The Norton Simon Art Foundation and their 'Koh Ker' Statue

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In Koh Ker, northern Cambodia, is a temple, dating from the mid-900s. Flanking an entrance there, were a pair of sandstone statues depicting scowling athlete-combatants in intricate headdresses positioned in battle-ready stances. The pair of sculptures ('five feet tall and weighing 250 pounds'), were still in position in old photos of the temple. The site however was one of those plundered in the 1970s amid the chaos of power struggle and genocide, when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Looters hacked their way into long-inaccessible temples, pillaged priceless antiquities and sold them to Thai and Western collectors. All that remains on site now of these two statues are the broken off feet and the heavy pedestals. The statues have both left the country under unclear circumstances, and both are now in America.

One of them was offered for sale in Sotheby's New York in March 2011. The sale was stopped and the object is the subject of an investigation. New York Times journalists Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal indicate one possible manner in which the Sotheby's matter could soon be resolved:

Working with the Unesco office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia has asked Sotheby’s to bargain with a wealthy Hungarian antiquities collector who has offered to pay $1 million for the statue and present it to Cambodia as an act of good will. “There is no question the statue was looted in the final stages of the war,” said the collector, Istvan Zelnik, a former Hungarian diplomat in the region who has visited Koh Ker. His own collection forms the Zelnik Istvan Museum of Southeast Asian Gold in Budapest. “The best solution is that I purchase it for purposes of donation,” Mr. Zelnik added.

The other statue is also in America. In 2007 archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau located it as being the one on display since 1980 at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. Although drilled for the insertion of two massive metal rods for display, the lower portion of the knocked-off statue matches perfectly the pedestal from which it had been detached and which still stands in situ on the site. This statue also "surfaced" on the market, this time in New York, in 1975. Norton Simon, an industrialist and collector, reportedly bought it in that year from a leading Madison Avenue antiquities dealer, William H. Wolff.

Koh Ker statue, Norton Simon Art Foundation M.1980.15.S (Photo © 2012 Norton Simon Art Foundation)

There is a 1925 French colonial law declaring all antiquities from Cambodia’s temples to be “part of the national domain” and “the exclusive property of the state.” This law seems to have remained in force after Cambodian independence in 1953:

Tess Davis, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation and the Cambodia scholar who dug out the law, said it had been analyzed by three French-speaking lawyers conversant in cultural heritage litigation and by [Anne] LeMaistre[, the Unesco representative in Phnom Penh]. All four say it “nationalizes ownership of Cambodian cultural artifacts.” If international legal authorities and American civil courts agree, the law could establish 1925, rather than 1993, as the dividing point after which Cambodian artifacts taken without government permits can be treated as stolen property.

Archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau says the relics were looted in the early 1970s. He said French records in Paris indicate that the statues were in place in 1939, and that the Koh Ker temple was thickly covered by jungle and inaccessible by road until it became a military staging area for Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces in the 1970s.

The New York Times journalists Mashberg and Blumenthal sum up the antiquities trade and the Koh Ker affair thus:

The quiet tussle over the relic reveals the swampy terrain of auctioning antiquities with incomplete or disputed pedigrees. Sellers with a good-faith belief in their ownership rights enter a landscape in which ethics and regulations are evolving, governments are increasingly assertive, and lawyers versed in arcane statutes are as necessary as jungle guides. “We live in a different world, and what was acceptable 50 years ago is no longer so,” said Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a lawyer, [...] “Whatever the letter of the law may state, in the end you have to ask yourself, ‘Does the item pass the smell test?’ ”

One collector is putting a million dollars of his own money into doing the right thing and sending pone of the pair back to the country from which it was stolen against a backdrop of slaughter and destruction - after all what collector would want a 'blood antiquity' on display in their collection? Perhaps the Norton Simon Art Foundation might consider the time has come to make a similar gesture.

