Why Greece Does Not Need the Elgin Marbles
An (unpublished) paper by Michael Daley, Director, ArtWatch UK, that was delivered at the Economist’s Athens Conference, 12 March 2003:
Lots of reasons have been put forward in support of the campaign to remove the so-called Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. Individually, these justifications rarely withstand scrutiny, but cumulatively, their repetition has left many in Britain with the impression that under all the smoke there must be both a fire and a wrong in need of righting.
I wish to suggest today that, to contrary, there are good reasons for contending that the restitution campaign is itself wrongheaded, unjust and culturally dangerous.
The original removal of the sculptures from the Parthenon and the ground and the walls of the Acropolis by Lord Elgin has been presented as theft when the British Museum’s legal title is today accepted by all parties to the dispute. The removal has long been caricatured as vandalism and desecration when, demonstrably, it constituted an act of rescue and celebration. This fact, too, has now largely been accepted.
Faced with the legitimacy of the British Museum’s ownership, the would-be “restitutionists” have appealed above the rule of law to the forces of sentiment – and forces, often, of distinctly nationalistic sentiment. “These sculptures mean so much more to us than they ever could to you” it is said. And even more disconcertingly:
“Without these sculptures we are not complete as a nation, they comprise our very soul.”
It would be hard for anyone to resist such morally coercive appeals – and the British are constitutionally inclined to want to “do the right thing” but, as it happens, resistance is no longer necessary: Greek scholars have testified that although the Parthenon indeed was, for members of late 19th century Greek society, a sacred symbol of the nation, the rise in the 20th century of tourism and economic modernisation has “taken them out of their role as symbols and gradually turned them into social goods”.
Confirmation of this transition appeared with a recent announcement that Greece plans to replace low-spending tourists with high spending ones by “showcasing Greek cultural traditions”.
With the decline of appeals to nationalistic sentiments, the claims of an Urgent Aesthetic Imperative have been advanced. “It is a crime against art”, the argument goes, “not to allow the component parts of a glorious entity to be seen whole.”
The cult of the dismembered-whole-in-need-of-reintegration was launched in 1945 by Thomas Bodkin with his seminal book Dismembered Masterpieces – A plea for reconstruction by International Action. It certainly is sad when artistic ensembles are scattered by history but in the case of the Parthenon sculptures it is worth recalling Bodkin’s comments on them:
“It is abundantly clear that the statues from the pediments, the portions of the frieze and the metopes now in England should never be re-integrated on their original sites. Those few sculptures which Lord Elgin did not remove have in the intervening one hundred and forty-two years been allowed to deteriorate into utter wreckage, corroded by wind and rain and the fumes ascending from the factories of Piraeus”.
Bodkin of course did not know of the notorious Athenian pollution that would be in train from the 1960s. Greek scholars have testified to the devastating consequences for the Acropolis monuments of that further, later pollution.
In the view of many here and abroad, Greece’s own past neglect and mishandling of the Parthenon and its remaining sculptures constitutes one of the greatest 20th century art conservation tragedies. To those of us who are professionally dedicated to the survival and welfare of art, the vocal opposition of Greece’s own scholars and art lovers to today’s Government-led scramble for development is certainly heartening but it does also confirm that vital lessons have not yet been learnt. These developments compel the observation that a nation that is showing indifference to its own patrimony and is cavalier with even its most precious historical sites, does not need to take on more heritage responsibilities. To those who might feel such a judgement harsh, we cite a single plea. It came recently from the island of Paros.
“…We are therefore obliged to ask for the support of the international academic community, suggesting that our overseas friends mail letters of protest to the Greek Minister of Culture, underlining their concern about the deliberate destruction of monuments on Paros. How is it possible to demand the return of the Parthenon marbles, while allowing the ruthless destruction of other ancient temples by unqualified employees?”
In the face of this actual, ongoing destruction, British restitutionists and museum personnel have taken to fretting about a need for “context”. What context? Reuniting the Elgin sculptures with the decaying Parthenon building is now, as Bodkin could already see, impossible. The new sculptural ensemble being mooted for Athens is that of a wholly severed – and, in fact, distinctly out of context collection. That is, it would be indoors, not out. It would be off Acropolis, not on. Even if every museum presently holding Acropolis sculptures were to return their works, the new “entity” would still remain incomplete because of early losses.
More embarrassingly, if all the surviving sculptures were to be returned to Athens tomorrow, they could not be joined by Greece’s own west frieze sculptures, which were removed from the Parthenon ten years ago and still await a decision on possible conservation treatments to stabilise their pollution-damaged surfaces. Were this problem to be resolved, it would still be necessary, before any assembling of the survivors could take place, for the sculptures that presently remain united with the Parthenon, to be “dis-united” from it, as if in emulation of Lord Elgin’s long condemned original actions.
In truth, of course, the Parthenon sculptures can never be “shown in context” because their original context is so long gone. It might now be imagined but it can never be replicated. We do know, however, that the sculptures originally survived as symbolic adornments to a temple standing on a reinforced hill and not in a modernist museum, to be built on stilts, on an important archaeological site in an earthquake zone and in the teeth of opposition from national and international scholars. Far from there being plans to recreate the original on-Acropolis context, there are even plans to remove, what one leading restitutionist terms, “the litter of unclassified stones” from the Acropolis in order to make more footpaths for more tourists. This is a particularly alarming prospect if Professor Snodgrass’s claim that eighty per cent of the Parthenon building is believed to be still present, is correct. There is, however, something much more important at stake in this dispute than the preservation and the right displaying of historical artefacts.
As mentioned earlier, the present hectoring demand that sculptures be moved from one museum to another is unedifying and dangerous. For one thing it constitutes nothing less than a government-led assault on the very idea of the internationally comparative museum. Greece – of all countries – does not need to be party to such a regressive manoeuvre.
It jeopardises international scholarly cooperation. It gives encouragement to those members of the museum sector in Britain who seem only too eager to shed as much as possible of what they see as so much colonial loot. I do recognise that members of the Greek Government have shown themselves to be aware of some of these dangers and that they themselves insist that the Elgin Marbles are the only sculptures for which demands will pressed. But what politician was ever able to bind his successors? Who today could guarantee that the removal of the Elgin sculptures from the British Museum would not instantly and forever thereafter be taken as a precedent for copycat campaigns in Greece and elsewhere?
For this artist, what is most saddening about the present campaign is that by trading the universal for the local, it conspires against a proper recognition of the true nature and full extent of Greece’s patrimony. There is a lot of wonderful art in the world but the truth that is being lost in this squabble over particular material objects is that Greek classical art is like no other art – it has done what no other art has ever done: millennia after its birth, it has emerged from death and neglect to seize the imaginations and enlist the passions of other people in other places. Greek classicism has even vanquished, later, better-preserved classical offspring. It has done so not by conquest or politicking but solely on merit; by example; on the unrivalled authority of its inventions. It is unfashionable to say so, but these inventions stand uniquely transcendent and enduring, outside of time, original context and regardless of geography and ethnicity, as artistic paradigms and exemplars.
Even within the antique world, Plutarch had marvelled that the sculptures of Pericles’ time, far from dating, retained a time-defying freshness and newness – as masterpieces. In the 19th century Karl Marx was stymied by the sheer force of Greek Art – to which, as a scholar at the British Museum’s reading room, he was regularly exposed. Marx’s grand meta-system was to be elegance itself: the so-called cultural superstructures of societies stand on, and are determined by, their economic bases; by their technical means of production. The more advanced the means of production, the more advanced the cultural manifestations. Primitive, economically backward societies, he planned to demonstrate, produce primitive backward art. Classical Greek art, however, blew this premise. How could it be, Marx was forced to ask himself, that an ancient art should not only continue to afford us with pleasure but should persist beyond its own time as both a standard and an unobtainable goal? The best explanation he could offer was that Greek art remained eternally charming because it represents the “the historical childhood of humanity, where it had obtained its most beautiful development.” This condescension will not do.
Greek forms have gripped modern minds, in world superpowers like Britain and the United States, not by their charm but by their potency, and their living relevance. Colonialism exposed modern Europeans to the charms of very many competing aesthetic value systems, but the power of Greece’s artefacts has remained uniquely awesome and persuasive – wherever they have come to rest.
The Greek temple, for example, stands perennially iconic as motif. It remains unequalled for its combined lucidity of construction and elegance of articulation. Which is why, for example, it remains incorporated into the fabric of Britain’s premier motorcar, the Rolls Royce – and with a winged victory as mascot on its bonnet. The Greek temple – and not, say, the pagoda – is as deeply entrenched in the modern unconscious as any Jungian archetype. Simultaneously, it confers dignity and reassurance to banking and stands guardian to free speech and debate in our modern universities and seats of government. In London, next to the historic Tower of London, a temple provides home to the names of British merchant seamen who perished in the Atlantic and Mediterranean at the hands of German U-boats and bombers.
