Footnotes

Medici, Getty, BP: Are museums run on "tainted" money?

• A Q&A with Quebec's art crime unit.
• Officials from Egypt and Iraq met this week to discuss protection of archaeological heritage.
• A new play documenting the theft of the Mona Lisa.
• Shelling on the Thai/Cambodia border damages ancient Khmer temples. 
• Should foreign archaeologists, museums and others working in Egypt had plans in place in Egypt to secure sites in the event of political unrest?
• A museum in New Zealand installs a radio tracking system to boost security.
• Swedish artists want tax incentives for the arts.
• An account of the FBI Art Crime Team.

Miller on the Doctrine of Discovery

The Doctrine of Discovery was an international legal principle which allowed European settlers to claim any lands they 'discovered' from the indigenous peoples living there.This attitude, which seems shocking today, lies behind much of the call for restitution of objects and cultural heritage today. Robert J. Miller (Lewis & Clark Law School) has posted "Christianity, American Indians, and the Doctrine of Discovery." 

The European countries that explored and colonized North America utilized the international law Doctrine of Discovery to claim the sovereign, property, and human rights of Indigenous peoples. Discovery was developed primarily in the fifteenth century by Spain, Portugal, England, and the Church and was designed to control the acquisition of non-European lands. The assumed superiority of European religions and civilizations played a major role in justifying Discovery. Starting with the fifteenth century papal bulls and the later English Royal charters, the primary goals of colonization were alleged to be "propagating Christian Religion" and bringing "human civility" to the "pagan," "heathen," "Infidels and Savages" who "yet live[d] in Darkness and miserable ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God." The United States Supreme Court expressly adopted the Doctrine of Discovery in 1823 in Johnson v. M'Intosh and expressly relied on Christian religion and Euro-American civilization to justify its decision. The goals of, and the justifications for, Discovery continued to be part of United States Indian policy and Manifest Destiny until nearly the end of the twentieth century.

(via)

"He really loves art. . . "

This is what an art thief looks like.

". . . but also the money that he can get from it".

So says an unnamed source describing the notorious Stéphane Breitwieser who stole 240 works of art, went to prison, wrote a memoir and has been arrested again in his home:

At Breitwieser's home, police discovered about 40 paintings, three sculptures, and a tapestry, French newspaper Le Parisien reports. At Breitwieser's mother's place, cops also found a landscape by a Brueghel pupil that had been stolen from a Brussels museum. Several valuable objects, including chandeliers and pocket watches, were also discovered in the pond next to Breitwieser's mother's house. In the past, she destroyed several paintings in order to protect her son, and also hid his stolen artworks along a highway, in a canal, and even in a neighbor's chicken coop.

1. Police Nab Europe’s Most Notorious Art Thief — And His Mom, Too, ARTINFO France, April 25, 2011, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37537/police-nab-europes-most-notorious-art-thief-and-his-mom-too/ (last visited Apr 25, 2011).

Footnotes

A Rothko has been found, Christie's expects to auction it for $18 million

• Hmm. A 'new' 7-ft Marc Rothko?
• Palm tree justice realized: an Egyptian court jailed five officials over the theft of the Van Gogh painting last summer.
• Salzberg's Museum of Modern Art will hand over a 1915 painting by Klimt called "Litzlberg am Attersee" to the Canadian descendant of the previous Jewish owner. The work was seized in 1941.
• The evilest art dealer?
• Italian antiquities were seized at the Swiss border and a curious apulian fishplate at looting matters.
• The LAPD's Art Theft Detail interviewed by Catherine Sezgin.
• Securing Egypt's ancient treasures.
• Spain recovers paintings by Greco and Goya.
• Budget cuts may signal a decrease in historic preservation in the U.S.
• Jordan has a new online antiquities database.

More War, More Looting

Jason bringing Pelias the Golden Fleece

From Jason and his argonauts to Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, cultural takings are nothing new. So argues Richard J. Evans—Professor of History at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Chair of the U.K. Spoliation Advisory Panel—in a terrific long-read that argues the looting of heritage during wartime continue despite attempts to police conflict.

It is a beautifully written historical summary of wartime looting, which puts the ancient world, modern unrest, and World War II in historical context. I really recommend giving the entire piece a read, but here are some highlights:

The history of [looting] goes back far indeed, beginning perhaps with Jason and the Argonauts looting the Golden Fleece; and it continued with the Romans’ habit of looting art from conquered cities in order to parade it through the streets of Rome in the ceremonial procession of the Roman triumph before putting it on display in the Forum.

. . .

ELGIN’S ACTIONS reflected his belief that educated Englishmen were the true heirs of classical civilization, whose legacy permeated the minds of educated elites across Europe. This influence was nowhere greater than in revolutionary France, where Napoleon’s victorious armies began concluding a series of treaties with conquered states across Europe, notably the Treaty of Tolentino, signed by the pope in 1797, that allowed them to appropriate artworks to stock the Louvre Museum, founded in 1793.

. . .

It is vital to learn the lessons of the Second World War and put effective arrangements in place in advance of future fighting to rescue and restore cultural objects and prevent looting. Such arrangements were not made in Iraq in 2003, and the devastation was vast. The international community cannot prevent looting and destruction in the course of civil unrest, but it can take steps to minimize it in cases of interstate conflicts. Above all, the art and museum world needs to be more vigilant in monitoring the trade in looted goods in the wake of conflicts such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, and law-enforcement agencies need to step in with sanctions against those who encourage—or benefit—from it. In a globalized world, every state has, as the Hague Convention urged more than a century ago, a duty to act as the trustee of the culture of all nations, not just its own.

1. Richard J. Evans, Art in the Time of War, The National Interest, May-June 2011, http://nationalinterest.org/article/art-the-time-war-5163 (last visited Apr 19, 2011).

An Amicable End to a Nazi-era Spoliation Claim

Some museums do unilaterally do the right thing. I have been forwarded on a press release from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston regarding the purchase agreement for four tapestries which had been held by the museum since the 1950s. A provenance search by the museum revealed that the tapestries had been included in a forced sale in 1935. Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer had been forced to sell the works. In 2010 The MFA contacted the successors of the Oppenheimers and a settlement was recently reached. The museum's press release is embedded below:
MFA_Barberini Textiles Press Release

Footnotes

Is this Maya style statue fake?

• Mexico tells a French auction house, that a Maya statue is fake.
• Grim times for arts funding at Universities in America.
• Ancient graffiti prompts the question: do the vandals write history?
• The Arts Council in England has been told to deaccession art by a parliamentary select committee.
• Musty smells and preservation.
• A critical view of the Cultural Property Implementation Act.
• An antiquities collector opens his own museum in France. He started buying them seven years ago after discovering they were far less expensive than might be assumed.
• An account of looting in Latin America.