James Cuno will be a familiar figure to long time readers of this blog. Representing the anti-restitution side of the museum establishment in the USA, he has been one of the most outspoken critics of the return of artefacts. At times in recent years, it has seemed as though his stance has been mellowing, but his latest article shows that this is clearly not the case.

Following James Cuno’s article, is a critique of it by Dr Kwame Opoku – who is amongst other things a long standing detractor of Cuno’s Encyclopaedic Museum theory.

James Cuno, President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust

From:
Foreign Affairs

Culture War
The Case Against Repatriating Museum Artifacts

By James Cuno
From our November/December 2014 Issue

In December 2007, the Italian government opened an exhibition in Rome of 69 artifacts that four major U.S. museums had agreed to return to Italy on the grounds that they had been illegally excavated and exported from the country. Leading nearly 200 journalists through the exhibition, Francesco Rutelli, Italy’s then cultural minister, proclaimed, “The odyssey of these objects, which started with their brutal removal from the bowels of the earth, didn’t end on the shelf of some American museum. With nostalgia, they have returned. These beautiful pieces have reconquered their souls.” Rutelli was not just anthropomorphizing ancient artifacts by giving them souls. By insisting that they were the property of Italy and important to its national identity, he was also giving them citizenship.

Rutelli has hardly been the only government official to insist that artifacts belong to the places from which they originally came. In 2011, the German government agreed to return to Turkey a 3,000-year-old sphinx that German archaeologists had excavated from central Anatolia in the early twentieth century. Afterward, the Turkish minister of culture, Ertugrul Gunay, declared that “each and every antiquity in any part of the world should eventually go back to its homeland.”
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Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed the increase in returns of disputed artefacts in recent years. American Museums have led the way here, but many others are now being drawn into this new way of operating – to return the artefacts without things progressing as far as legal action, on the basis that doing so will aid other co-operative projects with the countries involved.

For many years, people clamoured that the return of the Parthenon Marbles would open the floodgates for the emptying of museums. Now, it appears that the floodgates have already partially opened & the Parthenon Marbles had nothing to do with it.

So – now that that argument seems no longer valid, surely it is time for the British Museum to reconsider the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures in Athens? Unlike many of the countries that have threatened legal action, or to withdraw co-operation, by blocking exhibit loans etc, Greece has always maintained good relations with museums in Britain – but it appears that taking the nice approach counts for nothing in this instance – the carrot is not enough & there needs to be the threat of some type of stick before large institutions are willing to come to the negotiating table.

From:
New York Times

The Great Giveback
By HUGH EAKIN
Published: January 26, 2013

THE news has become astonishingly routine: a major American museum announces it is relinquishing extraordinary antiquities because a foreign government claims they were looted and has threatened legal action or other sanctions if it doesn’t get them back.

In the past two months, the Dallas Museum of Art has transferred ownership of seven ancient artworks, including a pair of Etruscan bronze shields, to Italy and Turkey; the Toledo Museum of Art has handed over to Italy a rare water vessel that had been on display since 1982; and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has announced it will be transferring to Sicily a terra-cotta head believed to depict the Greek god Hades, which it purchased from a New York dealer in 1985 for more than $500,000. Other museums across the country — including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Cleveland Museum of Art — have also given up prized antiquities.
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Former Getty Director, Michael Brand, reveals why he left the institution along with some of the issues in dealing with the return of looted artefacts during his tenure. He also re-iterated what others have mentioned before – that Marion True was used more as a scapegoat, than being the true root of the disputed antiquities issue.

From:
Art Newspaper

Ex-director of Getty Museum reveals why he was ousted
Michael Brand takes pride in working with Italy and Greece to overcome impasse over controversial artefacts
By Elizabeth Fortescue. Web only
Published online: 19 July 2012

The former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Michael Brand, has revealed more about the reasons for his abrupt departure from the Los Angeles institution in January 2010, telling The Art Newspaper that his position there had become “untenable”.

Brand blames many of the Getty’s internal troubles on its management structure. The director of the Art Gallery NSW in Sydney since June, Brand recalls his role as the Getty Museum’s director as a “lonely” one. “It became very clear that the museum director was in a position where he couldn’t actually make decisions or plan,” Brand says.
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More coverage of Turkey’s requests for the return of artefacts from various museums around the world. These requests form part of a wider cultural plan, to make more of the country’s culture, that includes the planned construction of a huge new museum in Ankara.