Given the chance, Greek sculpture is seen to stand supreme in all company, in whichever museum – the bigger the museum, the greater the victory. The grandly ambitious international museum is now coming under fire politically, but it has been both an expression of and an agent for the modern renaissance of Greek antiquity. It is barely half a century since an historian like Hans Tietze could describe the artistic individuality of great museums as themselves “spiritual entities, and not merely as fortuitous accumulations of art treasures.”
Under today’s rules of correct, multi-cultural, discourse, museums like the British Museum may no longer say that ancient Greek art stands as the world’s best, as the most attractive and most humanly affirmative. But nowhere is this trait more apparent than in Bloomsbury in London, in the British Museum. By Insisting on seeing international, multi-cultural museums as repositories of loot; by fetishising original architectural/social contexts and localities; and by fostering nationalistic sentiment, we risk losing sight of a fundamental artistic truth: the sheer stand-alone transcendent quality of Greek sculpture. Pericles was given to inviting his dinner guests to see the Parthenon sculptures as they were being carved. Everyone who passes through London today can dine for free at Pericles’ table in a splendid purpose-built neo-classical hall – and certainly not in a cellar or basement as British restitutionists too often allege. It would be a tragedy if these supreme ambassadors for the finest art of sculpture were to be wrenched out of the great world forum of cultural voices that the British Museum comprises and in which they excel. Greece truly does not need to be party to such a brutal, disruptive act. Greece thrives, looks her very best in such elevated and various company. She lives. She needs nothing. Her primacy is absolute and unassailable. Well should be left alone.
Above, Michael Daley, Director ArtWatch UK, at the Acropolis, Athens, 2003.
CODA
The Economist conference – and the campaigning contribution made by Lord (David) Owen – was reviewed in the Greek newspaper eKathimerini – as is today’s meeting of Prime Ministers Keir Starmer and Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London.
In August 1998 a correspondent in the Sunday Times’ books section wrote (under the heading “All Greek”):
“A more positive and generous list of the achievements of the ancient Greeks than Frederick Raphael’s more grudging one is given by the scholar F L Lucas: ‘Within seven centuries this race invented for itself epic, elergy, lyric, tragedy, comedy, opera, pastoral epigram, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war… a stupendous feat for a race… whose most brilliant state, Attica, was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000′!”
In February 2000 we wrote (in “Pheidias Albion”, Art Review):
And let no one believe that foreigners alone reject Greek demands or condemn Greek practices. A few years ago, The Times carried this plea from Mrs Magdala Delfas:
“When in 1967 I left Greece under the colonels’ rule, my visits to the British Museum brought me solace. I was able to keep in touch with my cultural heritage outside the geographical and political confines of Greece.
“Later, I discovered to my delight and amazement that apart from the perfect display of the Elgin Marbles in their special gallery, they are kept in a country where the study of Ancient Greece is kept alive, where Greek plays are performed either in the original or in English, and in the most erudite and scholarly fashion, like the Theban plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford last season and in London this year.
“Schoolchildren, among them my own son, have the privilege and joy of reciting verse and studying Homer in the original. By contrast in Greece, the study of ancient Greek in schools has been stopped. The impoverished language of today has been cut off from its natural roots.
“Visitors to museums (including that on the Acropolis) are frustrated by restricted opening times and high admission charges. Moreover, a new gallery close to the Parthenon to house the marbles would violate the Acropolis.
“The advocates of the demand for the return of the Elgin marbles, which stems from empty nationalist zeal and socialist politics, should direct their zeal and support towards Cyprus. The marbles must remain where they are, in a country which cherishes the classical tradition.”
3 December 2024
How Illissos (and Mr MacGregor) flew close to the Sun
In the new Art Newspaper it is reported that the free-standing Parthenon sculpture, Illissos, was flown by a “circuitous” route when loaned by the British Museum to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It did so, it has been acknowledged by the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, to avoid possible Greek seizure through the E.U. courts.
The Hermitage Museum director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and the British Museum’s (then) director, Neil MacGregor, at the press opening of the loaned Parthenon sculpture Illissos in St Petersburg in December 2014.
As the Art Newspaper reports:
‘Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, tells us that to forestall any attempt to intercept the sculpture, it was flown from London to St Petersburg “circuitously”. He says: “It could not be transported through Europe, because Greece believe that it belongs to them and they could have attempted to seize it at some airport en route, and according to the laws of the European Union, this would have been legitimate.” The exact route it took is a mystery, however. Did it travel via the Arctic or over North Africa? Piotrovsky declines to say, and a spokeswoman for the British Museum will only say: “When flying any loan overseas, the British Museum chooses the most direct route possible. This was true for the loan of Ilissos to the Hermitage.”’
Previously, in a letter to the Times and in our Spring 2015 Journal (- see below), we attacked the fact of the profoundly politically provocative, insensitive and physically dangerous loan that was conducted in such secrecy that neither the UK Goverment nor any of its cultural agencies were informed of the loan. But we had not disclosed that the sculpture was, in truth, flown in two stages via a Middle-Eastern state, thereby subjecting the sculpture to additional risks and to four take-offs and four landings in addition to transportation by the usual lorries and fork-lift trucks.
“Where should the Elgin Marbles be housed?” – ArtWatch UK Letter to The Times, 9 December 2014:
“Sir, On balance, the case for the British Museum retaining the Elgin Marbles stands (reports, Dec 5 & 6), but it has been gravely weakened by the irresponsible and gratuitously provocative loan of one of the works to the Hermitage Museum.
The case for continuing to hold the Elgin Marbles in Bloomsbury after two centuries has rested in part on the physical safety of the collection and on permitting the illuminating artistic pre-eminence of the sculptures themselves to be best appreciated in the context of a multi-cultural, international ‘encyclopaedic’ museum.
That the present venture has exposed what is arguably the world’s supreme depiction of a nude male figure to serious and needless risks is confirmed by the museum’s defence of its own great secrecy. As you report, its registrar boasted that ‘museums are good at mitigating risk’; that the loan needed undisclosed insurance; and that, if intercepted by thieves, ‘they would be unable to sell it’.
Reducing risk is not the same as eliminating or declining to incur it. Positively embracing risk by placing the sculpture on a lorry, a passenger aircraft (months after another was brought down by Russian-armed separatists in Eastern Europe) and another lorry, on each leg of the journey, can only be seen as a failure of imagination and a dereliction of duty on the part of the museum’s trustees.”
ArtWatch UK Journal No. 29
In the introduction to Journal 29, (“Museums, Means and Menaces”) we noted that museums had once provided havens for art and solace to visitors; that they had been cherished for their distinctive historically-given holdings and that their staffs were (appropriately) answerable to trustees. Today, we complained, museums serve as platforms for conservators to strut their invasive stuff and as springboards for directors wishing to play impresario, broadcaster or global ambassador. Collections that constituted institutional raisons d’être, are now swappable, disrupt-able value-harvesting feasts. Trustees are reduced to helpmeet enablers of directorial “visions”. No longer content to hold, display and study, museums crave growth, action, crowds and corporately branded income-generation. For works of art, actions spell danger as directors compete to beg, bribe and cajole so as to borrow and swap great art for transient but lucrative “dream” compilations. Today, even architecturally integral medieval glass and gilded bronze Renaissance door panels get shuttled around the international museum loans circus (- see Chartres’ Flying Windows).
We had supported the British Museum’s retention of the so-called Elgin Marbles for over a decade, in print and in public debates in New York, Athens and Brussels (- see Journals 19, 20, 25 and 26).
We complained that the loan had breached a two-centuries long honouring of the original terms of purchase which had required that the Parthenon carvings collection be kept intact within the museum and that this state be regarded as inviolable. We had learned that the British Museum’s (supine) trustees, having already conferred an effective vote of confidence in Putin’s Russia just months after that country had annexed the Crimea, and Russian-armed separatists in eastern Ukraine had destroyed a Malaysian Airlines Boeing with a loss of 298 lives, including around 100 children (see Journal 29 cover above), were reportedly considering a further three loans to other “suitable” museums. This declared intention gave the lie to suggestions that the loan to St Petersburg had been an exceptional case made in celebration of the Hermitage Museum’s 250th anniversary. Given that a key consideration in ArtWatch UK’s support of the museum’s retention of the Parthenon carvings had been their relative safety in the museum, the undiscussed action and reversal of policy meant that it had become impossible for us to maintain that support. Now, in the light of Mikhail Piotrovksy’s disclosure, it is surely time for the Trustees of the British Museum to cease sheltering behind the unfounded statements of its spokespeople and disclose the route by which a manoeuvre to evade the possible processes of European law was made. The Trustees might also make clear whether the provocative Parthenon loans policy initiated by the previous director is to be maintained under the new director.
