Illegal Exhibits

Last November, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) unveiled the newest addition to its collection: a marble statue of the goddess Eirene, which, at nine feet tall, towers above visitors. Created around 2000 years ago, "Eirene" is an awe-inspiring piece of Greek antiquity, which constitutes a point of great pride for the museum. But she won’t be there for patrons to admire for much longer: the statue is on loan from the Italian government, and will be reclaimed in 2009.

The timing of the "Eirene" loan corresponds with a broad set of investigations and lawsuits regarding looted art that has targeted some of America’s most renowned art institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA, and the university art museums at Yale and Princeton.

Though the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM), which collectively own one of the largest collections in the country, have so far not faced

any public claims on its antiquities, it remains an open question whether the university, like its Ivy League peers, will also attract accusations that it possesses looted treasures.

As allegations of stolen art mount against museums and institutions around the world, American museums are now attempting to strike a balance between adding to their permanent collections and ensuring that they don’t own antiquities that were illegally taken from foreign countries.

TELLING THE TRUE-TH?

In the 1970s, the government of Italy began demanding that American museums return art that they believed had been looted from Italian soil. But for years, domestic museums refused to comply unless Italy could provide substantial evidence that these items had been acquired through illicit means.

In 1995, the Italian government got a truckload of evidence when its national police force raided the warehouse of Giacomo Medici, finding records of the pieces he had acquired from looters. The government sued Medici and fellow art dealer Robert Hecht for trafficking in stolen antiquities, and 10 years later, Marion True, a curator at the Getty Museum, was charged with being a co-conspirator. As the Getty Museum’s curator of antiquities since 1986, True allegedly purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Greek and Etruscan artifacts from Hecht and Medici.

True met Hecht while working at the MFA’s department of classical art, before she attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In the same year that True was charged, the MFA was accused of possessing looted artifacts through dealings with Hecht, whom Italian investigators suspected of selling or giving the museum more than 1,000 artifacts, all possibly stolen.

In September 2006, after negotiations between the Italian government and the MFA, the museum transferred possession of 13 objects back to Italy. In return, the Italian government promised future collaborative efforts with the museum, including loans of cultural significance. The colossal "Eirene" is the first of these loans, and a fitting gesture: Eirene is the goddess of peace.

But this loan will only last three years—a reminder of the tenuous nature of this new peace. Museum collections may be forced to change in scope and character, particularly as more hotspots for looting are revealed. Museums, archaeologists, dealers, and foreign governments face the dilemma of finding collaborative ways to prevent looting.

Otherwise, the conciliatory pose of "Eirene" might be replaced by increasing strain in the relationships between museums and foreign governments, as museums strive to maintain the status of their antiquities collections and governments assert claims to works that they believe to rightfully be theirs.

ART AND THE IVY

In March 2006, Yale’s art collection fell under scrutiny. The Peruvian government sued Yale for the rights to archaeological materials excavated from the Incan ruin Machu Picchu nearly a century ago by explorer and Yale professor Hiram Bingham. In September 2007, the two sides structured an agreement that stipulated that Yale would cede ownership of the artifacts and return many of them to Peru as early as 2009. Yale would, however, be legally permitted to retain certain pieces for 99 years as part of a research collection.

But the agreement remains unsigned, in part because many Peruvians aren’t content with the current terms. Late last month, Eliane Karp-Toledo, the former first lady of Peru, wrote a scathing op-ed in The New York Times claiming that despite its request to keep part of the collection for 99 years, Yale lacked "any historical claim to the artifacts."

"The agreement reflects a colonial way of thinking not expected from a modern academic institution," she wrote.

Peru wasn’t the only country that took issue with an Ivy League museum. Following an investigation by the Italian government, the Princeton University Art Museum sent three ancient objects back to Italy in October 2006 and adopted a more conservative acquisition policy. Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt says that these policies follow the 1997 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO) agreements, which apply to ancient artwork and archaeological objects. However, ethical guidelines for the acquisition and holding of artifacts by museums have been in place for decades, the result of an agreement UNESCO made in 1970.

ACQUISITIONS AT HUAM

At HUAM, the issue of repatriation claims has been on the mind of Susanne Ebbinghaus, the curator of ancient art. When asked whether any government had made claims to repatriate their antiquities under the UNESCO agreement or otherwise, Ebbinghaus replies, "That is the question I wouldn’t like to talk about...If there was any major claim, you would have heard about it."

