You Can’t Go Home Again, Nefertiti

Nefertiti, 3,500 years ago, was Akhenaten’s chief wife. Her bust is the main attraction of the newly opened Neues Museum in Berlin. The Egyptians want it back.

Mona Lisa, five hundred years ago, was the only wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Her portrait by Leonardo da Vinci is the most famous painting in the world. The Italians have the good sense not to ask for it back. It got to the Louvre legally. If they did so, they would have to demand that every major museum in the world – and an unknowable number of private collectors – surrender all its Italian masterpieces.

Works of art may be where they are as the result of naked plundering, like seizing the Rosetta Stone, which Napoleon acquired during his Egyptian campaign, thereby enabling his scholars to decipher the hieroglyphs. Or their acquisition may have been a matter of negotiation, like the Elgin Marbles. Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, acquired sections of the Parthenon at a time when the Ottomans, who had owned Greece for centuries, had no idea of their cultural importance. And no interest in it. Lord Elgin did. He made it possible for millions of people to admire them in the two centuries since his day, well preserved in the British Museum, a world centre. In the Acropolis they would have crumbled. If the Greeks were to get them back they would put them in a museum. Compared to the British Museum all Greek museums are provincial.

There is one exception, when a demand for the return of a cultural property proved not to be unrealistic. That is a case in which the robbery was so crude, and so recent, that no one could defend it. A sixth-century B.C. Greek vase ended up in the Metropolitan Museum in New York after tomb robbers had dug it up outside Rome during the 1970s. It had been buried for thousands of years below what became modern Italy. Many centuries ago it had come into the possession of an Etruscan collector, a kind of ancient Lord Elgin, who lived on what is now the outskirts of Rome. Not a single Etruscan has survived to claim it as Etruscan patrimony. If the Americans allowed the Italians to claim it because they, the Italians, had had de facto possession of it (in the ground) for centuries, the British can say – and do say – they had de facto possession – and legal ownership to boot – of the Elgin Marbles for two hundred years, and that is what counts. Nationalistic arguments do not count.

In legal terms, the laws of the land apply. There was nothing illegal or exploitative in the German acquisition of Nerfertiti. If a work of art was acquired by a colonial power as a result of an act of looting at a time when imperialism, and therefore looting, was practiced by all the great powers, the world has to accept it, not for moral reasons – of course it was grossly immoral – but because any alternative policy would be unrealistic and unworkable. The truth is that works of art acquire squatter rights.

The age of imperialism is over. The Iraqis have every right to claim the art back that was stolen from their museums after the American invasion.

When such claims cannot stand up, as is usually the case, we can always comfort ourselves with the thought that in moral terms great works of art belong to all of humanity.

This is not an empty phrase.

Why, we may ask, should any objects necessarily reside in the modern nation-state controlling the plot of land where, at one time, perhaps thousands of years earlier, they came from, and whose population may have only a tenuous connection with the people who produced the art? The question goes to the heart of how culture operates in a global age.

The answer is – they shouldn’t.

This posting was inspired by Michael Kimmelman’s essay “Who Draws the Borders of Culture,” in The New York Times of May 4, 2010.