From:
Spiegel

07/20/2012
‘Art War’ Turkey Battles to Repatriate Antiquities
By Matthias Schulz

If one were to describe the current mood in Turkey in one word, it would be pride. Once decried as the “sick man of the Bosporus,” the nation has regrouped and emerged as a powerhouse. Turkey’s political importance is growing, and its economy is booming.

In cultural matters, however, Turkey remains a lightweight. To right this deficiency, the government plans to build a 25,000-square-meter (270,000-square-foot) “Museum of the Civilizations” in the capital. “Ankara will proudly accommodate the museum,” boasts Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertugrul Günay. “Our dream is the biggest museum in the world.”
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Turkey is applying more pressure to the foreign museums that it claims contain looted Turkish artefacts. Various exhibition loans to these museums are now being cancelled, in an attempt to convince the institutions involved to take the issue more seriously & attempt to resolve it.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Turkey turns up the heat on foreign museums
The list of antiquities demanded gets longer as more exhibitions are hit by the loans boycott
By Martin Bailey. Museums, Issue 236, June 2012
Published online: 13 June 2012

Turkey is set on a collision course with many of the world’s leading museums, by refusing exhibition loans because of antiquities claims. European museums that are being targeted include the Louvre, Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In America, claims are being lodged against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Cleveland Museum of Art and Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Turkey’s tough new approach was first reported by The Art Newspaper (March 2012, p1, p10; April, p6).

Among the exhibitions that have been hit is a British Museum project on the Uluburun ship, the world’s oldest recovered wreck. Dating from the 14th century BC, it was discovered (with its cosmopolitan cargo) in 1982, six miles off the south-west Turkish coast. It was put on display 12 years ago at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. The British Museum was discussing an exhibition, along with reciprocal loans to Turkey, but this has had to be dropped because of Turkey’s claim for the Samsat stele.
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Following the demise of Zahi Hawass’s restitution campaigns after the Arab Spring & the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, Turkey has recently made restitution requests for a large number of artefacts located in foreign museums around the world. Apparently, this is just the tip of the iceberg though – there are many more items on their list of requests than have been revealed so far.

Quite why they are aspiring to – or even using the term Encyclopaedic Museum (also known as a Universal Museum) is unclear though – as this is the justification regularly put forward for retention of the artefacts that they want returned by the museums that currently hold them, I’d have thought that they would be desperate to steer as far away from that term as possible.

From:
The Economist

Turkey’s cultural ambitions
Of marbles and men
Turkey gets tough with foreign museums and launches a new culture war
May 19th 2012

IN THE spring of 1887 a Lebanese villager named Mohammed Sherif discovered a well near Sidon that led to two underground chambers. These turned out to be a royal tomb containing 18 magnificent marble sarcophagi dating back to the fifth century BC. The Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, ordered the sarcophagi exhumed, placed on rails and carried down to the Mediterranean coast, where they were sent by ship to Istanbul. The largest sarcophagus was believed to contain the remains of Alexander the Great. The coffin is not Turkish and Sidon is now in Lebanon, but the sarcophagus is regarded as Istanbul’s grandest treasure, as important to the archaeology museum there as the “Mona Lisa” is to the Louvre.

The mildly Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led by the Justice and Development (AK) party, likes to think of itself as the heir of the Ottoman sultans. The Turkish authorities have recently launched a wave of cultural expansionism, building new museums, repairing Ottoman remains, licensing fresh archaeological excavations and spending more on the arts. A grand museum in the capital, Ankara, is due to open in time for the centenary of the Turkish republic in 2023. “It will be the biggest museum in Turkey, one of the largest in Europe; an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan or the British Museum (BM),” boasts an aide to Ertugrul Gunay, the culture and tourism minister. “It’s his baby, his most precious project.”
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The Getty Museum has returned three fragments of an ancient gravestone to Greece, following a deal made in 2011. Two of the fragments join onto another fragment that had never left Greece.

Greece plans to lend other artefacts to the Getty in return.