Harvard reacted quickly to the 1970 UNESCO convention, according to Ebbinghaus. A committee drafted acquisition standards that were accepted by the university one year later, which may explain why Harvard has not yet faced a large public claim on its objects. The document stipulated that curators should make sure that their acquisitions had not been illicitly imported or exported in the recent past and established that the museum should know an object’s history at least as far back as July 1971.

HUAM and Ebbinghaus are currently reviewing their guidelines. "Sensitivities have been changing a lot since the 1970s," she says.

An artifact’s origin is often unclear, complicating the acquisitions process for museums. "That is certainly true for some objects in our collections," Ebbinghaus says. If the artifact has been recently dug up and looted, buyers should be able to recognize that it comes from a recently plundered location.

Still, Ebbinghaus says, "the way collecting worked in Europe and the U.S. in the earlier part of the 20th century, there may have been documentation, but nobody ever paid much attention to it." A small statuette that shows up at an auction and lacks documentation may have been in a collection with poorly kept records—or it may have been looted.

At present, Ebbinghaus, among others, is considering alternatives to acquiring objects, such as exchanges and long-term loans. These agreements would resemble those made by the MFA and Princeton. But repatriation poses a problem when museums want to examine artifacts in-depth and on a long-term basis, as researchers may have less freedom to engage with items on loan.

"I think in any case, it is good for museums to keep their own collection, because it means that things may be done with the objects that [they] might not be able to do with loans," Ebbinghaus says. "For instance, we have a conservation lab, and we can do technical research and give permission to do testing, which we would never get from a country that had an object on loan to us."

Furthermore, as part of Harvard, HUAM has a specific educational mission. As a result, Ebbinghaus says, HUAM wants to "continue collecting because we believe in having this collection here available for teaching purposes."

PEACE ON THE HUAM-FRONT?

Former HUAM director James Cuno is leading the charge to reconsider the conciliatory poses that other museums have been striking. To Cuno, the current president of the Art Institute of Chicago, placing too much faith in long-term loans can be counterproductive. "The only problem with this is whether or not such loans will be made," he writes in an e-mail. "To date, ‘source countries’ have been disinclined to make such loans."

Cuno claims repatriation poses a threat to the diverse cultural offerings that "encyclopedic" museums put on display. U.S. museums have the mission of "collecting representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy" for "the study [of] individual traditions within the context of other traditions," he said when testifying to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the U.S. State Department in 2005.

If permanent collections dwindle as nations reclaim objects, he argued, these museums will no longer be able to display the same gamut of different cultural artifacts side by side, losing a vital resource for prolonged educational comparison.

Additionally, Cuno maintains that the countries seeking to reclaim artifacts do not always have the best interests of the objects in mind. He contends that several young governments, such as those in Greece and Turkey, see both antiquities and export laws as ways to forge a national cultural identity.

But these countries should not necessarily have sole claims on the pieces merely because they came from within the physical boundaries of their nation. "It is a stretch of the imagination to link modern Egypt to ancient Egypt, modern Greece to ancient Greece, modern Rome to ancient Rome, communist China to ancient China," Cuno told The Boston Globe.

To improve the tense relationship between U.S. museums and foreign governments, both Ebbinghaus and Cuno recommend a twofold strategy: performing stringent background checks on objects while finding new ways for museums to permanently acquire artifacts.

For Cuno and Ebbinghaus, the future of antiquities lies in replacing the current minefield of export regulations with another system: partage, a process by which institutions that sponsor excavations receive a share of the finds. In the first half of the 20th century, the archeological museums of universities like Yale and Harvard and art museums like the MFA used partage to acquire their most important pieces. In the 1920s and 1930s, a team from Harvard excavated a site called Nuzi in modern Iraq, finding thousands of cuneiform tablets that detailed daily life. These remain on display in Harvard’s Semitic Museum.

HUAM and other university museums have special access to archaeology departments, which is perhaps accompanied by a certain degree of responsibility. "I do see a call to university museums to put out an extra call to archeologists, because they are part of the community," Ebbinghaus says.

They may not be the Met, the MFA, or the Getty, but according to Cuno, university museums should follow standards similar to those of the art world giants in order to build strong collections. "The enlightenment principles of the encyclopedic museum—the representation of the world’s artistic legacy under one roof as a means of encouraging greater understanding of the world and the interrelatedness of cultures—is always a good thing," Cuno writes. In the eyes of advocates like Cuno and Ebbinghaus, university museums in particular now have a massive task laid out for them: trying to forge agreements between cultures that balance the demands of both scholarship and cultural heritage—a kind of beneficial peace that’s not just on loan.

—Staff writer Elsa S. Kim can be reached at elsakim@fas.harvard.edu.