Should museums hand back plundered art?
Alastair Sooke weighs up solutions to the inflammatory political problem of cultural ‘restitution’
In 2017, the bright-eyed, recently elected French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech addressing students in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Lasting almost two hours, it was meant to reset the relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa. Macron touched on lots of important issues, including terrorism, climate change, and, in a passage that made the hair of Western museum directors stand on end, culture. “I cannot accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France,” he declared, before calling on French museums to return that “heritage” within five years. He then underlined his point on Twitter: “African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums.”
“Prisonnier”: it was a provocative, emotive word, deployed to win over an African audience – and, for good or ill, the repercussions are still being felt today. Within months, Macron had invited Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist and writer, and Bénédicte Savoy, the French art historian, to explore his bold idea. In a lengthy report, submitted to Macron last November, they argued for the repatriation of many of the 90,000 sub-saharan artefacts they had identified in French museums.
Before long, champions of “restitution” (as the return of displaced cultural objects to their country of origin is known) were bandying about inflammatory phrases such as “museums of blood”, referring to institutions such as the British Museum, which owns thousands of African artefacts – including, controversially, the Benin Bronzes, looted by British forces in 1897. Last month, Jesus College, Cambridge announced that it would return a bronze sculpture of a cockerel plundered during that expedition. That’s one more object than France, which, according to The Art Newspaper, so far has not sent back a single item to Africa following the publication of the Sarr-savoy report – though earlier this week, during a visit to West Africa, Franck Riester, the French culture minister, pledged to return 26 artefacts, looted by the French in 1892, to Benin by 2021. Still, from the perspective of museum directors in Europe and North America, the report’s findings remain radioactive.
This autumn, Geoffrey Robertson, the human-rights barrister who is an advocate, with his colleague Amal Clooney, for returning the British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures to Greece, fuelled the fire by publishing Who Owns History?, a pithy, polemical book about the vast, complex, and sensitive subject of restitution. Ask any museum director about Macron’s remarks – or, indeed, mention Robertson’s name – and at once they will switch into defensive mode. Restitution, for them, is an ongoing source of tension, because, frankly, it presents an insoluble problem: a contested object, after all, cannot be in two places at once.
As David Cameron once put it during a visit to India, when asked if the enormous Koh-i-noor diamond, presented to Queen Victoria and now part of the Crown Jewels, should be returned: “If you say ‘yes’ to one [request], you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.” Given that the diamond is at the Tower of London, his remark was confusing – but the point still stands. Restitution seemingly offers an existential threat to so-called “universal” or “encyclopedic” museums that display different world cultures side by side, of which the British Museum is the paragon.
“What is fundamentally wrong is the claim that because they are ‘encyclopedic’, they are entitled to possession of cultural property plundered from other people,” Robertson told me recently. “In any advanced legal system, thieves must give back their loot, no matter how long ago it has been stolen or how well it has been kept.”
On paper, Robertson’s position sounds radical but compelling. So, are Western museums in danger of being hollowed out?
Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, rejects the suggestion that the “universal” museum is under threat. Unsurprisingly, he deplores Macron’s tweet about artefacts held captive in Europe: “That is not an adequate description of how these objects are being taken care of in museums, and how they are being made accessible and shared, and explored and researched.” Moreover, Fischer laments the insinuation that institutions such as the British Museum are “repositories of loot” – when, in fact, “very, very few objects in the collection come from that context”.
Rather, for Fischer, the British Museum, which was founded during the Enlightenment, in 1753
– ie before the rise of 19th-century imperialism – is an instrument of education, freely accessible to all, disseminating knowledge, and promoting understanding between peoples. Last year, it attracted
5.8 million visitors.
For Neil Macgregor, Fischer’s predecessor, “encyclopedic” museums should increasingly function as “lending libraries”. He acknowledges that some objects in British collections were taken in circumstances of “violent war, colonial conquest, plunder, loot”, but adds: “The question now is what you do with that – and how you get the maximum global benefit in a world that needs to understand each other’s pasts. The restitution debate is really saying that objects in place A should be in place B. The argument I’m making is that objects that tell you about the history of humanity should be exhibited in places C, D, E to Z, on a regular basis.”
