At the Benaki Museum in Athens recently, visitors were greeted by a huge poster that read, “You have been robbed.” The poster was at the entry point for an exhibition entitled History Lost, housed in three archaeological museums in Athens, Nicosia, and Nemea, which detailed the plundering of more than 100 sites in Cyprus and Greece of ancient treasures.
But this is not just the looting and illicit trafficking that we’ve all been reading about lately. “History Lost” catalogues artifacts removed from Cyprus without permission over a long period of time. It begins with objects that formed part of the earliest collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: those taken by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a self-designated archaeologist who “worked” (or “pillaged,” depending on your perspective), numerous ancient sites from 1865 to1876. He smuggled thousands of objects to the West against the explicit orders of the ruling Ottomans. Many of these items were eventually sold to the Metropolitan as well as to the young Stanford University. Di Cesnola himself became first Keeper (director) of the Met’s antiquities. A newspaper accused him of dealing in stolen goods, some of which were also faked. There was a trial and a scandal. He won. But who lost?
Cut to the present day.
Marion True, former curator of antiquities at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, is on trial in Italy for conspiring to traffic in art objects from antiquity. The charge is that True, aided by art dealer Robert Hecht Jr, knowingly bought objects for the Getty collection that were illicitly obtained.
Most countries now have very strict laws prohibiting the transfer of antiquities to the marketplace; the journey stolen objects take is a complicated one. It begins with the people who dig them up and sell them to local art dealers. The objects are then sold again to a co-conspiring international dealer, who falsifies their provenance (the documented history of the ownership of an object). Thus “laundered,” the goods are finally sold to art museums or private collectors.
The money involved in some of these transactions often runs into many millions of dollars.
The issue of provenance is an important one. Determining the continuous line of ownership answers many of the questions about how an object came into a museum’s possession. When there are holes in this history, questions inevitably arise.
The number of questioned artifacts in the Getty case alone started at 52. Some have been removed from the list; others the Getty has agreed to return. Many remain in contention.
The Getty, the perennial “bad boy” of the museum world, is wealthy and aggressive in its purchasing policies, but it is not alone in facing charges from Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and others about buying stolen goods. In the Getty case, Greece and Italy have joined together to seek restitution of art objects. But negotiations are also going on with the Metropolitan in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in museums in Cleveland and Los Angeles among others. Both New York and Boston have already agreed to give back some of the pieces they currently hold. But negotiations are slow and cumbersome. A good deal of money and major reputations are at stake.
The problem of bounty from ransacking has been around for hundreds of years, and now, the culture of acquisition itself is in some ways on trial.
Stand at the Acropolis today and listen to tour guides say, even now, that Greece would like materials returned by the British Museum that were taken as long ago as the Napoleonic Wars. History tells us this custom is an old one: the rapacious notion “to the victor belongs the spoils.” Much of this pillaging, some of which formed the heart of many museums’ early collections, happened when there were few laws that prohibited taking antiquities out of their country of origin. This does not justify the vandalism that often followed success on a battlefield, but technically — if not morally — it was not illegal until the late nineteenth century to remove works of art without permission. These laws did not bother the Nazis, however, but that’s another museum story.
Laws protecting ancient treasures have now been in place a long time, and the antiquities in the spotlight in the current Italian trial were not taken as spoils of war. They were allegedly stolen outright as part of a huge present-day underground business. Whether it’s a private collector or to a major museum, the lure of owning something rare is strong.
The Getty is hardly the only culprit, although it has become the poster child for the need to rethink the ethics of art collecting. The current head of the Getty told the New York Times recently, “I think if you look at Marion (True) and at the Getty Museum, I don’t think you could ever accuse us of not using objects to good ends.” Is this suggesting that the ends justify the means?
“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” cultural critic Walter Benjamin tells us. The storm that rages around the collecting of antiquities is a good example of what Benjamin was talking about. We can be grateful that the treasures of antiquity may be well cared for; but we should also be concerned about how those precious objects arrived at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world.
Stay tuned. This is one museum story that is far from over.