Source: Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal, 'Mythic Warrior Is Held Captive in an International Art Conflict', The New York Times, February 28, 2012

Vignette, two trunkless legs of stone alone in the jungle stand (after Agnes Dherbeys, The New York Times),

Peruvian Viceregency of Spain Illegal?

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The US courts have told the Tampa-based deep sea salvage company Odyssey Marine Explorations that they have to return to Spain the gold and silver coins and other finds which they took in 2007 from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal in 1804. At the time of the discovery the find was estimated to be worth around $500 million to collectors, which would have made it the richest shipwreck in history.

Now Peru has asked the Supreme Court to put a hold on the return of the treasure to Spain because it claims that the treasure was ultimately "stolen from the Peruvian people" by Spanish colonialists.

"Cultural Property Observer", Washington lawyer Peter Tompa ('Peru to Supreme Court: Spain Stole It First!')postulates:

Shouldn't the ardent repatriationists of the archaeological community support Peru over dastardly Spain? Surely if they pushed for Yale to return study artifacts from Machu Picchu, they should root for Peru in its efforts to take back what they are due from whatever source. Or, is their ire selectively employed against American companies and institutions? Perhaps "finders, keepers" is the best rule after all.

I find the lawyer's argument rather difficult to follow. Yale University hanging on too long to the loaned excavation archive from Machu Piccu is a relatively cut-and-dried case.

The area that is now Peru in 1801-4 was a viceregency of Spain, under the rule of the Bourbon king Charles IV and administrated by Viceroy Gabriel de Aviles. The Peruvian mines and Lima mint (where many of these coins were struck) were Spanish-run for the Spanish Crown. Do the Peruvians expect the US Supreme Court to declare the entire Viceregency of Peru illegal? The Spanish Empire as a whole? On what grounds do they expect this re-writing of history?

I suppose if the US Supreme Court is going to negate colonial claims in such a manner, it’d be equally logical for the US Government to give the land Washington DC stands on back to the Nacotchtank and Piscataway and start paying them back-rent going back to 1791.

Map: The Spanish colonies in South America, 18th Century [Wikimedia]

American Academic Opposes Italian Repatriation

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In the comments section of a Planet Princeton article 'Princeton University Returns Art to Italy', Florida-based US academic Dr Robert Steven Bianchi („Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art and archaeology, modern art” "President at Bianchi Associates, Inc" and a Lecturer in the firm "Archaeological Tours") reacted in the same way as many collectors' lobbyists:

The repatriation of these objects is absurd in the extreme. The Italians boast of their ability to repatriate works of art but simultaneously cannot manage their vast cultural heritage. The deplorable conditions at Pompeii and the condition of the sites in Rome itself, particularly that of the Colosseum are but two examples of the hypocrisy – the Italians cannot take care of their own so they launch witch hunts against those who cherish, protect, preserve, and educate the world about that heritage in order to conceal their own disregard for and indifference toward their own cultural property.

The objects in question were returned to Italy it seems in absence of any evidence that they had left the country by lawful means, so it is not really a question of Italy "boasting" of its "ability to repatriate" unlawfully appropriated items.

It is likening chalk to cheese to compare the preservation of portable antiquities in collections with massive roofless ruins (non-portable antiquities) in the open air. The American mentions the Colosseum, this Flavian building has stood in the centre of the city for coming up to two thousand years. After it went out of use for its original purpose, it has been damaged by stone robbers and earthquakes in Antiquity. By the 1640s the ruins were so overgrown that a botanist found over 3200 species of plants growing on, in and around its walls. Nearly 400 years later then, no wonder that there are problems with slowing down the dynamics of disintegration.



Here's a recent photograph of the Colosseum which illustrates the sort of problems the American's comparison ignores. Instead of sniping, one would have thought the US academic would have made a more useful contribution by coming up with an idea how to protect the fragile ruins already damaged by 2000 years wear and tear from wind, rain, frost, alternate heating and cooling cycles, rising ground water, tourist erosion and all the other effects which threaten these sites. Simply suggesting other countries (scil. his own) hang on to the smaller stolen artefacts does not really seem to me to be very helpful approach to the wider problem.

