Laws on stolen cultural property - Elgin Marbles
Matthew Taylor
world of art. & how the regulations / attitudes differ between US & Europe.
From:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2086136/
Trading Places
Cultural property disputes are reshaping the art world-but how?
By Carol Kino
Posted Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT
It's a sad truth that the depredations of war and imperialism have sometimes
had positive side effects for art history. Take the Metropolitan Museum's
recent "Manet-Velázquez" show, on the influence of 17th-century Spanish
painting on 19th-century French art. For most of the 18th century, Spanish
artists like Murillo, Zurbaran, and Velázquez were little known outside
their homeland. Then in the early 1800s, hundreds of Spanish paintings
arrived in Paris as Napoleonic war loot. Some were briefly shown at the
Louvre before Napoleon's defeat, after which they were returned. Later that
century, French artists began adopting the Spanish artists' realist
aesthetic and loose, sensuous brushwork-a move that laid the foundations of
Impressionism and radically changed the course of modern art.
Unlike many European museums, American museums were built with civic and
capitalist muscle, rather than imperial might. Yet well into the 1970s their
attitude toward acquisitions-as any expert will admit off the record-was
frequently "don't ask, don't tell." But today American courts are dealing
with an unprecedented number of Holocaust reparation cases. And last year,
the Justice Department successfully prosecuted a well-known New York dealer,
Frederick Schultz, for conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. As
a result, some foreign collectors and museums have become more cautious
about loaning work to museum shows-particularly those in America-and
everyone has become vastly more diligent about conducting provenance
research before buying.
What prompted this shift in global attention, when the world often turned a
blind eye in the past?
The laws that allow countries to seek restitution of what's known as
"cultural property" are a byproduct of the early 20th century, when art-rich
countries like Turkey, Italy, and Greece began to introduce what are known
as "patrimony laws." (These essentially deem all newly discovered artifacts
found within their borders to be the property of the state.)
The movement to protect world culture dramatically intensified after World
War II, during which the Nazis and the Russian army confiscated
unprecedented numbers of artworks from individuals and public institutions
throughout Europe. 1954 saw the drafting of the Hague Convention-the first
major international agreement to establish guidelines for protecting
cultural property during wartime. Then, in the 1960s, the international art
market heated up so much (resulting in increased trade of stolen goods) that
UNESCO, in 1970, drafted another convention that encouraged countries to
work together as much as possible to enforce each other's export
restrictions. (By 2003, UNESCO's guidelines had been ratified by 96
countries, including the United States.) As Thomas Hoving, a former director
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, famously wrote in his 1993 memoir, Making
the Mummies Dance, "I recognized that with the UNESCO hearings, the age of
piracy had ended."
Today, trying to make sense of all the different international laws is
enough to set anyone but a lawyer wailing like the tortured figure in Edvard
Munch's "The Scream." In 1995, UNIDROIT (originally the legal auxiliary of
the old League of Nations) drafted a convention that aims to enforce export
restrictions and help unify cultural property laws worldwide. Within most
countries, illegally gotten cultural property is generally covered by a
nation's stolen property laws. But transport that cultural property across a
border, and you may have violated civil law, criminal law, an import or an
export prohibition, or a combination of the above, depending on which
country we're talking about, what the object is, and who owns it-and that's
just for starters. Much also depends on the particulars of the bilateral and
multilateral agreements, if any, between the countries in question, which
stipulate whether and to what degree one will honor another's export
restrictions.
Obviously, when the dispute is between nations, national pride, politics,
and political grandstanding tend to take precedence over law. That's
probably why such disputes have a habit of becoming so emotional, and so
unresolvable-as evidenced by the long-running brouhaha over the Elgin
Marbles, which escalated about 20 years ago. Britain holds that the
sculptures, removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, were
legally purchased by Lord Elgin from the Ottoman Empire, which then
controlled Greece-a move that thereby saved them from destruction during
Greece's War of Independence and by modern-day Greek air pollution. Yet
Greece counters that the seller was an occupying force, therefore the
purchase shouldn't count. Both nations regard the sculptures as their
cultural patrimony. But Greece didn't exist as an independent nation until
1832-and in any case, its 20th-century patrimony laws can't be applied
retroactively. Perhaps that's why Greece, so far, has attempted to resolve
the matter through diplomacy, rather than in court.
