Artwatch UK
NEWS & NOTICES [ News Desk: news.artwatchuk@gmail.com ]
  • Jacques Franck here concludes his three-part demolition of the once attributed but now deposed, $450m New York/Russian/Saudi Leonardo da Vinci Salvator Mundi picture’s supposed stylistic, artistic and technical credentials. [read more]
  • Jacques Franck, painter/draughtsman and art historian specialist in Leonardo da Vinci’s evolved painting techniques, explores the conceptual limitations and the resulting adverse consequences (i. e. damaging restorations and mis-attributed works) of art historical studies and scientific essays that are today being made without duly informed consideration of actual historical artistic practices. [read more]
  • A remarkable show of haunting monochromatic prints is running at the Art Space Gallery (until 8 October). As can be seen in a short film made by the gallery’s director, Michael Richardson, Peter Freeth, who works without technical assistance or commercial collaboration, has devised a novel form of printing in which all parts of the plate are bitten simultaneously in the acid bath. [read more]
  • A slim but eloquent and persuasive study of the assorted depictions of rock in Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne examines the pictorial means of the most perplexing figural invention in the artist’s oeuvre. [read more]
  • The Leonardo Salvator Mundi controversy turns on which artist’s hand is – or which artists’ hands are - present on the painting. Many scholars agree that more than one hand is present. Here, it is demonstrated that while two hands are present, neither belongs to Leonardo. [M.D.] [read more]
  • artin Kemp and a dozen (largely mute) art historians bet the professional farm on a “from-nowhere” Salvator Mundi being an autograph Leonardo painting. On fetching $450m in 2017 it disappeared. No-one will say where it is. We now hear from a previously reliable source that it never left New York. [read more]
  • With museum and gallery visits becoming ever-more crowded noisy expensive and denuded of works loaned, in needless restorations, or stored as directors play developers as well as impresarios, the appeal of small venues grows. Bury Street in St James’s is buzzing with two (free) exhibitions, one light on drawings, one rich. [read more]
  • The latest addition to the fast-growing but least-estimable art book publishing genre – The Book of Art Attribution Advocacy - has finally arrived. It comes eight years late and on the second anniversary of Christie’s, New York, 15 November 2017 sale of the formerly attributed-Leonardo, Salvator Mundi picture - which disappeared the following day. [read more]
  • ArtWatch UK Notices: On October 1st, AWUK holds the tenth Annual James Beck Lecture (Speaker: Ben Lewis, author of The Last Leonardo) in London and publishes its thirty-second members’ Journal “From Sistina to Salvator” [read more]
  • The July/August issue of the Art Newspaper carries three fascinating items on the standing of the disappeared Salvator Mundi painting which may or may not be included in the forthcoming Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre. [read more]
  • After the Cutty Sark debacle, some good cheer. Another ship in another place has been turned into museum without being burnt to a frazzle, hoist out of water and travestied by being unceremoniously dropped into a modish glass and steel architectural hooped skirt (see below). [read more]
  • A most remarkable exhibition is running until March 10th at the Royal Drawing School (19–22 Charlotte Road, London EC2A 3SG). [read more]
  • The Louvre Museum in Paris has attacked one of its own named Leonardo restoration consultants - Jacques Franck - with professional disparagement and an allegation of having conveyed “fake information”. [read more]
  • Two supposed Leonardos are now in difficulties. The Salvator Mundi, sold for half a billion dollars just over a year ago, hasn’t been seen since. In France, the Saint Sebastian drawing saved for the nation was not bought and has now been put back on the international market. [read more]
  • Frances Moreton, Director of the War Memorials Trust, writes: "Our war memorials remind us not just of those who lost their lives but the consequences of conflict and the importance of preserving these memorials to ensure that future generations learn from the experiences and sacrifices of those we remember." [read more]
  • Today museums seem as likely as not to be closed for “re-development”. Even small "time-capsule" artists or collectors home/museums, like Leighton’s, are fair game. Closures present loan opportunities and the National Gallery has snaffled some Courtauld Gallery Impressionist plums. [read more]
  • In our 11 October post (“Two developments in the no-show Louvre Abu Dhabi Leonardo Salvator Mundi saga”) we suggested that new-style confidential legal conflict-resolution procedures might favour the big guys over the little guys – who “necessarily will forfeit their strongest card: the capacity to raise institutionally embarrassing press coverage”. [read more]
  • Dalya Alberge reports in the Guardian that a Leonardo scholar, Matthew Landrus, believes most of the upgraded Salvator Mundi was painted by a Leonardo assistant, Bernardino Luini. [read more]
  • The journalist and writer Tom Wolfe died on 14 May aged 88. He is survived by his wife Sheila (Berger) Wolfe, a graphic designer and former art director of Harper’s Magazine, and their two children, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Tommy Wolfe, a sculptor and furniture designer. [read more]
  • Last night we were bidden, as Sir Roy Strong might have put it, to the opening and reception of the joint British Museum and Rodin Museum exhibition “Rodin and the art of Greece”. [read more]
PREVIOUS ARTICLES
   

