Showing 7 results for the tag: Victoria and Albert Museum.

June 19, 2012

Turkey puts pressure on foreign museums involved in artefact disputes

Posted at 8:07 am in Similar cases

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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May 18, 2012

Turkey gets tough on disputed cultural treasures in foreign museums

Posted at 7:54 am in British Museum, Similar cases

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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April 23, 2012

Turkey plans to block loans to British Museum over artefact dispute

Posted at 8:14 am in British Museum, Similar cases

Turkey is taking a similar line to the one taken in the past by Egypt & Iran, by withdrawing co-operation, in an attempt to secure the return of disputed artefacts.

Their plans to follow this approach are not entirely surprising, as in both of the previous cases mentioned above, it was successful in speeding up negotiations or getting the museum in question to reconsider their stance on the issue.

From:
Hurriyet

Turkey refuses to lend artifacts to British Museum exhibition
March/05/2012
ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

According to Britain-based The Art Newspaper, Turkey is refusing to lend artifacts to leading British and American museums until the issue of disputed antiquities is resolved.

The ban means Turkey will not lend artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London’s British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), reported The Art Newspaper.
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March 19, 2012

Turkey wants 1700 year old marble head returned from London’s V&A museum

Posted at 1:45 pm in Similar cases

Turkey has asked London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to return a marble carving of a child’s head. The legality of the head’s removal from Turkey is unclear. In recent years, Turkey has been making many similar efforts to request the return of certain specific artefacts.

From:
Independent

Turkey demands return of its ‘Elgin marble’
V&A holds carved head removed from sarcophagus by Britain’s consul-general in 1882
By Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent
Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Turkey is demanding the return of an ancient marble head, now languishing in the stores of a London museum, which was taken from Anatolia more than a century ago.

The Turkish culture ministry has asked the Victoria and Albert Museum to return a 1,700-year-old life-sized marble carving of a child’s head, described as bearing a likeness to Eros, the Greek god of love.
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February 22, 2010

The Magdala treasures in the British Museum

Posted at 1:57 pm in British Museum, Similar cases

Many years after they were originally taken from Ethiopia during a punitive exhibition by the British army, the Magdala treasures in various institutions in the UK continue to be a source of contention. There has been little headway towards any sort of comprehensive assessment of whether any of these artefacts can be repatriated, despite the fact that they have a religious & cultural significance for many Ethiopians whereas in the UK many of them are not even on public display.

From:
Voice-Online

Should Britain return Africa’s stolen treasures?
BY Davina Morris
Published: 21 February 2010 – Issue: 1411

FANS of the ‘90s BBC comedy show The Real McCoy may remember the sketch when pro-African activist Babylon (played by Felix Dexter) urged black Britons to head down to the British Museum with a big bin liner to “tek back your tings!”

Though the sketch was intended to be comedic (and it was), it highlighted the ongoing issue of whether British institutions should return the many cultural items they possess that were taken from Africa years ago.
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November 3, 2009

China’s worldwide hunt for artefacts looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace

Posted at 11:23 pm in British Museum, Similar cases

Further coverage of the decision by China to try & catalogue the artefacts in museum around the world that were looted from the Summer Palace. The British Museum says that they don’t see this as a threat – but then they said in the past that the New Acropolis Museum adds nothing to the argument for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
The Times

October 20, 2009
China in worldwide treasure hunt for artefacts looted from Yuan Ming Yuan palace

China is to send a team of artefact hunters to nearly 50 countries to track down thousands of treasures looted by foreign armies 150 years ago.

The experts will scour museums, libraries and private collections in Britain, the US, France, Japan and elsewhere to photograph and catalogue what was taken from the Yuan Ming Yuan, popularly known as the Old Summer Palace, after British and French armies sacked it in 1860 then picked through what remained in 1900.
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October 29, 2009

China wants to catalogue its artefacts in Museums abroad

Posted at 1:42 pm in British Museum, Similar cases

China hopes to send experts to foreign museums to build a more complete catalogue of the Chinese artefacts looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace in foreign museums (many of which are not on public display).

From:
Agence France Presse

China experts to search abroad for looted relics
(AFP) – 2 days ago

BEIJING — China will send a team of experts to museums around the world in an effort to record more than a million cultural relics it says were looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, state press reported Monday.

Museums, libraries and private collections in the United States, Britain, France and Japan will be the primary targets, the China Daily reported, citing the director of Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan, or Old Summer Palace.
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