Phot. Alessandro Bianchi, Reuters

The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: the Case of the Netherlands

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Jos van Beurden is a Dutch research journalist who has published extensively on the protection and endangerment of cultural and historical treasures. He has just published a book: "The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: The Case of the Netherlands". This analyses 34 cases in which the Dutch state and Dutch heritage institutions have handed over cultural and historical treasures that were acquired in colonial times and more recently. He investigates the dynamics of their return practice and gives his analysis extra depth by including cases in which return has not materialized.

The shrinking divisions between a poor South and a rich North, colonizer and colonized, and source countries and art and antique market countries impact our thinking about return. How do Dutch heritage institutions deal with this new reality, when the return of their objects or collections comes under discussion? That is the central question in this critical book.

The book seems a useful addition to the literature about the return of colonial trophies, Nazi-spoliated art and human remains.

France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand

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Since 2003, New Zealand has been engaged in an ambitious program of collecting back Maori heads (mokomokai) and skeletal remains from museums around the world. On Monday, authorities in received 20 ancestral heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity. French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand and New Zealand's ambassador presided over a solemn ceremony at Quai Branly museum in Paris. The heads were encased in a box.

Some Maori heads, with intricate tattoos, were traditionally kept as trophies from tribal warfare. But once Westerners began offering prized goods in exchange for them, men were in danger of being killed simply for their tattoos, French museum officials have said. [...] The practice of preserving heads was begun by Maori as a way of remembering dead ancestors. In the decades after Europeans arrived, the heads became a curiosity and sought-after trade item, prompting Maori to ramp up their production levels.

Associated Press, 'France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand', January 23, 2012

Vignette: mokomokai from Roen

The Future of Egyptian Repatriation Efforts?

David Nelson's short article ('Egyptologists still digging up past, even with uncertain future', Medill Reports* Jan 19, 2012) has a few words on repatriation of ancient Egyptian objects taken out of the country pre-1970 which might be of interest. Among his those he talked to was Kathleen Scott, director of publications at the San Antonio chapter of the American Research Center, and Emily Teeter, a research associate at the Oriental Institute, at the University of Chicago:

For Egyptians, the ancient civilization their ancestors established along the life-giving Nile River and beyond is still a sense of national pride.[...] Tied to the revolution is the question of repatriation of ancient artifacts. In recent years some native Egyptologists have requested the return of such items as the bust of Queen Nefertiti, now in the Neues Museum in Berlin, and also the Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum in London. [...] But with current situation in Egypt, historical materials are even less likely to be returned.

“Zahi Hawass loved to bring this topic up every now and then,” Scott said, referring to the former minister of antiquities. The appointee of Mubarak, often sporting an Indiana Jones-like fedora, Hawass frequently demanded the return of objects in foreign hands. “In certain circles, it was popular. The truth is, the Rosetta was part of a treaty in the early 1800s, it’s nothing that the British Museum is going to relinquish," Scott said.

“Hawass’s job was to keep Egypt in the news,” Teeter said of the flamboyant now-retired minister, “and he did a good job of that.” However, most don’t put much stock in the sometimes controversial debate. “There are very specific laws that if a good case is made, then an artifact should go back,” Teeter said. “But there are things that have been out of the country for hundreds of years and have no legal basis for repatriation."

Scott said it is unlikely any famous artifacts will be returned. “Unless they were illegally obtained somehow," she said. "But for the most part they were obtained as gifts or through international treaties. It’s a difficult political discussion.”

Of course one reason why "famous artefacts" might go back is so that the museum displays of the 'source country' can give a much more complete picture. For example we could take the case of the bust of Nefertiti. If at some future date a prestigious, super-modern site museum was to be set up at Amarna with many of the premier pieces of Amarna art from the site displayed alongside each other attempting to give a holistic picture of the period and place. Should this iconic piece then be allowed to remain in far-off Berlin as, let us be honest, a piece of trophy art, rather than taking its place and serving a function among the other items produced in Egypt at a specific place and time, a place and time which precisely this one work epitomises so well? (The same goes of course for the Parthenon Marbles.)

