Quai Branly Museum to Return All Mummified Maori Heads

The Quai Branly Museum in Paris is organising the restitution to New Zealand of about 20 mummified Maori heads. Last year, the French parliament passed a law recognising the Maori heads as body parts and not museum objects (duh) which paved the way for their return to New Zealand. The first was taken back in May 2010 and last week Stephane Martin, the president of the Quai Branly Museum, said that the remaining heads held by French collections would be returned in an official ceremony in January. He insists however that this is purely on the grounds that they are human remains "that cannot be displayed and have no cultural gain, and would not be considering returning any other foreign artefacts in his museum's collection".

Mr Martin says the heads should be considered differently to other museum artefacts. "It's always uncomfortable to talk globally of restitution because each case has to be addressed distinctly and separately".

Australia Network News 'Paris museum returns mummified Maori heads', Oct 2011 09:16:00

Namibian Skull Collection

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Following protracted negotiations, it has been announced that the skulls of hundreds of Herero and Nama people slain by German colonial troops bent on subduing what they
called South West Africa will be returned to Namibia on October 4. Their skulls were taken to Germany for anthroplogical research from 1904 to 1907; but now more than 100 years later German authorities have finally agreed to return the skulls. Namibians have been agitating for reparations for the massacre of an estimated 65 000 Herero and Nama people by Germany.

The mass killings between 1904 and 1907 are regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century. On January 12, 1904 the Herero - led by Samuel Maherero - rebelled against Germany colonial rule. In August, German General Lothar van Trotha defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them to the desert in the Omaheke Region, where many died of thirst when the Germans poisoned wells and the few other water sources. This was after the general had issued his 'extermination order', which sought to clear the land of all Herero people. In October of the same year, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans only to suffer a similar fate. Estimates say when the uprising started, there were around 80 000 Herero but by 1907 there were just 15 000. In 1985, the United Nations Whitaker Report classified this as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama people. The government of Germany acknowledged its guilt in 2004 but has ruled out any financial compensation. This has not stopped a group of Herero from suing Germany for its crimes against humanity, though the Namibia government has been strangely quiet about assisting their cause.

Philip T Shingirai and Mabasa Sasa, 'A long-awaited homecoming', Southern Times, 30-09-2011

Deborah Cole, 'Germany to hand back stolen Namibian skulls' AFP October 1, 2011

"Heroic" collectors?

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Heroic Africans
Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures
Metropolitan Museum of Art
September 21, 2011–January 29, 2012

This major international loan exhibition challenges conventional perceptions of African art. Bringing together more than one hundred masterpieces drawn from collections in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, and the United States, it considers eight landmark sculptural traditions from West and Central Africa created between the twelfth and early twentieth centuries in terms of the individual subjects who lie at the origins of the representations. [...]

The works featured are among the only tangible links that survive, relating to generations of leaders that shaped Africa's past before colonialism, [...]

The works come from a number of west and central African cultures: the Akan of Ghana, ancient Ife civilization and the Kingdom of Benin of Nigeria, Bangwa and Kom chiefdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields, the Chokwe of Angola and Zambia, and the Luluwa, Hemba, and Kuba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

sculptors from these regions captured evocative, idealized, and enduring likenesses of their individual patrons whose identities were otherwise recorded in ephemeral oral traditions.

This exhibition raises a number of questions about the presence of the objects themselves. Why are no African museums represented in the loans programme? Also if these works form a link with the past of the regions covered, why are they scattered in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, France, the UK and US?

Following the presentation at the Metropolitan, the exhibition will travel to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, where it will be on view February 26 through June 3, 2012. There are no plans to show it in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, Zambia, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Return of head from Sidamara Sarcophagus Requested

Turkey is asking for the return of a life-size marble head of a child, with curling hair, broken off at the neck that was knocked off the Sidamara Sarcophagus, now on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The head is now housed in the reserve collection of the Victorian and Albert Museum in London.

The head was snapped off a sarcophagus excavated in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) in 1882 by a British archaeologist named Sir Charles Wilson, who then covered the tomb over again. He took the head to England and his family gave it to the museum in 1933. The tomb to which the head belongs, the 3rd century A.D. Sidamara Sarcophagus, was re-discovered in 1898 and currently resides in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Now, the Turkish culture ministry wants to reunify the marble head [...] with the sarcophagus.

