Word: museum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Right after my visit to Malibu, I headed back to New York City and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This time I was paying my last respects to the Euphronios krater, a magnificent painted Greek mixing vessel from the 6th century B.C. The Met bought it in 1972 for what was at the time the enormous sum of $1 million. But even as he was haggling over the price, Thomas Hoving, then the Met's director, suspected the jar had been looted from Italy. He even said so years later in his very cocky memoirs...
...much more saturnine character, duly began negotiations for the return of the krater and 20 other pieces from the Met's great collections. One week after I last saw it, the krater was in Rome, along with 68 other objects recovered from the Met, the Getty, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and other places, all on display as part of "Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces"--nostoi is Greek for "homecomings"--a victory-lap exhibition of repatriated treasures...
...betting now it will be a long time before a U.S. museum director buys another ancient treasure with a wink and a nod or anything less than a documented-ownership trail longer than an Old Testament genealogy and much more credible. But the givebacks of recent years are just part of an accelerating worldwide struggle over the past. It has complications brought to the table by archaeologists, who say any commercial market for antiquities is an incentive to looters who plunder archaeological sites. And then there's the ordinary museumgoer, who has a crucial stake--being able...
...think for a moment this is a problem just for a few museums in the U.S. Last fall Rutelli told TIME that he planned to turn next "to European institutions, starting with Denmark, as well as Japan and other parts of the world. And it goes for [Italy] too. We have returned hundreds of stolen archaeological artifacts from Pakistan, Iran and Iraq." In January he made his first successful claim against a private collector, Shelby White, a trustee of the Met, who agreed to give back 10 items from the collection she had formed with her late husband. And Italy...
Unsurprisingly, having endured the Rutelli campaign, even museums that may have once played fast and loose have tightened their practices. But curators and museum directors complain that cultural-property laws prevent virtually anything from being exported lawfully, guaranteeing a continued black market even if museums don't take part in it. And they're exasperated by demands to return objects that entered their collections many years before the adoption of laws that bar their export. "We've acknowledged that some claims are reasonable," says Michael Brand, director of the Getty Museum. "But if you start claiming everything, it becomes impossible...