he was at