August 31, 2007 11:53
More on Maier
Let's get back for a moment to financially troubled Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., which has been thinking about selling or sharing some of the collection of its Maier Museum as a way to raise money. The school has asked a judge to determine whether the will of Louise Jordan Smith, who donated some of the Maier's most valuable works, would permit a sharing arrangement — assuming they can find a partner.
Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who is building a museum in Bentonville, Ark., is also known to have her eye on the Maier, which holds paintings by Belllows, O'Keeffe , Hopper and Winslow Homer, among others. Which is why I was struck by a passage in a farewell letter that was sent recently to Randolph faculty, staff, alumni and trustees by Ginger Worden, the school's outgoing interim president. At one point she turns to the possibility of leveraging the art collection, preferably through a sharing arrangement, as a way to raise money. Then she says this:
The goal would be to share ownership of a select number of our top paintings as partners with another institution, preferably in Virginia..... We are actively working toward a sharing agreement involving some of our art that would include internships and educational enhancements for all involved. As is true in most negotiations, there are days of optimism and others where the goal seems extremely elusive. So, I remain enthusiastic about this possibility but need to remind myself and all of us that if we are not successful in bringing about such a sharing arrangement, our trustees will have to consider the sale of a small number of our treasured pieces of art.
People familiar with the Randolph talks tell me that one Virginia institution contemplating a deal to share the art is the Virgnia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. But the cost to an outside museum of a sharing arragement with Randolph would almost certainly be in the tens of millions. In its request to the court concerning the Louise Jordan Smith bequest, Randolph says that those works alone, which are just part of the Maier holdings, may be worth $40 million.
So any kind of sharing deal would require a very heavy fundraising effort for the Virginia MFA, a museum that doesn't have access to as many deep pockets as institutions in larger cities. Remember that even in Philadelphia, where Eakins' The Gross Clinic was put on the market last year by Jefferson University, it required two museums jointly to come up with the $68 million purchase price — and that one of them had to sell one of its own Eakins to raise the cash.
Does the difficulty of finding an in-state museum with that kind of money help to account for Worden's words that there are days "where the goal [of concluding a sharing arrangement with a Virginia institution] seems extremely elusive"? If Virginia falls through, I would count on an offer from out of state. For instance, Arkansas.
August 29, 2007 1:50
Hirst's Skull Finds a Buyer
For the Love of God/Damien HIrst — Photo: Getty
Bloomberg's Linda Sandler is reporting that Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull has been sold to a (so far) unnamed "investment group" for the $100 million that Hirst was asking. (Sandler's story notes that The Art Newsaper reported recently that during discussions on the sale the skull — it's official title is For the Love of God — had been discounted to 38 million pounds, roughly $76.6 million at the current exchange rate. But Hirst's business manager is insisting that Hirst got his full asking price. Will the paperwork on this deal ever be made public? )
Whatever they paid, those investors have made their purchase at the very moment when the superheated art market may be headed for a cooling off period, what with the hedge fund billionaires who were some of the biggest art buyers having been some of the biggest losers in this summer's mortgage lending meltdown. Then again, investment groups generally buy for the long haul. The earliest one that I know of, La Peau de l'Ours — that's the "bear's skin" for us anglophones — started buying art by Picasso, Matisse and other then-risky moderns in 1904 for the purpose of holding it for ten years. At their auction in 1914 they scored roughly a five fold increase on their money.
A decade from now, will Hirst's skull be worth half a billion? That would require a lot of careful tending of Hirst's reputation. (You can count on that part.) And also occasional reminders to the rest of the world that the thing exists at all. That won't be easy to do if it's locked away in a vault for much of the next decade. Which may help to explain why one of the terms of sale was an obligation on the buyer to lend the skull to museums for a period of about three years.
And the skull's actual value as, well, a work of art? That doesn't get talked about much. And Hirst, who is a literally indifferent painter — his studio assistants turn out his painted works — but a reasonably canny conceptual artist, no doubt conceived the thing precisely to be the last word in pure capitalist fetish object, it's "value", including its market value, being entirely a consequence of....its market value. I get the joke. I'm also glad I'm not footing the bill.
