The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met) is creating a team of four experts responsible for tracing the provenance of pieces suspected of having been obtained through looting. Pressure from foreign governments, as well as legal measures against illegal trafficking of works of art, have pushed the museum to review its collections in the context of a global rereading of history; Decolonization today consists of returning marbles, bronzes and ceramics to where they were stolen. The creation of the provenance team results in part from conflicts like those of the institution currently with Cambodia. In short, it is about redefining the notion of cultural good and doing it, for the first time, in a systematic way.
“As new information emerges and the climate changes around cultural assets, we must be proactive and deliberate in our direction and devote the necessary resources and attention to this work. The initiatives we create, based on the principles of research, transparency and collaboration, chart a path forward through this complex territory and show the world that we are committed to being a proactive and engaged player in ongoing debates, as well as what an exceptional actor. a place to discover world cultures,” Max Hollein, director of the Met, told EL PAÍS. He underlined the pre-eminence of the institution in world culture. “As the custodian of nearly 1.5 million works of art from over 5,000 years of human creativity and as a leading voice for artistic and cultural heritage, it is essential that the museum becomes involved in this question,” he added.
In early May, in an open letter and an article on the museum’s website, titled Thoughts on the Met Collection and Cultural Properties, Hollein expressed the need to respond to the increasing scrutiny of its collections. The Met is not the only museum involved in the debate: Greece is in talks with the British Museum to repatriate the Parthenon Marbles, and Germany recently returned the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Museums housing works from other times and places are now haunted by suspicions of looting or smuggling. The debate is not only academic, it also has legal connotations, as in the case of the Manhattan district attorney’s tireless search for stolen art.
The Manhattan district attorney has seized dozens of antiquities from the Met’s collection for return to, among other places, Turkey, Egypt and Italy. In 2008, the Met returned to Italy the famous Euphronios Krater, acquired in 1972 for $1 million. Last year, it returned 45 items to different countries, trying to head off criticism that it had not taken enough action. “Despite the urgency that the media environment may suggest, we must be diligent, thoughtful and fair in our evaluation of any evidence presented to us,” Hollein wrote in the article. “We are committed to getting it right, and we are also committed to taking the time necessary to get it right. »
Just a few days ago, the prosecutor announced the return to Iraq of two pieces looted from the ancient city of Uruk during the Gulf War. One of them, a Sumerian figure of an alabaster ram, belonged to Shelby White, a Encounter trustee, and the other to an antiques dealer. “We will not allow New York City to be a haven for stolen cultural artifacts,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg tweeted. Earlier this year, around 30 works, also owned by White and valued at $20 million, were returned to Greece.
The Antiquities Trafficking Unit, led by Investigator Matthew Bogdanos, has been very busy in recent months. In September, he seized 27 items worth more than $13 million, including a valuable Greek artifact. Kylix ceramic. In March, it requisitioned a headless bronze statue of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, dating from the year 225, valued at $25 million. For years, she had presided over the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries.
Collaboration with the prosecutor
The Met’s apparent urgency to trace the origins of its pieces is not motivated by legal action, according to its director. “We have a constant dialogue and sometimes we are confronted with evidence that we hadn’t seen, which pushes us to act,” Hollein explained. “There is collaboration. I don’t think our efforts conflict with those of the prosecutor and that we should take a step because they have.”
Professor Elizabeth Marlowe, director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, believes that the clamor from public opinion and the prosecutor has put pressure on the museum. “I think the Met is finally accepting that public opinion is moving towards restitution in cases of obvious crimes. In recent years, the Manhattan district attorney has also been very proactive in art theft cases and is not afraid to go after the most prized works of the city’s most important cultural institution. city.”
Marlowe cites two notable cases, the Cambodian Khmer works and the Benin bronzes: “Scholars and journalists have done important work to uncover the stories, like that of the sacking of Cambodian temples by Douglas Latchford (who was indicted in 2019 in New York for falsifying the origin of coins and died the following year). Social media has played a fundamental role in keeping the public’s attention on the subject and on cases like the Benin Bronzes. The Met’s African galleries are currently closed and are being reinstalled for the first time in over 30 years. Will they create a new distribution for their collection of 160 Benin bronzes, or will they return them to Nigeria, as the Smithsonian, German state museums and many other institutions have done? Time will tell us.”
The three galleries of African art, like those of ancient American and Oceanic art, are temporarily closed for a “new renovation project that will reinvent these collections for a new generation of visitors,” according to the museum’s website. The Met took a few steps with the Benin Bronzes by returning three pieces to Lagos earlier this year as part of a collaboration with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeriasimilar to those with Sicily and Greece. The latter is part of a historic agreement: Greece-owned collector Leonard Stern’s collection of 161 pieces of cicladic art will be on display at the Met. The 15 most important pieces from the collection can be seen until October at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in an exhibition entitled Returning home: the treasures of the Cyclades on the way home. Starting in January, they will be housed at the Met for the next 25 years, although they remain the property of Greece. Cultural diplomacy has become an alternative route to litigation. Two exhibitions opening in July – one on the origins of Buddhist art in India and the other on Pueblo pottery – follow this line of collaboration.
A discussion on a contemporary definition of the concept of cultural property is also on the table. Many museum collections contain works obtained by exploitative societies suffering from poverty, colonialism, war and political instability. The Met focuses on objects acquired between 1970 and 1990, a time when traceability was very lax. 1970 marked the beginning of a UNESCO treaty aimed at ending the illicit trade in antiquities, but it was implemented only irregularly.
Most of the pieces at the heart of the conflict between Cambodia and the Met left the country in the 1970s, against a backdrop of political instability and the Khmer genocide. Phnom Penh claims at least 45 items were stolen during this period. The Met has removed works from the gallery dedicated to Khmer art, but it has refused to show documents that support – or contradict – the legitimacy of their acquisition. He, in turn, asked Cambodia to prove that the works had been obtained illicitly.
Today, the question of identity also comes into play. “We live in a time,” Hollein writes in the article, “where the idea of a cosmopolitan, global society is being questioned and where some, more nationalist, voices view cultural artifacts less as ambassadors of a people but rather as proof of national identity. .” A new definition of the museum is necessary, beyond a simple repository of objects. “We are able to present and share works with a global audience and tell meaningful stories about these works, from ancient times to the present,” Hollein wrote.
Nazi Looting and Murillos of the Meadows Museum
The looting of works of art by the Nazis deserves its own chapter in the history of looting. Like in the George Clooney movie The men of the monuments, teams of researchers and experts scoured museums and private collections in search of stolen objects. Amanda Dotseth, director of the Meadows Museum in Dallas, knows the subject well. “We had the case of two paintings by Murillo, Santa Justa And Saint Rufina, purchased by Algur H. Meadows in the 1970s, and we discovered that they had been seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family in France. We investigated and made it public when we found evidence that these two works had been returned to their owners before we acquired them and that they had been incorporated into the Meadows.
Dotseth supports the scrutiny applied: “I agree that we need to follow best practices from both the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Visitors (AAMD). At the Meadows Museum, we follow what is called “due diligence”, the investigation into the provenance of acquisitions. In the event that we find that a work in our collection has questionable origins, we investigate it. We must always continue to investigate the origins of a work, as well as its modern history.
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