|
|
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL Who (Really) Owns the Past? The nub of what follows can be simply expressed. Who has true title to antiquities or art treasures? Is it the country of origin? Or even a tribe? Does a good-faith purchase and possession trump another country's laws? In any case, are art treasures or antiquities a legitimate prize of war? Coincidentally, these questions have joined together in a media cascade stretching from Italy and Peru to New Haven and Kennewick in the State of Washington, spanning the centuries from pre-Columbian North America to the Second World War and the troubled U.S. intervention in Iraq. Anybody who dips even slightly into these matters will find that the waters are choppy. People who care or know little about museums or collectors can foam with passion when foreign hands are perceived as profaning a national treasure. Very wisely during the Second World War, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower assigned a team nicknamed the Monument Men to accompany U.S. forces in Europe to deter looting. When its members, many of them museum curators, heard of a White House plan to assume custody, vaguely defined, of German cultural treasures, they signed what became known as the Wiesbaden Manifesto. Drafted in November 1945, it affirmed in part: "We wish to state that from our own knowledge, no historical grievance will rankle so long, or be the cause of so much justified bitterness, as the removal, for any reason, of a part of the heritage of any nation, even if that heritage may be interpreted as a prize of war. And though this removal may be done with every intention of altruism, we are none the less convinced that it is our duty, individually and collectively, to protest against it." Their protest was heeded. Major art works discovered in caves and castles by American forces were in due course restored to their German owners, though freelance looting by officers as well as ordinary G.I.'s was often carelessly policed. By contrast, at Stalin's orders, so-called "trophy brigades" combed through Soviet-occupied Germany to scoop and hide away such supreme prizes as Heinrich Schliemann's Trojan gold (now finally on public display in Moscow's Pushkin Museum), the monumental Pergamon Altar from Berlin, and the jeweled treasures of the Dresden Museum (the two latter trophies were returned to Communist East Germany by Nikita Khrushchev). To this day, Moscow's refusal to honor an agreement on reciprocal restitution signed by Mikhail Gorbachev persists as a thorn in Russian-German relations. (The sole work of any value returned by Russia under that accord was a stained-glass panel, stripped in 1945 from a church in Frankfurt an der Oder.) It happens these are matters I have studied and written about since the 1970s. From my experience, I distill these generalizations: that no art-acquiring nation is without sin (not even the virtuous Dutch); that the devil reposes in the fine print in all efforts at restitution, and that the morality of the art world is as spongy as the rules meant to constrain a global appetite for suspect treasures—suspect because they may be stolen, smuggled, or fake. With these strictures in mind, consider some current developments: Item: After eight years of litigation, and more than a half-century after Herman Goring's agents snapped up at distress prices the best of the collection, the Dutch government agreed this March to return 202 paintings now hanging in Dutch museums to heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Jewish art dealer in prewar Amsterdam; around a thousand more works from his blue-chip stock are still missing or hang elsewhere in museums and private collections.1 Item: In what may be an auspicious precedent, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered in February to return to Italy a famous Greek krater that it purchased in 1971 for $1 million, as part of an agreement under which the New York museum would be promised the extended loan of antiquities of equal interest.2 Item: Forensic anthropologists were at last able this year to analyze the bones of Kennewick Man, whose 9,400-year-old remains were found in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington; for years the skeleton was subject of an opaque legal dispute arising from the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPA), meant to protect Indian sites.3 Item: After waiting nearly a century, Peru recently made formal claim to artifacts unearthed from the Inca city of Machu Picchu in 1912 and 191415 by a freewheeling Yankee, Hiram Bingham III, a sometime Yale historian, explorer, wartime aviator, Connecticut governor, and U.S. senator. Yale claims Bingham divided his finds with Peru; Peru insists it received nothing of value; the critical documents are evidently missing. Yale has offered to share objects now in its Peabody Museum of Natural History; Peru demands everything.4 Item: Egypt has threatened "a big legal action" against the Saint Louis Art Museum to recover a 3,200-year-old mummy mask it acquired in 1998, claiming the relic was stolen from Cairo's Egyptian Museum. "I will make this museum as a criminal, to be listed as a criminal museum," declared Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass in a March interview, adding that he would never settle for any mealy compromise, Italian-style.5 Item: Sadly and finally, the United States is the principal accessory in the most brazen and shameful looting incident of our era, the plunder of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad on April 10-12, 2003. At least 15,000 objects were stolen, including Sumerian sculpture, Abbasid wooden doors, Assyrian jewelry, the head of a Babylonian terra cotta lion, and around five thousand cylinder seals documenting the genesis of what we presume to call civilization. This happened as U.S. occupying forces stood by under the rubric "stuff happens," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's lame alibi. Since then, some four thousand objects have been returned; a thousand from Jordan, three hundred from Italy, and more than six hundred from the United States.6 And this is but a moiety.