Latest

“The Fate of the Parthenon Sculptures before and after Elgin”

The abiding central contention in the Elgin Marbles dispute is that the acquisition of the sculptures was such a base and illegal act of plunder that it must be undone and righted. The charge is not only unfounded it masks subsequent Greek culpabilities on the preservation of its Acropolis monuments.

The Parthenon sculptures, which are considered by the British Museum to be the greatest material productions of mankind and which are, as such, superbly well and fittingly displayed, were rescued from an abominable neglect and desecration that persisted on the Acropolis after their removal. Because the Marbles were lawfully acquired over two centuries ago, would-be restitutionists are effectively demanding that today’s asserted moral rights be backdated to circumvent and trump the law.

An even-handed (if not entirely unpartisan) examination of such restitution demands has been given by Alexander Herman, the director of the Institute of Art and Law in his 2021 and 2023 books, Restitution and The Parthenon Marbles Dispute. In the former, while noting a general shift in favour of policies that “do justice for wrongs committed in the distant past” Herman concedes that much as the term “restitution” evokes notions of justice, equity, fairness and the righting of wrongs, “it is not, strictly speaking, a legal term”. But when acknowledging the intrinsically problematic nature of restitution (“it reveals a tension between the aspirations of those seeking justice for a cause and the tough reality of legal constraint and practical considerations”), he betrays exasperation on the ineffectuality of many would-be restitution claims with a counter plaint “Perhaps the usual arguments for retaining the treasures of another culture, be they legal or museological, are beginning to wear thin”.

That the “retentionist” case often proves undefeatable on argument or evidence* is testified by Herman’s resort to the counter authority of precedents: “those arguments are in need of being tested in the light of the many recent developments that have taken place” – the developments in question being the widescale returning of human remains and artefacts to indigenous descendants. Ironically, this appeal to precedent with the Elgin Marbles is made when the Greeks have long denied that their return to Athens would itself create a monumentally dangerous museum-emptying precedent even though, as Herman acknowledges, almost all “restitution stories trace their points of reference, one way or another, back to Greece’s claim over the Parthenon Marbles.”

[* Calls for the return of supposedly looted British Museum Chinese artefacts have spectacularly backfired with the publication of Prof. Justin M. Jacobs’ Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures. As Dalya Alberge reported in the Observer, research has established willing and enthusiastic Chinese assistance on their acquisition.
This book will very possibly prove a game-changer. It takes the current wave of restitutionist cant head-on… and thrashes it: “Neither Stein nor Elgin acquired these objects in a manner that could be described as military plunder… Lord Elgin was unarmed… he was in fact the flesh and blood embodiment of Great Britain’s military alliance with the Ottoman sultan against the French navy in the Mediterranean…and that gratitude came in the form of permission – both written and oral – to remove ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens…” He asks: “Can anyone truly speak on behalf of ancestors – literal or figurative – who lived four, five, or even ten generations ago?” He invokes the wisdom of David Lowenthal: “In 1985 the historian David Lowenthal published a book titled The Past Is a Foreign Country, a now classic study of how we humans constantly rework the heritage of past generations for new purposes in the present wholly unanticipated by our forebears. ‘The past is a foreign country’, I often tell my students. ‘They do things differently there.’” And he expresses the number of British Museum artefacts that can, technically speaking, be designated as plunder as a proportion of the entire collection – “0.000024 per cent”. ]

In The Parthenon Marbles Dispute, where he greatly expands his examination of the Marbles, Herman’s frustration at obdurate retentionist facts might seems evident: “whether we like it not, there is little in the way of impugning the legality of the permission given for the removal of the Marbles.” Such a grudging recognition that there was neither plunder nor theft, might have cued George – “There is a deal to be done” – Osborne, Chair of the British Museum’s Board of Trustees who, like Donald Trump, seemingly exults in his own deal-making capacities (- in which very respect, however, he has been charged with performing a disservice to the museum’s trustees by Lord Sumption, medieval historian and former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom).

