"To the greater glory of antiquity?" (Met's new galleries of Greek art), The Art Newspaper, May 1999, pp. 18-19.

To the greater glory of antiquity?

by Jason Edward Kaufman

[This story is in three parts: project overview, gallery descriptions, and the issue of provenance.]

PART I: Metropolitan unveils long-forgotten Greek treasures

NEW YORK. The Metropolitan has reinstalled the largest and most comprehensive display of Greek art in the Western hemisphere, a chronology of 1,200 works spanning the archaic and classical periods from the 6th through the 4th centuries BC. It's been more than half a century since a great many of these antiquities last saw the light of day. In 1948 the Roman atrium was converted into a restaurant, depriving the department of half the space in the South wing specially designed in the 1910s to house the collections. What little remained on view was so haphazardly presented that all sense of order was lost. As director Philippe de Montebello recalls, "The Greek and Roman galleries were in dire need of refurbishment, indeed rethinking. Too much was in storage, the installation was old fashioned and not attractive, a bit akin to open study-storage, and crammed into too small a space. When I hired Carlos Picón in 1990 [as Greek and Roman curator-in-charge] it was with the idea that he should oversee this reinstallation."

The first of three phases was the opening in 1996 of the Robert and Renée Belfer Court for prehistoric and early Greek art, which runs along the south side of the museum's Fifth Avenue entrance hall. The newly completed second phase has restored the adjacent suite of McKim Mead and White beaux-arts galleries and freshly installed the Greek works they were meant to contain. The final phase, slated for the next three to five years, will convert the restaurant back into a Roman atrium for sculpture, and create new galleries for Etruscan, Roman, Cypriot, Hellenistic, and South Italian art. "There's a certain logic that's now reestablished," observes the director with evident satisfaction.

The project is part of the Metropolitan’s five-year $400-million capital campaign -- to which an astonishing 75 private individuals and foundations have contributed $1 million or more. About $150 million is slated for the Greek and Roman reinstallation, of which $75-80 million covers the second phase, including the Greek galleries, climate control and infrastructure for the entire South wing, and sundry other projects, such as a department library named after Aristotle Onassis and sponsored by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. The Greek and Roman department's international support group, the Philodoroi, have proved themselves enormously committed to the project. Among the 38 members (each pays $6,000 a year) are four of the six New York families or individuals who will have their names in bronze on the entablature of a sponsored gallery -- Mary and Michael Jaharis, Malcolm H. Wiener, Robert and Renée Belfer, Judy and Michael Steinhardt -- and another gallery honoree, curator Dietrich von Bothmer, is the support group's founder. The other gallery patrons are trustee Yannis Costopoulos, the Greek chairman of Alpha Credit, and Anastasia Costopoulos. And many of the Philodoroi are collectors who have loaned to the inaugural installation, including trustee Shelby White and Leon Levy of New York, whose antiquities were showcased at the Met in 1990 and who gave $20 million to name the forthcoming Roman atrium, as well as Lewis M. Dubroff of Syracuse, Thomas Spears, the Steinhardts, Sally Werner Vaughn of Houston, and the artist Claudio Bravo of Chile, among others.

Picón’s installation is a chronology that integrates objects of various media to reveal cross-sections of culture. Some display cases examine the stylistic traits of individual artists such as the Amasis Painter, the Brygos Painter, Lydos, and Makron, while others mix ceramics, bronzes, and decorative arts to illustrate the iconography of theater, symposia, warfare, and other topos, further elucidated in expanded labels and wall texts. With whole collections of terracottas, glass, and jewelry emerging from storage, one might have expected an overzealous effort to exhibit them. Yet, the director encouraged a less-is-more approach which obliged Picón to show only the very best works (secondary pieces will go into open storage), and gave rise to the beautiful scheme by chief designer Jeffrey L. Daly, the main virtue of which is its lack of clutter.

The ensemble’s central spine is the former Cypriot Corridor that links the entry hall and the restaurant. Once one of the grandest sculpture galleries in America, the 140 x 27-foot expanse had become a dingy passageway on the way to the cafeteria or the garage. Newly restored, the rosette-coffered barrel-vaulted marble-paved chamber -- a direct descendant of Roman imperial baths -- again contains the large-scale statuary for which it was built. Four new doorways have been cut through the limestone-sheathed walls to allow circulation into the six nobly proportioned flanking galleries, and three recessed skylights covered since the war have been reopened to dramatic effect. The marble sculptures are divided between this central hall and the east galleries, bathed in sun light streaming in from the roof and from the bronze windows facing Fifth Avenue. Such grandeur befit the greatest collection of Classical art in America.

De Montebello hails the project as one of signal importance to the museum and its audience: "For the Met the reinstallation of the Greek and Roman collection completes its encyclopedia of all civilisations. Anyone who understands the role of classical art in the Western tradition will recognise the importance of returning this work to public view. It confirms that at the end of the millennium interest in history is not dead. In a world that is increasingly looking at the transitory and the fashionable, it is a major museological statement, I think, to go back to fundamentals, namely to the roots of Western civilisation in Antiquity."