Michael Daley, 9 March 2016
THE FATE OF SCULPTURES AT: 1) The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 2) The British Museum; 3) The National Museum of Kolkata; 4) The Academy of Art in Perugia; And, the Burrell Collection next?
STOP PRESS: On Tuesday January 21st the Burrell Collection (Lending and Borrowing) (Scotland) was passed in the Scottish Parliament without a vote. Barely half a dozen MSPs attended. They unanimously supported the Bill (although one called for some published account of the proposed £45m development plan). There is no minimum number of votes necessary for a bill to gain approval.
Neil MacGregor and Thomas Campbell, the directors respectively of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will now be able to make arrangements for the first two stops in the planned international tour of plum Burrell works to help raise £45m to repair and refurbish the Burrell Collection building, the roof of which has been left leaking for decades. The desultory non-debate took place during an international spate of damaged sculptures.
Accident at Perugia
As we reported on 14 October 2013, when Canova’s sculpture The Killing of Priam was being detached from the wall of the Academy of Art in Perugia to be shipped to an exhibition at Assisi, just 24 kilometres away, it was dropped and smashed beyond repair (as Tomaso Montanari had recently disclosed). The removal operation was headed by the shipping company Alessandro Maggi di Pietrasanta.
Accident at Kolkata
On 14 January this year, the Art Newspaper reported another catastrophic accident, this time at the National Museum of Kolkata where a rare 2,000 years old carved lion was dropped and smashed when being moved within the museum during renovation (see Figs. 1 and 2). The Art Newspaper was quick to claim that the accident “highlighted a shocking lack of professional procedures for handling antiquities at Indian museums” but many major well-resourced and staffed western museums have proved accident-prone in their treatment of sculptures in recent years – and in one respect, as discussed below, the Kolkata museum procedures would seem superior.
Accidents at the British Museum
Consider first the record of the British Museum. In the 2007 book “The Museum: Behind the scenes at the British Museum” (written to accompany a fawning ten-part BBC television series), it is said that:
“Sending precious ancient objects around the world is all very well in theory, but in reality it’s a massive operation fraught with practical and official difficulties. Before any loan is considered, the British Museum has to be certain that the destination museum can provide the right conditions and security. ‘We can only lend responsibly’, says Neil MacGregor. ‘The museums we’re sending to have to be able to ensure their safety. Beijing now has a museum that can accept international loans: it’s new, and it reaches international standards, and it’s very pleasing that they chose to open it with an exhibition of British Museum treasures. Shanghai, being a more cosmopolitan city, has had a good museum for a long time – and there are places opening up in the Chinese provinces that we’ll be happy to work with. It’s easier and safer to transport these big, valuable objects now but it’s just as important to be certain that they’ll be safe at the other end.’”
With regard to safety, as we reported on 6-8 September, when, in 2006, the British Museum packed the peerless and desperately fragile Nimrud Palace alabaster relief carvings (see Figs. 8 and 9) and sent them all by lorry to Luxembourg from where they were flown to Shanghai in two cargo Jets (which broke their 11 hours flights with a stopover in Azerbaijan), it was discovered on arrival that the recipient museum’s doorways were too low. No one, it seems, had thought to measure either the doors or the packing cases.
It was further discovered that the host museum’s lifts were inadequate. In consequence, the crated carvings had to be “rolled in through the front door”. This meant “that we had to get a mobile crane to get them up the stairs. Even then we had to unpack three of the modules to get a bit more clearance”, said the British Museum’s senior heavy-objects handler, Darrel Day, in one of the museum’s self-promotional television programmes (see “The Museum”, BBC2, 2007).
When the collection was finally unpacked it was found that “a few little conservation things had to be done.” The injuries have not been identified and no photographs of them have been published. When crated Chinese terra cotta warriors arrived on loan at the British Museum, they in turn would not pass through the door of the reading room – even when the door’s frame was removed.
Accidents at the Metropolitan Museum
As for the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Burrell Trustees will have further grounds for qualms when considering authorisation of loan requests to that venue. In 2008 an Andrea della Robbia terra cotta, St. Michael the Archangel, fell from the walls and smashed (see Fig. 4). So far as we know, it has not yet been repaired and returned to view.
Six years earlier, in 2002, a much larger and art historically more important sculpture, Tullio Lombardo’s life-sized carved marble Adam (Fig. 6) – the first monumental, classically inspired nude of the Renaissance – also fell to the ground and smashed into many pieces (see Fig. 7). It did so when its stand collapsed. We must assume that like the Andrea della Robbia, this work, too, has still not been repaired and returned to the gallery. On 28 January 2010, Randy Kennedy reported in the New York Times that neither of the Met’s smashed Renaissance sculptures were back on view (“Despite Assurances, Met Finds Artworks Aren’t restored Overnight”). The Museum’s press office has not responded to either of our inquiries last week on the present condition and whereabouts of the two Renaissance sculptures. At the time of its collapse in 2002, the Met said that the Lombardo would be back on display in two years time. Fortunately, both of these accidents occurred after hours and when no visitors were present. In both cases no museum staff witnessed the accidents.
Unlike the Kolkata Museum (and the National Gallery in London, which supplied ArtWatch with photographs of the painted panel by Beccafumi which was dropped and smashed when being dismounted from a temporary exhibition within the gallery), the Met permitted no photographs to be taken of the Tullio Lombardo sculpture, which witnesses reported to have been smashed into hundreds of pieces.
The Met defends both that original suppression of evidence and the continuing secrecy surrounding the two restorations. In January 2010, Randy Kennedy reported that the unusual seclusion in which the Lombardo restoration was being carried out had generated suspicions that the sculpture is beyond repair. This lack of institutional transparency was defended by the chairman of the museum’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts, Ian Wardropper, on the grounds that seeing images of broken sculptures would be “detrimental to museumgoers’ ability to appreciate such pieces once repaired”. Mr Wardropper suggested on that occasion that the work was probably three years from re-emerging and he attributed the increasing length of time to an original decision to restore the statue “in the most meticulous and durable way possible.”
The Met believes itself to have been hampered in its goal, Mr Kennedy reported, because “few pristine life-size museum marbles like the Adam have ever shattered, so reliable technical information about restoring one is limited.” Nonetheless, Mr Wardropper was bullish about the significance of the protracted restoration. A large insurance pay-out had been made (the size of which the Met also declines to disclose), and it was decided to use this money for a monumental restoration research project on the best means of repairing smashed carvings.
It has been promised that at the restoration’s end, the repaired and cleaned work will be unveiled as the centrepiece of a special exhibition to be housed in a new gallery dedicated to the Venetian Renaissance. That the work itself is of great art historical and artistic significance is not in dispute (see comments at Fig. 6). At the same time, consideration might be given to the artful propagandistic means by which museums can contrive to present the eventual recovery of needlessly or carelessly lost or damaged works as Public Relations Triumphs – see “Questions and Grey Answers on the Tate Gallery’s recovered Turners”.
In January 2010 the Met’s then new director, Thomas P. Campbell, said that after initial doubts he fully supported the lengthy restoration: “The sculpture is 500 years old. Whether it’s off display for eight years rather than five is insignificant.” The sculpture is now at least 521 years old and has been off display for twelve years. We are told that research carried out on the safest means of pinning fragments of marble together has established that the most commonly used material – stainless steel – has the great disadvantage of having greatly more tensile strength than the marble itself. It is not clear why this “discovery” required such lengthy and expensive research: it has long been recognised that the iron pins used to re-assemble the Parthenon during its 1930s restoration had resulted in fractures of the marble, either as a result of earth tremors or the expansion of the iron through rusting (the restorers had not followed the ancient Greek practice of encasing the iron in lead to prevent corrosion). The consequence of using steel (or titanium, as is now being used on the Parthenon) for pinning today, is that when sculptures are next dropped or severely shaken, the pins can shatter the marble from within, introducing many more and greatly more serious injuries. It should, therefore, go without saying that moving stone works that have been repaired with metal pins inescapably compounds the risks.
