NY Times Roils Cultural Property Experts With Two Problematic Op-Eds---Part II

Allan Gerson

(Part I is here.)

Reasonable people can disagree about whether London's Royal Academy should exhibit works confiscated by the state after the Russian Revolution from private collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. To me, it's a no-brainer: We want these great masterpieces to be seen by a wide public. Others, however, feel this makes the Royal Academy complicit with the seizure from the original owners.

But reasonable people---especially the pundit writing on this topic last Saturday for the NY Times Op-Ed page---should have a reasonable grasp of the facts of the situation before sounding off.

In his Saturday Op-Ed, Plunder Goes on Tour, lawyer Allan Gerson (above) gets so many facts mixed up regarding the current show of works loaned from Russian museums to the Royal Academy that his brief would never hold up in court.

First, he suggests that legislation providing immunity from seizure for works in loaned to museum exhibitions is an "unusual condition." In fact, we have on the books, right here in Gerson's own country, an immunity-from-seizure law designed to facilitate loans of culturally significant objects to exhibitions at American museums---Public Law 89-259.

Gerson goes on to surmise that visitors to the show at the Royal Academy will be "delighted to see artworks long held in secret in Russia."

Here's one of those supposedly secret works:

Henri Matisse, "The Dance," 1910. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Photo Archives Matisse, Paris. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2008

Gerson repeatedly confuses the "hidden" war booty that was taken by the Russians from Germany after World War II with the commonly displayed and occasionally loaned works that were seized by the Bolsheviks, such as the above painting from Shchukin's collection, also loaned to the Museum of Modern Art's 1992 Matisse retrospective. A selection of works removed from Germany (which are not the works at issue in the Royal Academy show) was first displayed in the State Hermitage Museum's landmark 1995 "Hidden Treasures Revealed" exhibition.

Although works confiscated from the pioneering Russian collectors of modern art have been loaned before, the issue has now come to a head because heirs of those collectors have expressed a desire to be compensated, if not by the art itself, then by proceeds from the London show.

I am of the opinion, as already expressed here, that without ironclad guarantees that loaned objects will be returned, major international exhibitions that have been the lifeblood of museums around the world will be seriously compromised.

If they succeed in sabotaging the principle of immunity from seizure, claimants will not further their cause. But they will insure that many great works of art will never be shipped to international loan shows, for the benefit of a wider public. Lenders won't lend if they fear their works won't come back.