Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Cultural Heritage

What’s The Best Course For the Bamian Buddhas?

It has been more than a dozen years since the Taliban blew up the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, but — as an article today’s New York Times outlines — there is no consensus still on what if anything should be done to the site. And there’s little money to do it. The article describes the split:

BamyanBuddha_Smaller_1The major donor countries that would have to finance any restoration say the site should be left as it is, at least for now. The Afghan government wants at least one of the statues rebuilt….The Afghan government craves the symbolic victory over a still-threatening Taliban that rebuilding would allow it to claim. Many of those funding the restoration fear that rebuilding when so little of the original pieces remain would not be reconstruction at all, and more reproduction than a true accounting of history.

And a German archaeologist working to stabilize the site, Michael Petzet, also president of the German branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, is siding with the Afghans — only to be opposed by UNESCO.

Professor Petzet argues that rebuilding the Buddhas would be no different from past efforts to reassemble parts of the Roman Forum — another project criticized by some archaeologists — or repair damaged mosaics after the earthquake in Assisi, Italy. “It’s something human to want to do,” he said. “In France, whole cathedrals were reconstructed in Gothic style after they were blown up by Protestants in the 1600s.”

These magnificent figures were built about 1,500 years ago (having taken as long as 100 years to do it), and the Standing Buddha, at 174 ft tall, was the world’s largest. Petzet says he and his team have found and catalogued “as much as 30 percent of the surface of the smaller standing Buddha, enough, he says, to restore it persuasively.” UNESCO puts the figure at about 10 percent — and very little of the surface.

Looking at the pictures and video accompanying the Times article, it’s hard to see how the Buddha — it would be the smaller one — could be reconstructed, not that I have any specialized expertise in the matter.

But one look at the picture I’ve posted, of the smaller Buddha (115 ft tall), shows what was lost. It seems to me that, near-term, priority work should be stabilizing the site so that visitors could see the caves and passageways, some painted with murals and decorated with carvings and statues. That itself might bring back some tourists.

And the rubble, the “remains”? They could, as some are suggesting, go in an on-site museum, which would illustrate what the Taliban did. It could have, as some have previously suggested, computer-generated recreations of the Buddhas. By then, Petzet may have discovered more pieces, making the restoration more feasible.

Right now, UNESCO should let his team resume its work, which was stopped when it realized he was starting to recreate pedestals for recreated Buddhas — there’s no harm in that.

 

The New Stolen-Art Tracker Opens Its Doors

On Monday, Art Recovery Group PLC — the brand-new competitor to Art Loss Register — opened its offices in Kensington, London, and announced an impressive line-up of staff members.

christopher-marinello-2-630x473x80-2ARG, you’ll recall, was founded last fall after ALR came under intensified scrutiny for its heavy-handed practices. The New York Times laid them all out in an article headlined Tracking Stolen Art, for Profit, and Blurring a Few Lines, published last Sept. 20. In it, Christopher A. Marinello, who was often ALR’s spokeman, said he was quitting and would start his own firm — that happened, with the founding of ARG, last October.

Now Marinello is really open for business. I couldn’t find a website, per se, but it does have a Facebook page entitled Art Recovery International. Among its new staff are Mark Maurice, Executive Director, a corporate/wealth manager who has worked with dealers and collectors  worldwide and “has dealt with a number of high profile restitution and cultural patrimony cases involving complex cross border disputes,” and Dorit Strauss, who has been in the fine art insurance industry for more than 30 years, once as Vice President and Worldwide Specialty Fine Art Manager at Chubb & Son.

Here’s the rest of the press release, including details of the types of work ARG (or ARI?) will do — like “Location and recovery services involving stolen, missing and looted works of art” and “dispute resolution services in cases of defective title, illegal export and unclear authenticity.”

This service, as we know, is sorely needed. Let’s hope it can compete with ALR — competition is good.

Where I Was A Few Weeks Ago

1620972_829991537026967_1318460368_nAnyone who writes travel articles can tell you that they usually take months to go from computer to publication — for lots of reasons including seasonality. So I rarely post my occasional travel piece here — not to mention the fact that this blog is about art and culture.

But tomorrow’s New York Times travel section publishes an article on the cruise I took in Mid-February to Senegal and the Gambia, so why not post it? It’s in print with the headline Through An African Artery and online with the headline Crocodiles and Culture on a Cruise in West Africa. The pictures are different, too, and the online version even has one of me petting a crocodile.