Even if the vote in the Scottish Parliament should go in favour of Glasgow Life’s attempt to overturn Burrell’s wishes and binding instructions against foreign travels, the trustees of his collection might nonetheless, when considering authorising a loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reflect on the fact that the Lombardo sculpture was smashed only because (as we had reported in the ArtWatch UK Journal 17 in 2002) it had been removed in 2000 from the cherry-wood pedestal on which it had (presumably) stood since its 1936 acquisition by the Met, and placed on a modern conservation-standard base and shallow plinth constructed with MDO (Medium Density Overlay Plywood). At that time, the then director, Philippe de Montebello, promised that, after an anticipated two years restoration, “The figure will stand again on a solid pedestal and, frankly, only the cognoscenti will know.” A dozen years on, that claim has yet to be tested. What can be said, is that the sculptures at the Burrell Collection presently stand securely on wonderfully stable stone bases (see Figs. 11 and 12) and, as ArtWatch pointed out to the Scottish Parliamentary hearing on September 19th, they would remain safely so if “as we most strongly urge, the Parliament rejects the request to overturn Burrell’s still perfectly well-founded prohibition on foreign travels for works in collection.”
Michael Daley
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
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Bubbles burst.
A few years ago a director at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was chided for producing blockbusters that bust no blocks. Today, aside from its catering and retailing outlets, that museum – which once advertised itself as “An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached” – has a department exclusively dedicated to the production of special exhibitions. It generates eight exhibitions a year with a further fifteen travelling around the world at any one time (see “The world is her oyster”, in the Autumn/Winter 2013, V&A Magazine). As more and more of Art’s Flying Dutchmen encircle the globe, an awful lot of holes are appearing in the collections of great museums – as at the Louvre, as Didier Rykner has eloquently demonstrated (“The Louvre Invents the Gruyère Museum” ). This development is perverse as well as regrettable: a chief defence that museums make when seeking funding for expensive acquisitions is that they are needed to fill crucial gaps in a collection.
At the British Museum the number of loans (and therefore holes) doubled between 1985 and 2000, in which year 214 objects or groups of objects were loaned. That was for starters. In 2008, under its present globe-trotting director, Neil Macgregor, the museum got 2,500 objects “on the road” in Britain alone. In a submission this year to the Scottish Parliament, Mr MacGregor boasted that between 2003 and 2013 the museum had loaned over “over 30,000 (many very fragile)” objects, with only eight injuries. In 2006 the BM packed 160,000 visitors in three months into a (physically) small exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings, at £10 a head (plus takings from the catering and retailing outlets). Mr MacGregor ruefully claimed that three times as many tickets could have been sold had space permitted. The following year he announced plans for a £100m expansion of the British Museum that was reportedly triggered because it had had to turn down a unique chance “to show off” the largest collection of Tutankhamun treasures ever seen in the west (Evening Standard, 6 July 2007), works which went instead to the former Millennium Dome, now re-branded as “02”.
It would seem that nothing in museums is now safe from this international exhibitions jamboree – no work plays too important a role within a collection, or is too fragile, or too unwieldy, to prevent curators from taking a gamble with its welfare (in hope of reciprocal loans and a curatorial buzz). The Metropolitan Museum in New York is one of the most voracious recipient/organisers of exhibitions. It needs to be. Its special exhibitions, which are free, are the biggest justification for the museum’s whopping “recommended” $25 entrance charge (- the legality of which is under challenge). As we have seen, the present director of the Metropolitan, Thomas Campbell, once boasted that only his museum could have shaken-down (“Item: The Met’s Strong-arming of Reluctant Lenders”) other great art institutions to get them to part with the fabulous Renaissance tapestries that were sent to a special show in New York.
The Metropolitan Museum will likely be the first international stop (after a six months stay-over at the British Museum) for a long-planned show of plum works from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow that will take place should the Scottish Parliament oblige the Glasgow City Council by over-turning the prohibitions in Sir William Burrell’s bequest on all foreign loans and vulnerable works within Britain.
Next October in New York, the Museum of Modern Art will host a show of some of the most fragile and difficult-to-transport works of modernism. As Martin Bailey reports in the current Art Newspaper, (“Journey at Snail’s pace”) Henri Matisse’s monumental 1953 paper collage, The Snail, is to leave the Tate for the first time since the gallery bought it more than 50 years ago. It will be a star exhibit in “Henri Matisse: the Cut-Outs”, at Tate Modern next April, that will include its sister works, Memory of Oceania, 1953, and Large Composition with Masks, before travelling to MOMA in New York. Although the itinerary is set, what is not yet clear, Bailey discloses, is how the Tate’s giant and fragile work will travel or even how it will be be packed:
“The problem of how to transport the huge work, which measures nearly three square metres, has plagued conservators for years. Paris’s Grand Palais asked to borrow the work for a major retrospective on the artist in 1970, but was refused because of the risks associated with transporting it. Its original late-1960s glazing is being replaced with laminated glass, which will reduce the risk of damage during transportation. However, laminated glass is heavy: with its frame, the work will weigh around 300kg. If the collage is set at a 45° angle within a crate, it will fit more easily through doorways, but if the work is transported flat, it will need a case measuring around four square metres.”
Those keenest to lend and borrow lean heavily on the relative safety of international aviation, but with these particular monumentally large but flimsily constructed works, Bailey discloses that a spokeswoman for the Tate was unwilling to discuss transport arrangements. He has discovered, however, that they might travel by sea because there are almost no cargo planes large enough to carry them, and because the exhibition’s sponsor is… South Korea’s largest shipping company, Hanjin Shipping. Either way, as Nick Tinari of Barnes Watch has repeatedly testified, when Matisse’s mural La Danse was detached from its permanent home at the Barnes Foundation, Merion, and sent off at a 45° angle on an open flatbed truck to the first stop (the National Gallery of Art, Washington) of a world tour, it was to return home badly damaged.
Not only are museums gutting themselves to feed international loan exhibitions, they are, as our colleague in New York, Ruth Osborne, discusses (“The Dismemberment of the Louvre: Travels to Louvre Abu Dhabi promise damages and leave Parisian Museum-goers in the Lurch”), beginning to do so on an even greater scale as part of international “rebranding exercises” in which museum annexes are created in improbable but rich centres so that museums may present themselves as pan-national or global brands (- along with Gucci now read Guggenheim). A lot of money is being made and a lot of careers advanced. Some journalists effectively double as cheerleaders for the tourism-fuelled cultural arts economies of centres like London and New York. However, along with these booming arts economies, risks are rising – and not just with the works of art: those who blithely authorise streams of loans risk putting their own reputations on a block.
Michael Daley
NEWS UPDATE 26-11-13
The Guardian today carries this letter from ArtWatch UK:
“You illustrate the new exhibition of Turner seascapes at the National Maritime Museum with a giant reproduction of the artist’s now badly wrecked, many-times restored ‘Rockets and Blue Lights’ without issuing any kind of art conservation health warning (Eyewitness, 21.11.13). A clue to the extent to which this picture is no longer a remotely fair representation of Turner’s work is found in the picture’s full title, ‘Rockets and Blue lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water’ – for this was once a painting of two steamboats in distress, not of one. The now lost boat was recorded in a large chromolithographic copy of the painting that was commissioned in 1852, and in a photograph of 1896. Viewers who compare your present image with the recorded earlier states of the picture will likely marvel at the transformation by twentieth century restorers of the sky, and at the losses of storm-driven smoke from the funnels of the original pair of steamboats, one of which vessels has now disappeared under the waves along with its originally depicted crew members.”
In the ArtWatch UK Journal No 19 (Winter 2003), we carried an article by the artist Edmund Rucinski (“Ship lost at Clark. Many records feared missing. Establishment unfazed.”)
Unfazed the establishment was then – and, evidently, so remains today. Despite the disappearance of the second boat (and its smoke) in a recent cleaning, the owners of the Turner, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute of Williamstown, USA, had included the work in a travelling exhibition (“Turner – The Late Seascapes”) that ran at the Clark from June to November in 2003, before transferring across the Atlantic to the Manchester Art Gallery in January 2004 and then on to Glasgow in March 2004.
At a public lecture at the Clark Institute, on 2 August 2003, Edmund Rucinski (who knew of the 1852 chromolithographic copy shown right) had been astonished to hear the restorer, David Bull, claim that the picture had originally depicted a single boat and that the second, now-removed, boat had not been painted by Turner but was a restorer’s addition made, possibly for Lord Duveen around 1910. That claim slowly sank. When Rucinski spoke to David Bull and asked on what authority the second boat had been removed, he replied that it was on a photograph of a single-boated copy of the painting that had been supplied by the Clark Institute’s senior curator, Richard Rand.
On 15 October 2003, the Times’ arts correspondent, Dalya Alberge, reported that when asked how it had been established that the second boat could not have been painted by Turner, Mr Bull had said: “The answer is we don’t know. It was a general consensus.” Thus, what had been presented publicly as a historically verified certainty was downgraded within a couple of months to a best guess, collective assumption. That position was maintained for several months and was reiterated in the Manchester Evening News of 14 January 2004, which reported: “The American owners of the painting and the restorer…say a second boat may have been added by an early 20th century restorer”.
