News from the art world
U can’t touch these
Dan Hicks is not the first intellectual to “criticise the British Museum for retaining stolen African treasures”, says Nicola Woolcock in The Times. But he may well be the one with the most unlikely celebrity fan. In a new book, The Brutish Museums, the Oxford archaeology professor argues that in displaying the spoils of empire, Western museums “have become vehicles for a militaristic vision of white supremacy”. He cites as a prime example the British Museum’s custodianship of the Benin Bronzes, a series of 900 brass plaques and sculptures seized in a British attack on present-day Nigeria in 1897. Since writing the book, Hicks has received support from an unexpected quarter: the rapper MC Hammer, best known for his 1990 hit U Can’t Touch This. The musician, who joined the academic for an online discussion last week, says that Hicks is “speaking the truth”. “Dan, your words brought tears to my eyes”, he wrote in his endorsement of the book. “I salute you.”
An Anglo-Irish agreement
In 1915, the Irish art collector Sir Hugh Lane was among the victims when the ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Atlantic, says Mark Brown in The Guardian. Lane had initially bequeathed his “breathtaking” collection of masterpieces by the likes of Manet, Monet and Degas to the National Gallery in London, but “evidently, he changed his mind”: a codicil stating his wish to leave the paintings to Ireland was later found in his desk, but as it was unwitnessed, “London exercised its legal right to have them”. This sparked a bitter dispute between Britain and Ireland. Now, the two nations are finally on the verge of compromise. Under new proposals, two groups of five paintings, including Renoir’s The Umbrellas and Manet’s Music in the Tuileries, will be rotated between the National Gallery and Dublin’s The Hugh Lane gallery for five-year stints. One of the works – Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day – was stolen from the Tate Gallery in 1956 by two students “intent on publicising Ireland’s claim”.