| diwas k |
Posted
on 30-Apr-01 09:25 AM
An interesting op-ed in Monday's Boston Globe.... read on.... (lifted from boston.com)
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Sometimes, restoring ancient art means sending it home
By H.D.S. Greenway, 4/30/2001
SPRINGTIME CROWDS of foreigners and Parisians are lining up to see the French national collection of Asian Art in Paris these days at the newly refurbished Guimet Museum. And well they might. It is an exquisite collection, begun by Lyon industrialist Emile Guimet in the 19th century, consisting of 45,000 objects from the East. Those familiar with Cambodia gasp to see larger-than-life stone figures holding on to a giant Naga snake frozen in the act of churning the milk of a sacred sea. It can only come from Preah Khan in the ancient Khmer temple complex known as Angkor, one of the wonders of the world. And there, on the wall, is a huge red brick frieze from the neighboring Banteai Srei temple. One's reaction is: Shouldn't these priceless treasures be back in Cambodia where they belong? Weren't old Guimet and his successors indulging in acts of cultural theft?
But then wander into an adjacent room where the Afghan collection is and gaze on the tranquil form of a Gandhara Buddha and the mood changes. Thank God Emile Guimet got there before the Talaban did!
And there you have a centuries-old debate. Was Lord Elgin saving the marble friezes from the Parthenon when he hauled them back to Britain in 1801? Or was he robbing Greece of a national treasure? The British have argued that the Greeks were burning their statues to make lime back in the early 19th century. But Lord Byron, Shelley, Prince Charles, President Clinton, and every Greek government since 1983 has asked the British to send the Elgin marbles back. When Melina Mercouri, the ''Never On Sunday'' actress-turned-cultural minister of Greece, requested their return a few years ago, the British Museum's comment was said to be: ''All we can say for certain is that the lady has lost her marbles.''
Before the last century, collectors gave little thought to keeping art objects in place. The prevailing thought was: Of course they belong in London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, or New York, where civilized people can have a look at them. Then attitudes began to change. The French writer Andre Malraux, who would later become cultural minister of France, was caught trying to rob the treasures of Banteai Srei and arrested in 1923. Later, in the chaos of civil war in the 1980s, art objects were taken out of Angkor by the helicopter sling load to make their way into the art markets of Bangkok and the West.
Indeed, long before the Islamic zealots of the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, art theft had been going on in Afghanistan. ''The looting of the Kabul Museum may have been masterminded by antique dealers in Peshawar,'' Gerard Fusseman wrote in Le Monde, referring to the Pakistani city on the Khyber Pass. ''Western customers are not particular about the provenance of the items they buy.''
For the last 30 years the policy of cultural guardians such as UNESCO has held that art objects should remain in their country of origin. This year, in the wake of the Taliban outrage, they changed their minds. Now there is a scramble to get things out of Afghanistan. UNESCO's chief, Koichiro Matsuura, said recently that ''this general mobilization in favor of cultural heritage has transcended the boundaries between nationalities and religion.''
The best solution to the Afghan art tragedy, one that was suggested by both sides of the Afghan civil war, is that all the art that can be saved be placed in a secure place such as Switzerland and kept in what might be called an escrow account museum to be preserved until it is safe to send it back, no matter how long that takes. The principle should be that it is right to save art if it is in danger, but when the danger passes, the old rules about keeping art at home should prevail. It is impractical to ask that all the museums return their treasures, but in certain cases where an art object has a particular national importance, it should be returned.
A serendipitous example is the Lion Throne of Burma. It was looted by the British when they captured Mandalay in the 19th century, but it was returned by Lord Mountbatten upon Burma's independence after World War II. In the time in between, the palaces of Mandalay and everything in them had been destroyed by fire during the war. But the Lion throne was spared and can be seen today in Rangoon.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page 11 of the Boston Globe on 4/30/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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