Cultural Heritage

Maybe retirement, if that’s what Gary Vikan–former head of the Walters Art Museum–had entered, loosens inhibitions. Vikan’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal may not have been written if he still had the job. It’s headlined The Case for Buying Antiquities to Save Them.  It’s about the unrelenting damage being perpetrated by ISIS, of course.

It challenges the “prevailing view among archaeologists, reflected in bills in Congress, [that we should] ….exclude from the U.S. all antiquities thought to originate in those countries.”

Vikan instead says:

This is a mistake. After decades of museum experience with cultural property of uncertain provenance, I believe that we should accept looted antiquities from these troubled areas, even when such action might be considered “encouraging looting.” The expenses that museums might incur—including the costs of returning the pieces to the countries of their origin—are worth paying to keep them out of reach of ISIS sledgehammers.

No one, anywhere, should buy art from ISIS….[But] In times of extraordinary risk, we should be open to dealing with bad guys to create a safe harbor for works of art. This is an act of rescue and stewardship—and should be done with the explicit understanding that eventually, when the time is right, the objects will be repatriated to the country of their origin.

He is right. In Britain, Neil MacGregor recently said that the British Museum, which he directs, is holding–“guarding”–an object looted from Syria.

In June, the House of Representatives passed HR 1493–provisions here–which among other things allows for such “safe harbor” importation to the U.S. of Syrian antiquities if the President grants a waiver and if no money goes to terrorists. Pretty difficult to determine, but it’s a step in the right direction, I guess. Still it has yet to get into the Senate. You can read more about it on the Cultural Assets blog of Greenberg Traurig.

For Near Eastern antiquities, these are desperate times; they require fresh thinking and the challenging of conventional wisdom.

 

Literally. Bettina Burr (known as Nina, pictured left)–the daughter of Baroness Bettina Looram de Rothschild, who reclaimed about 250 pieces of Nazi-looted art from Austria after it passed a new restitution law in 1998–has donated 186 objects to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The trove, which includes jewelry, jeweled boxes, furniture, prints, drawings, miniatures, paintings and rare books, is most of what remains that had been passed down to her and her relatives from her ancestors in the Austrian Rothschild family. The great collectors were Nathaniel (d. 1905) and Albert von Rothschild (d. 1911).

I’ve written the story of the gift for tomorrow’s New York Times, and it’s online now: Rothschild Family Treasures Find a Resting Place in Boston.

But there’s much more in my notes, for example:

Among the highlights are George Romney’s Portrait of Emma Hart (at right), of the woman who later became Lady Hamilton and was Romney’s favorite model. This seems to be an early version of her, and though the MFA  did not put a date on it, it said that “the painting was in good condition when it arrived at the MFA, and cleaning revealed its glowing colors and exciting brushwork. The location of this particular work was previously unknown to scholars, and it has since proven to be the primary version of one of the artists’ most popular compositions.”

There’s also a Swiss-made Oval snuff box with miniature of Catherine the Great (about 1775, pictured below) and many pieces of jewelry and jeweled snuff boxes and objets de vertu.

Thomas Michie, the MFA’s senior curator of European decorative arts and sculpture, said that the gift “transports us into the ranks of European museums that own small, precious objects, the kinds of things that have not traditionally been Yankee taste.” Which museums, I asked? He said the Wallace Collection and the V&A–though not in quantity. “Our gift is small in quantity, but it is wonderful in quality.”

Books are another highlight, said Michie, adding that there will be three cases of them in the exhibition of the gift, which opens on Mar. 1 and runs till June 21: Restoring a Legacy: Rothschild Family Treasures.

You can see more in the museum’s press release.

When the exhibition ends, 14 items will be returned to Burr, as they are promised gifts, to be transferred when she dies. But the rest, Michie said, can and will probably be integrated with the rest of the collection. “I haven’t looked that far ahead,” he said, “but it won’t be hard to fold a lot of these items into the permanent collection galleries. The museum is actually planning an 18th Century French gallery, though “it’s not funded yet.” But, he added, “now we have the material for it, and that’s where these things will turn up.”

One of the things I loved about this story concerns Burr herself. Her relationship with the museum began when she volunteered and became a tour guide, giving introductory and specialized tours. Later she worked on the cataloging of Japanese woodblock prints and became an overseer. It was only in 2006 that she was elected to the board of trustees.

Burr told me that she talked about making this gift with her mother, who died in 2012. “She thought it was a fine idea,” she said.

Indeed it is.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MFA