August 29, 2007 11:47
Attention: Wal-Mart Shopping
Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress who's always on the hunt for artworks to fill her forthcoming Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., has jumped into the Fisk University sale. The story appeared first in The Tennessean. She's offered to purchase a 50% share of Fisk's Alfred Stieglitz bequest. That collection includes the Georgia O'Keeffe painting Radiator Building — Night, New York that Fisk is already hoping to sell to the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Walton is proposing to take the entire collection, not just the O'Keeffe, in a sharing arrangement with Fisk that would bring the school $30 million. The Walton offer is contingent on the Chancellor of Davidson County disallowing the proposed deal between Fisk and the O'Keeffe Museum. There's a hearing on that question coming up next month.
Whether it happens or not, these sharing arrangements are getting to be an ever more common proposal for cash-strapped colleges looking to turn their art collections into revenue. But the deals leave open a lot of unanswered questions. Here's just one. If Walton's offer were acccepted by Fisk, would her museum be allowed to lend works from the Stieglitz bequest to other museums? Would Fisk have any say over where the works could travel? When institutions "share" collections, who makes the rules? My guess would be the partner with the checkbook.
August 28, 2007 2:29
The Plot Thickens
Yesterday Mark Schwartz, an attorney representing the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a non-profit group attempting to prevent the Barnes collection from being moved from its home in Merion, Pa. to Philadelphia, filed a petition in Montgomery County Orphan's Court asking Judge Stanley Ott to rescind his earlier decision permitting the move. Blogger Tyler Green and Jim McCaffrey of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin have both obtained copies of the filing and provide details on line.
The filing is a step that's been expected for some time. The surprising part is how far the 79-page petition goes in making some explosive claims, namely that the process that culminated in Ott's decision was riddled with conflicts of interest. Attorney Schwartz had originally been retained by the Board of Commissioners of Montgomery County, where the Barnes is located, to file the petition on their behalf. But Schwartz resigned after members of the Board, which is also seeking to keep the Barnes in Merion, decided that they didn't want to be associated with some of the claims that Schwartz was preparing to make. His petition points the finger at a whole roster of players in the Barnes mess, including Barnes Foundation President Bernard Watson, the trustees of Lincoln University — that's the Pennsylvania school that was given control of the Barnes Foundation by Barnes himself — Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell and the state attorney general.
Here's just one of those claims:
"The attorney general, instead of assuring adversarial proceedings in this matter, became an active participant with Gov. Ed Rendell to pressure Lincoln University trustees to withdraw their opposition to the Barnes Foundation's petition [for permission to move its collection, thus breaking the terms of Barnes' will] in exchange for a commitment by the commonwealth [that's the state of Pennsylvania for you out-of-staters] to give Lincoln University millions of dollars of taxpayer money. The attorney general did not recognize its conflicts or those of others."
The most intriguing claim of all? That if the Barnes collection does move to Philadelphia, it may not end up, as is now the plan, in a purpose-built new museum. That project has already run into a number of obstacles. Instead, the petition suggests, the priceless collection could end up in "a place of last resort" — which might just be the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That's the very institution that Barnes spent a good part of his life feuding with.
One other irony here. The Philly Museum already possesses the collection assembled by Barnes' friend and attorney John G. Johnson. At his death in 1917 Johnson left over 1200 paintings and his house to the city of Philadelphia. But in 1933 the city and the Pennsylvania Museum of Art — as the Philadelphia Museum was then called — successfully petitioned a judge to demolish the house and move Johnson's collection into the museum. Barnes watched the whole episode unfold with complete dismay, and over the years moved repeatedly to insure that nothing of the kind could ever happen to his collection. We'll see.
August 27, 2007 1:46
Anguished Architect Alert
This morning the British daily The Guardian published a feature piece on Rem Koolhaas in which the oracular architect had this to say:
"The market economy thrives on spectacle and novelty," says Koolhaas. "Its buildings are ever more dramatic. It offers the promise of total freedom, but in architecture this quickly leads to the danger of grotesqueness. It is hard to do serious, disciplined buildings in such a condition. The media, of course, encourages this teenage architecture; it gives most attention to extreme capitalist buildings, to this ever-growing accumulation of architectural extravagance, to fanciful museums full of shops.
