Going Public: Art Museums and Acquisitions, Now and in the Future

James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

Text of a talk given at Yale University Art Gallery as part of the lecture and panel discussion program Looking Ahead: Issues for Museums in the 21st Century, 2 May 1998.

Art museums in this country are very popular. The Art Newspaper recently published a list of the fifteen most popular exhibitions of 1997. Of these, the number one show, Picasso: The Early Years, drew over 530,000 people to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the second most popular, Renoir’s Portraits, attracted 490,000 to the Art Institute of Chicago. Added together, almost 595,000 people saw Monet and the Mediterranean at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In all, some 4,600,000 people saw just thirteen different exhibitions in only nine museums, for an average of almost 307,000 at each venue (two of the exhibitions each had two venues among the top fifteen). And these were only the temporary exhibitions!

Last year the combined total attendance at just two museums—the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—was almost ten million. Of course, some of these were no doubt repeat visitors, but still, that’s a lot of people, comparable in number to the populations of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined. It’s an average of 16,000 people a day at each museum, or roughly three times the number of the Harvard undergraduate student body.

How do we account for this extraordinary interest in our art museums? No doubt our increased sensitivity to visitor services and public programs plays a big part. But so, too, do our permanent collections. Our national and international reputations are based almost entirely on our permanent collections. By all accounts, museum visitors most enjoy seeing works of art they know to be accessible almost all the time. Visits to the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the National Gallery, not to mention smaller museums like those at Yale and Harvard, would seem to confirm this: more people visit our permanent collection galleries than our temporary exhibitions. If they come especially for our temporary exhibitions, they almost always visit our permanent collections and spend more time there. If you’ve been to the Whitney Museum lately, you know what I mean: the new permanent collection galleries are packed, while the temporary exhibition galleries are sparsely attended. The Guggenheim Museum’s buildings and internationalist ethos are also draws, even more than their temporary exhibitions, and I would imagine that Bilbao’s interest in partnering with the Guggenheim Museum was due to the strength of its permanent collection rather than to any temporary exhibitions it might organize.1 The same would be true of the Museum of Modern Art were it to pursue similar partnerships.

Our permanent collections define our museums. They represent an extraordinary commitment on behalf of the public and are the artistic heritage we pass on to future generations. Indeed, of all the things museums do, building the permanent collection is the most important: it is the foundation of our public and scholarly programs; it is the reason we can organize temporary exhibitions, which either derive from works in our collections or are made possible by the mutual exchange of loans among various institutions’ permanent collections. And, in any case, the museums represented in this panel (the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Harvard University Art Museums; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery) were founded to house permanent collections rather than to host temporary exhibitions; if they had been founded for the latter, they would be kunsthallen and not art museums.

I realize of course that in the face of our electronic, digital, virtual, and globalizing future—which some would say argues against the need for a permanent collection of particular works of art being in any one place at any one time—this may sound quaint and old-fashioned. But I would argue that, especially for encyclopedic collecting museums like Yale’s, collection building in the future will not only be just as important as it has been for the past one hundred years—and the material presence of the work of art will be just as crucial to our understanding and appreciation of art itself as it always has been—but that in fact, collection building in the future may be our museums’ greatest challenge. How do we continue to build collections when col-lection building itself is seen as ethically and politically suspect, a means of perpetuating an undesirable imbalance of power in the world between the "haves" and the "have nots," between the "art-importing" and "art-exporting" nations? In this scenario, collection building through acquisitions is seen as taking something from someone else who more rightly deserves it.

Recently the ethics of collections building, or museum acquisitions, have drawn fire from journalists and some of our academic colleagues. They have focused their attention on art that may have been looted by the Nazis during the Second World War and on works of art that may have been illegally obtained from various ancient cultures. In the first instance, they note that museums have works of art with gaps in their provenance corresponding to the years of the war in Europe. Such gaps, they claim, suggest that the works were likely confiscated from private owners by the wartime German government. They further contend that by now we should have filled those gaps with new knowledge, implying that we have not done so because we would rather have those works of art in our collections than return them to their rightful owners. In the second instance, our critics fault us for acquiring antiquities without proof that they were not looted and/or illegally exported from their countries of origin. They maintain that, by acquiring antiquities with less than full documentation, we are contributing to looting and to the loss of archaeological knowledge—again, because we want above all to possess works of art that are advantageous to our institutions.

