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Turkey's Inquiry into 22 Treasures at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Image A large, headless, Roman-era bronze statue believed to represent Marcus Aurelius has reigned for 26 years as the resident philosopher-king of the Cleveland Museum of Art. With its lifelike presence, fluid drapery folds and dark, luscious patina, the sculpture is one of the museum’s signature treasures. Yet a mystery has always hovered over this exceedingly rare object. Where, exactly, did it come out of the ground, and who unearthed it?

Just as important, how many hands did it pass through before it found its way into the collection in 1986? The museum has long stated that the work might have been found in the 1960s in an obscure village in southwestern Turkey called Bubon, but it isn't sure.

The government of Turkey, on the other hand, is sure. It says that the bronze and nearly two dozen other works in Cleveland were looted from its soil, although the country has produced no evidence.

According to reports in the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Britain's Economist, the country has launched an international campaign aimed at repatriating such works. And it's proceeding in a way that could shake the foundations of encyclopedic museums with items collected before contemporary laws and international agreements intended to prevent looting and trafficking.


In late March, Turkey released to Times reporter Jason Felch a list of 22 objects in the Cleveland museum that the country says were dug up and illegally exported from its territory.

The list casts suspicion on a stunning catalog of objects acquired by the museum between 1915 and 2005. Among them are a 5,000-year-old Cycladic "Stargazer" statuette once owned by Nelson Rockefeller; 16th-century Ottoman ceramics; the aforementioned "Emperor as Philosopher," plus most of the so-called "Jonah Marbles," a group of widely admired early Christian sculptures from the late third century.


Jonah emerges from the whale in one of the famed "Jonah Marbles" at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Turkey hasn't yet officially claimed that the works should be returned, but it wants to perform scientific tests on them and to collect information the private, nonprofit museum keeps in its "object files," which are not open to the public. In the meantime, Turkey has threatened to deny requests for loans to exhibitions and has said legal action is possible if it doesn't get cooperation.

"We always try to find a diplomatic way to solve our problems and try not to pursue a legal action," Murat Suslu, the director general of Cultural Assets and Museums for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, said in a recent email to The Plain Dealer. "But sure, it [legal action] is always an alternative."

Along with the Cleveland museum, Turkey is seeking information about objects at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, D.C.

According to an article in the Economist on May 19, Turkey has also asked about objects at the Louvre Museum in Paris; the Pergamon Museum in Berlin; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London;, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal; and the Davids Samling Museum in Denmark.

The magazine described the Turkish thrust as part of a campaign by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to assert Turkey's rising economic and political power in the Middle East.

But if museums around the world were forced to return ancient objects to modern countries occupying the territories of long-gone empires, it could result in a grand reshuffling of art collections along strictly nationalistic lines.


If the Cleveland museum lost some or all of the items on Turkey's list, it would seriously hurt its collections of ancient Roman, early Christian and Islamic art. But it's far from clear whether Turkey can succeed. David Franklin, the museum's director since late 2010, said that, based on legal advice, he could not comment on Turkey's inquiry.

 "We don't want to have an open discussion about this in the media," Franklin said. "We don't think that's productive."

However, he said in a separate interview on the general topic of repatriation, "if there are legitimate claims to be made" about looted artworks at the museum, "we want people to be able to make them."

The operative word is 'legitimate.' To date, Turkey has not said it has any physical evidence showing that the 22 works in the Cleveland collection were indeed looted from its territory.

Instead, its claims are based on whether art objects are linked stylistically to Turkey and on whether foreign museums have official permits showing artworks were legally exported.

The Ottoman Empire began requiring such permits in 1869. In 1906, Turkey declared that all cultural objects are state property, unless permission is granted to remove them.

Turkey hasn't found any Cleveland permits in its files, Suslu said.

This means obviously and logically that the artifacts have been removed illegally, he said.

If the 22 objects on Turkey's list were proven to be stolen property, it could render the museum vulnerable to action by U.S. authorities, as well as a lawsuit by Turkey, legal experts have said.

But it's fair to ask whether Turkish record-keeping is flawless and/or a rock-solid basis on which to claim ownership of artworks in foreign museums.