I have to agree with Koolhaas about the danger of the grotesque, of clients urging their architects, including mediocre ones — I don't mean Koolhaas — to produce ever more flamboyant buildings as a way to get noticed. (I've been told that something of the kind played a role in Frank Gehry's over the top design for the Experience Music Project in Seattle, an undertaking by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and his sister.) But for Koolhaas to complain about the media giving attention to the "ever-growing accumulation of architectural extravagance" seems a bit odd coming from the man whose firm designed the rather extravagant and heavily publicized Seattle Public Library...
to say nothing of the forthcoming CCTV Headquarters in Beijing.
I guess he must mean all those other extravagant buildings. You know, the ones the other guys do.
August 24, 2007 1:23
I've Got the Perfect Art Gift for John Travolta
I belatedly made it yesterday to the Guggenheim's summer show "The Shapes of Space", where it would be safe to say one of the most popular pieces is Piotr Uklanski's Untitled (Dance Floor). It's one of those synchronized flashing disco dance floors. The wall card was careful to relate his work to everything from Mondrian to Carl Andre. But it struck me that the floor didn't need all the art historical referencing to qualify as art. It's like a Roman mosaic, but with a beat.
Then again, with it's can-you-top-this? energies, Dance Floor does work pretty well as a joke about Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie — eat your heart out Piet! — to say nothing of Andre's dour plates-on-the-floor. Andre said it was ok for people to walk on his plate pieces? Hey, at the Guggenheim I saw two kids do cartwheels on this thing.
I'll never look at a certain movie the same way again.
August 22, 2007 11:14
They Speak For Themselves
Spc. Robert Acosta — Photo: Nina Berman
A New York gallery, Jen Bekman, has a powerful summer show of photographs by Nina Berman of wounded Iraq War veterans. You can find images here, and more of them in Berman's book Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq and on her website. Holland Cotter has a review in today's New York Times.
Along with the photographs of wounded soldiers made by James Nachtwey, these are some of the most affecting pictures I've seen of the costs inscribed on the human body by the war in Iraq. No matter what you think of that war, it would be fair to say that over the past few years Berman has paid more compassionate attention to American veterans than their own government has.
August 21, 2007 11:32
Don't I Know You From Somewhere?
While I was on vacation, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority in San Francisco unveiled three competing plans for a new office tower and transit terminal that will be the tallest building in the city. For once all three schemes have something to be said for them.
There's one by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill:
(Image courtesy SOM)
One by Richard Rogers' firm, now called Rogers, Stirk, Harbour + Partners:
(Image courtesy Transbay Joint Powers Authority)
And one by Cesar Pelli:
(Image courtesy Transbay Joint Powers Authority)
But at first glance, the thing that struck me is that Pelli, whose plan calls for a 5.4 acre rooftop park at its base, has offered up in the tower portion of his design yet another variation of the rounded obelisk that he's already plunked down in Hong Kong and Jersey City, N.J.
It's all the more unusual since Pelli is an architect who doesn't repeat himself that much. But sometimes architects hit on a form that they can't stop fiddling with. Or to put it another way, sometimes their busy offices just find it easier to roll out one more version of what they've done before.
In any event, here's a link to the Transbay website with more info and pics on the three contenders. (When you get there, click on "What Will It Look Like?")
August 20, 2007 10:36
Recommended Reading
Last month, in a post I did about the death of the photo curator John Szarkowski, I mentioned that one of the best photography books I ever read was Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence by the photographer Tod Papageorge. The book is a brilliant rethinking of how Frank, in his masterpiece The Americans, came to grips with Evans' masterpiece, American Photographs.
The Papageorge book, which originated as the catalogue for a 1981 show that he organized at the Yale University Art Gallery, has been out of print for years. But a few days ago Eric Etheridge, a New York blogger and photographer, got in touch to let me know that with Papageorge's permission he has posted the full text as a PDF on his blogsite. You can find it here. It's definitely worth a look. So is Etheridge's blog, where he hopes to post other worthwhile but hard to find photography texts in the future.
