Mikhail Piotrovsky: Beneath the Banner of Political Correctness

A museum snatches things from their traditional context and places them in a different context. If it is a universal museum, such as the Hermitage, it presents them in the context of world culture. If it is a national one, then in the context of the nation’s history.

A time has now come when desires are arising to cancel museums altogether. The grounds are that the things assembled there were not created for presentation in a museum. Bound up with this is one of the favourite topics for discussion in the museum world today – restitution, the return of objects to the territory where they were created.

That is sometimes being decided by force. Police officers arrive at the Metropolitan Museum; the authorities confiscate recently acquired Egyptian antiquities from the collection. A former director of the Louvre is being accused of supporting the illegal trade in cultural valuables. Issues of restitution have become aggravated.

Around the world, governments are competing over who will give the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria and when. Sensational events are happening. The German Foreign Minister flies to Nigeria and takes twenty bronze objects with her. Germany reckons itself better than anyone in this process. Macron was planning to give Benin bronzes back but has not done so as yet. The Americans are not giving them back, nor are the British, although both are promising. Germany is in a special situation – it still has a lingering guilt complex. German museum people say that they would not like to give the bronzes back, but it is necessary because Germany has a poor reputation in Africa. Uprisings were suppressed there with much spilling of blood. That does not apply to the bronzes, though – it was the British who took those away.

These events have left museum directors in a certain state of bewilderment: this is an obvious breach of museum principles. But another argument comes into play – the struggle against the colonial legacy. Pressure forces a search for compromises. Otherwise museum culture and artefacts will be lost. The artefacts need not only a well-regulated climate, but also the museum context. When they end up in a different place, they are excluded from a proper dialogue with people.

What are these Benin bronzes that have caused such a fuss?

Benin was a state that existed from the late Middle Ages until the late 19th century on the territory of present-day Nigeria. For many centuries, it was a substantial power that controlled trade in western Africa, actively collaborating with the Portuguese and other colonizers. Among other things, so the encyclopaedias now tell us, Benin traded in human cargo. The word “slaves” is going out of use. Gradually the state weakened. The British arrived in place of the Portuguese. In the late 1800s, a series of conflicts arose. A group of Britons were killed – diplomats, by some accounts, according to others, adventurers seeking to stage an armed coup. The British army mounted a punitive expedition, sacking the capital, deposing the rulers and plundering their palace.

In exchange for goods from Africa, Benin used to receive large quantities of brass bracelets that were melted down to cast plaques depicting various things. The rulers’ palace was adorned with metal plaques featuring figures of warriors, goddesses and animals. The British gathered all that up and carried it away. Some pieces were seen as trophies of war, some were presented to the Queen. The majority were simply looted by the troops. Auctions around the globe had a boom. Today there are Benin bronzes in almost all the world’s museums. There are many in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in the British Museum. Some are also in the Kunstkammer here with us, donated by a German ethnographer in 1900. The Benin bronzes are acknowledged in Europe as a popular art form in tune with the contemporary world.

Discussions around the idea that it is time to return these pieces have been going on for a long time. The legal aspect is clear – they were obtained as a result of military operations. Museums acquired them from someone or other, but the looting happened first. That’s an uncomfortable situation for a government. Now, when a new round of the struggle against colonialism has begun, the issue of the return of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria has become a banner.

A Benin dialogue is underway, but complications are arising. In France and the UK, for example, there are laws forbidding the removal of anything from state collections. Another complication is the matter of who the artefacts should be given to. In modern-day Nigeria there is a province that is the old Benin, there is the central government and there are descendants of the dynasty that owned the looted palace. It is not especially clear whose property the bronzes will become. Compromises are being sought. One of the star architects has produced a design for a Museum of West Africa, but building work has not yet begun.

In another example of the ownership of heritage not being entirely straightforward, an American woman has filed a suit against the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, from whose museums people are promising to return bronzes to Nigeria. The woman is a descendant of slaves from the places where the sculptures brought to America were produced. She says that the Benin authorities are also guilty, that they accepted copper in exchange for slaves. The sculptures are her cultural heritage. She wants to be able to see them where she lives.

We, too, are caught up in this narrative. It all began with cries about the displaced valuables from Germany. We started to display and discuss them, while warning that there was no call to raise a fuss for that reason, for asserting that Russia is bad and others are wonderful. People said that it was opening a Pandora’s box and there would be major consequences. And that’s just what happened. Regarding the displaced valuables from Germany, we reached some compromises, took some important decisions.Then it emerged that many items from German museums are now in France, that there are things that belonged to Jews that were not returned to them and remained in museums in Germany…

Everything got stirred up. Turkey put a ban on German archaeologists working there until objects that were originally on its territory are returned. Egypt starts legal proceedings, demanding the return of the bust of Nefertiti from Berlin, the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum. Greece is demanding that the Parthenon marbles be sent back to Athens from London… Demands are going around the whole world.

