Happy Saturday POU!! We end our week with how American museums have reacted as more countries demand their stolen art returned.
American Museums Take Measures Mindful of Repatriation of African Art
In February of 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art ended an exhibition earlier than expected when the centerpiece of “Nedjemankh and His Gilded Coffin”—after seven months on view with robust attendance figures nearing 450,000—was found to have been looted from Egypt. The museum had acquired the ornate golden coffin from the first century B.C. two years ago for €3.5 million (around $3.9 million) from Christophe Kunicki, a Parisian art dealer who supplied fake provenance records including a forged Egyptian export license dated 1971.
According to an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, however, it appeared that the coffin had been stolen from its homeland in 2011. In response to the finding, the Met agreed to turn the artifact over to the Egyptian government. But the question of how such a tainted treasure could work its way through the hallowed museum’s acquisition process remained.
“Stewards of the world’s most important artifacts have a duty to hold their acquisitions to the highest level of scrutiny,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement at the time. Max Hollein, the Met director then just a few months on the job, said, “Our museum must be a leader among our peers in the respect for cultural property and in the rigor and transparency of the policy and practices that we follow.” Hollein vowed that the Met would learn from the incident and that he would personally be “leading a review” of the acquisition program in order “to understand what more can be done to prevent such events in the future.”
The turnabout at the Met was not the first of its kind in the United States, and it won’t be the last. In fact, calls for repatriation of holdings in American museums may be about to get much more heated, as attention to the matter migrates beyond Europe and demands for closer scrutiny intensify across the globe.
“The Baltimore Museum of Art has been following the discussions and debates about repatriation very closely,” said Kevin Tervala, associate curator of African art at the BMA. The museum’s collection of African art was established in 1954 through a gift from Alan and Janet Wurtzburger and, in the years since, has grown to include more than 2,500 works ranging from ancient sculptures to contemporary paintings. The majority of these were donated by American collectors, with others purchased from dealers, galleries, or artists themselves.
Though it hasn’t encountered any repatriation requests from Africa, the Baltimore Museum is in the process of creating a Cultural Property Working Group responsible for assessing the museum’s current collection policies as well as recommending revisions to past procedures to ensure that the institution upholds “not only the letter but also the spirit of the law,” Tervala said. The institution’s provenance research at present is the responsibility of curators, but, due to the expensive and time-consuming nature of the process, such research extends only to accessions currently underway. “Barring a massive change in the way that art institutions are financed,” Tervala said, “it really is not feasible for institutions with significant collections of African art to conduct this sort of research on a collection-wide scale.” Though he said no amount of attention or care can make up for “mistakes of the past,” Tervala added that he hopes efforts of the kind he has undertaken can “reinforce the public trust in art museums as ethical and moral institutions.”
The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, took up the matter of public trust in 2014, when provenance problems arose over works of African art entering its collection. The museum had received the objects as part of a bequest from the late William E. Teel, who left the institution more than 300 African and Oceanic works, among other objects. The museum suspected that eight items had been removed illegally from Nigeria, however, and immediately contacted the country’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, which regulates cultural exports. When the commission confirmed that export documents had been forged, the MFA returned the works in question.
“The area of provenance research has been changing since the 1990s,” said Victoria Reed, the museum’s curator for provenance—a position made permanent in 2010 and unique to the MFA. Reed attributed the change in part to rising interest in art stolen during the Nazi era, which led to higher demands on museums’ due diligence. And given that each museum is “unique in terms of its history, scope, governance, and mission,” she said, establishing professional standards for historical holdings is needed for the sake of “accountability and consistency.”
Kathryn Gunsch, the MFA’s curator for African and Oceanic art, said that part of setting standards is drawing a distinction between the past and the present. Given that many collections were “formed before notions of cultural patrimony existed,” she said, work brought in decades ago might have upheld the “standards of their time, and the standards that we apply today may not apply in ten years—which is why it’s important to keep track of our thought process.”
