Negotiating Culture: Heritage, Ownership, and Intellectual Property

2. The Trial of Marion True and Changing Policies for Classical Antiquities in American Museums: Appendix: Art Repatriated to Italy and Greece through 2010

38 2 The Trial of Marion True and Changing Policies for Classical Antiquities in American Museums R Laetitia La Follette The indictment of Marion True, curator of classical art at the J. Paul Getty Museum, by a Roman court in 2005 on charges of conspiring to traffic in illicit antiquities marked a dramatic shift in the history of ownership claims over contested works of ancient art. This chapter shows how the indictment changed the way premier museums in the United States acquire classical Greek and Roman art and resulted in the repatriation of over a hundred such cultural artifacts to Italy and Greece so far. In its impact on art museum policy, True’s trial, together with the negotiations that led up to and followed it, thus ranks in importance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (see Joe Watkins’s essay elsewhere in this volume) and the task force established in 1997 to investigate art looted by the Nazis during World War II.1 The trial also demonstrated some of the flaws implicit in the policy advocating the free flow of cultural materials across national borders, known as cultural property internationalism.2 By negotiating directly with premier museums in the United States—and when that failed, indicting one of their curators—the Italian authorities succeeded in altering museological attitudes and long-standing practices in the United States that had condoned the purchase of stolen antiquities. z 39 The Trial of Marion True True’s trial and its fallout redefined the ownership of ancient cultural artifacts in two important ways. With the restitution of some looted antiquities and the revision of guidelines for future purchases, our leading museums now acknowledge restrictions on their ability to collect and own ancient art. In particular, they agree to exercise better due diligence to ascertain that any antiquity they seek to acquire left its country of origin before November 17, 1970, the date of UNESCO’s Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.3 The new museum guidelines thus address some of the more egregious past mistakes and lay out reforms, but they still ignore those antiquities acquired since 1970 that remain in American collections. In this chapter I argue that the status of these more recent acquisitions must be addressed,and that the way museums present ancient art must also change, replacing a valuation based predominantly on aesthetics with one that reflects the importance of an object’s context and its multiple histories. Some have questioned the need for the dramatic changes ushered in by True’s trial, asking “Who owns antiquity?” or “Who owns the past?”4 Staking a claim to the past does not, however, justify purchasing purloined artifacts.Since there is still some confusion about why the changes in museum ownership policy were necessary, I offer first a review of the evidence for past purchases of looted antiquities, the museums’ rationale for doing so, and the way such purchases have shortchanged our understanding of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In the next two sections I trace the way museum policy for the acquisition of antiquities began to change in the late 1990s and examine the central figure associated with the changes, Marion True, and lessons learned from her trial and ancillary investigations. Finally, I return to the educational mission of the museum, showing how the gaps in the history of unprovenanced antiquities—works whose modern ownership history is unknown or murky—have undermined that mission. I conclude that True’s trial, the revised acquisition policies, and the restitutions, together with new longterm loans, have contributed to a new model of international collaboration over cultural property, one based on shared stewardship instead of ownership. 40 å Laetitia La Follette Museums and Looted Antiquities Marion True’s indictment in April 2005 prompted prominent museums that feared similar suits to reach accommodations to avoid litigation. Within months, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston rushed to negotiate deals in which they transferred title of disputed objects to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of comparable material from that country. Three years after the opening of True’s lengthy trial, her former employer, the J. Paul Getty Museum in southern California, as well as the Princeton Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, had done the...