Last December, an alliance of about 40 major museums, known as the Bizot
Group, issued a statement in support of the so-called "universal museum"-one
whose collection brings together work from many periods and cultures. (18
museum directors signed the statement, including those of the Metropolitan,
the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hermitage.) The statement
argues that with time, objects become "part of the heritage of the nations
which house them." Clearly, the signatories were also trying to protect
their own backs: If the British Museum were ever to return the Elgin Marbles
to Greece, the act would likely unleash a torrent of similar claims that
could drain the resources-and the collections-of some of the world's great
treasure-house museums.
Nonetheless, the Bizot statement has since been slammed by various museum
associations and cultural watchdogs for being "Eurocentric" and for taking
"a George Bush approach to international relations."
Yet when it comes to cases that can be fought in court, the United States
(New York State and California in particular) is actually one of the best
jurisdictions in the world in which to recover stolen art. For one thing,
our common-law legal system offers theft victims better protection, because
it mandates that even a good-faith purchaser cannot acquire stolen property.
The United States also has a record number of especially tough bilateral
agreements with other countries, like Italy, Cyprus, and Peru, which allow
those countries to pursue their own illegal export cases here. Yet to much
of the world, our prosecutorial approach seems to miss the point. Europe and
Japan, when balancing international relations against free trade, have
tended to favor the latter-the argument in favor of a more relaxed art
market being that it helps grease the wheels for traveling loan shows and
allows museums to keep on collecting, thereby helping culture to circulate
globally.
Of course, it doesn't matter what laws or bilateral agreements are in place
if no one enforces them-as we've seen recently in Iraq. Yet using legal
parameters as the restitution cut-off point makes total sense. Clearly, the
issues underlying each case are complex; thus each must be judged
individually. But a legal measuring stick-rather than a more amorphously
moral one-still permits prosecution of cases involving Holocaust spoils and
many 20th-century export restriction breaches, while avoiding the Pandora's
box of centuries-old claims that could be opened if the British Museum were
to return the Elgin Marbles.
And ironically enough, as some recent conflicts have shown, it's not always
such a terrible thing to have some of a country's treasures dispersed
throughout the world. If an Elginesque diplomat had struck a dicey deal for
Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas in the 19th century, the Taliban wouldn't have
been able to shell them into smithereens in 2001. In May, just after the
Baghdad Museum was looted and many of Iraq's Mesopotamian treasures were
lost, the Metropolitan opened "Art of the First Cities," its own
Mesopotamian survey, which relies heavily on loans from the British Museum,
the Louvre, and the Hermitage. Were it not for 18th- and 19th-century
imperialist depradation, that history might well not exist today.
Culturebox thanks Lawrence M. Kaye and Howard N. Spiegler of Herrick,
Feinstein, LLP; Jason Hall, director of government and public affairs, the
American Association of Museums; and the U.S. State Department's
International Cultural Property Protection Web site.
astron
laws and how they could be used as a remedy . Could it apply to objects
outside the US though ?
"Matthew Taylor" <matthew....@NOSPAM.mtaylor.co.uk> wrote in message
news:Fd2cnR51xo9...@brightview.com...
Matthew Taylor
"astron" <ast...@texas.gov.us> wrote in message
news:YImdnaiLSKM...@comcast.com...
> Good post Matthew. I especially like the part about New York and
California
> laws and how they could be used as a remedy . Could it apply to objects
> outside the US though ?
>
>
Based on other cases, in theory it could - but only if they entered the US -
say for an exhibition. The chances of it happening are unlikely, as I can't
see the BM lending them out to anyone, & it would also require the US to
want to get involved with the issue - which they probably wouldn't, unless
there was an obvious benefit for them.
Matthew