ArtCurious News This Week: January 27, 2023
Hi there, listeners. It’s Friday, which means that it is time for ArtCurious News this Week, our short-form news roundup meant to bring you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. I’m your host, Jennifer Dasal, and we’ve got some great stories for you today, Friday, January 27th, 2023.
This week’s stories:
ArtNews: Heirs Sue Guggenheim to Recover Storied Picasso Painting, Citing ‘Wrongful Possession’
WESH Orlando: Orlando Museum of Art placed on probation by American Alliance of Museums
The Guardian: Frederick McCubbin painting defaced with Woodside logo in protest at Art Gallery of Western Australia
ArtNews : Mexican Archaeologists Discover Evidence of Pre-Hispanic Mayan Settlement
ArtNews: A Mass Burial of Decapitated Roman Remains Discovered in England
ArtNews: Gilded Warrior’s Tomb Discovered During Construction of an Expressway in Romania
ArtNews: Archaeologists Uncover Intact 52-Foot-Long Ancient Papyrus from 50 BCE
Smithsonian: Archaeologists in Egypt Unearth 2,500-Year-Old Mummified Crocodiles
ArtNews: 1,800-Year-Old Roman City Unearthed in Luxor, Egypt
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Episode Transcript
Happy Friday, ArtCurious listeners! Jennifer here with your short-form news roundup meant to bring you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. This is ArtCurious News this Week and today is Friday, January 27th, 2023. Let’s get right to it.
This week, like many of our weeks on this show, has a couple of themes running through it. Today’s themes are: museum troubles and archaeological discoveries. For today’s first story, we’re doing a little callback to one of the episodes of ArtCurious News This Week that we aired last summer. If you listened to our show back in July 2022, you might remember that I shared that the F.B.I’s Art Crime Team had seized 25 paintings from the Orlando Museum of Art’s 2022 exhibition, “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” when those works were considered potentially inauthentic works by the 1980s superstar painter. As the investigation into the authenticity of these works continue at the F.B.I., the American Alliance of Museums, known as AAM, officially placed the Orlando Museum of Art, or OMA, on probation. AAM is the U.S.’s official accreditation organization for museums of all sorts—not just art museums—and it wields huge power, because it connects museums to other institutions around the country and is a way to suggest that each museum partner has been vetted as an institution in good standing—meaning that it’s not risky to work with them to, for example, borrow or lend works of art to temporary exhibitions—which of course trickles down to visitorship and to a museum’s money-making aspects. It’s a lot. So while the AAM essentially put this warning upon the OMA, as first announced by the Orlando station WESH, they did not note the exact reason for the probation. A spokesperson for the AAM simply noted, quote, "The probation period is set by the Accreditation Commission and determined based on the museum’s particular compliance issues. To move out of probation, the museum must demonstrate that it has addressed its particular compliance issues to the Accreditation Commission’s satisfaction." Unquote. In return, the OMA released a statement, reading, quote, "The OMA remains fully accredited and has been a member in good standing of AAM since 1971. Our status is now temporarily probationary after the events surrounding the Heroes & Monsters exhibition. We are working with the AAM to remove our probationary status and expect to remain in good standing." Unquote.
I want to note that while accreditation by an outside organization like the AAM is like a stamp of approval that can have huge effects of museums big or small, I don’t want to make it sound like an unaccredited museum is somehow bad, or not as important or worthy. It’s just a complication, and I can only hope, as the OMA noted, that they are indeed only temporarily held in probation and that the institution can rise above their problems and move forward into a more stable future.
Not that the Guggenheim has been having a very good week either. This week, a lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan court against the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The suit charges that a painting by—of course—Pablo Picasso—a 1904 Blue Period painting titled Woman Ironing that is currently part of the Guggenheim’s collection and worth around $200 million, belongs to the heirs of a German Jewish family persecuted during WWII. The heirs, and several nonprofit Jewish organizations, are fighting the Guggenheim to reclaim ownership. The heirs claim that the original owners-- Karl Adler and Rosi Jacobi—had originally purchased the piece from a German art dealer in 1916, and only rid themselves of the Picasso and other works because they wanted to leave the country to avoid persecution and they needed to raise funds to do so. The bad news is that they had to sell their beloved art collection at bargain-basement prices, which they sold to the son of their original German art dealer. The good news is that they ended up making enough cash from the sale that they received visas, and escaped to Argentina in 1940s. The German dealer’s son ended up gifting the Picasso to the Guggenheim as part of his bequest, and it entered the museum’s collection in 1978. Now, the Adler heirs—who have been battling it out since at least 2021—are taking the Guggenheim to court for quote-unquote “wrongful possession.” The Guggenheim claims that they are taking the Adler concerns extremely seriously, but that there’s a squishy gray area here, because the Adlers, they note, legally sold the Picasso to the art dealer, making it a fair transaction. The heirs, though, note that the sale came from, quote, “economic duress.” Unquote.
It's strange how timely this story is, because I just gave a lecture this week at a local synagogue about the ongoing efforts and problems of Nazi-era art restitution. I’ve talked about restitution a bunch of times on the podcast—both in our regular episodes and in our news segments—and I usually proclaim that things are getting better, that more and more institutions are working with heirs and claimants to determine rightful ownership. But there are institutions that are—I suppose—more hesitant, like the Guggenheim, to just give works back to their original owners if there was a sale of some kind in the middle. And I get this. In the Guggenheim’s mind, this early Picasso—a masterpiece of his most famous pre-Cubist period—is a big deal, and to the museum, it was passed to them legally, first by a sale in Germany, and then through a bequest. But to the Adlers, it was a sale that the family never wanted to make but did so because their lives were literally at stake. The Picasso was a family treasure, and now they want to get it back. I’m not a lawyer, but I can see that this is a super-complicated issue for both sides. I’m really interested to watch how this one pans out over the coming months. I’ll be sure to report back on the podcast if and when the lawsuit’s status changes.
