Museums are not having the best press at the moment. In addition to long-running disputes over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and Benin Bronzes, there have a been a recent spate of “returns” of items deemed to have been looted or stolen, ranging from a 2700-year-old gold and carnelian necklace in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from Turkey to a bevy of Khmer sculptures that had pride of place at such leading museums as the Metropolitan Cleveland Museum of Art. Although Justin M Jacobs’s recent Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (with a telling question mark) deals with controversies regarding acquisitions of a more historical vintage, it is hard not to draw a line between them and these more recent developments.
Setting most misgivings aside, Jacobs argues that almost everything in museums arrived there as diplomatic gifts, purchases or archaeological quid pro quos. It is hard to take issue with this: the Elgin/Parthenon marbles came with official Ottoman paperwork, most pieces in museums were bought from dealers and much digging took place with an understanding that finds would leave with the archaeologist. He is pushing back against what sees as unreasonable claims that
any time a work of art or an ancient artefact is removed from the land in which it was produced, that act of removal is considered morally repugnant – on a par with rape. This idea, once confined to narrow academic debates, has in recent years vaulted into mainstream consciousness.
A great deal of Jacobs’s argument comes down to autres temps, autres mœurs.
One can understand why a scholar might wish to take issue with a framing that he feels disingenuous. But as far as the broader discussion is concerned, this feels something of a straw man. A somewhat more introspective approach to the issue is taken by the Penn Museum’s Xiuqin Zhou in her forthcoming A Chinese Emperor’s Six Stone Horses, which deals solely with the two reliefs of horses (of an original set of six) from a Tang Dynasty mausoleum now at the University of Pennsylvania. These, in addition to striking works of art, are
historically significant, tangible evidence to the epochal events of the early Tang dynasty, one of the golden ages in Chinese history. The names of the horses are recorded in history, as are the ferocious battles in which they secured the triumphant victories. Also recorded is the name of the horseman who rode these heroic steeds to battle and commissioned this group of six individually carved equine sculptures. The horseman was the then Tang prince, Li Shimin 李世民, who later became Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 626–649), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty (618–907).
Zhou provides a long and amazingly detailed description of the works themselves and their artistic and historical context before discussing, with as much detail and context, how they came to the Penn Museum. It is arguably a scholarly tour-de-force, but for these purposes Jacobs’s account is shorter:
In 1913 a French dealer commissioned the removal of two of the reliefs, but ‘the men transporting them were attacked by peasants and the precious relics thrown down a precipice.’ … The two reliefs, once recovered … were given … to the local provincial military commander … He in turn gave them to President Yuan Shikai… After Yuan died in 1916 with his family in political disgrace, one of his sons apparently sold the two stone reliefs to a Chinese dealer named Zhao Hefang …
They eventually ended up in the hands of the famous dealer CT Loo who sold them, after some competition, to the Penn Museum. Jacobs’s previous book, The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures, is cited by Zhou in her discussion. David Chaffetz, in his recent book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires, puts the underlying issue succinctly: the reliefs, he writes,
delight most visitors; the exception is the Chinese, who dearly want them back.
The argument that museums bought the disputed pieces fair and square is, evidently, increasingly less viable.
A great deal of Jacobs’s argument comes down to autres temps, autres mœurs and writes that
the curators who worked in Western museums did not personally transport the objects under their care. It is more accurate to say that they purchased them.
Yet the argument that museums bought the disputed pieces fair and square is, evidently, increasingly less viable. Zhou, who clearly loves the reliefs she writes about, is more nuanced:
If the two Stone Horses were to appear in the antiquities market today, I believe the Penn Museum, and probably many other museums as well, would not consider acquiring them… We cannot erase the deeds of the past nor apply today’s standards to the people of the last century. We can, however, create a future for the two Stone Horses that is based on the professional practices and standards of the 21st century.
Jacobs protests that he’s a mere historian, and that the history of these things matters when discussing possible restitution. Fair enough, but even if his book isn’t itself an apologia, it has been used as one. More seriously, however, Jacobs’s past isn’t, as they say, even past: museums clearly kept at it, well beyond the date by when they should have known better.