Looted art and struggles with its restitution
Where it all starts and why the story never ends?
What a shaky ground one steps in when it comes to discussing the inevitable yet so uncomfortable questions of the restitution of the works of art.
Wait, why returning something unlawfully taken away in the past could ever be labelled uncomfortable?
Isn’t it a perfect case where “common sense often makes a good law”, like the American jurist and politician William O. Douglas once said?
Perhaps, this bias of lawful/unlawful and appropriate/unethical has all the potential to become one of the most burning issues of the day in the art world.
Many countries faced those dark pages in their history when the private property of some was unequivocally declared a national treasure of the state [or, worse, simply stolen by that state’s officials].
What happened next is a real fork in the road.
The disastrous social and political catastrophes of the 20th century left tons of work on such cases for many generations to come.
WWI and WWII, Nazis and the Bolsheviks, who speeded up the dissolution of the Russian state in the 1917, became the main contributors to the list of losses and cruel expropriations.
Projects like Getty Provenance Index do a great deal of work in establishing the roots of all lost and looted art during those days.
[Alas, history repeats itself over and over again. One can’t escape the ghastly news coming daily from Afghanistan where the new self-proclaimed authorities fall into the same trap of expropriations, confiscations and negations that have once been an irrevocable part of the common European past].
And while the cases of restituted art confiscated under the Nazi regime are making headlines [at least, they take place], the state crimes committed in the days of the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Empire are still painfully kept buried in obscurity.
Last to know, first to go
The bestseller book of Selling Russia’s Treasures: The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art, 1917–1938 has been recently re-published in a new revised and updated edition [available only in the Russian language so far].
“Selling Russia’s Treasures documents one of the great cultural dramas of the twentieth century: the sale, by a cash-hungry Soviet government, of the artistic treasures accumulated by the Russian aristocracy [this concerned every social circle in fact — MV] over the centuries and nationalized after the October 1917 revolution. An astonishing variety of objects, from icons and illuminated manuscripts to Fabergé eggs and Old Master paintings, entered the collections of wealthy Westerners like Andrew Mellon and Armand Hammer in the 1920s and 30s.”
With a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky — the powerful Director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg for almost 30 years — the richly illustrated volume seems to shed enough light on the disastrous irreparable [and awfully underpriced in the most cases] sales of the treasures of the Russian museums abroad.
However, the question and the dutiful acknowledgment of the sources of how these treasures ended up in the state museums is still shamefully omitted.
Look at this photo from 1923.
Here one of the [numerous!] foreign guests of the Soviet State is actually trying on the Great Imperial Crown of the Russian Emperors with the orb and the sceptre in his hands!
What a disgraceful fairground attraction where the sacred symbols of your country’s power and historical continuity are traded as mere bells and whistles.
The most astonishing part of this vintage photograph is the erased faces of the state officials who were actually authorising [and organising] this three-ring circus in a malign desire to sell off the symbols of the past and get money fast for building the new utopian socialist state.
The faces are hidden, the names are protected, the traces of thousands of treasures are lost forever.
Luckily, the publication of such texts and archive materials makes a huge contribution to the attempt of analysing the questionable [to say the least] decisions of the past, most of which were covered by the quick-to-pass laws, acts and decrees authorising whatever required.
Exitus Acta Probat — the result validates the deeds when they need it to.
In the case of Russia [and some other post-Soviet block countries], the fundamental questions of “whom to begin with” and “where to stop” haven’t been taken off the table still.
How did most of the national treasures become ones? Who were their former owners that were forced to either leave their collections and flee the country or were simply robbed by authorities in a decree that literally made their private property stately owned?
It would be naive to dream of restituting the gems of Hermitage, Pushkin and dozens of other minor museums in Russia to the heirs of their original lawful owners.
The country that has never put the value of the private property as the basis for the ‘common wealth’ of the nation [whatever that means] couldn’t care less of the misfortune of those unlucky who lost everything under the weight of its rulers’ ambitions.
However, there is at least something that could be done in order to reinstate the fair sequence of events and pay a dutiful tribute to those who directly ‘invested’ in what would then become the national pride and treasure.
Unlike the proper provenance research and indications in the artwork labels in the museums worldwide, the history of private collecting in Russia hasn’t been acknowledged the way it should.
Whenever we wring our hands and once and again contemplate the awful losses and deaccessions of museum funds, let’s not forget those private individuals who were there first and whose art made the glory of these public collections.
The thorough attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ the original owners of the expropriated [looted and stolen, to put it bluntly] art must be the least yet the essential thing we could do to those whose names were elegantly forgotten and replaced by the grand labels of world-famous institutions.
Who were those people who lived before us and assembled brilliant works of art under their roofs? What were their missions? And how their works ended up in the museum?
If only we could be more transparent and officially tell these stories [set up exhibitions, highlight the provenance, etc.], then we would be more aware of what happened in the past and finally establish a solid foundation to confidently look ahead in the hopefully brighter future.