Compromises need to be sought. One would be that something does get handed over, while the rest remains in temporary keeping. We, for example, have a problem with our suburban museums. We give back some of the things that at one time or another came into the Hermitage from them for display on a temporary keeping basis. Together they are part of a single museum fund and are registered as property of the Hermitage.

The development of museums and the art market led to cultural valuables becoming very expensive. Which is why this fuss began. There is a UNESCO convention that works of art must not be relocated illegally. Any act of relocation after its signing is a crime.

In Rome, a Museum of Rescued Art opened this summer – an enormous display of things illegally exported from Italy and brought back by the carabinieri, who search them out all over the globe.

Museum treasures draw tourists. People in Benin want it to become like Bilbao, where the Guggenheim Museum was built. The decaying port city started to flourish thanks to tourists. In Bilbao 20th-century art from various countries is on show. In Benin, they will be displaying African antiquities. The idea of an ethnographic museum is under attack nowadays. Ethnography singles out non-European, exotic peoples. The context is colonial. In Berlin, on the site of the Palace of the Republic they have built the Humboldtforum – a museum of non-European cultures, where, along with African and Asian objects, Benin bronzes are also on display. There is an ongoing debate about the concept behind the museum. The very idea has a smack of colonialism about it.

Museums are research institutions. They engage in the study of cultures. Otherwise, what you get is either Disneyland – an amusement for tourists, or, worse still, forbidden territories. Access is denied to returned artefacts that are considered sacred. Museums in America, Canada and Australia have exhibits that belonged to the native peoples, many of which are sacred objects. There is not always open access to those even in museums.

The Benin bronzes have not yet been handed over, but talk about compensation is already starting. The pieces were in museums, money was paid for tickets. And there should be payment for them having been taken away as well…

There will be no end to it. If everything is to be sent back where it came from, Rembrandt’s paintings will have to be shared out between the cities where he lived and worked, icons distributed to the monasteries…

Today there is much discussion about burying skeletal remains and mummies. You might imagine this is plain and simple – it should be done. Nobody has objections on that score, apart from the scientists who study them. Not only skulls were extracted from the graves, though, but artefacts and coffins as well. Does that mean they should be reburied too? They were not made to stand in museums. It is possible to go far down that road. People need to grasp that excessive political correctness is a threat to museums.

The cancellation of museums is the cancellation of the history embodied within them. Of other people’s history and one’s own. If history belongs to me alone, then I can do what I want with it. That is how the terrorists who destroyed Palmyra behaved. The museum is a place where they show everything.

Museums are a creation of the Age of Enlightenment, a European invention. They need to be handled with caution. For an illustration, it’s useful to look back at our own history.

In 1917 representatives of the Ukrainian Rada came to Dmitry Ivanovich Tolstoi, the Director of the Hermitage, with an order signed by Iosif Djugashvili [Stalin] to hand over those exhibits that had come from Ukraine. The matter did not go any further. The Soviets quarrelled with the Ukrainian Rada, and nothing was handed over.

Many items that had come from Ukrainian territory were transferred to Ukraine from the Hermitage in the 1920s. They included something considered a sacred object: the famed banners of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. Many years later, some Ukrainian colleagues and I spent several months poring over the lists to find out where those things had ended up. There was archaeological gold, paintings, books, the banners… Everything had been lost during the war; nothing remained.

In 1923, Georgia demanded the return of ancient manuscripts that originated from its territory. The Academy of Sciences objected. Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, an orientalist and specialist on the Caucasus, objected. A man whose mother tongue was Georgian urged people to stop talking about a return of the works, it could only be a question of a transfer. The items had been donated or purchased, and no-one took them from Georgia by force. Regarding their removal to Georgia, Marr wrote: “For Caucasian studies in Saint Petersburg, this is a stab in the back.” Here they are examined, studied, made into common property.

Thanks to our history, we can learn and teach a lot. This is particularly true of decolonization. We have been carrying out our own decolonization for a long time. In Soviet times, we declared the Russian Empire to have been a prison of peoples and tried to compensate for the harm caused by “colonization”. We exalted the role of its constituent ethnic groups: opening museums, publishing books, and creating an Oriental Department in the Hermitage. All this raised those peoples’ awareness and understanding of their importance. Many nations were formed within the framework of the USSR. It was a policy of the state.

Life can be unfair. Demands to give something back are a tragedy for museums. Yet museums have been and remain one of the main values created by civilization. We must take care not to harm them, even under conditions of political correctness.

This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №245 (7328) on 28 December 2022 with the headline “Beneath the Banner of Political Correctness”. The original text can be found here.