In the news are smiles in The Hague and tears in Cleveland. Plus where did 227 pounds of gold go?
O n a mood-brightening, happy March note, let’s talk Vermeer, specifically Girl with a Pearl Earring. It’s a marquee work of art, very much loved, and owned by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Mauritshuis is the perfect blossom of loveliness among European art museums. It’s intimate, in a compact old building with a collection focused on the best Dutch Golden Age painting. The Mauritshuis has been inviting the public to submit interpretations of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Thousands of Girl groupies responded, and selected photos are now displayed in My Girl with a Pearl, which opened this week. The show’s 60 works include animal, mineral, vegetable, video, and AI interpretation. Kudos to the Mauritshuis, which obviously embraces and honors creativity and isn’t afraid to laugh.
On a somber, scary note, the Manhattan district attorney got another scalp, this one from Buckeyes over a headless bronze. An exquisite bronze sculpture from around the second century a.d., possibly depicting Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Art since 1986, will soon head to Turkey, thanks to the DA’s Antiquities Tracking Unit. For years, the Republic of Turkey has insisted that the majestic, larger-than-life-size, rare bronze was looted in the 1960s from what was a lost Roman city near Bubon in southwestern Turkey. The Cleveland Museum bought it in good faith, believing that it was from 150 b.c. and Greek, rather than from Imperial Rome.
The Antiquities Tracking Unit has forced the restitution of more than a thousand works of art from American collections since 2017. It’s teamed with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Italy, Greece, and even Iran. The Cleveland Museum’s bronze is valued at $20 million and is the centerpiece of its antiquities galleries. The museum went to court to contest the DA’s move to seize the sculpture.
I’ve evolved from a restitution absolutist — believing that we Americans should giddily send art with a shady past back to its Old World homeland, however shady — to a skeptic. The Antiquities Tracking Unit has too much unfettered power. With crime running wild on New York City’s streets and illegals by the thousands in luxury hotels, raiding art museums shouldn’t be a priority.
And why carry water for Turkey? Its government is a profoundly antisemitic, despotic mischief-maker. When is enough enough? Turkey has vaults of ancient bronzes. It could make a million duplicates of the Liberty Bell, if they believed in liberty. If the DA’s office is indulging woke antics, it’s doing it at the expense of Americans who want to learn about the ancient world through its greatest art. If it’s got an anti-colonialism fever, it needs to get over it. The zeitgeist has changed.
The Cleveland Museum, alas, seems to have lost its battle, felled by specks of dirt and well-tailored plugs. Last year, the Turks, the DA’s office, and the museum agreed to an analysis of the sculpture’s bronze, lead plugs at its base, and soil traces found by the plugs. They also agreed that a German analyst, Ernst Pernicka — from the Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, a lab in Mannheim, Germany — would answer questions on provenance, material identification, dating, production, and authenticity. They do sound serious indeed. Pernicka compared the Cleveland bronze’s lead plugs with holes at the archaeological site near Bubon where sculptures of Roman emperors were once displayed. “If the plugs don’t fit, the bronze don’t need to split” — Cleveland, that is, to paraphrase Johnnie Cochran.
Well, they fit better than those gloves fit OJ. Fit to a tee, in fact. Using isotope analysis and 3-D photogrammetry, Pernicka concluded that the statue’s soil traces are as Turkish as Topkapi.
It’s hard to grow up, as I did, in ye olde North Haven in Connecticut, or anywhere near New Haven, without knowing at least something about evidence obliteration, as mastered by what was, in my day, a robust gangster class. Then, the guys would have put “Marcus Aurelius,” or whomever the bronze depicts, through the triple-foam undercarriage car wash and turbo-powered vacuum, filed the plugs flat, and packed the base with soil from wherever Jimmy Hoffa’s buried.
The Cleveland Museum has agreed to return the bronze. The Turkish government will consider a cultural agreement with the museum allowing for long-term loans, but it seems this won’t include this bronze. The museum bought it in 1986 for $1.85 million from a New York dealer and isn’t seeing that money again.
In another restitution case, this week the Met returned to Greek diplomats an impressively fierce bronze griffin’s head from the seventh century b.c. It would have decorated a cauldron used in votive ceremonies. It’s been in the Met collection since 1972, when it arrived as a gift from a trustee. In legends, griffins have the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, merging the strengths of animal and aviary kingdoms to guard treasures. At our house, our schnauzer does that work.
This restitution didn’t involve a DA mau-mau. Last year, the Met established a tougher in-house provenance-research team led by Lucian Simmons, who was the head of provenance research at Sotheby’s and, before that, one of its Impressionist and modern-art specialists. His group is reviewing proposed acquisitions, ensuring that they’re clean, as well as objects long in the Met’s collection that might have sticky fingers in their genealogy. The Met’s many tussles with the Antiquities Tracking Unit led to its commitment to ownership hygiene. That’s good. My point is that the DA’s office needs to know when to cool it.
Speaking of heavy metal that walked, Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious gold toilet is back in the news. The 3,633-ounce, 18-karat ultimate throne, titled America, was on display in 2019 in Oxfordshire at Blenheim Palace, home of the dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill, when it was stolen. In 2023, the thieves who stole it from Blenheim were finally arrested. This past week, three of the accused crooks finally ran out of potty-break time and went on trial. Cattelan is a conceptual “participation artist” who also made Comedian, a banana fixed to a wall with duct tape, which sold at Sotheby’s in November for $6.2 million.
America was fit for participation, and I can attest to that. It was at the Guggenheim in a single-occupancy loo before it traveled to Blenheim. I’m far too demure to have taken advantage of all its properties, preferring porcelain and a Vermont rock-maple seat, but it did indeed flush.
But it flusheth no more. Evidently, the gang cased the drive to the Blenheim Palace museum, its galleries, and the powder room — visitors could book a time slot there to have America all to themselves. The thieves surmised that their golden goose, this one with a tank, bowl, and handle, could easily be theirs, and it was. The heist took all of five minutes. The toilet, insured for £4.8 million ($6 million), has never been found. Prosecutors and police believe that it was cut to pieces and melted.
It took three years for arrests to happen and two more for the case to come to trial. Who knows? The burglars might go free or get a typically European slap on the wrist. Will a stash of ingots, subtly shaped like the lid of a toilet tank, await them?