The Los Angeles Times, via Associated Press
This limestone and marble cult statue of a Greek goddess was given to Italy by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2010 after the museum, responding to litigation in Italy, concluded that it had been looted. Its place of discovery remains unknown. More Photos »
THE news has become astonishingly routine: a major American museum announces it is relinquishing extraordinary antiquities because a foreign government claims they were looted and has threatened legal action or other sanctions if it doesn't get them back.
Saint Louis Art Museum
The funerary mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, acquired in 1998 by the Saint Louis Art Museum, is now claimed by Egypt. More Photos »
In the past two months, the Dallas Museum of Art has transferred ownership of seven ancient artworks, including a pair of Etruscan bronze shields, to Italy and Turkey; the Toledo Museum of Art has handed over to Italy a rare water vessel that had been on display since 1982; and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has announced it will be transferring to Sicily a terra-cotta head believed to depict the Greek god Hades, which it purchased from a New York dealer in 1985 for more than $500,000. Other museums across the country — including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Cleveland Museum of Art — have also given up prized antiquities.
Since 2006, more than 100 statues, bronzes, vases, mosaics and other works have left public collections in the United States. Among them was the Euphronios krater, depicting a scene from the "Iliad," which awed visitors to the Met for decades, and a rare limestone and marble statue of a Greek goddess, which the Getty purchased for $18 million in 1988.
In nearly every case, the museums have not been compelled by any legal ruling to give up the art, nor are they receiving compensation for doing so. And while a few of the returned works have been traced to particular sites or matched with other fragments residing in the claimant country, many of them have no known place of origin.
Museums have heralded these restitution agreements as a way to take a stand against illegal excavation and forge stronger ties with art-rich nations. In September, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology agreed to send to Turkey — on "permanent loan" — 24 pieces of ancient gold jewelry that it acquired in 1966 and that may have come from Troy.
Although Penn officials concede that the jewels' actual place of discovery, or findspot, is unknown, they say the deal has allowed them to secure continued access to the Aegean sites where their archaeologists have worked for decades. (In a similar quid pro quo in 2011, the Turks threatened to suspend the license of the German Archaeological Institute, which has been active in Turkey since Ottoman times. After Germany returned a sphinx Turkey had claimed, that threat was revoked.)
But giving up objects has done little to halt the international trade in looted antiquities, while rewarding the hardball tactics of foreign governments and impoverishing Americans' access to the ancient world. And while preserving good relations in some cases, these agreements have also spurred a raft of extravagant new claims against museums — backed by menacing legal threats.
Countries like Italy and Greece have used the news media to embarrass museums with alarming stories of rogue curators and nefarious dealers; they have withheld exhibition loans from museums that rebuff them; and they have resorted to aggressive legal action, opening criminal investigations of museum staff and enlisting the help of American federal prosecutors to obtain museum records and seize disputed works.
In the process, museums' relationships with foreign governments have become increasingly contingent upon giving in to unreasonable, and sometimes blatantly extortionary, demands. As Stephen Clark, the Getty's current chief counsel, put it, "The Turks have said to me flat out" that they won't loan the museum any art "unless you give up something we want."
Foreign governments' tactics have become so threatening that some museums are now combing through their permanent collections and pre-emptively giving up works that might become the targets of future claims.
Museums themselves are partly to blame. For decades, most antiquities available in the international art market that had not come from pre-20th century private collections lacked a known findspot and date of discovery. Museums figured they could collect these objects because they bought them in countries with legal antiquities markets and notified potential claimant governments when they bought them. But since there was no record of the works' archaeological origins, the governments had little basis for making a claim. And when they did — often on hearsay or stylistic grounds — there was rarely sufficient proof for recovery.
Hugh Eakin is a senior editor at The New York Review of Books.
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