These are of course complicated matters and I can only speak generally here. They are also, I should emphasize, two distinctly different matters. One involves relatively recent confiscation of personal property under the threat of, or as a result of, state-sanctioned terrorism carried out against individuals simply because of the religious faith, parentage, or sexual orientation of those individuals. The other involves a complicated set of events, many of them disconnected, occurring over many centuries and involving works of art buried for hundreds if not thousands of years by acts of natural disaster and warfare or by the more banal effects of time itself, and which may or may not now have a convincing connection to the people and culture of the country in which they are found. In the instance of Nazi-looted art, we are talking about acts against individuals still alive or with heirs, while in the trade in antiquities we are talking about alleged illegal acts against a people defined by recent nationalist politics, and who may have little more or no other relation to the past peoples and cultures in question than the coincidence of geography.

Therefore, admitting the general and introductory nature of my remarks, I offer them up simply as a means of reminding us of the very reason museums make acquisitions, and to argue that acquiring works of art is in almost every case in the service of the public good. This fact is not being considered in recent debates, and the increasing constraints being placed on acquisitions will deprive our museum-going public—the millions of people every year—of the experience they have come to expect from art museums: the chance to encounter, study, learn from, and be inspired by the works of art of all kinds, and from all times and cultures, that form a particular museum’s permanent collection and thus are, almost always, there for such encounters.

Collecting works of art is a great responsibility. Museum curators and directors must to the best of their ability, and after much experience and advanced academic training, decide which works of art to collect and thus which to preserve for future generations. Needless to say, we do not do this alone. Before making acquisitions we read the writings of many scholars, talk with many colleagues, and often have the works in question examined by conservators. We need to feel confident that the work is important, genuine, and in good condition. After all, resources are scarce and we cannot afford to make many mistakes.

Museum directors must also be assured that their museums can acquire valid title to the work of art—that it is in fact the property of the person from whom they are buying it. This is not always easy. The record of ownership of a work of art dating back many centuries is often incomplete. How a fifth-century-B.C. Greek vase or a nineteenth-century painting by Renoir, for example, passed from its maker to its current owner is often not fully known. If we are lucky, that record was of interest to its owners and was kept; most often, especially for ancient works of art or works held by owners during times of war and other calamities, records were not kept or were lost.

Sometimes a work of art has been included in an exhibition or sold at an auction for which a catalogue has been published. For about the past hundred years, these catalogues have been illustrated, but sadly, only partially so. Most often a work of art is described generally, and sometimes even mistakenly. From such sketchy records it is simply not always possible to know how a work has passed from its maker to its present owner, and whether it has always done so legally.

Having completed an appropriate amount of research and consulted the International Foundation for Art Research, the museum director is forced to make the decision whether or not to acquire the work. I want to emphasize, however, that making an acquisition is not a final act; it is but one step in an ongoing process of studying the work of art. Upon acquisition, museum curators continue to research works. After all, now they have time to do so more thoroughly, for the opportunity to acquire a work of art is always limited by time: the museum has to decide within a fixed period, usually no more than a few weeks. After acquisition, the curator can spend any amount of time researching its provenance, its importance, and the method of its manufacture. In fact, often a museum acquires a work for the very purpose of studying it further, always with the goal of increasing public knowledge.

Most often, acquiring a work of art means that a work formerly in a private collection is now accessible to the public. It is published and exhibited; scholars come to know of its whereabouts, and the general public is encouraged to see, learn about, and appreciate it. This access is always much more difficult, if not impossible, when a work is held privately.

Equally important is the art museum’s dedication to preserving works of art. Museum security systems and environmental conditions are almost always better than those of private collections, and the works of art are more likely to be handled by people specially trained to take care of them. In fact, art museums are more accurately to be thought of as caretakers than as owners of the art in their possession. Everything about a museum—its physical, human, and financial resources—is dedicated to passing the work of art safely on to succeeding generations.