On 28 March 2004 the show moved to Glasgow and the Glasgow Herald reported that the Clark’s senior curator had said “We have always maintained that the original Turner had two boats”. The importance of heavy promotion for travelling exhibitions was demonstrated in October 2003 when the Tate, which had not taken part in the travelling exhibition, nonetheless issued a press release that ended with the following claim:
“One of the stars of the show is Turner’s dramatic “Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water”, 1840 which has recently undergone major conservation and is a loan from the Sterling Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA”.
In additions to newspaper reports of critisms of the restoration, many interventions were made by scholars, as below:
“Since ‘Slavers’ and ‘Rockets’…have ended up in collections geographically so close to each other, it struck Hamilton [James Hamilton, the show’s curator] as a good idea to show them together, arguing that Turner had intended them as a pair. The first snag was that Boston decided that ‘Slavers’ was too unstable to travel, even to Williamstown, so it was not in the show at all…But there is a danger that Turner has become a guaranteed crowd-puller, to be had recourse to at the expense of equally interesting but less certainly popular subjects. This is not a development to be welcomed, if only because Turner’s works are exceptionally vulnerable: the paintings, to the stresses of travel on their experimental construction; the watercolours to the exposure of light. He is not a resource that can be exploited indefinitely…”
~ The Turner scholar, Andrew Wilton, in a review for the Burlington Magazine, March 2004.
The ‘Slavers’ of which Wilton spoke, is Turner’s oil painting Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying – Typhoon coming on. In 2000 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which owns the painting found it to be damaged and “extremely unstable” on return from a loan to the Tate Gallery. Despite having been “glazed and sealed against changes in relative humidity, the picture [had] reacted significantly to the voyage” and lost flakes of paint. An unfazed (and institutionally unrepentant) Tate spokeswoman said in response to disclosure of the damage:
“It arrived here safely where it was examined thoroughly. Its condition was stable…However, Turner’s paintings are notorious for becoming unstable.”
Indeed they are. So why the incessant demands from temporary exhibition organisers to keep borrowing them? And why the systematic attempts to deceive the public into believing that the most restoration-wrecked pictures are the “stars” of the shows?
For our part, we have repeatedly drawn attention to these travel-induced injuries. On 24 October 2007 the Daily Telegraph carried this letter from ArtWatch UK:
“Sir – The Mellon Center’s decision (report, October 17) to break its own rule never to lend Turner’s fragile ‘Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed’ seems perverse: only seven years ago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston lent its Turner ‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and the dying, Typhoon coming on’ to the Tate. On its return to Boston, that painting was found to have suffered losses of paint and to be in an ‘extremely unstable’ condition. A Tate spokeswoman said: ‘It arrived here safely…Its condition was stable…However, Turner’s paintings are notorious for becoming unstable.’ This being so, why are trustees and curators prepared to take such risks with priceless works of art?”
Clearly, the question still stands.
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
A Poor Day of Remembrance for Burrell
In June ArtWatch UK was invited (as “campaigners for the protection of works of art”) to give evidence at a hearing at the Scottish Parliament on a private bill to overturn the prohibition on foreign loans from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The experience was both heartening and depressing.
The transparency of the Scottish Parliament’s procedures could not be faulted and we have rarely enjoyed such courtesy and assistance in making our case, or of proceeding with such comprehensive documentation to hand. Our written submissions to the committee and a number of items of additional information were readily accepted into consideration (as were those of colleagues in Donor Watch and Barnes Watch) and made available online. The witness hearings have been televised and their transcripts published online. The testimonies given at the hearing of 9 September are discussed below by Selby Whittingham of Donor Watch. Those given on 19 September are discussed opposite. (The filmed record of the latter can be seen on YouTube.) The record of what was said by whom of which interest group is there for all to see.
We were impressed, too, by the vigour and vigilance of the Scottish press. The Sunday Times (Scotland) journalist, Mark Macaskill, for example, had done what the Scottish Parliament, the Glasgow Council’s many tiers of cultural agencies, and – shamefully – the Burrell trustees themselves, had all failed to do – locate and heed (6 November 2013) the views of one of Sir William Burrell’s descendants: “Mona Dickinson, who lives in Evedon, Lincolnshire, said neither she, nor the wider family, had been consulted by the council or the trustees of the Burrell Collection. ‘I rather suspect they have tried to smuggle this through’, she said yesterday.” This intervention would not have been lost on the Art Fund’s director of development, Amy Ross, who argued in October’s Museums Journal that where no family members survive who might agree to renegotiate a bequest’s terms, existing arrangements should stand, for fear of clear breaches of trust dissuading others from making future bequests. Ms Dickinson’s opposition to the proposed overturning of Burrell’s terms of her ancestor’s bequest could not have been firmer or clearer: “Glasgow Council obviously thinks it can get the bill ratified this time. I’m sure it thinks sending some of the collection overseas will make money and attract publicity. But this debate was thoroughly rehearsed in 1997. Experts warned then, as now, that every time you wrap and unwrap a tapestry, some sort of damage can occur. It is inevitable.”
The hearing in which we gave evidence took place on 19 September under the committee set up to scrutinise the BURRELL COLLECTION (LENDING AND BORROWING) (SCOTLAND) BILL. We had assumed that consideration was being given to a proposal to over-ride the terms of Sir William Burrell’s bequest but learned, rather, that concrete arrangements were already underway to lend the collection’s works to a succession of venues within Britain and abroad even though this operation (known as “The Tour”) expressly ran against Burrell’s clear wishes and instructions, as set out in both his will and an agreement with the City of Glasgow. It began to seem as if the Scottish Parliament (which the comedian Billy Connolly dubbed a “Wee pretendy parliament”) was in danger of being bounced by an invitation from a big city council not to thwart a linked series of major and mutually dependent projects already set in train and fronted by a co-opted assembly of influential art world players in a new organisation – “Burrell Renaissance” – created to drive the not-authorised plans along.
It had not been reassuring that on the day of the 9 September hearing, the Convener of the scrutinising committee, Joan McAlpine, (SNP), a journalist on The Daily Record, had told The Scotsman that plans were already in motion through Glasgow Life (which she sees as “the arms-length organisation which manages the Burrell”) to send part of the Burrell Collection to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and that these provided “an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the collection, the city and Scotland”. Nonetheless, she assured the newspaper, her committee had an “open mind”. It certainly appeared that, under the committee members’ interrogations, the case for the (prospective) enterprise had repeatedly fallen apart. The public discomfitting of the enigmatic Glaswegian director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, drew from him both an insistence on an earlier “neutrality” that had escaped some commentators and an impassioned espousal of the present attempt – to which he is party as a co-opted adviser – to overturn Burrell’s terms.
It became apparent during the hearings of 9 September, for example, that the sums being sought (£15m here, £15m there) had the precision of little more than a bureaucrat’s back-of-an-envelope wish list. It had further emerged that in little over a decade there had been a tenfold increase in the claimed cost of remedying the Burrell Collection’s leaky building. The fact that rectifying the Council’s long-standing neglect of the building (the roof of which had leaked from virtually its first days) was said to require such huge and rounded sums – as well as the closure of the collection for no less than four years – was itself presented as a justification for breaching Burrell’s terms and sending his works abroad as revenue-raisers and civic/national flag-wavers. In 2001 the estimated bill for repairing the roof was put at £1.75 million. With further sums allotted to upgrade the museum’s plant, retail and display and exhibition areas, the total was said to be “likely in the region of £4 to £5 million.” Today, the latter is put at between £40 and £45 million. No explanation was given for this staggering inflation.
Because of the clarity and force of Burrell’s explicit wishes and terms of bequest, it had been conceded that no possibility exists of their being overturned or “re-interpreted” in the courts: “As there is no legal remedy which would allow all the restrictions on lending and borrowing to be relaxed, Glasgow City Council must pursue a private bill in order to achieve this end”. If successful, the Council and its cultural satellites would not only breach Burrell’s prohibition on foreign loans but also those against loans within Britain of entire categories of vulnerable works, thereby creating not just a precedent for further general subversions of benefactors’ wishes and terms, but also a potentially lethal one for benefactors’ attempts to protect their art from being subjected to needless risks.
