Two weeks ago, I wrote about
the controversy
at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, provoked by racist comments made at a
group of black 7th-graders who were on an outing as reward for
excellent school work. The Museum leadership proposed new procedures to be more
welcoming. But the racial tensions that a visit to the MFA could arouse can’t
be fixed by even the friendliest attitude toward African-American guests,
because racism is embedded in the whole enterprise of international art
collection.
We visited the MFA last week
to see their new exhibit on the Bauhaus, whose creativity, aesthetic, and
politics we very much appreciate. The path to the exhibit led through a much
larger display of African art objects.
The cultural context in which
African bodies were represented in objects is strikingly different from what we
call Western art, so African artifacts in museums inevitably appear exotic to
the Western eye. Because European whites assumed that their civilization was
superior to all others, the creations of African artists were long considered
primitive. The MFA, like most museums now, makes an effort to counter the myth
of white Western superiority by stressing the high levels of skill embodied in
their collection of bronze and ivory sculptures made over six centuries in the
independent Kingdom of Benin, now part of southern Nigeria. The Benin kings
sponsored workshops to produce objects of the highest quality, often depicting
religious rituals, veneration of ancestors, and kingly power. The introductory
sign said these pieces “rank among the greatest artistic achievements of
humankind.” Other commentators on
Benin art agree that the artworks in the MFA represent the finest creations
of African artists.
The MFA signage explains a
little about how these objects came to be in Boston. The Benin Kingdom was
invaded by the British in 1897, Benin city was razed and burned, the King
overthrown, and about 4000 artworks were seized as “spoils of war”. They are
now housed in museums
in London and Oxford, Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden, Vienna, New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston. Few remain in Nigeria. The Benin objects are a small
part of the British Museum’s collection of 200,000 artworks from Africa. In
what I assume is a relatively new wording, the exhibitors at the MFA ask, “What
are the ethics of collecting and displaying works removed from their places of
origin during periods of European colonialism?”
Other cases of the “collection”
of foreign cultural creations are instructive in answering this question. The
Nazi state and its representatives systematically collected the
valuables of the people they conquered, considered inferior, and were
killing. They stole everything valuable from Jews in the Third Reich and across
Europe. They looted official collections from the nations they defeated.
Over 70 years later, the
return of these objects to their owners continues to pit those currently in
possession against their previous and rightful owners. Legal issues complicate
these discussions, but nobody argues against the moral right of the victims and
their descendants to their property. The universal belief that Nazi stealing
was morally abhorrent is the foundation for every discussion of return.
When Soviet armies pushed
into Germany, they took vast quantities of art from museum collections. The
Russians made a persuasive claim – German armies waged a war of obliteration
against the Soviet population and landscape. The German art works taken back to
the Soviet Union were only a token compensation for property destroyed and
millions of lives lost. Since then, some have been returned and some remain in
Russian museums, objects of international argument. In 1998, Russia
passed a law legitimizing their continued possession of what they termed “Cultural
Valuables Displaced to the USSR”, with this justification: “partial
compensation for the damage caused to the cultural property of the Russian
Federation as a result of the plunder and destruction of its cultural valuables
by Germany and its war allies during World War II.”
No such justification exists
for the presence of African artifacts in Western museums. They were simply
taken as part of a wider appropriation of value by Western colonial conquerers,
who simply showed up in independent African nations and kingdoms, killed anyone
who tried to defend themselves, and took whatever they wanted back home.
Although the US was not part of the colonial scramble which divided up Africa
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American
collectors and collections now possess large quantities of the stolen objects.
Many white Americans, and
other white Western peoples, see their relationships with Africans through a
haze of patriotism and self-assurance. We were beneficent teachers about
advanced human civilization, the unquestionable truths of Christianity, and the
proper use of economic resources, earthly and human. The assumption that humans
could also be property was no longer official national policy, but white
supremacy still defined white, and thus US federal, policy. Ownership of
property was changed through conquest.
We now share a significant
debt with all the national looters by conquest, the Germans, the Russians, the
British, the Portuguese, and other European nations. Our institutions, public
and private, and many individuals, most of whom are very wealthy, owe
reparations for organized theft. Difficulties in figuring out how it should be
accomplished are no excuse for pretending the debt doesn’t exist.
The carefully worded
acknowledgment that inhuman behavior lay behind the movement of African art
into Western museums is new. But that’s too late and not enough. The middle
schoolers from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy did not need a guard to
mention watermelons to experience racism at the MFA. The collections of African
art proclaim the racism of the past, the white assumptions that they could take
anything they wanted from blacks, including their labor and lives.
Now the MFA admits this is
controversial. It isn’t. White
colonial conquest of Africa was a holocaust before the Holocaust. The
fruits of genocide lie in glass cases in Western museums.
African art belongs where it
was created, where it is meaningful rather than merely exotic, where it could
induce pride in its creation instead of shame in its looting.
Give it back.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
June 11, 2019
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