*Medill Reports is written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill school. Nefertiti bust from Wikicommons.

Stanford Symposium on the Ethics and Legal Issues in Collecting "African Art"

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Since 2003, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University has been holding an annual symposium on the 'Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas'. This one (Sat Jan 21st) has the title: "Cultural Heritage and African Art: Negotiating the Rise of Ethical and Legal Collecting Concerns". The blurb says:

In recent decades, the media and academic circles have given great attention to the protection of cultural property from looting and the sale and collection of archaeological materials. More recently, collectors, scholars and curators of African art have been increasingly confronted with ethical dilemmas and legal ambiguities in the collection of non-archaeological arts from Africa.

This day-long symposium focuses on identifying the ideological concerns and practical solutions surrounding the legal and ethical considerations of collecting African art made in the last 500 years.[...]Speakers are:

• George Okello Abungu, Ph.D., founding director, Okello Abungu Heritage Consultants, Nairobi, Kenya
• Derek Fincham, J.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, South Texas College of Law, Houston
• Kate Fitz Gibbon, J.D., attorney, Kate Fitz Gibbon Law Office, Santa Fe, N.M.
• Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
• John Henry Merryman, J.D., LL.M., professor of law emeritus and affiliated professor emeritus in the Department of Art, Stanford University
• Sylvester Okwunodo Ogbechie, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
[...][my hyperlinks]

Discussions of collecting and international movement of cultural property these days tend to focus on the issue of dugup (archaeological) material. An equally contentious area is the collecting of ethnographic material. There is here too the same range of ethical problems as with the appropriation by individuals of the cultural property of an 'Other' for personal entertainment and profit and all the issues that involves. Perhaps the problems are greater in the sense that some of this material has freshly been removed from its social functions and context of living memory, while archaeological material has been through the stage of being 'forgotten'. I would argue too as indigenous societies undergo transformation, there is a context destroyed too when items are removed from one cultural context to serve as trophy "art" or "collectables" in another without adequate documentation. It is rather sad therefore to see that the issue is represented rather one-sidedly - several of the participants are connected with the "art" side of the issues of collecting of African ethnographic items, but no anthropologist or ethnographer will be on the panel. The concentration in this panel alongside the representative of the arts world of known pro-collecting advocates Merriman, Fincham and Fitz-Gibbon is striking. That they'll not be recommending "sending it all back" is my guess.

Also one is struck by the terms used, ethical and legal considerations are to be "negotiated" rather than guide actions. One almost gets the impression that this panel will be working on the premise that private collecting of African ethnographic items should go on unabated, but collectors, scholars and curators of "African art" should be learning to "negotiate" the ethical issues and the legal constraints.

It would be useful if this meeting resulted in a publication for those who cannot be in the audience in person.

In addition, I think one valuable first step to aiding "negotiating" the underlying question of concern to collectors (of legal origins) would be if somebody would gather together for collectors of such items a compilation of all the relevant cultural property legislation of the 54 recognised African states (65 territories) concerning the ownership, transfer of ownership and in particular export of collectable items, so anyone thinking of buying a piece can see at a glance what the legal, at least, criteria by which in doing their 'due diligence' they should be applying. There are translations of the legislation of individual countries available on the Internet (several such databases listed in the left sidebar of my main blog), but they are not complete or systematically compiled, so absence of legislation for a given country could be due to that country having a free-for-all on its cultural property, or the fact that the compilers have not yet found the relevant acts in a form that they can incorporate into their database. It is a notable circumstance that as far as I can see, not a single US dealer in "Tribal Art" includes even links to such resources, let alone lay out what the various pieces of legislation on export of cultural property relate to the items they have on sale, which ones need (and in their stock have) export licences, and which do not require export licences and why.

Vignette: Fundamental ethical issue to be "negotiated", making African cultural property accessible to all, including future generations in Africa.