August 17, 2007 1:35
More on Murray
The Lowdown, Murray, 2001 — Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Generalitat Valenciana
Ok, lets finish up the Elizabeth Murray train of thought I started Wednesday, about the extraordinary number of influences that went into producing her pictures.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, where Murray was a student in the late 1950s, she fell in love with DeKooning's pivotal abstraction, Excavation. All the thrusting, elbowing, push-pull forms that DeKooning dug up for that painting got buried back into her unconscious, later to burst out in the spring loaded space of her own work. She once told Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of The New York Times, that "I would leave my painting classes sometimes and run upstairs to the galleries to check out that painting, and literally dash back with it visualized in my mind to try to replicate that stroke on canvas."
Excavation, De Kooning, 1950 — The Art Institute of Chicago
Stuart Davis is an artist Murray once said she never thought of as a plain influence, but it's hard to look at her work and not think of his. So much of what he did in the 1920s through the '50s predicts what she did decades later, which was to combine Cubist space with Pop references. His thrusting, fractured, party-colored planes are obvious predicates to her own, even if she didn't see it that way.
Colonial Cubism, Davis, 1944 — Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn.
And his phenomenal 1938 mural Swing Landscape is an obvious forerunner of Murray's wonderful late work, like The Lowdown and Do the Dance.
Swing Landscape, Davis, 1938 — Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington.
The late 60s, when Murray was still working her way thorugh various early styles, was also the moment when Philip Guston made his famous return to figurative painting in a cartoonish style that owed something to R. Crumb. As Murray herself once acknowledged, his inventory of bean shapes, even his preoccupation with shoes, seeped into her own work.
Pit, Guston, 1976 — National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
One artist whom Murray has cited repeatedly for having a big influence on her thinking about the space of the canvas is Ron Gorchov and his saddle canvases of the 1970s and 80s, which bowed out from the wall. She first saw them in 1976, around the time of her first forays into shaped canvas.
Ulysses, Gorchov, 1979 — Courtesy Julian Schnabel
Then there's the question of Frank Stella. In an interview that she gave to Rob Storr a few years ago when he was preparing her retrospective at MoMA in New York, Murray said that she had seen the show at Leo Castelli in 1975 at which Stella first exhibited his painted steel wall pieces. "I thought they were fantastic and really wild," she said. But she also insisted to Storr that she felt that Stella's work had nothing to do with her own. Maybe. Let's just say that the idea of breaking out of the picture plane was very much in the air in the mid-70s, and Murray and Stella were both thinking along similar lines.
La Vecchia dell'Orto, Stella, 1986 — Centre Pompidou, Paris
Something else you couldn't avoid in New York in the '70s was subway graffiti. Murray told Storr that while she often just thought of graffiti as vandalism, she couldn't help but be excited sometimes by "those big bloopy shapes."
Subway car graffiti — graffiti.org
I could go on. I haven't even mentioned Al Held and Brice Marden, both of whom Murray frequently cited. Or Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, whose work in the 80s had a similar buzz to it. But you get the picture — Murray's work was a very sophisticated synthesis of multiple inspirations. They brought her to a place where she could reconcile the fractured planes of Cubism with the biomorphic swells of Surrealism, which opened the way to paintings that were both dreamlike and wildly energetic. Though it's a game we all love to play, it's hard to know which painters the future will think highly of. But I'm putting a big bet on her.
August 15, 2007 11:44
Where Does She Get Those Ideas of Hers?
Mouse Cup, Elizabeth Murray, 1981-82 — Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson
Looking Around is in a looking around mood today. And I still have Elizabeth Murray on my mind. In the tribute to Murray that I wrote yesterday for Time.com, I called her a "brilliant synthesizer". What I was thinking of there was her gift for blending multiple disparate influences into a language of form and space that was in the end entirely her own. So I decided that today I would just sort through some of the image bank that's been running through my head these past few days as I thought back on her work. Since there's a lot of show and tell to do here, I'll probably break this post into two or three parts and finish it tomorrow or even Friday.
So let's begin....
The Ray, Chardin, 1728 — Musée du Louvre, Paris
To begin with, much of the time Murray was a still life painter. That's easy to forget because there's nothing very still in the springing energies of her canvases. But a table, a chair, a pair of shoes, a cup and saucer — these were her typical motifs. Yesterday I mentioned that she could be understood partly as what the French call an intimiste, a painter whose subject is the ordinary middle class household. It's a term that's most often applied to painters of the Impressionist era and afterwards. But it could easily be cast back further in time to the 18th century and Chardin.
