Three cheers for the Getty Museum which has finally decided enough is enough when it comes to the Italian government's increasing game of cultural extortion.
Using the gullible press as a PR tool and leveraging recent victories over the Metropolitan Museum in NY and the Boston MFA, the Italian government kept up an increasing effort to claw back more and more antiquities from the Getty's collection.
After months of prolonged negotiations, the Getty Museum based in Malibu, CA, walked out of talks this week effectively drawing a line in the sand with the Italians.
According to the UK's Independent newspaper, Michael Brand, the director of the Getty, has sent a closely argued, six-page letter to Francesco Rutelli, the Minister of Culture, saying he is "deeply saddened" by the failure to reach agreement after more than a year of talks, and announcing the end of "these present negotiations". Mr Rutelli's office said the letter had been received "with surprise and disappointment".
At the center of the dispute, as reported in the Independent, is an enormous marble and limestone statue of the goddess Aphrodite, sold to the Getty for $18m (£10m) by a British antiquities dealer who was jailed last year. The statue, one of the glories of the Malibu museum, is claimed by the Italians to have been dug up by grave robbers in Morgantina, Sicily, and illegally exported to Switzerland, where the British dealer Robin Symes sold it on to the Americans. But the statue is just one item on a list of objects the Italian government has been demanding be returned.
The Getty, which thoroughly researched the provenance prior to the purchase, traced ownership to a Sicilian man named Renzo Canavesi who stated the statue had been in his family since 1939. Some scholars who have closely examined the statue, including one who is an authority on the archaeology of Morgantina, say there is no evidence that the Aphrodite came from that area.
The actions by the Getty, one of the richest and most philanthropic museums in the world (which grants tens of millions of dollars for archaeological and conservation projects in Italy!), indicate a possible sea change in the seeming one-sided battle over cultural patrimony that has been waged by the Italian government since 2001. It is good to finally see an American museum take a firm stand with reagrds to its collection and resist the urge to simply roll over in the hope of averting negative press headlines.
You can't pick up a newspaper or visit an art blog these days without running into a story about some country suing a museum or institution or country over the return of some artwork or antiquities which may have made their way to that country through either shady means or even forgotten formal agreements.
Bloomberg reported a while back that the government of Peru plans to sue Yale University, over hundreds of artifacts taken from the ancient city of Machu Picchu nearly a century ago.
And this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back (or in this case the llama's back).
The artifacts made their way to the US through Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham. One side claims that the artifacts were on loan. Yale contends the artifacts were legally excavated and exported "in line with the practices of the time."
And if these artifacts were sent to the US through some agreement with the Peruvian government nearly a century ago, then Yale has a case for keeping them; otherwise -- in the event that the American archeologists simply found them, crated them and shipped them to the US - all on their own -- then today's courts may well rule in Peru's favor.
And that straw that may break the camel's back may also unlock Pandora's box (which Greece will soon be suing for).
First: let's get one thing clear: Nazi art loot should and must be returned to their original owners or descendants.
But for most of all the other demanding of artwork returns: where does it stop?
Because unless you have some official paperwork signed, stamped and approved (and recognized as valid) then...
Does every Roman artifact in museums around the world have to be returned to Italy? And do Italian museums have to return Roman antiquities that were made in other parts of the Roman Empire to the nations that now exist there? And Italy better start packing the 13 Egyptian obelisks that are all over Rome: Cairo is clearing out some spaces for them.
Every Greek vase back to Greece? But do Greek museums have to return Cypriot antiquities to Cyprus?
Does every mummy have to find its way back to Egypt?
That "official" cadaver of Christopher Columbus in the Havana Cathedral? Sorry... back to Spain; or is it Italy, or Portugal? All three of those nations currently claim him as a native son, although I suspect that the Grand Admiral's descendants, currently living in Spain, have first dibs on Chris' bones.
And the fake Columbus cadaver in the Seville Cathedral? Back to Genoa, even if it's fake (just in case).
After all, that fake Scottish Stone of Destiny has made its way back to Scotland (God only knows where the real one is), but there are probably hundreds of thousands of antiquities (if not millions) from all over the world disseminated... all over the world.
Our own Smithsonian in the US has over 100,000 pre-Columbian antiquities in its inventory (most of which are not even on display). Do the ones that were created by pre-Columbian artisans from north and south of our border have to be returned to the countries that now exist there?
Unless these museums have a provenance with lots of country of origin stamps authorizing the removal of the antiquity, I'd be pretty nervous if I was one of those museums.
And even if you have such a paper, what's to stop today's version of a country's government from saying that they do not recognize the authority of their predecessors to allow the removal of a national treasure from their nation.
And where does it stop?
Frida Kahlo was essentially ignored by Mexico while she was alive, and yet decades after her death she was deified outside of Mexico, and eventually the government of Mexico made her works a national treasure and forbade the export of any of Kahlo's works from Mexico. I think that this is a good (if late) thing for Mexico and Mexicans.
But what's to stop a future Mexican government from demanding the return of any and all Frida Kahlos outside of Mexico back to her mother nation.
It would just be a case of this "return" trend being pushed a little more.
As an American, personally, I think that from now on, when I visit foreign museums, I will be making a list of American Indian artifacts in those museums, and they better damned have a piece of paper somewhere full of stamps and signatures from the Sioux, or the Walla Walla, or the Cheyenne, or the Seminoles or the Oneida or whatever indigenous Native American nation that currenly lives in the USA created them.
Official export paperwork from the United States government is not valid, and will not be accepted, regardless of how many non-Indian Washington, DC officials have signed it.
Of course, that may also mean that every non-Indian museum in the USA itself, would have to return every Native American Indian artifact back to their tribes.
Makes my head hurt...
Posted by: Lenny Campello | May 10, 2007 at 05:03 PM