This is rather brutal treatment of an artefact even by late nineteenth century standards, not having the resources or ability to remove the whole sarcophagus, the relic hunter took a "sample" with a hammer.

The Turkish authorities are currently in negotiations with the Victoria & Albert museum to repatriate the object. These negotiations between the two parties are said to be "amicable" and ongoing. If the object is reunited with the sarcophagus, it would be a gesture of international goodwill because its removal from Turkey was before the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.

Laura Allsop, 'Echoes of Elgin Marbles: Turkey asks UK to return ancient sculpture', CNN.com, September 8, 2011 (Photo, Konya/CNN)

More on Nefertiti

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An interesting article on the continuing international squabble over the Nefertiti bust:

This queen owes her immortality to a gifted artist. The bust he fashioned out of gypsum and limestone some 3,350 years ago became an eternal monument to her beauty. As realistic as the image is, it has the radiance of a goddess. "It's no use describing it; you have to see it!" said the German archaeologist who unearthed the bust of the Egyptian queen in the desert sand almost a century ago. Hardly anyone is familiar with the name of the sculptor, Thutmose, but the bust is of the famous Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile, Great Royal Wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. And thanks to a coincidence, a minor detour of history, her likeness is not on display in a museum in her native Egypt, but in Berlin. Or was it not a coincidence at all, but rather fraud?

Michael Sontheimer and Ulrike Knöfel, 'German-Hating Frenchman Sparked Nefertiti Row', Der Spiegel, 18th August 2011.
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The Cyrene Apollo

At the two-day conference of the Council of Antiquities in Cairo about the repatriation of artefacts in 2010, Libya stated that it wished two antiquities to return, "a statue of Apollo from the British Museum and a marble statue of a woman from the Louvre". I'm not clear what the statue in Paris is, but the British Museum object is the ' Cyrene Apollo'.

The monumental Roman (2nd century AD) cult statue discovered in January 1861 by Lieutenant Robert Murdoch Smith and Commander Edwin Porcher, whose excavations in the Temple of Apollo in the Greek and Roman settlement of Cyrene, on the Libyan coast are recorded in a monumental site report published in 1864. The statue was found broken into 121 pieces, laying near the large pedestal on which it had originally stood. The fragments were painstakingly removed from the site and reassembled in the British Museum. The statue now stands 2.29 metres high but the right arm, which was originally raised, and the left wrist and hand are missing (photo).

In 1989 Libya requested from Italy the restitution of the Venus of Cyrene, a white marble statue (Venus Anadyomene) that dates from the second century AD. It was taken to Italy after it was found in 1913 by Italian troops near the ruins of the city and was housed in Rome’s National Roman Museum (AP Photo/Ministero dei Beni Culturali – Italian Culture Ministry). The Venus was only returned in April 2007.

Peter Higgs, 'The Cyrene Apollo', History Today, 44 (11) (1994), pp. 50-54
BM webpage

"The world's most disputed antiquities: a top 5 list"

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Melanie Renzulli, 'The world's most disputed antiquities: a top 5 list', Aug 3rd 2011:

One of the biggest arguments in the art world is the repatriation of objects, particularly antiquities. On one side of the debate are art scholars who feel that ancient objects should remain in the care of their current (usually Western) museums or locations. The other side argues that antiquities should be returned to the countries from which they were removed because they were taken during times of war and colonization or were stolen and sold through the highly lucrative art black market.

It's true that a great many antiquities and works of art we enjoy at museums today may have been acquired through looting or other unsavory practices. Here are five of the most famous works of art that have been repatriated or are the focus of an ongoing battle for ownership".

1) Elgin Marbles
Where are they now? The British Museum, London
Where were they? The Parthenon, Athens, Greece [...]

2) Obelisk of Aksum
Where is it now? Aksum, Ethiopia
Where was it? Rome, Italy [...]

3) Objects from King Tut's Tomb
Where are they now? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Where are they headed? Giza, Egypt [...]

4) Dea Morgantina (Aphrodite)
Where is it now? Aidone, Sicily
Where was it? Getty Museum, Los Angeles [...]

5) Hattuşa Sphinx
Where is it now? Istanbul, Turkey
Where was it? Berlin, Germany [...].

Photo: The London bits of the Parthenon Marbles