And it was Chardin's still life The Ray that came to mind today, partly because that cat creeping into the picture from the left looks like he might just set flying that whole carefully arranged ensemble of food and kitchenware. In Murray's pictures there's often a mishap at the center of things, spilled coffee, flying crockery — domestic life isn't always the same thing as domestic tranquillity. Those events lend themselves to her main formal concern, which is how to get pulse and motion into a static image. But they also serve a psychological purpose. They introduce a note of anxiety and emotional rupture. There's a fair amount of strife in Murray's pictures. They're funny, sure, but sometimes they leave you with the feeling that the laughs came hard.
The Plate of Apples, Cezanne, 1877 — The Art Institute of Chicago
When she was studying at the Art Instutute of Chicago in the late 1950s Murray had what she always thought of as a crucial encounter with one of the Institute's Cezannes, The Plate of Apples, a painting she described years later as one where "the space is all pouring out somehow at you." At the time the painting's main importance for her was simply that it turned her on to the joy of looking at painting. But plainly something of the canted, tilted iceflow surfaces of Cezanne's still lifes would find its way into Murray's work.
Still Life with Apples and Oranges, Cezanne, 1899 — Musée du Louvre, Paris
It was Cezanne of course who was the great source of the breakthrough into Cubism by Picasso and Braque. And the Cubist fracture of space is essential to the space that Murray arrived at. Twenty years ago, in a review of Murray's first major retrospective, at the Whitney Museum, my very esteemed predecessor as Time's art critic, Robert Hughes, made a shrewd comparison netween Murray and another Cubist, Juan Gris....
....with his smooth Ingresque planes and profiles of teacup, gueridon and spoon, their lights and darks fitting together like the notches of a key in the wards of a lock. But Murray's work is less composed, and its messages include the kind of direct psychological narrative, the contact with anxiety (including the anxieties of stylistic irresolution that must be faced with every new picture) that Gris's still lifes were designed to bury.
The Sun Blind, Gris, 1914 — Tate, London
Another ingredient of Murray's art is also traceable in part to Picasso, namely the bulging, brightly colored biomorphic forms that were a hallmark of his work in the 1930s, as he was playing with an almost (he never quite signed up) Surrealist phase.
Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table, Picasso, 1931 — Musée Picasso, Paris
And those forms soon migrated into the work of Arshile Gorky, Picasso's most devoted American follower and an artist who was a consuming passion of Murray's after she moved to the Bay area for a few years in the early 1960s to do graduate work at Mills College in Oakland.
The Liver is the Cock's Comb, Gorky, 1944 — Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.
But before we get too caught up in the high art sources of Murray's art, it's important to remember that one of her enduring inspirations has been comic strips and animated cartoons. By conflating the cartoon world and the Surrealist world, Disney and Dali, Murray taps into their common power as sites of fantasy and fantastical shape shifting. Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Disney features were all sources for her. To say nothing of the celebrated bird who was the explicit model for one of her painted forms...Tweety Bird
Tweety Bird, Leon Schlesinger, introduced 1942 — Warner Bros.
More tomorrow.... (Or should I do one of those Porky Pig exits? "That's all folks!")
August 14, 2007 5:40
More on Murray
Here's a quick link to an appreciation of Elizabeth Murray that I produced today for Time.com. One thing I didn't have space to mention there was that in her last years Murray's work continued to evolve in fascinating ways, and that some of her final works, madly complex polyptychs, were among her most inventive. If you happen to be in New York in the next month you can see one prime example from 2005, called Do the Dance, a churning, intricate jitterbug of a painting. (With maybe a whiff of Kenny Scharf to it.) It's in the very enjoyable summer show at MOMA called "What is Painting?" The show runs through September 17.
August 13, 2007 11:57
Elizabeth Murray: 1940-2007
Painter's Progress, 1981 — The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. © 2007 Elizabeth Murray
I'm back from vacation and unfortunately the first order of business is to talk about the death of Elizabeth Murray, the irresistable American painter. I can't think of another contemporary artist who gave me more sheer pleasure over the past few decades. In the 1970s, when everybody just knew that painting was dead, Murray and a handful of others — Susan Rothenberg, Brice Marden and Philip Guston to name three — came along with the kind of vital pictures that said: "Says who?"
