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Everyone (except perhaps a few collectors and dealers) will concede that there is a moral or ethical dimension to the Parthenon Marbles controversy. For the British Museum and its supporters, this centres on ‘ownership’, ‘good stewardship’ and the case for the ‘universal museum’, which has moral as well as cultural overtones. Armed with such arguments, the British Museum has striven long and hard (and with some public success) to occupy the ‘moral high ground’: even if you find the ‘universal museum’ argument logically flawed, divisive and tactless, you may accept that it is high-sounding - a world setting for world art as against nationalist pretensions - especially if backed by the undoubted merits of free admission for its public.
For their opponents, the ethical dimension is more concerned with natural justice and the righting of past wrongs. Of course it is difficult to reach agreement on what constitutes such a wrong. But if there is one issue on which everyone can agree, it is that, over the whole history of the twentieth century and longer, the Holocaust must occupy a position close to, or on, the bottom rung on the ethical ladder. To benefit, even unknowingly, from the Nazi looting of the property of Holocaust victims is, one might guess, the very last thing that a major public institution would wish to be seen to do.
But no: in certain circumstances, it turns out to be only the second-last thing. In 1939, the Gestapo seized from the home of Dr. Arthur Feldmann some 750 old master drawings, before he was tortured and murdered and his wife sent to her death at Auschwitz. More than sixty years later, his heirs discovered that four of these drawings had been inadvertently acquired by the British Museum in 1946: three of them bought at auction for nine guineas, the fourth bequeathed by a former Director of the Museum (can this really be true, only seven years after their first seizure ?). The Museum now, in 2002, approached the Government to see if an exception could be made to the 1963 British Museum Act, which had generally forbidden the museum to dispose of any of its holdings. But Counsel for the Attorney General held that under existing legislation this was impossible: why, if the principle were once established, it might be applied to other acquisitions where ‘unseemly circumstances’ prevailed: ‘the door would be open’. In a judgment of 2005, Mr. Justice Morritt agreed: only new legislation could entitle the Trustees to part with the drawings. So the Museum fell back on the alternative course of offering the Feldmann heirs financial compensation, which was accepted.
Though no doubt soundly based in law, this whole episode wore a sufficiently sorry look for the Government to promise new legislation, confined strictly to the category of Nazi loot. In October 2008, the then Minister announced action on an enabling clause, as part of the Heritage Protection Bill for 2009. But now, a British Museum spokesperson is reported as saying that the Museum is today ‘not in favour of a change in legislation’ (The Art Newspaper, November 2008, p. 00). Any doubt about the authenticity of this report is dispelled by a piece, attributed to Sir Norman Rosenthal ‘in discussion with William Oliver’, in the following issue (December, p. 30). Here it is actually proposed that heirs and distant relations of Holocaust victims no longer have an inalienable right to ownership, and that it is time to ‘let go of the past’.
The motive for the change of heart, though unstated, is clear: that other holdings of the big museums, under the potential shadow of ‘unseemly circumstances’, might come into consideration as well - just as Counsel for the Attorney General had warned three years earlier. We don’t even have to guess which holdings he then had in mind: he made specific mention of the Marbles.
By this volte-face, the British Museum has comprehensively evacuated the moral high ground from which we started. The expediency of avoiding the risk of further pressure, stiffened by even a faint shadow of legal force, being applied in the Marbles issue, has overcome revulsion at hanging on to the former possessions of a Holocaust victim and buying off his heirs. Inevitably, this reminds one of other occasions when this great public institution acted in ethically questionable ways. Some of these, linked by a thread of real animosity against the modern Greek state, are too embarrassing to recall after the passage of years. But in what may have been meant as a lighter vein the current Director, at the time of the Hadrian exhibition last year, was reported as having compared that Emperor with Lord Elgin, as a diffuser of Greek arts to the rest of Europe.
The Nazi loot question, however, touches a deeper nerve. Much as we may disagree with the British Museum on the Marbles issue, I personally would much prefer, win or lose, to be matched against an institution not so palpably at odds with its own high principles. Instead, we seem to have come to the point where the Marbles factor is a tail that wags the dog of policy - in the process, shaking off some of its probity.
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