The Legal Flypaper
Legally, prohibitions are unambiguous, every bit as categorical as laws against trafficking in narcotics, yet even more difficult to enforce. The United States led the way during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed Federal Law 100, drafted by Francis Lieber, a German-born legal scholar at Columbia College. A key passage in this first codification of the laws of war barred the seizure of cultural treasures or scientific instruments as victor's booty. A 1907 Hague convention on rules of land warfare built on this precedent, and its language was invoked in the Treaty of Versailles, which, inter alia, sought reparations for the destruction in 1914 of the Louvain Library in Belgium (the same library was again devastated by German invaders in 1940). But the most relevant and important international measure is the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, now formally binding 130 countries. Not only are signatories obliged to bar the importation of smuggled or stolen cultural artifacts, but they are encouraged to enact specific bans on objects looted from specific areas—as the U.S. has creditably enacted, at the request of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Mali, and Cambodia. And it is credibly asserted that the convention has indeed hampered, if not eliminated, the traffic in monumental stelae and sculptured fragments chopped from ancient edifices. The problem is that restitution procedures are cumbersome and near-impossible to enforce in the case of other undocumented objects looted from archaeological sites. How can the victimized country press a claim when confirming evidence is lacking? Italian authorities for decades challenged the Metropolitan Museum's account of the provenance of the Euphronios krater, ranked among the world's finest. The American seller, Robert E. Hecht, Jr., a resident of Rome, claimed that he acquired it from an Armenian coin dealer in Beirut, named Dikran Sarrafian, who for decades allegedly stored the fragmented vase in a hat box. Tracked down in his modest fourth-floor walk-up apartment by Nicholas Gage of the New York Times, Sarrafian explained that his father had acquired the krater "by an exchange from an amateur." He added that he was about to move to Australia, offering this exit line, "I wasted most of my life with whores and archaeologists." It was a story nobody believed. As a reporter-at-large for The New Yorker, I questioned archaeologists at their principal annual meeting in 1972. "Why not an Eskimo moving to Florida?" asked Machteld Mellink of Bryn Mawr. Harvard's George Hanfman remarked with a smile, "My boy, there is an old Russian proverb that the earth is kept warm by people who believe." Veteran excavators assumed, as did Italian police, that the krater had been found by tombaroli, or pot-hunters, in an Etruscan grave. As a 1957 catalogue of the William Randolph Hearst collection of Greek wares noted, "Almost all the vases in this exhibition were found in Italy, where they had been exported in antiquity. So preponderant in fact is Italy among the provenances of Greek vases that early excavators took them to be of local Italian, or Etruscan manufacture." (The note was written by Dietrich von Bothmer, the Metropolitans curator who promoted the purchase of the krater.) There matters might have rested but for a police raid in 1995 on a Geneva warehouse leased by an Italian dealer evocatively named Giacomo Medici. Not only did Medici store his stock in permissive Switzerland, as do many vendors of museum-quality works, but he kept a photographic record pinpointing the source of objects he had acquired. Italian authorities tried and convicted the dealer for illegal trafficking; his ten-year sentence is under appeal. Using the same evidence, charges were then brought against the dealer Hecht, now an octogenarian, and against Marian True, formerly the classical curator at the lavishly endowed J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. And collaterally, Italian authorities reportedly found photographs of objects that in their eyes matched works purchased by Shelby White, a Metropolitan trustee and widow of Leon Levy, collectors of perhaps the finest trove of classical antiquities in private hands. For decades, so insiders claimed, the couple enjoyed first-refusal rights of the choicest undocumented artifacts on the market; a few years ago, the Metropolitan