Murray's big shaped canvases, with their declamatory colors and cartoonish references to bodily form and household objects, were playful in all the best and smartest ways. Her work was youthful, but never puerile. She could be childlike without ever being childish. Like Howard Hodgkin, or for that matter Matisse, she offered us a bright, beckoning palette as a point of entry into all kinds of sophisticated reckonings with form. She drew inspiration from comic books and Tweety Bird, but also from Stuart Davis and Miro. And of course from every area of ordinary domestic life. All those cups, and shoes and children's toys — she took the "womanly" household realm and reminded us that it's the place where magic happens.
I'll have more to say about Murray later. She may be gone, but no artist ever left behind a body of work that was more exuberantly, enduringly alive.
Dis Pair, 1989-90 — The Museum of Modern Art © 2007 Elizabeth Murray
August 2, 2007 11:45
The Goodbye Girl
Goddess, probably Aphrodite, 425-400 B.C. — © J. Paul Getty Trust
Yes, I'm still on vacation through mid-August, so I resisted the temptation to jump in earlier this week to comment on things like the departure of Guggenheim Director Lisa Dennison for a job at Sotheby's or the suicide of the artist Jeremy Blake, whose haunting mixed media show Winchester I was lucky enough to catch a few years ago at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
But the deal between the Getty Museum and Italian authorities to return nearly all of the disputed antiquities the Italians have been seeking — that I had to come back for. You can get the details here from L.A. Times reporters Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, who just about own the Getty story.
I'll just add this much. With this deal, which includes an agreement to return the so-called Morgantina Aphrodite — that's her up top — Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has completed a trifecta of give back arrangements with major American museums. (He earlier persuaded the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Art to return numerous ancient artworks that were probably looted from Italian excavations.) And he's not done. He apparently still plans to pursue return of the so-called Getty Bronze, a 4th century B.C. Greek statue of a victorious athlete that both Rutelli and the Getty have decided for now to postpone discussions on. (And the Getty is right to dig in its heels on that one. Italy's case for the bronze, which was found in international waters, then brought on to Italian soil briefly before being illegally exported, is a good deal weaker than its claims on other work.) There was also a deal announced last month for the return of work from the Princeton Art Museum. And Rutelli has in his sights as well the Cleveland Museum of Art and objects in the private collection of Metropolitan Museum patron Shelby White. Meanwhile, the Greek government is on the warpath too over the same issue of looted antiquities.
That said, Boston, New York and the Getty were Rutelli's three biggest targets and he's now bagged them all. We can expect his demands on American museums to gradually wind down. Which leaves the question, what will be his legacy? Plainly, he established the principle that the 1970 UNESCO agreement on the traffic in antiquities is not just a paper tiger but a real rule of international law that museums will be expected from now on to observe scrupulously or suffer real consequences. (Meaning the return of costly art objects without compensation. There are no refunds for purloined art, though as a sweetener the Italians have promised long term loans to the American museums that have returned disputed works.) Though an illicit market for private collectors will go on, even they will find it harder to donate their collections to wary museums. All of this has to have a real impact on looting at archeological digs.
But will Rutelli's campaign have a lasting impact on the efforts to regain works of art that left their homeland in the years before the era covered by the UNESCO agreement? Some of the biggest cultural patrimony disputes involve works like that. The Elgin Marbles are the obvious example but there are others. The UNESCO agreement was not only intended to create a legal regime to regulate the trade in antiquities, but to create a kind of statute of limitations for claims by aggrieved nations. (Though Egypt and Ethiopia, to cite two examples, have successfully pursued older claims in recent years.) The objects that Rutelli went after were, I believe, all covered by the UNESCO agreement. But will his success re-open the larger question of artworks that crossed borders in earlier years? At the very least, it's going to make a lot of claimants bolder.
Meanwhile, you have until the end of this year to get to the Getty Villa see the works that the museum has agreed to return. Or, in the case of the Morgantina Aphrodite, until December 2010. After that, it's arrivederci baby for her too.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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