The extent to which, as previously described, all of the arts and sport have been brought under firm political control in Glasgow is remarkable and might be thought unfortunate. The two spheres are administered by an entity known as “Glasgow Life”, which is both a charity and a company with the formal title “Culture and Sport Glasgow”. The directors and trustees of Glasgow Life are appointed by the Council – and its chair is the deputy leader of Glasgow City Council, Councillor Archie Graham. Glasgow City Council manages all of the City’s museums and galleries through this body. In the case of the Burrell Collection, Burrell Renaissance has been created with a chairman who is also a member of Glasgow Life’s own, Council-appointed board of directors. At the bottom of this interlocking edifice is to be found the seemingly ineffectual Trustees of the bequeathed collection (- playing a “long-stop” role, in the chairman’s words). As for the Collection’s curators, when we attempted (through Glasgow Life) to meet them at the museum on September 18th we were met instead by three Glasgow Life officers.
Now we know better: the Committee is today recommending that Burrell’s prohibition be over-turned and that Glasgow Council’s wishes be met in full. The locked-in cash value of a fabulous artistic inheritance gifted to the people of Glasgow may now be harvested internationally by an administration that has brought the collection’s home to a shameful level of dereliction as it indulged itself elsewhere with expensive “Grand Projects”. Yet another tranche of hitherto well-preserved works will be consigned to the unvirtuous conservation cycle as works get “conserved” so as to be made “fit-to-travel” and then “re-conserved” to put them right on their return from their ordeals – if they return, that is, and are not filched en route (see right). The Committee has placed its faith in assurances given by the over-turners. We cannot share it.
THE BURRELL COMMITTEE HEARING OF 9 SEPTEMBER 2013
The Committee: Joan McAlpine (SNP) (Convener); Jackson Carlaw (Con); Mark Griffon (Lab); and, Gordon MacDonald (SNP). The Witnesses: Alan Eccles LLP; Cllr Archie Graham (Glasgow City Council Deputy Leader and Glasgow Life Chairperson); Sir Angus Grossart (Glasgow Life, Independent Director); Dr Bridget McConnell (Glasgow Life, Chief Executive); Hon. Christopher McLaren (Samuel Courtauld Trust, Chairman); Ben Thompson (National Galleries of Scotland, Chairman of Trustees); Jeremy Warren (Wallace Collection, Collections and Academic Director).
THE BURRELL COMMITTEE HEARING OF 19 SEPTEMBER 2013
The Committee: Joan McAlpine (SNP) (Convener); Jackson Carlaw (Con); Mark Griffon (Lab); and, Gordon MacDonald (SNP) (not present). The Witnesses:Michael Daley (ArtWatch UK); Prof. Hope Gretton (University of Edinburgh); Sir Peter Hutchison (Charirman, Burrell Trustees); Frances Lennard (Centre for Textile Conservation and technical Art History); Robert Taylor (Bannatyne Kirkwood France & Co); Peter Wilkinson (Constantine).
Secrecy, Transparency and Equivocations
Dr Whittingham discusses the September 9th hearing:
Ben Thomson for the National Galleries of Scotland on the subject of wills typifies those who want to have their cake and eat it. They profess fidelity to them to encourage future donors, but in practice think that they need not (sometimes/always) be followed. This contradiction is squared by arguing that the donor, if alive, would (mirabile dictu!) be someone of entirely the same opinions as the curator and would not only agree to the changes, but heartily advocate them! (So here Sir Angus Grossart on Burrell, 19; Hon. Christopher McLaren on Lord Lee of Fareham, 60-1).
Thomson’s equivocations are hard to understand, as he says that the NG of S adheres to conditions which they think are either absurd (their former Director, Sir Tim Clifford, derisively listed some in a radio programme in which I took part) or outdated – the latter in the case of the Vaughan Bequest of Turner watercolours, an example which must be awkward for advocates of the Burrell Bill.
The Hon. Christopher McLaren for the Samuel Courtauld Trust/Courtauld Gallery is much more gung-ho about lending and about overturning wills, admitting that they have done this in the case of the Seilern Bequest with the consent of the Charity Commission (47,60). He claims that no one has objected, but I did and I remember that Prof. Michael Hirst did.
In fact hard evidence is not given for many of the assertions and aims of those supporting the Bill. The financial benefits of tours are dubious. Whether they attract more visitors to the lending city is also unclear. The benefits to research are also debatable. The supporters say that loans promote it, whereas Jeremy Warren says that they take up curatorial time. When I first arrived at Manchester City Art Gallery, the committee chairman complained to me that the latter was the case.
Grossart says that the fact that Burrell lent to the 1901 Glasgow International exhibition shows that he was internationally minded (Grossart, 17). But that exhibition attracted visitors from abroad to Glasgow, just the opposite of what Grossart is advocating. The Chairperson of Glasgow Life (Cllr Archie Graham) states that Burrell was determined that his collection “should benefit the people of Glasgow” (14), whereas, Grossart says that “from a museums point of view, collections are left for the benefit of humanity” (17). No evidence is produced that this was Burrell’s aim or that it trumped his wish to benefit Glasgow. Of course supporters of the Bill argue that reciprocal inward loans benefit Glasgow, but again no evidence is produced that that was what Burrell wished. The promoters have conducted polls which show a majority is not opposed to the proposed change. But how was the question framed and how far did the respondents appreciate all the factors?
The Convener says that in the past Neil MacGregor opposed changing the will (33). But he has supported just the opposite. True, David Lister reported in The Independent (13.10.1997) that MacGregor, while maintaining “the need to respect the wishes of benefactors once they have been agreed by trustees”, was going to tell the Burrell Commission next day that the Museums & Galleries Act 1992 allowed some national Museums to ignore those wishes after 50 years. In fact he had stated that in the evidence submitted to the Commission on 1.8.1997. I can only imagine that he felt obliged to enunciate a general (and in practice meaningless) support for donors’ wishes as Director of the National Gallery, while in his heart having little sympathy with that. I remember attending a lecture at the Courtauld Institute years earlier in which he derided donors. Then in 1997-8 it was while he was Director that the National Gallery tried to persuade the Wallace to lend a Rubens contrary to the terms of the Wallace bequest. If he is now reluctant to give oral evidence to the committee, that would not be surprising. When I tried to tackle him in person on the subject of donors’ wills (at the AGM of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution), he made a quick exit.
As for the 1992 Act, it was a reiteration of those of 1883 and 1954. In 1883 The NG was acutely short of space and had an unbalanced and partly unwelcome collection. It was at a high tide of extreme Liberalism. The responsible Minister, George Shaw Lefevre, was “on the radical wing of the Liberal party” and was following the policy of a predecessor, Acton Smee Ayrton, “a former Treasury apparatchik recklessly determined on cost cutting” (Simon Thurley, Men from the Ministry, 2013, pp.31, 40). Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1882-4, Leonard Courtney, was another radical, who in 1916 supported the abortive Bill allowing the National Gallery to sell pictures. (In that debate he explained the variation in 25 and 50 year terms after which wills could be breached, something which puzzles people to-day; House of Lords, 21.11.1916 ). Both the 1883 Act (passed after virtually no debate and uncritically copied since) and the 1916 Bill had the same aim – of ridding the National Gallery of part of the Turner Bequest. As such they have no relevance to the Burrell question.
Numbers of works in collections are adduced as an argument for lending, on the grounds that there is not space to show most. Thus the Burrell can only display 2,000 out of 9,000 items (25). The National Galleries of Scotland have 100,000 items (44). These figures are meaningless unless broken down into those for works (a) which cannot usually be shown for conservation reasons (b) which are of little interest (c) which are the key ones. It is of course the last that foreigners want to borrow, and which (if not on loan) attract visitors to the home museum. For 150 years the figure of 30,000 or so works has been used by those wanting to argue for splitting up and loaning the Turner Bequest, a wholly misleading and nonsensical figure when one comes to exhibiting it and realises that there are only 20-40 key works that can be shown constantly.
Jeremy Warren admirably puts the case against undoing Burrell’s lending conditions (48-52). On the Wallace’s own record, he refers to the refusal to lend its Rubens landscape to the National Gallery in 1998 despite the pressure to do so from the latter. Warren’s evidence should be accorded great weight also because the Wallace Collection is the museum among those cited most analogous to the Burrell Collection.
The Hon. Christopher McLaren says that he and Warren, contrary to appearances, don’t really disagree, as he has recruited Dame Rosalind Savill to the Samuel Courtauld Trust (56). That begs the question of how far Warren and Savill agree (her somewhat nuanced views were briefly reported by David Lister in The Independent, 16.4.1997). It was under Savill that the Wallace held the Freud and Hirst exhibitions. Was she overpowered by Freud’s charm and forcefulness or did she really believe in her heart that showing his work in the midst of Wallace’s was compatible with the spirit of Lady Wallace’s stipulation that the collection be kept unmixed?