devoted a whole gallery to their collection. Such was the concatenation of circumstances that brought Philip de Montebello, the Met's long-serving director, to Italy, where a bargain was struck permitting the museum to exhibit the Euphronios krater until January 2008, with the promise of long-term loans by Italy of works of equal importance. However, the Met's director still insists that critics exaggerate the size and importance of the illicit antiquities traffic, and believes that a time limit of a decade or so should be fixed for claims against undocumented objects. In a panel discussions titled "Who Owns Art?" at the New School on March 6, he also offered these comments: How Italy prosecuted its case in the United States is rather shabby. It was entirely through the press. For years, we wrote countless times to the Italian ministry, to the justice department there and so forth, asking for a direct dialogue and really never got it. I went there with our secretary and counsel Sharon Cott in 1999 and it led to nothing. I was there in 2003 to discuss the whole issue of the silver that the archaeologist Malcolm Bell said, on circumstantial evidence, came from Morgantina in Sicily, asking whether they had any hard information. I got blank stares.7 Which brings us to the practical realities of restitution.
No Fuss, No Progress First came the books. An American art historian, Hector Felliciano, discovered that thousands of works looted by Nazis from French collectors, most but not all Jewish, had been silently melded into France's state-operated art museums. His book, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (HarperCollins, 1997) opened a window into a dark gallery and brought about dozens of claims by victimized survivors or their heirs. This followed The Rape of Europa (Knopf, 1994), a path-opening study by another American art historian, Lynn H. Nichols, that documented not just the staggering scope of wartime looting by Nazis but also recalled a 1939 auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, at which Americans snatched up at bargain prices major works stripped from German museums that were deemed "degenerate" in the Third Reich. The point is that it took two generations before the West's most famous museums began a conscientious search of suspicious provenances. After her history was published, Lynn Nichols reported that she received calls every day from people seeking help. And a claim that almost surely proved a turning point was pressed by a Holocaust survivor in the very closing days of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection." In January 1998, on behalf of his family, Henry Bondi, a retired chemical engineer in Princeton, New Jersey, asserted that the Portrait of Wally, appearing on the exhibition catalogue cover, had been stolen by the Nazis, then sold in suspect circumstances to the Austrian collector Rudolph Leopold. On the legal merits, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau barred the return to Austria of the disputed painting. The resulting growing furor prompted a congressional hearing at which leading museum directors vowed that they would research the provenance of all suspect works. art. Still, eight years on, the Portrait of Wally remains locked in a New York warehouse as the legal mills grind slowly, in an interminable echo of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.8 As a practical matter, victimized countries like victimized families have discovered that absent an uproar, museums obey the thermodynamics of inertia: when at rest, they stay at rest. Yet it needs adding that countries rich in antiquities do not help their cause with draconian legislation that criminalizes any and all sales of antiquities. There is something to be said for the British system that provides for sharing unearthed treasures between finder and the state, and which provides that an export license for an art treasure can be denied if British museums or collectors match the sale price. These valid arguments have been pressed ad tedium by dealers and collectors. Yet as a practical matter, to vary the Russian phrase, shrimps will whistle before art-rich countries permissively revise laws and rules embedded in the dogmas of eternal victimhood. Still, by recasting the whole controversy, is some reasonable accommodation of conflicting claims possible? I think it is possible, but only just.
An Honorable Grand Bargain?