WassuThe trip didn’t involve seeing any art. But we did visit cultural sites, including Kunte Kinteh island (at left), which the late author Alex Haley made famous in “Roots” as a place his ancestor Kunta Kinte passed through. And much further inland, we visited the Wassu Stone Circles (at right), megalithic structures that date to 750 to 1000 AD and are believed to be burial grounds of chiefs. Modern-day excavations turned up only a few grave artifacts there – a few bracelets, spears and other weapons, usually made of iron or bronze, and some pottery shards. But it, along with three other similar sites in that part of Africa, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

So have a look.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski 

 

Will Venice Get An Islamic Art Museum? Free?

On Feb. 3, Italy’s Prime Minister Enrico Letta visited Qatar on a trade mission, meeting with its the Prime Minister and Interior Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani. They had lunch (at right), discussed political concerns and Letta visited the Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha. Letta admired the works on view, and before long, he “revealed that the two governments were in talks to construct a building in Venice that would later be turned into a museum,” according to Gulf Times. In Venice. On the Grand Canal.

7eb769d2-e4f6-477f-9a58-4d15998c81d7As the Christian Science Monitor later reported it:

Speaking in Doha, Mr. Letta said the Italian government had “made a commitment to explore the opportunity to build an Islamic museum in Venice on the Grand Canal.” He gave few further details.

This caused a furor with the right-wing Northern League, which “has in the past campaigned for the rich north of Italy to secede from the rest of the country,” the Monitor said. The League and others complained about the cost, which Giorgio Orsoni, the city’s mayor, then said would be “zero” to Italians, a hint that Qatar would pay for it. Read the Monitor‘s article here.

These reports raise too many questions to come down on either side here. Yes, it would be nice to have an Islamic art museum in Venice, but I agree with the Northern League if it is not paid for by other countries. Venice itself needs so much work, not least to prevent it again from damaging flooding and sinking.

The Italian officials who say the museum is needed “to ease the city’s heavy reliance on tourism, which provides jobs but overwhelms ordinary life in the city and turns it into a sort of architectural Disneyland” don’t convince me. Won’t this bring more tourists, not fewer?  Yes it will bring non-tourism jobs, but to day that “The city needs more museums, educational institutes and research bodies in order to stem a population exodus and diversify its reliance on tourists,” as Antonio Armellini, a former ambassador who now serves as a special advisor to Venice, told the Monitor, doesn’t ring right to me.

Finally, it’s very unclear how the bruited museum will be built. Will it “probably be established inside an empty palazzo near the famous Rialto Bridge, which arches over the Grand Canal”? Or will it require a new building there? That would be a bad idea.

I suspect there’s a lot more politics to go on here before the situation is clear, and until then, I think I will stand on the sidelines.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gulf News

The Best Artistic Response To “Monuments Men”

MM_StJohnBaptist-213x300“The Monuments Men,” George Clooney’s movie supposedly based on Robert Edsel’s book (see this previous post for the real story-teller), is not doing well in the eyes of critics. The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott pretty much eviscerated it. Metacritic figured that, all told, movie critics rates it 52 out of 100.

But of course, even before the movie made its debut, museums tried to figure out how to capitalize on the publicity it would get. Nothing wrong with that. Of those I’ve seen, I like what the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is doing best of all. MIA has created a self-guided tour of the nine objects in its collection that were rescued by the Monument Men and Women. According to the release:

The tour begins on the third floor with the rare Renaissance bust of St. John the Baptist [below, right, today, and in recovery, at left] acquired by the MIA last year, which was looted by the Nazis and rescued by the Monuments Men in 1945. Other artworks on the tour include paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johannes Lingelbach, Ernest Ludwing Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, Willem de Poorter, and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, as well as a statue by Adam Lenckhardt and a dreidel with a remarkable story of survival. 

St_JohntheBaptist-283x300The tour also highlights two Monuments Men who came to work at the MIA after the war: Richard S. Davis, who served as senior curator from 1946 to 1956 and as director from 1956 to 1958, and Harry Grier, who served as assistant director from 1946 to 1951.

Why I like it best is obvious — it focuses attention on the art, and it draws people into the permanent collection galleries. The MIA is also blogging about the Monuments Men tour (first installment), with the stories behind each art work.

What’s up at other museums?

Those are a few  of the many, probably.

In an ideal world, the MIA and the others would have done this when The Rape of Europa documentary was released years ago, telling the real story. But then, of course, fewer people might have paid attention. The way of the world.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MIA