Towards a Ceasefire in the Antiquities Wars: The Next Step (Part I)

Now AAMD needs to tackle the hard part: What should its member museums do about all those objects they already own that wouldn't have entered their collections had the new standard been applied at the time of their acquisition?

This is the issue that has sparked the most acrimonious battles in the culture wars between American institutions and source countries. In recent years, our country's leading museums and universities had, for the most part, already become much more careful about not acquiring antiquities with dicey ownership histories that suggested they might have been looted and/or illegally exported.

But giving up already acquired objects is a far more complicated matter. The Getty, Metropolitan, Boston MFA, Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University have, in the last two and a half years, developed separate agreements to relinquish objects that source countries claimed had improperly left their borders. For the most part, the American institutions were initially resistant to crediting these claims, but eventually yielded to persuasion, pressure and the weight of evidence.

Like decisions on future acquisitions, repatriations from existing collections should be governed by coherent, consistent policies, designed to protect the interests of American museums and their public, as well as to respond to legitimate and reasonable claims by source countries. However, AAMD's members, hoping that the first wave of repatriations may be the last, have shown no inclination to work on developing detailed guidelines for future givebacks.

I think it's only a matter of time before other source countries follow Italy's lead in asking for returns. And, as last week's announcement by Italian Culture Minister Sandro Bondi indicates, Italy is also likely to keep up the pressure. AAMD's members would do well to grapple with these issues proactively, through a unified approach, rather than reactively, on a case-by-case basis.

So what might repatriation guidelines look like?

For starters, I believe that the ownership-history "cutoff date" for relinquishing works already in permanent collections should be more lenient than the 1970 line that's been drawn for future acquisitions. The relevant date for repatriations should be Apr. 12, 1983, when the U.S. passed the implementing legislation that made this country party to the UNESCO Convention.

That's not to say that our museums should purge themselves of all works lacking complete post-1983 provenance. Far from it. But an agreed-upon dividing line is needed to define which works should be potentially subject to compelling source-country claims and which should be granted repose.

That said, repatriation of a work with known provenance going back before 1983 should also occasionally be considered, particularly when the museum clearly had reason to believe at the time of acquisition that the object may have left its country of origin illegally. Good faith counts. So does convincing evidence that an object was likely looted and/or stolen, such as the photographs from the warehouse of Italian antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici of dirt-encrusted objects that eventually found their way into American museums.

COMING SOON: More Guidelines for Repatriation Agreements