According to Robertson, there has been a recent “surge” of restitution claims: “Macron’s declaration […] has given an impetus to these demands.” For now, though, Britain’s museum directors are refusing to budge. They argue that, for an artefact to be restituted, so many conditions must be met to ensure its future safety that the process is often unworkable. It would be unthinkable, say, to return an object to a country mired in civil war. “To have the cultural infrastructure – to have a museum – you need to be a place of peace and democracy,” says Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection in London.
Even lending prestigious artefacts can have unintended, harmful consequences. In 2010, the British Museum lent the ancient Persian Cyrus Cylinder to Iran. In his new book, Robertson claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the then Iranian president, “exploited the exhibition for propaganda purposes”. Earlier this year, Macgregor said that violent controversy at the time, over whether Iran should celebrate its pre-islamic history, resulted in the imprisonment of the national museum’s director.
Yet, in a small number of cases in Britain, should exceptions at least be considered? After all, most museums refuse to touch certain categories of artefact. Blood diamonds and elephant ivory are, rightly, considered beyond the pale. Moreover, everyone accepts that art looted by the Nazis should be returned to the descendants of the families from whom it was taken. Shouldn’t we apply similarly scrupulous standards to other spoils of war? The Parthenon sculptures don’t fall into this category. But what about the Benin Bronzes? Surely, it isn’t far-fetched to imagine a time when public opinion castigating the punitive actions of the British Army in the Kingdom of Benin, in modernday Nigeria, would compel Fischer’s successors to petition parliament to change the law, so museum trustees could “de-accession” – send back – the plundered plaques.
“‘Universal’ museums must conform with the morality of the modern world,” argues Robertson, “and not the amoral opinions at the time when cultural property was stolen or looted.”
To assuage fears that this would be the thin end of the wedge, any serious attempt at restitution would proceed cautiously, on a case-by-case basis, and refrain from hysteria. Thus, no one-size-fits-all precedent would be established. At the very least, says Robertson, museums should be more open about the brutal provenance of controversial items, and avoid “euphemisms” and “weasel words”.
However, this is just one opinion among many – and perhaps, conversely, it would be wrong to apply contemporary moral codes to historical events: until the 20th century, looting was customary in war. Ultimately, as the title of Robertson’s book suggests, the restitution debate comes down to the question of who “owns” the past. To Robertson, it is self-evident that, say, the Parthenon sculptures should belong to the descendants of Phidias and Pericles – the Greeks. For others, though, this sort of argument becomes snared in pernicious politics. “At what stage does a national narrative become a nationalist one?” asks Macgregor. “The further away the past gets, the harder that question about inheritance becomes.”
At the Wallace Collection, Bray’s “big fear” is that restituted artefacts may be “appropriated for political reasons”. “A museum should always remain neutral from politics,” he says, before showing me an impressive gold trophy head from Asante, in modern-day Ghana, taken by British soldiers during a war in 1873-74. Should it go back? “Objects, works of art, they all have a journey through history, a biography,” Bray tells me. “As long as you are open about that history, and how they’ve ended up in a museum – which, in the case of the Wallace Collection, is open to all, free of charge – I think they should stay there.”
According to Fischer, even Macron was playing politics in that speech in Ouagadougou. “Under his leadership, France has a very clear agenda,” Fischer says. “It’s no secret that Africa sits way up their list of priorities, when it comes to foreign policy. Macron links politics and culture more than many politicians. When he came to the UK [for last year’s Anglo-french summit at Sandhurst], he said France would lend Britain the Bayeux Tapestry.” So, Macron’s seemingly impeccable moral argument in favour of restitution may, in fact, be motivated by French foreign policy objectives.
This explains why the likes of Fischer and Macgregor still have faith in the “universal” museum, because it transcends nationalist self-interest. “In the end, the British Museum allows millions of people to engage with history and the interconnected cultures of the world,” Fischer says.
For Macgregor, the Enlightenment idea that history is not the “possession of one community” but a “shared inheritance” is more resonant than ever today, as “global consciousness is growing”. “The idea of a shared past,” he says, “is very important – and very strong.”
‘The further away the past gets, the harder the question about inheritance becomes’