Jason Edward Kaufman

PART II: Gallery descriptions and highlights [omitted]

PART III: The provenance debate

More than 90% of the Metropolitan's Egyptian holdings derives from sponsored digs, but nearly all of the Classical collections were acquired by gift, bequest, and purchase, and every one of the new galleries for Greek art contains recent acquisitions. It is easy to forget that these and other works added in the last twenty-five years were acquired in a climate altogether different from that which prevailed during the Met's first century. Today archaeologists blame private collectors, museums, and dealers for providing the economic incentive for context-destroying spoliation of ancient sites. Scholars demand a moratorium on collecting, and say museums, as research institutions, should lead the way. But as one museum insider who wishes to remain anonymous puts it, "Getting the bauble remains the most exciting thing -- and that doesn't have anything to do with the niceties of professional conduct." Source countries have forbidden the export of antiquities with laws that are routinely flouted. Yet, just 11 years ago Ashton Hawkins, executive v.p. and counsel to the Met's board, told the LA Times, "The Met seldom queries foreign ministries of culture about proposed acquisitions. Generally speaking, you have the warranty of a dealer that indicates he has a clear title." The museum source protests, "Dealers know that they can't offer works to museums or to principled collectors without a provenance, so they manufacture one." What is the ethical course for museums? The Getty now requires an existing record of publication for any unprovenanced object it acquires, and the University of Pennsylvania has quit the market entirely. But most museums, including the Met, continue to acquire unprovenanced antiquities, even as countries such as Turkey and Italy press for restitution in US courts. Here's what several key players have to say about the matter:

Phillippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

"The Metropolitan, obviously, like all responsible museums is not interested in acquiring stolen art, and we are quite careful looking into provenance. When acquiring an object of substantial value or importance, we write to the appropriate authorities in the putative countries of origin and ask if they have any information concerning it. Otherwise we study what is known and act on a case by case basis. This is due diligence....Where nothing is known, all is conjecture.

I feel that if an object is of great and artistic value, and there is not specific knowledge of its origin, that the responsible thing to do is to put it in a museum, not leave it languishing in the limbo of the market, or in some unknown collection where it cannot be studied. Better, obviously, to have a work of art -- albeit of uncertain origin -- displayed, studies, available to scholars, loved and cherished, than thrown back like some worthless chattel into the maw of the vast and all-swallowing unknown. The latter, incidentally, is not equivalent to a magical restitution to some unknown dig's stratum awaiting a licensed archaeologist.

Many source countries' patrimony laws are, I feel, too draconian and restrictive and thus invite illicit exportation since there is a real demand. (It is well known that museum acquisitions constitute but a minor percentage of such objects.) Of course any country has the right to pass laws with regard to its artistic patrimony and we intend to respect such laws. But many of these laws are overly stringent in the sense that they do not differentiate what is truly a national treasure

from what is an ordinary object that happens to have been made a long time ago. Many of the source countries, in fact, have immense warehouses of objects of the sort that are claimed, and they are often unpublished and unavailable. If reason could triumph over emotions and politics these could be put to fruitful use through exchange programs and the like.

There is much to be done prospectively and we all share in the concern for the wanton destruction of valuable sites. Likewise, it is good to note that many countries do take pride in their artistic patrimony being broadly known through its availability in many of the world's great museums. Indeed, I was heartened that the Greek Minister of Culture attended our recent press conference in Athens, in which we announced and described our project to give pride of place to Greek art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The role that ancient Greek art has played in the nurturing of so much of Western art up to the present day was a shared source of pride."

Carlos Picon, curator-in-charge of the Greek and Roman department at the Metropolitan:

"If a work is unprovenanced it doesn't exclude it from consideration. There are thousands of objects that seem to be unprovenanced but may well hark back to earlier collections and earlier histories, objects which are not published which have been lying in private collections for generations. There are very good reasons why sellers do not wish to be known. It doesn't mean that the object was looted, that the object was excavated yesterday. If something cannot be traced back to 1830 it doesn't mean that it's smuggled. The issue of provenance is a topical one these days because people like scandal. A lot of our collection is beautifully provenanced, stretching back to the 1870s and the early part of the century. The whole point is to bring it back without having to bow to current provenance issues that are not really applicable to us."

Jerry Eisenberg, owner of Royal-Athena Gallery in Manhattan, publisher of Minerva magasine:

"Most antiquity dealers are very ethical, but a few are willing to look the other way.

We formed an International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art, and subscribe to a serious code of ethics. We don't buy known stolen objects. We will buy unprovenanced things, but we check first with the Art Loss Register for anything valued at $10,000 or more. Not all unprovenanced things were looted. Some auction pieces are sold without consignee's name. They no longer have a provenance. American museums have been fussy about provenance, but if something irresistible pops up and they know it's not stolen or taken from government land, some don't follow their own guidelines. Private collectors' purchasing eclipses museums'. For the last 20 years there has never been major buying by American museums. It's not a matter of provenance, it's their lack of budget -- they just don't have the money for it."

Marion True, curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum, which plans to reopen its Roman Villa in Malibu, California, as a center for ancient art:

"In general, museums are more defensive and cautious about what they're willing to take on. There's no point in buying trouble. There's a growing awareness of international laws and the imposition of those laws in a more forceful way. We're encouraging international dialogue. The source countries want to move forward but it's an emotionally and politically charged issue and it isn't going to happen quickly. We tried to change the constitution in Italy to allow long-term loans of antiquities that were in need of conservation. But the law was expanded to include old masters as well, and the Parliament defeated it, saying they'd be giving away their heritage. We'd forego collecting in exchange for conserving sites in need. I'd like to have a moratorium on excavations until we stabilise the sites we already have, and make sure they're preserved for the next generation."

Interviews by Jason Edward Kaufman

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