McLaren argues that what matters is the spirit and not the detail (47). Of course disregarding the letter for the spirit conveniently allows the woolly subjectivism which is so often employed to overturn donors’ stipulations. In the case of the Lane Bequest, the National Gallery stuck like a limpet to the letter of the law in disregard of what a House of Commons committee judged was Lane’s actual intention. Ironically it was said that under Scottish rather than English law Lane’s un-witnessed codicil giving his collection to Dublin rather than to London would have been legally valid. MacGregor naturally favoured the National Gallery view, supported by a false understanding of the history, which I had to correct in the columns of the Museums Journal.
McLaren’s view of Lord Lee (60-61) is hard to reconcile with Lee’s opposition in the House of Lords and The Times in 1930 to the British Museum & National Gallery (Overseas Loans) Bill. Lee’s opposition nearly provoked a physical attack on him in the Lords by the proponent of the Bill, Lord d’Abernon! His statement of the risks of travel was reported at length in The Times (16-17.12.1930) and would surely have influenced the views of Burrell. The Bill was opposed by the BM, for which Lord Hanworth, Master of the Rolls, spoke. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, another BM trustee, gave three reasons for opposition: 1. Disturbance of study. 2. Danger of damage. 3. Difficulty of resisting pressure to lend. The BM was dropped from inclusion when the National Gallery (Overseas Loans) Bill was introduced in 1935. This and the exclusion of the BM from subsequent Bills constitutes an awkward fact for Neil MacGregor. The 27th Earl of Crawford found fault with the 1935 as with the 1930 Bill. He argued that, if the object was to promote Britain abroad, that should be done by British art, leaving the restrictions on lending foreign art, which was what was agreed. Mention has been made of art as a tool of diplomacy. Of course art has been used for that from time immemorial, but as gifts. No doubt international relations have a part to play today, but only when other considerations do not militate against lending.
Attempts having failed in 1930 and 1935 to allow the loan abroad of foreign art, in 1953 the 28th Earl of Crawford told the House of Lords that the Treasury was “asking you for the third time to change your minds” (24 November 1953, 466), though again only for the National Gallery and Tate. Again examples of damage done to works when on loan were cited – this time by MPs as well. The debates stretched into a whole year and raised questions about various wills such as Sir Hugh Lane’s. Like other donors Lane changed his provisions over time, as did Burrell, who according to his secretary, Mrs Shiel in 1997, once thought of locating his museum in London. This has been used as an argument for not regarding donors’ final wishes as binding for ever on the reasoning that if they had lived longer they might have changed again. However donors such as Lane, Turner and Burrell had laid their plans over many years and settled on their final one after much thought, perhaps sometimes more thought than that given to the matter by those who wish to change their provisions. The advocates of changing wills might come to change their minds too.
Today’s wish to “liberate” collections (Grossart, 16), the belief that what matters is “getting the works out and about” (McLaren, 56) may in the future seem to be just a fashion, the consequences of which come to be regretted, in some cases too late. McLaren says that the modification of Seilern’s conditions did not remove his one against lending paintings on panel, which the Courtauld would have adhered to anyway (McLaren, 48). This is tantamount to saying that a donor’s wishes should only hold when they concur with those of the curators and trustees for the time being. It should be clear that the main advocates of this Bill in fact do not believe that donors should control their collections from beyond the grave except perhaps for a short time after their deaths, whether or not the collection had been accepted on that basis. Is retrospective legislation desirable?
McLaren says that no one has objected to the changes made by the Courtauld. But the general public will not be aware of such changes. I cannot think of any recent museum catalogue or guide which states the donor’s conditions, much less any changes made to them by the museum. The old catalogues of the Wallace Collection, reprinted in successive editions over many decades, did, but that was unique. The V&A went further in setting up boards giving the conditions of gifts such as that of Sheepshanks, but it is hard now to discover the terms under which many of its main bequests were given. When I suggested some time ago that it would be easy to give these on the museum’s website, I was told that that would be too much trouble. That trouble would arise from the public knowing too much was clearly the unstated thought. The art world in general is shrouded in secrecy. Moves to greater transparency such as the Tate’s publishing the minutes of its board meetings online end in farce when one sees how much is deleted first. Dr Penny has asked for his submission to this committee to be removed from the website and has said that he will reveal details of damage to works of which he knows only under the cloak of the greatest secrecy. In such a state of affairs one cannot have much faith in museum assertions about damage or anything else unless these are closely challenged. Meanwhile curators commenting on a report on the Burrell hearings in the Museums Journal find it advisable to do so anonymously.
Statistics are also sometimes dubious. Thus Ben Thomson states that the Burrell exhibition at the Piers Art Centre at Stromness was visited by 80% of local residents (54). How local? Did they pay or get in free and in the latter case how were they counted? Is he talking about the total number of visitors or of visits?
Reference is made to maintaining or increasing the reputation of museums. In the case of Warren reputation among potential donors seems to be what is meant (49). In the case of the others the reputation of the curators among their colleagues round the world. It is doubtful if the wider public is much influenced by these considerations. A museum’s reputation may be damaged more directly when visitors go to it and are disappointed in their expectation of seeing key works which turn out to be out on loan. Again this may affect only a minority. Mention is made of the Cluny Museum in Paris, which has started lending abroad (Grossart, 22-3). That has lent its famed Unicorn tapestries to Japan. When I checked the first 50 (out of 800) visitors’ comments on the museum on TripAdvisor’s website many mention their absence, but only three thought their visit ruined thereby. Even so, is that an acceptable percentage?
Though I think the Bill makes an unnecessary and undesirable change, I am not wholly out of sympathy with its promoters. Julian Spalding, who initiated the move when he was Director of Glasgow museums, in May gave us a very stimulating talk, most of which I strongly agreed with and which consisted of suggestions probably too radical for many of the Bill’s supporters! When I was a curator at Manchester, I was frustrated by the “squirrelists” (Grossart, 22) and took the conservation concerns too lightly. Long thought about the issues has, I hope, made me wiser. Truly liberal views will take into account the dead and unborn as well as the living and current fashions. J.S. Mill recognised that opinions differ, which is why the peculiarities of donors’ provisions are to be cherished rather than dismissed. Otherwise museums will lose their individuality. Of the Burrell it is said that “the asset and unique selling point … is the imagination and vision of the man who created this incredible collection – that in itself is an amazing story” (McConnell 29) and that it constitutes a union of collection and building (McConnell 20).
I also have sympathy with Sir William Burrell’s Trustees. They opposed change in 1997 but now back it under the pressure of those who urge the dire necessity of raising money for the building (as their Chairman stated in the September 19 hearing). The same much contested argument was used to overturn the wishes of Dr Barnes, resulting in an even more fundamental departure from the donor’s ideas. The Trustees argue that they will have the final say in what should be lent abroad and some say in what should be lent in the UK. However they will be under the pressure to lend which Lords Crawford and others thought could be intolerable. Parts of the lending code are flabby (39-40). An object, it says, should not be lent for 5 years after it has returned from exhibition unless there are “exceptional circumstances”. Any circumstance can be exceptional for those bent on circumventing restrictions. Objects, it adds, shall not be on loan for longer than 3 years except for a tour longer than 3 years. That is no real restriction at all.
If the Committee is minded to back the Bill, the Code should be tightened up and the Trustees given final say in all cases. If a long tour is contemplated, the Bill should limit that to a one-off and thereafter strictly definite restrictions on time, repetition, material etc. should apply.
Selby Whittingham
Selby Whittingham is Secretary of the Watteau Society, Donor Watch and The Independent Turner Society.
UPDATE 19-11-13:
Restoration Damages Market Value
Philip Hook, a director and senior paintings specialist at Sotheby’s, has given further “from-inside-the-art trade” confirmation that restorations can damage the value of paintings. Writing in the Guardian (“Got anything in the red”, Arts, 19.11.13) on the present art market disconnect between sheer artistic quality and realised top prices, Hook gives good account of the Bling Factors driving markets fuelled by super-rich aesthetic chumps seeking instantly recognisable works above better but less familiar ones. He well describes the effects of atists’ biographical back-stories and the assistance given to prices by appealing subject matter: pretty women; animals that are depicted alive and not dead, and so forth. In discussing negative market forces, Mr Hook also cites the effects of picture restoration: “Condition is a factor. Paintings suffer and age over time, some more than others. Like human beings, some are subjected to cosmetic surgery. Where this has been too extensive, the price of a painting will be affected.” It is precisely for this reason that accidents suffered by loaned and borrowed works are so little reported. If paintings were required to be accompanied by log books which listed and described all known previous “conservation treatments”, owners might think twice about agreeing to take risks by lending works to travelling exhibitions.