Reconciling the present with the past is difficult but necessary. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi—a Nigerian-born curator joining the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture in July after working as a curator of African art at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College—said that relativism over past standards should not preclude museums from being “above reproach” with regard to their recent and historic holdings. “Given that the institutional history of the museum is fraught, a more ethical approach should stem from an acknowledgment that museums were part of the colonial ideology of conquest, domination, and attempts to hijack or re-write the narratives of so-called subject peoples to serve political, economic, and intellectual agendas,” Nzewi added. By recognizing realities of the past, museums will be better equipped to revisit and dissect their collections via “a well-thought-out and deliberate process of sifting through holdings and tracing the trajectories of individual objects.”
The Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles may offer a working example of how such research could be conducted going forward. UCLA purchased its first African art collection in 1961 and, after forming the Fowler Museum in 1963, acquired more. “We have received major donations from a number of important private collectors in Los Angeles, which was a strong locus of collecting African art from the 1960s to the 1980s,” Fowler Museum director Marla C. Berns, chief curator Matthew H. Robb, and associate curator of African arts Erica P. Jones wrote to ARTnews in an email.
The museum received a 30,000-object gift in 1965 from the Wellcome Trust in London, including 7,000 African artifacts collected by the English tycoon Sir Henry Wellcome. Though the museum’s policy is to request all available provenance information, such information tends to be limited, vague, or difficult to verify. Acquisitions from decades past, the museum officials wrote, “may not have had very much collection information beyond the donors and the dealers they acquired them from, if that. Coupled with the fact that many dealers were and are reluctant to reveal their sources or asked too few questions themselves, the result is a trail that often goes completely cold in a search for an object’s provenance.”
A partial solution presented itself to the Fowler earlier this year in the form of a $600,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study its Wellcome holdings from Africa. For a 40-month project initiated in February, the museum is dedicating two full-time fellows to work with curatorial staff to investigate the origin of 700 objects, with the intention, according to museum staff, to establish how much the “reconstruction of provenance can be enhanced by both comparative ethnographic research as well as scientific materials analysis.” Based on the success of their results, the Fowler will continue that approach while considering future steps such as “building connections to people in specific source communities to consider potential future actions around cultural patrimony and ownership, preservation and education, and possibilities for restitution.”
Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba (pictured above), a former Mellon Foundation research specialist and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s current curator of African art, has spent a lot of time considering the implications of restitution. “Countries are beginning to clamor for these objects, but they never left any country—they left cultures,” he said of distinctions among national identities that don’t always match up with the origins of historical objects that predate certain borders. “Are they bringing it back to the culture or the country?”
Ezeluomba illustrated his point with the example of his birthplace: Benin City, a remnant of the once-powerful Benin Kingdom that is now part of Nigeria. Of the many works removed from there at the turn of the 19th century, he asked, “Will you return [the work] back to the nation of Nigeria, which [didn’t exist] when those things were removed? It is complex.”
Even more complexity attends how such artifacts were originally used. “Are they going to continue serving the function or purpose for which they were removed?” Ezeluomba asked. “Most of this material was actually for religious use, and we know that when they leave their religious context, they are de-sacralized or de-consecrated. They’re not going back to serve that same function.”
The Brooklyn Museum confronted a scenario of just this sort after Kristen Windmuller-Luna joined as a curator of African art last year. New to the job—and after being greeted with controversy by some who decried the hiring of a white curator for her position—Windmuller-Luna set out to learn more about an African Yoruba masquerade costume known as the Egúngún mask, which entered the museum’s collection as a gift in 1998 and was being considered for an exhibition. After analyzing its materials, she established that the mask could not have been created earlier than 1920. When she traveled to Nigeria to learn more, she found herself among the descendants of the Lekewogbe family who had made the object and was told it had been stolen from a shrine in 1948.
As Windmuller-Luna recalled in an interview with the Art Newspaper, “I asked them: ‘Is this appropriate to be on view? Are you all right with this exhibition? Do you want the work back?’ ” To help answer her questions, the family and the curator communed in a divination ceremony through which gods were consulted and the mask was deemed no longer “spiritually empowered.” As a result, the mask went on view in February—with the family’s blessing—in the current Brooklyn Museum exhibition “One: Egúngún.” (cont’d on page2)