Recognising that Britain never occupied Greece and that, accordingly, “the claim for restitution is less clearcut”, Herman then shifts ground and temporal location to claim the issue is “less about the circumstances of the original removal and more about vulnerability felt by modern Greeks, especially when it comes to threats [?] from the outside, and the traditional inability of those on the British Museum side to show much empathy.” Aside from the Meghan Markle-like whine of an institution-wide empathy-deficit at the British Museum, Herman ignores the greatly more than empathetic roles played by the British in both Greece’s 19th century War of Independence and her subsequent liberation from Nazi-rule.

Precisely because there is neither a legal nor a compelling stand-alone moral case for “restitution”, Herman commends a deployment of the currently fashionable “conflict resolution” mediation procedures designed to bypass courts and their notorious costs and risks. On this stratagem he speaks of the role for a (somehow) mutually acceptable “mediator” – and goes so far as to float the prospects of the so-called “Parthenon Project”, an avowed restitution outfit led and funded by members of a single Greek family and which boasts on its website that “The Chair of the British Museum recently publicly confirmed that there is a deal to be done between the British Museum and Greece”. The site also carries a Financial Times report of a secret meeting at the Berkeley Hotel in November 2021 between Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and George Osborne:

“Osborne listened intently as Mitsotakis set out his case. He had barely given any thought to the Parthenon Sculptures during his career in British politics. He’s best known for his role as the country’s ‘chancellor’ after the global financial crash. But recently installed as chair of the world’s oldest public museum, Osborne saw a chance to show he is running an enlightened institution ready to engage in the debate about the repatriation of artefacts. He also saw a man across the table with whom he could do business. ‘Nobody has tried, well, ¬forever,’ Osborne has told colleagues… Osborne has declined to speak publicly about his talks with Mitsotakis, fearing that anything he says could be used against the prime minister, who is facing an election in the coming months.”

In the event Mitsotakis survived the election but, as we tweeted on 16 August, “in 2003, possibly encouraged by Lord Owen’s support, the [then] Greek Prime Minister said to Tony Blair ‘I have an election to fight next year – could you do something about the Marbles?’” That earlier request for political assistance is public knowledge only because, Herman discloses, it was picked up by TV cameras. It is not known whether the FT article was “sourced” by Mitsotakis or Osborne, or both.

Herman also reminds the reader that in 2019 the Institute of Art and Law gave training courses to members of the British Museum staff on museum-world laws and ethics but perhaps most valuably, he alerts us to the true dangers of a would-be Osborne-engineered “loan” deal by applauding the success of a past recovery from the British Museum of an indigenous Canadian artefact by the expedient manoeuvre of a perpetually renewed three-year loan: “The result may not be ideal. The mask is still effectively owned by the British Museum trustees. But no one could fault [Andrea] Stanborn calling the event a ‘repatriation’…the loan was once again renewed in 2020…” That de facto repatriation was only made possible, however, because the recipients acknowledged the museum’s ownership: “The British Museum did recall it for an exhibition in London in 2017, but then returned it…”

That there is no legal case against the B.M.’s ownership of the Elgin Marbles would now seem to be widely recognised. That being so, it should equally be recognised that there can be no countervailing moral or culturally compelling case for moving the Marbles after more than two centuries from one museum to another, either once and for all, or repeatedly at intervals with all the increased concomitant risks of injury. In their first secret meeting, Osborne and Mitsotakis proceeded so fast as to have identified possible loan “swaps” from Athens to London but at a later meeting the Greek prime minister told Osborne that he wanted the whole collection back permanently and not on loan. The present chair of the B.M.’s trustees is said still to believe “a deal is possible”.

As for the conspicuous moral lacuna in the persisting restitution claim for the Elgin Marbles, it can best be appreciated by examining the scale of neglect and desecration that Lord Elgin discovered and the magnitude of his act of cultural preservation and appreciation. Not only were so many sculptures removed to safety, but the craftsmen and artists Elgin employed had also made meticulous cast and drawn records of the then preservation-states of other sculptures which today testify to subsequent losses and erosions when in Greek hands. A due recognition of Elgin’s service to art requires no new instruments of law, no secret meetings between politicians and trustees, and no wordy mediated haggles but, rather, nothing more than the simple use of our own eyes. Abundant photographic and other visual evidence testifies to the scale of pre- and post-Elgin abuses and desecrations of Greece’s cultural legacy. In our Summer 2002 journal we carried an article by the independent scholar Ellis Tinios which chronicled the extent and the truly terrible artistic consequence of those losses. We were and remain grateful to him as we reproduce his illustrated account in full below.

Michael Daley, Director: 20 August 2024