Pre-1970 Provenance Now Not Good Enough?

There is a disturbing new trend appearing among those attempting to put an end to collecting of antiquities and ancient art highlighted by CCP: 'The Guennol Stargazer – Pre-1970 provenance isn’t good enough?". The issue was raised following the sale of the 9-inch-high Anatolian Chalcolithic stone figurine known as the Guennol Stargazer, formerly part of the collection of Edith and Alastair Bradley Martin, for $14.5 million. The “Stargazer,” so named because its eyes appear to be looking into the heavens, was on loan to NY’s Metropolitan Museum for 27 years, and has been documented in the US for more than 50 years. Just prior to the auction, the government of Turkey filed a claim to the statue, which was rejected by Judge Alison Nathan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. A group of demonstrators raised placards at Christie’s doors at the May 28 sale. The Turkish government claims that the statuette belongs to Turkey, and questioned Christie’s role in its sale. This is because archeologists say that there was “no documentation of its excavation, curation or display in Turkey before it surfaced in the United States in 1966.”

There is nothing “remarkable” about that – it is typical of Turkish works that circulated widely in the international market in the mid-20th century. Sales of enormous quantities of antiquities took place in Turkey in the early 20th century, though they lessened considerably by the sixties – and a nine-inch-high statuette of abstract form would not have been considered of much interest in Turkey at the time.

The anti-collecting archaeologists suggest that Turkey has had a law prohibiting export of antiquities since 1906. As CCP point out:

This is hardly relevant. If simply having a law on the books in a foreign country created a presumption of illegality under US law – then our museums would be empty. The stone figurine is unquestionably lawful to buy or sell under the 1983 Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act, (CCPIA) the primary US legislation that explicitly covers the ownership of ancient and ethnographic art. The CCPIA does not apply: there is no US-Turkey agreement under that law, and even if there was, Turkish objects that could be shown to be outside Turkey for more than 10 years would not be affected. Any question of illegality would have to be based on a claim that Turkey’s national patrimony laws would make the statuette unlawful to buy, sell, or even possess under the National Stolen Property Act. This Act would rely on there having been a valid, enforced patrimony law in Turkey at the time the object was exported. However, the US does not enforce Turkish or other foreign laws without question, and for good reason. There are many Turkish laws that are not consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

This controversy-that-is-not-a-controversy is not just about Turkey or about this particular object. It is about finding every act of collecting or exhibiting ancient art somehow wrongful and harmful to society. Such unbalanced arguments often ignore the merits of granting repose, an important legal principle, to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented artifacts that have circulated for decades in trade, they encourage selective enforcement and prosecutions, both of which should be anathema to members of a civil society.

Arguments based on purely nationalist claims lack any consideration of the social value of the global circulation of art, the understanding and connection it brings, or the humanist (as opposed to nationalist) argument that all humankind shares the responsibility to preserve and to study the works of all of the rest of humankind. They deride humanism as “apologist.”

A stop needs to be put to this undermining of collectors' rights.