August 19, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Afghan national museum reopens
- Purloined art found in truck of homeless man (Detectives track down a $25,000 painting, the last of three stolen in 1997 from a Portland gallery)
- Are the Brits losing their marbles?
The time to return the Parthenon sculptures is now, says David Hill (Australian Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marble)
Afghan national museum reopens
The national museum of Afghanistan has reopened for the first time in a decade and features a major new exhibit feared lost in the civil war.
The artefact, known as the Rabotak Stone, a one and a half metre wide block of white limestone is two thousand years old and contains unique information about the mighty Kushan empire.
Other items on display include a big, black stone bowl from the early Islamic era and a small Buddha statue.
The BBC Kabul correspondent says although many of the museum's treasures have been stolen and sold abroad, the museum is of special importance to Afghans who have seen much of their cultural heritage destroyed during the last twenty years of war.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
Purloined art found in truck of homeless man
Detectives track down a $25,000 painting, the last of three stolen in 1997 from a Portland gallery
By Katie Pesznecker of The Oregonian staff
Portland detectives discovered the final piece of a three-year puzzle Tuesday when a stolen painting worth $25,000 turned up in a homeless man's truck. The painting, "Daisies in a Glass" by De Scott Evans, was one of three stolen in June 1997 from a Portland art gallery, said Detective John Kuechler of the Portland Police Bureau's Central Precinct property crimes unit.
The three paintings are valued at $80,000 total. Detectives recovered the other two June 16.
Two are by Evans, done in the late 1800s. The second Evans painting, "The Irish Question," has two potatoes hanging from a string.
Both are worth at least $25,000, "and you'd never have a clue," Kuechler said. The third painting is of 21-year-old Nicholas I before he was czar of Russia. It's valued at $30,000.
Artist Henri Benner completed the portrait in 1817. It was part of a 14-piece collection that belonged to the Russian royal family before their execution in 1918.
After the 1997 theft, three years passed with no sign of the art, Kuechler said. Then, in June, "The Irish Question" appeared in a downtown Portland gallery. Detectives visited the gallery and learned the painting had been purchased at a Salem flea market -- and that a second painting purchased there was on the way. Sure enough, the portrait of Nicholas I arrived June 16. Detectives seized both paintings.
Then this week, after receiving a tip, detectives visited a homeless man who lives in a truck in Portland.
"We made contact with this illegal camper, who we've cited a lot," Kuechler said. "And guess what he's got in his truck? A $25,000 painting." Detectives didn't arrest him. "He had no clue, except for the fact that he was holding it for somebody else," Kuechler said.
Kuechler said that charges probably won't be filed and that the paintings changed hands several times before detectives recovered them. Police have no suspects in the original theft.
Kuechler said all three paintings will probably eventually be auctioned at Christie's or Sotheby's.
You can reach Katie Pesznecker at 360-896-5738 or by e-mail at kpesznecker@news.oregonian.com.
Are the Brits losing their marbles?
The time to return the Parthenon sculptures is now, says David Hill.
It is almost exactly 200 years since Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and British Ambassador to Constantinople, started stripping more than 100 magnificent marble sculptures and fragments from the Parthenon in Athens and began shipping them to England. The Parthenon is one of the most important monuments of Western civilisation. Its spectacular statues and frieze from the classic Greek age, depicting the human, heroic and divine worlds, are widely regarded as "the finest ancient artworks known to man".
Elgin, who had originally intended to keep the Marbles as a private collection for his family estates in Scotland, was later financially pressured to sell them to the British Government. They were then given to the British Museum, where they have remained since 1816 - a jewel in the crown of the museum's exhibits. The removal of the sculptures was controversial from the start, triggering protests in Athens even as the crates were being shipped from the port of Piraeus. The protests spread to London, where calls for their return have continued ever since.
But despite the overwhelming calls - in Britain, Greece, and elsewhere around the world - for the British to return the collection to Athens, there is no sign yet that the Blair Labour Government is ready to hand them over. In March the influential Economist magazine published a poll showing that a staggering 84 per cent of British Labour Government members would vote for the Marbles to be returned. I can think of no other case where a Government would try to maintain a position so widely at odds with so many of its members.
The Economist poll is consistent with every other survey in Britain in recent years and confirms the widespread opinion that there are now no good reasons for denying Greek claims for these unique treasures to be returned to where they came from and where they belong. A British Mori poll, a Channel 4 viewers' survey and last week's CNN poll all show that more than 80 per cent favour returning them.
Yet as recently as last month the Government made it clear it was not ready to change its policy. In evidence to a House of Commons select committee, the Minister for the Arts, Alan Howarth, said: "The Government does not believe that a convincing case, morally or culturally, has been made for a return of the Marbles."
What makes the Government's position even more puzzling is that sending back the sculptures would be philosophically consistent with all that Blair's New Labour aspires to be: ethical, forward-thinking, modern, internationally co-operative, European, magnanimous. Holding on to the collection demonstrates the opposite: that it is reactionary, out of step, backward-looking, conservative, imperial. Interestingly, Blair's predecessors as Labour leaders, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, were both committed to returning the Marbles if elected to office.
One attempt to explain the Government's stand is its fear of offending the Establishment - as we saw when it backed off at the eleventh hour from banning fox hunting - despite having secured widespread party and public support. And the British Museum is quintessentially Establishment. Its trustees include the Duke of Gloucester, a countess, a lord, a dame and eight knights of the realm. Britain may have lost its former colonial territories, but its national museums still hold vast cultural treasures; the surviving legacy of hundreds of years of empire.
These museums are now becoming increasingly out of step with museums around the world which have been handing back material over which there have been claims. Indeed the Australian Museum has been a leader in the field for more than 20 years, having returned significant items to Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.
We were all hoping that the recent House of Commons select committee inquiry into the return of cultural property would give the issue a nudge along. After all, the Labour-dominated committee inspected the Parthenon and took evidence from the Greeks and the British Museum specifically on the issue of the Marbles. Alas, their report, which was released last month, was a fizzer in that it failed to make any findings one way or another.
At least the committee did shoot down the tired old British Museum argument that to uphold a claim for the return of the Parthenon Marbles would open the floodgates to other claims. In its report to Parliament, the committee said, "We see few signs that museums are being engulfed in a tidal wave of claims designed to empty the galleries and display cases in British Museums." At the end of the day we all know the collection should go back - and inevitably it will. So Blair should just get on and do it.
David Hill is a former managing director of the ABC and a member of the Australian Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. He will be speaking at a seminar on the Marbles at the Powerhouse Museum on August 26.
The Sydney Morning Herald