The World's Looted Beauty: Who Owns Art?

I've just returned from a Baltic cruise that allowed me to indulge in a favorite activity: visiting art museums. This trip included stops at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg as well as the British Museum in London, both with impressive foreign-origin collections. Coincidentally, on the plane at the start of my journey, I watched the film "The Monuments Men" about American efforts to recover and return Nazi-looted art troves (racing Russian "trophy brigades" seeking to confiscate the purloined art). But the film, in focusing on Nazi villains, missed the more complex question of who really owns the world's art treasures. It's not a new problem. Consider, as a hypothetical, an antique Greek sculpture snatched by Russians from a German museum that had appropriated it in World War II from a French private collector, who had purchased it after its pillage by Napoleon in Italy, where it had long ago arrived as Roman spoils from Greece. Who owns it? Among current celebrated art squabbles is the Greek demand that the British Museum return famed sculptural friezes from the Parthenon. Various American museums, including the J. Paul Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also have been pressured in recent years into returning masterpieces with similar shady provenance to their countries of origin. Dealers, collectors and museums -- the art market -- can defend their profitable art transfers by arguing that vulnerable treasures must be removed from their origins to best preserve them from the poverty, corruption or war of "source" countries or individuals. Meanwhile, governments of "source" countries, many once victims of colonial looting, have begun to assert the claims of cultural heritage and national pride, and to seek the power and prestige boost from return of high-value art assets. Many of these disputes end in legal and political stalemate. Holland Cotter discussed the issue in a 2006 New York Times article "Who Owns Art?" and suggested a compromise in which museums and individual collectors become "keepers instead of owners of art, responsible for conserving it in the present, and responsible for letting it go when circumstances are auspicious to do so in the future." History supports the idea. Looted, exiled, cached or flaunted, great art has transcended time and possession by any single mortal or transient political power. We can at best strive to be good stewards in the present. But political and economic powers are stubbornly blind to history. Will the British Museum really hand over its famed Parthenon marbles now that there is a spiffy new museum in Athens? For more discussion, see Cotter's article at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/arts/artsspecial/29treasures.html?_r=0