From:
Archaeology News Network

Getty Museum repatriates antiquities to Greece
Source: Associated Press [March 09, 2012]

Three ancient marble fragments from the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have been repatriated to Greece following a deal last year.

A culture ministry statement says two of the 2,400-year-old pieces are parts of the same broken gravestone decorated with relief sculptures, and will be joined onto a third section in a Greek museum.
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As well as eighteen artefacts in the Metropolitan Museum, Turkey is requesting the return of many other disputed artefacts in other museums across the USA.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Turkey asks U.S. museums for return of antiquities
By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2012, 8:48 p.m.

The government of Turkey is asking American museums to return dozens of artifacts that were allegedly looted from the country’s archaeological sites, opening a new front in the search for antiquities smuggled out of their original countries through an illicit trade.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are among the institutions that the Turkish government has contacted, officials say.
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For some artefacts, museums hold onto the excuse that at the time, it was accepted practice. But for many more recent artefacts that are looted, that excuse holds no water. Who should be blamed for this though – the dealers or the collectors? Are too many people / institutions willing to accept items with fairly questionable provenances that if investigated properly would clearly not be valid?

From:
Financial Times

December 2, 2011 12:02 am
Lost treasures
By Feargus O’Sullivan

In March this year, a statue of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, left the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, its home since 1988, to return to the Sicilian town of Aidone, where it was discovered.

Six months later, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts returned the Weary Herakles to Turkey, so the torso of the mythological Greek hero could be reunited with the legs and pelvis of a statue discovered near Antalya in the early 1980s.
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A (somewhat subjective, but still interesting) list in the New York Times of the most disputed antiquities, following the return of some Egyptian Artefacts from the Metropolitan Museum.

From:
Gadling

The world’s most disputed antiquities: a top 5 list
by Melanie Renzulli on Aug 3rd 2011 at 1:00PM

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that it would return 19 Egyptian antiquities that have lived at the museum for most of the last century. These artifacts, excavated from the 14th century B.C. tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (King Tut), include a sphinx bracelet, a small bronze dog, and a broad collar with beads, among other bits and pieces. Zahi Hawass, the former Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, argued for the artifacts’ return in November 2010, claiming that the artifacts had been removed from the tomb illegally in the 1920s. But, the instability in Egypt during and following that country’s revolution this year has delayed the repatriation of King Tut’s belongings.

One of the biggest arguments in the art world is the repatriation of objects, particularly antiquities. On one side of the debate are art scholars who feel that ancient objects should remain in the care of their current (usually Western) museums or locations. The other side argues that antiquities should be returned to the countries from which they were removed because they were taken during times of war and colonization or were stolen and sold through the highly lucrative art black market.
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Another review of Chasing Aphrodite – about the Italian’s hunt for looted artefacts in the Getty Museum.

From:
Washington Times

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Chasing Aphrodite’
CHASING APHRODITE: THE HUNT FOR LOOTED ANTIQUITIES AT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MUSEUM
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 384 pages, illustrated

The 19th century was the golden age of acquisition. European and American collectors, smitten with the lure of antiquities from Greece, Italy and China, spent recklessly to assemble great collections in London, Paris and New York. No one questioned that marbles from the Parthenon would get more careful attention in London than in Athens.

Then the tide began to turn. Italians became restless at the sight of their “patrimony” being exported abroad. In 1939, Italy passed a cultural property law stating that archaeological objects found after that date were the property of the state. In Athens, Greeks demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles.
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An interesting followup to the previous post about the ongoing problems of artefact looting within Greece.

From:
SAFE

Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Repatriation Effects: Greece’s National Archaeological Museum

In the Galleries:

While we all revile the looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade of artifacts, we can now begin to review the effects of the repatriation of ancient material back to the countries of origin. Here I am not referring to Native American remains, but the statues and vases created by the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. Recently, I visited the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, which has seen financial and public relations troubles partly due to the national economic crisis. Here, I saw the 2007 repatriated kore from the J.P. Getty Museum standing amongst other statues without any bells or whistles describing its sordid history. Also on display was a bronze athlete, repatriated in 2002, propped in its own corner. I believe that the return of these objects reflect legal and ethical principles, which absolutely must be upheld.
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