Bloomsbury man makes historic contribution to Crisis at Christmas with magnificent gift to Greece

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As reported today by the usually well-informed 'ArtNose':

LONDON: Saint Neil MacGregor, the quietly spoken patron saint of Bloomsbury today astonished the museum world by sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens. As the ancient fragments were loaded on to the back of a flatbed truck outside the front entrance to the British Museum, Saint Neil took a small chopped shallot from his inside pocket and wiped a tear from his eye. Visibly moved by his own magnanimity and clearly struggling to maintain his legendary composure, he clutched to his breast a copy of his recently-penned international best-selling blockbuster A History of the World in 100 Looted Objects Belonging to the British Museum and to Nobody Else, So There. "Greece is teetering on the edge of the abyss," said the frail Scottish saint as he watched the venerable ancient fragments being man-handled onto the back of the waiting lorry. Wiping his nose on a dog-eared replica of the notorious firman that had enabled Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin to desecrate the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century, Saint Neil's voice cracked as he delivered a rousing valediction to the objects that have for so long mired his museum in ignominy and shame.

[more here]


Percy Flarge [Editor], 'Bloomsbury man makes historic contribution to Crisis at Christmas with magnificent gift to Greece', Artnose (www.artnose.co.uk)

Would that it were true.

image: http://www.artnose.co.uk/

Mokomokai Repatriated

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Twenty tattooed Maori heads have been repatriated from France to New Zealand after more than 200 years. A team from Wellington's Te Papa museum plans to trace the origin of the heads and return them to their communities. More than 500 heads of Maori ancestors remain in collections around the world.
There is a video here. Source: Reuters Friday 27 January 2012

Richard Gott: Let's end the myths of Britain's imperial past

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Richard Gott (author of Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt, - published by Verso) has an interesting opinion piece in the Guardian about British nostalgia about the days of Empire and false notions of the history of colonialism.

Half a century after the end of empire, politicians of all persuasions still feel called upon to remember our imperial past with respect. Yet few pause to notice that the descendants of the empire-builders and of their formerly subject peoples now share the small island whose inhabitants once sailed away to change the face of the world. Considerations of empire today must take account of two imperial traditions: that of the conquered as well as the conquerors. Traditionally, that first tradition has been conspicuous by its absence.[...]
The British understandably try to forget that their empire was the fruit of military conquest and of brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination.

A self-satisfied and largely hegemonic belief survives in Britain that the empire was an imaginative, civilising enterprise, reluctantly undertaken, that brought the benefits of modern society to backward peoples. Indeed it is often suggested that the British empire was something of a model experience, unlike that of the French, the Dutch, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Portuguese – or, of course, the Americans. There is a widespread opinion that the British empire was obtained and maintained with a minimum degree of force and with maximum co-operation from a grateful local population. This benign, biscuit-tin view of the past is not an understanding of their history that young people in the territories that once made up the empire would now recognise.

I wonder to what degree current British school textbooks address these issues.

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)