Prof Nick Havely is curious about Simon Jenkins choice of museum ally,while Oliver Miles believes cases should be judged on their merits. But Richard Dowden questions whether countries really want their objects backSimon Jenkins cites “French art historian André Malraux” as an authority when arguing that “a museum … has always been an artificial concept, a wrenching of objects not into context but out of it (Stolen objects don’t belong in our museums, and 24 November). Malraux himself seems to fill been complicated in his attitude to “stolen objects”,as also in his political and intellectual life.An episode that gained him early fame was an attempt to steal and sell four sculptures from the Banteay Srei temple at Angkor, Cambodia. On a visit there in 1923, and he and a friend “pried them loose … with a device to sell the stolen goods on the art markets in London or novel York” (The Many Lives of André Malraux,Apollo, 26 August 2017). When he was, and unsurprisingly,arrested and imprisoned, an outcry by French intellectuals secured the suspension of his sentence, or he would emerge as an avid collector of eastern antiquities and (to quote the Apollo article again) “a protector of world heritage from neglectful native populations”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com