Yesterday I posted an interview with Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli about his very successful efforts to retrieve important works of art from American museums that Italy claims were looted from archeological digs or otherwise exported illegally. He spoke to Time just as the first of 40 once disputed items were returning to Rome from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
This morning I sat down in New York with the Getty’s Director Michael Brand, who came to the museum in 2005, after it emerged that many items in the collection of the Getty Villa were probably looted from Italian sites. Since then it’s been his job to clean up the mess and put the museum’s acquisitions policies on a firmer footing, but also to defend certain objects at the Getty against further Italian claims. Here’s some of our conversation, which I’ll post in two parts:
LACAYO: Your museum recently issued a revised policy statement about acquisitions. The policy says that the Getty will undertake “due diligence” in acquisitions. How will that due diligence be different now from whatever precautions the Getty took in the past to ensure it wasn’t receiving looted objects?
BRAND: It’s the same due diligence, but there are different criteria that you set the results against. First authenticity. Then the provenance. Where the object is from. What’s changed is we’ve now made 1970 a clear bright line. (NOTE: That’s the year of the UNESCO Treaty governing the trade in antiquities.) Now if we can’t trace the ownership of an object back to 1970, it’s not ok.
LACAYO: Even 1970 is not a bright line in the eyes of some claimant nations. The Italians claim ownership of items going back to 1939. Do you have to satisfy each nation’s different statute of limitations?
BRAND: This is a gray area. I thought the statement by Mr. Rutelli [the Italian Minister of Culture] in the interview with TIME this morning was interesting. Your magazine asked him whether Italy would support the claim being made by an Italian town for an Etruscan chariot exported to New York over 100 years ago. And he said no, that was 100 years ago.
I think what would be good is if everyone could converge on this 1970 date as a realistic line in the sand. It’s a reasonable position to go forward on.
LACAYO: To go back to this question of due diligence. If you’re using the year 1970 as a bright line now, why didn’t you do that before? The UNESCO treaty was already in force when your museum made its disputed purchases. The U.S. is a signatory. There was a bright line there already.
BRAND: Well, I think it’s part of an evolution in museum practice in general. Our previous policy was widely acclaimed as one of the strictest in the U.S. It wasn”t as strict as the one we have now. The basic goal is that museums should want to build their collections. But they should also collect responsibly. Everyone is trying to work out now, what does that mean and where do you draw the line? So now we’ve taken a step to choose 1970 as an internationally agreed date and make that very clear.