Alright, this is a good moment for a little break before we get back to more ArtCurious News This Week. Please support me and the show by listening to a couple of ads or join me over at Patreon and support this show ad-free for the price of a latte. That’s just $4 a month for ad-free content over at patreon.com/artcurious. Quick thanks and welcome aboard to this week’s newest patron: Christelle. Big ongoing thanks, too for my VIP patrons Flamestress, Gaston, Stephanie, John, JL, Rhonda, Lance, and Robin. Want your name read here every week? Become a VIP—our most helpful level of support. We’ll be right back. Thanks for listening!
Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our last story today, we’re reporting another high-profile art defacement, this time at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. The painting, a piece by artist Frederick McCubbin titled Down on his Luck, was spray- painted with the logo of Woodside, an oil and gas company. It should be noted that of course the painting was glazed—i.e., framed and the surface of the painting covered with glass, or, as in this case, Perspex, a kind of Plexiglas. This is just the latest example of the numerous ongoing climate protests that have centered around art—especially oil paintings—(get it? Oil paintings?) and museums. In this particular case, the protestors noted that they were attempting to draw attention to, quote, “ongoing desecration of sacred Murujuga rock art,” unquote, in the Burrup Peninsula, about a thousand kilometers north of Perth, at the hands of Woodside, who has been working to provide natural gas to its customers in Western Australia and beyond. Meanwhile, the protestors released a statement, saying in part, quote, “Toxic emissions from Woodside’s Burrup Hub are destroying the oldest, largest rock art gallery in the world.” Unquote. Their choice of the Frederick McCubbin painting as the target of the protest is an interesting one—as a signifier as a local cultural high point in the minds of many, a painting only a hundred years old, whereas the rock art mentioned by the protestors is over 50,000 years old—and oftentimes pushed away because of its aboriginal roots. So the protest here is twofold—one with an environmental and a cultural core. And I’m guessing that we’re not going to see these kinds of protests stop anytime soon. The only thing that might would be stricter security both upon entering a building, which at some point might even include body searches—and/or more guards patrolling museum galleries. Woof. Talk about less fun for art lovers and museums both. But as I’ve said many times on this show, I see both sides. I don’t love climate protests that focus on art, but I also understand the reasoning. It gets attention, and you know what? They’ve got a point. If our earth is going up in both literal and metaphorical flames due to climate change, what’s the point in protecting works of art?
(Now that I’ve said that, please don’t opt to go defacing or destroying works of art—let’s just all use our voices and voting power to try to fight climate change as effectively as possible!)
And now, a little lightning round dedicated to archaeological announcements just in the past week or so, because y’all, it’s been bonkers. First up, in the Mexican state of Tabasco, where archaeologists overseeing a dig for a future oil and gas pipeline in the area discovered what was announced to ArtNews as, quote, “two-meter-high domestic housing platforms made of clay,” unquote, that point to at least one large, if not two smaller, settlements from the pre-Hispanic Mayan era. Next, in a similar discovery during a construction project, workers in Romania uncovered a tomb purportedly belonging to a warrior—probably dating from around the time of the Huns in the 5th century C.E.—and the tomb was filled with gilded and bejeweled artifacts, including a golden saddle, jewelry, and a mask that probably covered the deceased warrior’s face. Archaeologists in Bucharest did note that this is only one of four archaeological sites yet discovered and that the dig for the construction project is only halfway done, so it's likely that we might hear more about this kind of find in the future. But wait, there’s more! A team out of Oxford University announced this week that 17 decapitated skeletons dating back to the Roman era—around the third century C.E., have been found in a town outside of York, England. While researchers note that the reasons behind the decapitations are unknown, they do state that this isn’t the first time such remains have been discovered in the area, with similar caches located in both 2021 and 2022. The skeletons in these sites have typically been found with their skulls placed between their feet, which could point to a number of things: a way to signal that the dead was an enslaved person, a kind of human sacrifice tied—or not—to a fertility ritual, and more. In other words, we don’t know much, but every discovery could lead to a new understanding of the Roman period in modern-day England. And now, we’ll finish with a trifecta out of Egypt: in the past week, announcements from Egypt’s ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have included the finding of a 52-foot papyrus scroll dating from 50 B.C.E., several nearly intact crocodile mummies that are at least 2,500 years old, and last but not least, the unearthing of yet another Roman site—this one, from around the 2nd or 3rd century C.E., in Luxor, Egypt. Luxor, long an archaeological and cultural hotbed, has been in the news this year several times already for announcements of over 60 mummified remains discovered, as well as yet another potential royal tomb in the fabled Valley of the Kings and Queens.
Whew. What an incredible week, everyone—and that’s all I have for you today--thanks for listening to ArtCurious News this Week. I have an exciting announcement to make, and that’s that our amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, Vermeer-centric tour to the Netherlands with Like Minds Travel is SOLD OUT. So excited to share this journey with all those aboard. But never fear—more options for ArtCurious travel are in the works, so stay tuned here, and on social media at @artcuriouspod, and my website: artcuriouspodcast.com. In the meantime, thank you all for your support and for listening today—until next week, stay curious.