Likewise, is the absence of an export permit in a museum file proof that a particular object came from Turkey as opposed to some other country whether inside or outside the boundaries of the former Ottoman Empire? And should the museum cooperate if Turkey is essentially asking the institution to incriminate itself according to Turkish law?
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So far, Turkey's inquiry appears only to have guaranteed that the Cleveland museum won't discuss the case publicly. Turkey also believes the museum is dragging its feet. Suslu said Turkey first approached the museum in 2008. But it didn't hear anything for two years, at which time, he said, 'they politely rejected to give information about provenance,' the ownership history of art objects. The situation appears to have reached an impasse.

An undated photo provided by the Italian Culture Ministry to the Associated Press on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008, shows an Apulian volute crater, dating back to the 4th Century B.C., one of the 14 art works returned to Italy by the Cleveland Museum of Art after a negotiation with the Italian government.

The story is very different from that of an Italian inquiry into fantiquities in the Cleveland collection in 2007, which was based on photographs and documents seized by police in a 1995 raid on a warehouse in Switzerland operated by smugglers.

In 2008, the museum returned 13 ancient works to Italy after the government there said that evidence from the raid showed the works were handled by traffickers before the museum bought them from art dealers in good faith.

The museum also returned a 14th-century processional cross allegedly stolen from a church outside Siena after World War II. In the case with Turkey, it's unclear whether the museum would relinquish anything without clear evidence of wrongdoing.

While Franklin has declined to speak about the artworks at issue, former curators familiar with the Marcus Aurelius statue and the Jonah Marbles, the top items on the Turkish list, say they don't know where the works were excavated before the museum bought them.

Arielle Kozloff of Shaker Heights, the now-retired curator who led the purchase of the Marcus Aurelius bronze in 1986, traveled to Bubon later that year to investigate its origins. According to local gossip, villagers dug up the sculpture in the 1960s, along with many other bronzes, which appeared on the art market over the following two decades.

But Kozloff concluded in a 1987 article in the museum?s bulletin that any connection between Bubon and the Marcus Aurelius was conjectural.

Last week, she said in a brief interview that "we simply don't know where that bronze came from."
Suslu said he has asked the Cleveland museum's permission to perform what he called 'chemical analyses' on the works under scrutiny.

But such tests might not prove anything about the origins of the works in question. For example, William D. Wixom and Holger Klein, two former museum curators who researched the Jonah Marbles, said in interviews that the works were carved from stones quarried in Turkey.

But they said the marble's origin indicates nothing about where and when the sculptures were unearthed before the museum bought them in 1965. The marble could have been exported anywhere in the Roman Empire before or after it was carved, they said.

Despite its questionable aspects, the Turkish inquiry has highlighted the Cleveland museum's uneven approach on the topic of provenance.

Over the years, the museum has published catalogs of certain areas of the collection, including European Old Master and 19th-century European paintings, which contain detailed information on provenance.
In other cases, it withholds information to protect the confidentiality of donors and to avoid tipping off competitors about which dealers it patronizes, Franklin said.

The museum's website omits provenance information entirely. That?s true of many museums, but standards are changing. The Indianapolis Museum of Art, for example, includes a line on provenance for every work cataloged on its website.

Franklin said the Cleveland museum will follow suit, but he added that the changes can't be made quickly. "You don't just cut and paste on the website," he said. "You have to decide what goes on the website and what remains confidential."

Turkey's global initiative on artworks coincides with a worldwide debate over ways to prevent looting of buried treasure in source countries' rich in archaeological heritage.

The question is whether any statute of limitations exists, or whether modern countries can reach back centuries to recover booty stolen by invading armies, removed by archaeological expeditions or taken more recently by looters.

The Association of Art Museum Directors, whose 160-plus members represent America?s largest art museums, issued guidelines in 2008 saying that the 1970 UNESCO Convention aimed at halting the looting of antiquities should be the line of demarcation.
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Under the guidelines, museums should avoid buying an object unless it was outside its likely country of origin before 1970 or was legally exported thereafter.

Franklin said he's serving on a task force examining the status of so-called 'orphan objects,' such as the Marcus Aurelius, which were acquired between 1970 and 2008.

Turkey, obviously, is reaching back much further in time.

Whatever happens next, the Cleveland museum finds itself on the leading edge of a potentially bitter international controversy.

Artworks that have resided quietly in its collection for decades have suddenly acquired a sharp contemporary relevance. And while the museum fends off challenges that could gut parts of its collection, it may also feel pressure to research and share more about the origins of works such as the Marcus Aurelius, which remain unknown. (http://www.cleveland.com)
Last modified onSaturday, 06 May 2017 10:07
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