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It is not clear how, without entrance charges, lending works to the British Museum might offset in part the estimated high costs of putting the Burrell Museum to rights during the period between 2016 and 2020 when its building is scheduled to be closed for already urgently needed repairs. During the 9 September Hearing, the Committee’s members showed distinct concerns about what might be termed “the business model” of The Tour. In fact, the revenue-raising capacity of The Tour seemed to disappear in a single question/answer exchange:
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Protecting the Burrell Collection ~ A Blast against Risk-Deniers
In a remarkable development the National Gallery’s director, Nicholas Penny, has served notice to the trustees of the Burrell Collection of the grave risks they would be undertaking if they were to loan the collection abroad against the terms of Sir William Burrell’s magnificent 1944 bequest to the city of Glasgow.
As the Herald Scotland reports (6 September), Dr Penny has attacked the “deplorable tendency” for museum staffs to deny the grave risks that are run when works of art are transported around the world. In his submission to the Scottish Parliament committee now considering the bill to overturn the terms of Burrell’s bequest and his specific prohibition on overseas loans (to which committee we will be appearing as a witness this month), Penny, who has had knowledge of 10 major accidents during his career in museums and galleries in Britain and the US, offered to give details of the cases, in confidence to a trustworthy individual to be nominated by the Scottish Government. News of this offer and of Penny’s views broke when Herald Scotland spotted an accidental posting of his submission on the Scottish Parliament’s website.
Unsurprisingly, Penny’s bombshell has caused consternation among those wishing to send the collection on tour during a refurbishment of the building in Pollok Park which is expected to take four years and cost £40m. (We have have expressed bemusement in the past at the nicely rounded figures of building restoration costs which so often come in at sums like… £40m.)
The body “Glasgow Life” which runs Glasgow’s museums is reported to have been “flabbergasted by this”. If it is surprising that a museum director should be outspoken on this sensitive subject which involves a number of art world vested interests, there can be no surprise to readers of this site about the reality of the risks and the adverse material consequences of which Penny complains. In honour of Artwatch International’s founder, the late Professor James Beck, the Autumn 2007 ArtWatch UK Journal (No 22) carried a thirteen pages long report on the dangers of art loans – “Blockbuster Exhibitions: the Hidden Costs and Perils”, by Michael Daley and Michael Savage. For the full text of the report, click on this PDF. (Michael Savage has posted a response to Penny’s intervention on his Grumpy Art Historian blog.) On 13 December 2010, in response to an appeal from Polish curators and conservators to help halt a further loan of Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (“An Appeal from Poland”), we disclosed the extent of an injury to a panel painting by Beccafumi that was dropped and smashed when being dismantled from a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery (see top, right). That photograph (and an internal report on the incident) had been given to Artwatch by Dr Penny when we commented in our Journal on news of the incident carried on the National Gallery’s website.
On 11 July 2011 we reported (“Questions and Grey Answers on the Tate Gallery’s recovered Turners”) on how the Tate had paid a £3.5m ransom to Serbian gangsters in order to recover two Turner paintings that had been stolen when sent (without a Tate courier) to a small, badly protected German gallery.
The Herald Scotland reports that Glasgow Life is proud to have “formed a partnership with the British Museum, one of the leading authorities on loaning items, to benefit from its expertise”.
It is true that under its present director, Neil MacGregor, the British Museum is a hyper-active dispatcher of art around the globe (- over 4,000 objects in 2006 alone). It should be appreciated, however, that practice does not make perfect in this hazardous arena. As described in our Journal 22 report, when the British Museum packed the peerless, desperately fragile Nimrud Palace alabaster relief carvings and sent them all to Shanghai in two cargo Jets (which broke their 16 hours flights with a stopover in Azerbaijan), it was discovered on arrival that the recipient museum’s low doorways were too low. No one, presumably, had thought to measure them first. It was further discovered that the host museum’s lifts were inadequate. In consequence, the crated carvings had to be “rolled in through the front door – which meant that we had to get a mobile crane to get them up the stairs”, the British Museum’s senior heavy-objects handler, Darren Day, explained in one of the museum’s self-promotional television programmes. When the collection was finally unpacked it was found that “a few little conservation things had to be done.” When crated Chinese terra cotta warriors arrived on loan at the British Museum, they, too, would not pass through the door of the reading room, even when the door’s frame was removed – some expertise?
A restorer in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has claimed that there is a professional concept of “acceptable potential loss” with regard to loans. As described in our 8 February 2011 post (“The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around”), since 2003 it has been a declared ambition of the European Commission to “facilitate”, “encourage”, “promote” and make “easy” the “mobility of art collections” within Europe. To this end, the EU urges that loaned works of art not be insured, on the extraordinary conviction that accidents can always be remedied: “in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”
The simpliste Eurocratic view of restoration is the more alarming because, travel accidents aside, with increased volumes and velocities of loans come an explosion of needless, often themselves destructive, conservation and restoration “treatments” that are undertaken prior to loan exhibitions as lenders seek to protect themselves by having their works “put in condition” for travel. This is done in order to be able to identify and establish (for insurance or blame-allocation purposes) the origin of subsequent injuries. Unfortunately, putting works into restorers hands in such bids to attain supposedly optimally secure condition for travelling itself presents hazards. We discussed one of the most spectacular examples of needless injury in our post of 8 January 2011. On that occasion an owner put his prized and beloved Renoir into the hands of a pair of leading restorers simply to lay a couple of small blisters and then to dispatch the picture from Washington to Paris. The restorers, without any authorisation, presumed to clean, reline (and wreck) the painting, Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, as the distraught owner, Duncan Phillips, later confessed. On arrival in Paris, the newly restored Renoir was at first rejected as a Renoir. Having long enjoyed pride of place in the home of the great collector, Phillips moved it on its return from Paris into an anteroom. Today it enjoys pride of a place in a hideous over-scaled modern extension to the delightful period house that Phillips bequeathed, along with his collection. The present administrators of the museum have refused all requests to inspect the records of treatment on that painting, and, generally seem rather more animated by mounting their own special exhibitions than in ministering to the original and perfectly self-sufficient collection:
“Intersections is a series of contemporary art projects that explores —as the title suggests— the intriguing intersections between old and new traditions, modern and contemporary art practices, and museum spaces and artistic interventions. Whether engaging with the permanent collection or diverse spaces in the museum, the projects suggest new relationships with their own surprises. “Many of the projects also riff on the nontraditional nature of the museum’s galleries, sometimes activating spaces that are not typical exhibition areas with art produced specifically for those locations.”
Burrell be warned. Awful as recent “developments” at the Phillips have been, the United States has witnessed an even greater betrayal of a bequest: the wresting of the entire contents of the Barnes Collection from its, also bequested, delightful purpose-built original home and grounds, in order to place it in a worse than awful modernist pile a few miles away, hard by a noisy polluting freeway in the centre of Philadelphia. The denouement of the Barnes Bequest hike began (as is proposed at the Burrell) with a vast international travelling exhibition. At the Barnes, as now at the Burrell, the jaunt was premised on the morally-coercive “conservation” justification of putting the building itself “into condition” on behalf of the great collection of works. Humbug has rarely appeared so rank. The specially commissioned “site specific” Matisse mural was detached from the walls of the museum, packed on a flat-bed, open truck – against all reassuring conservation-compatible promises – and carried at an angle (see photographs, right) to Washington. Nick Tinari, who is to submit testimony to the Burrell Inquiry, has informed ArtWatch “I can state unequivocally that damage was done on the tour to the Matisse mural, the Seurat Models and a Picasso. I have documentation for all three.” Tinari further points out that, as with the intended Burrell tour, the Barnes tour – which netted $7m – breached the benefactor’s express prohibition on foreign loans. Far from serving to make the collection safe, that earlier exercise paved the way to a full takeover. More generally, it served as a template for trustees everywhere who might wish to harvest cash value that is otherwise locked into permanently housed works of art.
Clearly, Dr Penny’s intervention addresses much more than the welfare of the Burrell Collection, precious and vulnerable though it is. It is greatly to Penny’s credit that he should have spoken in such frank (and brave) terms. It is also greatly to the credit of the Scottish Parliament that it should be engaging in such an open exercise before another art world horse may be induced to bolt.
Michael Daley
ADDENDUM
On 7 September, Herald Scotland reported the submission of written evidence made by Dr Selby Whittingham of Donor Watch:
“Dr Selby Whittingham, of Donor Watch, says in his submission: ‘There can be a case for departing from the terms of a bequest when those are incapable of being carried out wholly or safely … but that does not apply in the Burrell case in this instance.
‘This bill is a consequence of the current vogue for loan exhibitions and for using outward loans as barter for inward loans. This vogue is not wholly benign. It deprives visitors to a museum of works which they may expect to see. And we are not convinced that the transport of works of art is as free from hazard as the advocates of this measure optimistically maintain…'”
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