Thomas Hoving, the Metropolitan's former and freebooting director, once declared that in legal fact the museum's treasures were owned by self-appointed trustees. That was true, but not the whole truth. The museum benefits from public funds, sits tax-free on public property, and builds its collection through tax deductions awarded donors. It is a hybrid creature: its possessions are a public trust, and its officers are stewards accountable for preserving and ensuring access to cultural treasures in the broadest sense. It would appear that those purposes are served by the prospect that the Euphronios krater will be accessible after its return to Italy, and that New Yorkers will benefit by a succession of long-term loans of works of equal merit. In fact, the Metropolitan has a fiduciary accountability to the attorney general of New York State, and cannot secretly dispose of treasures bequeathed to it. And this is not just an American principle. Decades ago, the House of Commons commissioned a portrait of Winston Churchill by the noted artist Graham Sutherland. Churchill hated the result, possibly because it signaled his stubborn willfulness. His widow Clementine evidently destroyed the painting. Whatever her legal right to do so, she was justly censured for failing to protect what was a public document of considerable value and interest. As a matter of ethics, if not law, the same principle applies to all important works in private or public collections. These seem to me other sensible principles that should be considered: First, let there be a fifty-year limit on new claims made by foreign governments for return of illegally exported antiquities. Whatever the circumstances of Peru's case against Hiram Bingham and Yale, why wait nearly a century? By the same logic, the Egyptian obelisks, uprooted in the nineteenth century that now rise abreast the Thames, the Seine, and the Tiber (and within Central Park) could be claimed by Egypt. But, and it is an important but, there should be no statute of limitations on claims for art seized by Nazis before and during the Second World War, a suitable act of reparations for the art world's long silence and complicity. Second, permit a distinction between exhibiting truly ancient human remains, and more recent skeletons. Native Americans are right to protest the museum display of their ancestors' skulls as curiosities; we do not dig up the Pilgrim Fathers and treat their bones as artifacts. Yet we have benefited immensely from the study of Egyptian mummies, the Bog People of Denmark, the Ice Man found in the Alps, and sacrificial Inca remains.9 Bones older than five hundred years, like the prehistoric remains from the State of Washington, should be exempted from U.S. legislation meant to protect Native American remains. Finally, it would be simple justice in restitution bargains to require that claimants devote more funds and resources to preserving and guarding ancient sites and museums. Certainly one's eyes are dry in reading the intemperate outburst of Egypt's director of antiquities, since the great Egyptian Museum in Cairo has been notoriously neglected, starved of funds, and is an easy target for thieves. Writing in 1973, it seemed to me the world of art consisted of three elements: a casino, a palace, and a slum. The casino is the international art market, with its perfumed chic and golden counters, in which buyers wager on tomorrow's taste, and in which no new record price seems outrageous. The art critic Robert Hughes wrote then in Time that in its upper reaches, "the art market has been afflicted with a kind of collective hysteria, a St. Vitus's dance of zeroes across the checkbook." Nowadays one needs to add three more zeroes as auction prices soar into the empyrean. Some of the prizes go to the palace—the great museums of the world, the richest being in the United States. But looming beyond is the slum which I judged a "place of squalor and ignorance where things of beauty and importance are routinely stolen or negligently permitted to crumble away." It hasn't changed much. Italian authorities excel at righteous finger-pointing at the United States, but failure to protect vulnerable sites like Pompeii persist as a cultural scandal. And as always, the tombaroli shovel with impunity in the very Etruscan areas from which the Euphronios krater was almost surely unearthed. Therein lies a tale.
The Truth about the Krater?
"How can that be, since Bob Hecht sold it to the Metropolitan?" "Yes, but the Metropolitan's is not the real vase. It's only a copy, right down to the cracks and chips—we're good at that here." He smiled, and winked. Doubtless a fairy tale. But who knows? The profusion of brilliant fakes is the venereal disorder of the antiquities traffic. When we next tour Etruria, we'll inquire again. Notes
|
|
||
 |
   |
|