Acquiring antiquities is especially sensitive. National laws and international guidelines require museums to exercise special caution when acquiring antiquities. The UNESCO Conventions, adopted in 1972 and signed into law in this country in 1983, forbid museums from acquiring works of art they know to have been looted or illegally exported from their countries of origin. In 1971 the Harvard Corporation passed a set of guidelines requiring Harvard’s museums to ascertain with "reasonable assurance" that the museum can obtain legal title of the work or object in question, and thus to know that the work or object was not looted or illegally exported.

Of course the key word here is "know." What should one do if one does not know whether a work of ancient art was or was not looted and exported illegally? As I outlined above, we cannot know everything about a work of art before acquiring it. Indeed, it is often only by acquiring, publishing, and exhibiting a work that we can find out more about it and encourage scholars and archaeological authorities to share their knowledge with us in the hopes of filling gaps in its background.

As I have already mentioned, some scholars, and especially some archaeologists, believe that museums should not acquire a work of antiquity unless it can be proved that the object was excavated and exported legally. They believe that such restrictions will discourage and eventually end looting, and that, as a colleague said to me, a work of ancient art is meaningless without knowledge of the archaeological circumstances of its "find spot."

We are all against looting, and we all want to document and preserve archaeological evidence. But stopping looting requires more than restricting acquisition. It means preventing looting at the source as well. Countries of origin must police archaeological sites and arrest looters before the works in their possession reach the open market. Once works do reach the market, however, other considerations arise. Should a museum decline to acquire a work just because it has no affirmative evidence that it was excavated and exported legally? Not necessarily. By not acquiring it, the museum prevents the work from entering the public domain. It will remain in private hands, and possibly nothing more will be known of it.

To take just one famous example, we know almost nothing about the archaeological circumstances of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Not one was excavated. When scholars learned they could be acquired and thus saved for posterity, they purchased them. If they had not, we would not know as much as we do about Judaism around the turn of the Christian era and about the Jewish sect of the Qumran, which shared so many beliefs with the early Christians. Far from being meaningless without knowledge of their archaeological context, the Dead Sea Scrolls have become the basis for an extraordinary advance in Biblical exegesis, precisely because they were acquired and preserved for study.

This is true of works of art as well. A recent opinion piece in the Boston Globe stated that "without historical context, the objects retain little more than aesthetic appeal." What is so little about "aesthetic appeal"? It is a condition of works of art that they have aesthetic appeal, and it is legitimate to appreciate and articulate that appeal in private or public, by speaking or writing about it. Works of art are not merely documents of the conditions in which they were found. They have meanings other than the historical, and they have many historical meanings: in addition to their archaeological circumstances, their forms and iconography have historical meanings, as do their material conditions (size, scale, material, technology, etc.), and their public and critical reception and artistic influence. Works of art, in fact, have many categories of meaning. That is why they remain so interesting to us, millennia after they were manufactured, and that is why museums acquire them.

Sometimes a museum is given a chance to preserve a work of art, even if its archaeological conditions are unknown. Without evidence that the work was looted and/or illegally exported, and in keeping with the 1972 UNESCO Conventions and national laws, an art museum might still serve the public interest by acquiring it, in order to preserve and share it with both current and future generations of the public.

Preservation was also the reason some private collectors gave for acquiring pictures at the notorious Galerie Fischer auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, in June 1939. There, works of art that had been judged degenerate by the Nazis and confiscated from German public collections were offered up for purchase. Some museums stayed away from the sale on the grounds that it in effect rewarded the Nazis for their invasion and occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. But private collectors like Maurice Wertheim and Joseph Pulitzer Jr. chose to bid on van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (1951.65) and Matisse’s Three Bathers with a Turtle in order "to safeguard this art for posterity," as Pulitzer said at the time. When later Wertheim gave the van Gogh to the Fogg Museum and Pulitzer the Matisse to the St. Louis Art Museum, they delivered the paintings safely up to the enjoyment of countless students and scholars, and the larger public.

