ArtCurious News This Week: August 5, 2022
Hi there, everyone. It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, back at you this week with our new short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this, as a gentle reminder, is in addition to the ArtCurious episodes you know and love and gets you up to date on the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. Okay, let’s go.
This week’s stories:
Artnews: Oxford and Cambridge Will Oversee Likely Largest UK Repatriation of Looted Objects to Nigeria
ArtForum: British Museum Proposes “Parthenon Partnership” With Greece Over Contested Marbles
ArtNews: 40 Years Ago, Henry Darger’s Landlords Discovered His Epic Art. A New Lawsuit Argues They Had No Right to Sell it.
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Episode Transcript
Hi there, everyone. It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, back at you this week with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. Okay, let’s do this.
Today is Friday, August 5, 2022. As you might expect from recent stories, there’s been a lot more news on the repatriation front. And it’s more good news about the so-called Benin Bronzes. Less than a month after Germany and Nigeria finalized their negotiations for restitution, two top universities in the U.K. are following suit. This week, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge both announced that they will be returning hundreds of Benin bronzes, following a formal request submitted earlier this year by the Nigerian government to Oxford’s museums, the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers, as well as to Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Benin bronzes were purportedly looted by British troops who ransacked Benin City, now part of modern-day Nigeria, back in 1897, and it was after that point that the pieces were disbursed to various British collections and other museums around the world. They’ve been at the center of the debate about museums and the ownership of cultural objects, and Nigeria has been calling for their repatriation for upwards of 50 years. In June, the Council of the University of Oxford alerted the press that they had completed an assessment of their artifacts and their connection to the Nigerian’s formal request for their return, and that the time has come to let them go back to their appropriate homes. In a statement, the Council wrote, quote, “The University decision is in line with similar commitments recently made by other US and European museums, and reflects a sector-wide move away from keeping together collections irrespective of how those artifacts were collected.” Unquote. As Nigeria has noted in its agreement with Germany, the return of the works of art doesn’t exactly mean that it will happen all at once, or that some works won’t stay behind for long-term loans or exhibitions, but it is, finally, a step in the right direction for museums all over the world.
My second story today follows exactly in this same line of thinking and has been equally controversial for decades. According to the U.K. newspaper, The Guardian, there’s another proposed plan for the potential repatriation of some major, major works of art: the British Museum’s Parthenon marbles. As noted in the Guardian article, this plan is being called the quote-unquote “Parthenon partnership,” and stipulates a coordinated effort between the British Museum and Greek authorities involving the long-term lending and display of the marble objects. You see, when museums have something in their collection for a nice, long time, like the Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles, they are loathe to part with them, hence the long-contested debate about where an object should literally and metaphorically “live”. The marbles have been a central part of the British Museum’s collection since the early 19th century, when they arrived after being “removed”—and I use those words in quotations here—by the infamous Lord Elgin, who was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that time. The marbles include some of the most important—and fragile—architectural and sculptural elements from the Parthenon, the most famous temple in the Acropolis complex in Athens, Greece—elements that are at least 2,500 years old. As with the Benin Bronzes, the quest to repatriate the marbles back to Greece has been going on for decades now, and a legal loophole within British law has long been the answer as to why the British Museum was not required to return them. According to the so-called Bloomsbury defense, the marbles came into the British Museum’s collection legally nearly two hundred years ago, and that, as a British institution, it is a public museum but is not controlled specifically by the government. Now, though, the tides have changed, and museums around the world are feeling the pressure to repatriate even their most prized possessions—and though difficult, perhaps, it’s also promoting new trust and, indeed, partnerships. As the director of the Acropolis Museum, Nikolaos Stampolidos, noted in response to the plan, quote, “In the difficult days we are living in, returning them [the Parthenon marbles] would be an act of history. It would be as if the British were restoring democracy itself.”
I love these two stories. Ugh, they’re the art and archaeological world’s “feel-good” reads.
I’ve got one more story to share with you today—and guess what, it also relates to the law and who has rights regarding a work of art. First, though, we’re going to take a little break for some brief words from today’s sponsors. But come right back—there’s more art news to share.
Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our last story today, I’m harkening back to a series we did on the podcast a couple of years ago, one all about the “Coolest Artists You Don’t Know.” In that series, I released an episode on the fascinating, influential outsider artist, Henry Darger. Darger was a self-taught artist from Chicago who worked as a custodian by day and created thousands of drawings, collages, watercolors, and more in his off-hours, eventually culminating in a manuscript for a 15,000 page book he called “In the Realm of the Unreal.” And yep, I didn’t misspeak—it truly is a 15,000-page-long manuscript. Go back and listen to ArtCurious episode #66 for all the details. This week, though, individuals identifying themselves as distant relatives of Henry Darger filed a lawsuit against the artist’s former landlords, who discovered Darger’s works in his apartment after the artist’s death in 1973. Since the 70s, the landlords-- Kiyoko Lerner and her late husband Nathan—have promoted Darger’s works, and, as the suit alleges, have illegally profited from them.
The Lerners claim that a verbal agreement between them and Darger prior to the artist’s death left them as the owners of the entire contents of Darger’s apartment—and with no spouse, children, or immediately family as survivors, Darger’s contents do seem to have transferred, at least casually, to the Lerners at that time. As noted by ArtNews, Darger apparently told them, quote, “I have nothing I need in this room. It is all yours. You can throw everything away.” Unquote.
The lawsuit, which was actually put in motion a few months back, is now moving into a new phase wherein Darger’s purported family—identified by the New York Times as, quote, “most of them first cousins twice or three times removed,” unquote, are suing the Lerners for a variety of potential misdeeds that, as holders of Darger’s works, have put them at an unfair advantage: everything from illegal trademarking of works of art, selling pieces, exhibiting them, and even “anticybersquatting,” which is the registration of a domain name to generate income off of it. In fact, the lawsuit asserts that the Lerners have, quote, “generated tens of hundreds of millions of dollars from the unauthorized exploitation of the Darger works.” Unquote. The plaintiffs in the case are not suing to be declared the rightful owners of the Darger works, and thus the heirs to his estate. How this will all play out is still yet to be determined.
Okay, bonus news to share, and I wonder just how many more weeks I’ll be sharing these kinds of notes. Yes, of course, there was another protest involving climate activists gluing themselves to works of art. Last week, protesters attached themselves to the frame of Sandro Botticelli’s painting, La Primavera, at the Uffizi in Florence. This time, they hit up Milan, where they glued themselves to the base of the futurist sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni, at the Museo del Novocento. Again, glued to the base, not to the bronze itself, but still.
Thanks for listening to this segment—our short-form news recaps—that will help round out our art historical knowledge here on ArtCurious. If you liked this episode, please let me know. You can hit me up on Facebook or Instagram (I’m quicker to respond on Insta, FYI) or email me at jennifer@artcuriouspodcast.com. If you’re missing your traditional ArtCurious content while we are on break between seasons, definitely check us out on YouTube. This week’s videos involve the idea of mythmaking when it comes to the life story of Vincent van Gogh, and tonight I’ll be posting my very first reaction video—to Yoko Ono’s iconic performance, Cut Piece. You can find those and all my videos by going to youtube.com/c/artcuriouspodcast, or by searching ArtCurious—one word—on YouTube. Until then, see you next week—and stay curious!