Today, with new information resulting from the declassification of thousands, if not millions, of secret government documents, and encouraged by the research and questions of writers like Lynn Nicholas (The Rape of Europa, 1994) and Hector Feliciano (The Lost Museum, 1995/97), museums are working hard to resolve the provenance of their collections’ works that have gaps just before and during the war years. Once again, this is not an easy task. Still, it is a necessary one. If art museums are in possession of works of art that rightly—that is, legally or ethically—can be shown to belong to others, they should seek to identify those people or their heirs. But what if there are no heirs, or if living relatives are only distantly related? As some have asked, assuming no legal claim: what ethical claim does a second-generation American, non-Jewish cousin-by-marriage of a Jewish Holocaust victim have on a work of art that was taken from that victim? Does that person have a more ethical claim on the work than the five million people each year who could see it if it were in an art museum? And if heirs cannot be found, or if they no longer exist or indeed never existed, why, as some have contended, should a work of art now in a public collection be sold and the proceeds given to an organization in support of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, especially when the buyer is a private collector, with the result that the work of art would be transferred from the public to the private domain?

Are there circumstances, in other words, where a public good outweighs a private good? And who is to decide? These are enormously difficult questions, and they can be asked not only of works of art confiscated by the Nazis, but of antiquities as well.

I don’t need to recount the story of the Elgin marbles and the debate about where they should be housed. It is enough to say, as Daniel Shapiro has written, that the debate is over the very meaning of "cultural property," which he defines as what a country, community, or people claim as their own unique form of expression. In the case of the Elgin marbles, he writes, "without question [they] belong to and are part of Greece’s identity and inalienable heritage, and are universally recognized as such, including in their display at the British Museum. But for some, Greek and non-Greek alike, the recognition that the Parthenon’s sculptures are Greek is not enough. Their return to Greece is sought, even though they can no longer be affixed to the Parthenon and, as in London, should be housed in a museum." That their being removed to England no doubt saved them from destruction by the Turks, from being put to other uses by the Greeks, or from being disfigured by acidic air pollution doesn’t matter. It is whose they were and how they could be stored now that counts to those who are calling for their return to Greece.

This raises a larger question: are works of art an international heritage or a national patrimony? Since 1972, the UNESCO conventions have favored national patrimony; indeed, the most recent set of conventions under consideration states that art-exporting countries "should obtain general rights to the return of cultural objects principally associated with their national culture."

The question remains: what should be the goal in determining the rightful venue for a particular work of art? To accommodate nationalist politics, or to preserve the work and encourage scholarship and the discovery of new knowledge? In my mind, the principle of international heritage is at least equally legitimate to that of national patrimony and, as such, must be taken into account when considering the matter of art museum acquisitions. In dealing with confiscated, looted, or otherwise relocated works of art, the aim should not be just to return them to their so-called nation of origin or to a possible heir, however distant and weak the claim, or to sell them for the financial benefit of those connected to the deceased owner only by virtue of having been fellow sufferers of unspeakable and inhumane government action. The goal must also be to ensure the safety, conservation, and accessibility of works of art.

Once again, these are not easy questions and there are no easy answers. But as museums move forward to consider them, as we sort through the legal and ethical claims that have been or will be made against works of art in our collections, and as we consider whether or not to acquire antiquities, let us not forget the very purpose of art museums: to acquire, preserve, exhibit, and interpret works of art in order to pass them and knowledge about them safely on to future generations. This has always been the purpose of art museums. And it will continue to be so in the near and far distant future. The question for the future will be how art museums can continue to pursue this purpose and build collections and meet their legal and ethical obligations under increasing constraints. What, in other words, will be the future of permanent collections, and how will the past be represented in the future?

James Cuno
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

1. In October 1998, the Guggenheim Museum opened a museum in Bilbao, Spain, which was paid for by Basque authorities, who will also make annual payments to the Guggenheim. In exchange, the Guggenheim will organize many exhibitions annually for its new museum. back