Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  Twice a year I’d drive down to DC for two days of CPAC meetings that took place in a stuffy conference room on an upper floor of an ugly government office building just south of the National Mall. What struck me as I looked around the room on the first day of my first meeting, in the winter of 2000, was that there were only six members of the committee present—six out of eleven. Since that’s a quorum, we were legally empowered to review the request on the table from Bolivia. But I had to wonder: who’s missing, and why? I was told that those members of the committee who, in the past, represented the point of view of the antiquities trade were now deemed to be flawed by an inherent conflict of interest, so they were not invited.

  And then I realized that the two of us who were there to represent the point of view of the museum community were certainly AAMD outliers. Vikan, for his role in the Kanakaria trial and for his outspoken opinion-sharing about the hypocrisy of the AAMD acquisition guidelines, was from the archaeologists’ point of view, a white knight. And so was Martin Sullivan, CPAC’s chair, who at that point was not even a museum director. But when he was a director at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Marty was a leader in drafting NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This required all institutions receiving federal funds to return “cultural items” (grave goods, human remains, sacred objects) to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes. So Marty, too, was a white knight. I realized that Ms. Kouroupas, the stern and mostly silent woman at the end of the table, had done her work. Of all possible museum members of CPAC, she had found the two with the word “repatriation” tattooed on their foreheads.

  This bothered me because the point of CPAC was to bring to the table eleven citizens of good will with different perspectives on the international movement of cultural property: three members of the general public, three archaeologists, three people from among the dealing and collecting community, and two museum professionals. CPAC’s implementation legislation of 1983 was based on the integrity of a process that would involve these multiple perspectives and voices proceeding through a series of four questions. First, is the cultural patrimony of the requesting State Party (requesting country) in jeopardy from pillage? Second, has the State Party taken measures to protect its cultural patrimony? Third, will the adoption of import restrictions, if taken in concert with other nations having significant import trade in such material, be of substantial benefit in deterring pillage? And fourth, is the application of import restrictions consistent with the general interest of the international community in the interchange of cultural property?

  The makeup of CPAC as I joined was clearly at odds with what I knew the intent of the Cultural Property Implementation Act to be. And it was obvious in no time that there were process problems as well. On the table in front of each of us was an enormous Xeroxed book replicating the request from the government of Bolivia. It was so dense and confusing that none among us, I think, could have figured it out on his or her own. So we had the benefit of a very smart recent PhD whose specialty was the ancient archaeology of the Andes. This meant that the version of the Bolivian narrative we received was that of the Bolivian government as digested and interpreted by an academic whose career interests were coincident with the requesting State Party.

  There was one remaining protocol to assure that we had the benefit of other points of view, if only briefly. It is called the “public session.” This is a designated period when the double doors of the conference room are swung open and anyone who has signed up can come in and testify. The testifying group consisted mainly of lawyers in fancy suits, all earnest and well prepared and mostly from New York, representing the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental, and Primitive Art, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and the AAMD. (This group had no access to that xeroxed book from Bolivia.) They would tell us what, from their point of view, was really going on, and this could be very important for our deliberations, especially on the question of whether our actions to interdict traffic of cultural property X from country Y could have any salutary outcome. It would be inappropriate to curtail the actions of Americans for some possible greater international good if that action would have no actual benefit.

  If we were to learn from the auction houses that virtually no Bolivian antiquities were traded in the US market, but were traded instead in London, Paris, or Brussels, we should then say to Bolivia: thanks but no thanks. I was also struck by how lackadaisical the tempo of our closed-door sessions was—typically academic and wandering—and how crisp the public session portion of our meetings was. With strict time limits and a ticking clock, it was in and out for those NYC lawyer types, and after they left, the committee went back to the business of helping Bolivia.

  The next thing that struck me as odd was how much junk was in that request packet from Bolivia. Somehow we were being asked to care about the import into the US of ethnographic material of the 19th century that I recall included little clay pipes you blow into, and which have a market value of maybe $25. Why? The implementation legislation requires that to be a qualifying object of ethnographical interest it must be “important to the cultural heritage of a people because of its distinctive characteristics, comparative rarity, or its contribution to the knowledge of the origins, development, or history of that people.” Were these tourist-trinket items somehow defining of Bolivian national identity? Were they to be understood as national material assets like oil or tin? And there was another issue: How about modern borders and, in this case, the Bolivia/Peru border? US Customs is asked to stop the import of, for example, a 16th-century wooden beer pitcher (kero) that comes from the Bolivian side of the border, but to let an identical one come in that happens to come from the Peruvian side of the border. And why is this? Because Bolivia had asked for such US action but, up to that point, Peru had not. Fair enforcement under such circumstances is impossible.

  This craziness brought me back to an antiquariat shop in Bucharest in 1975. Elana and I had gone in to look for souvenirs to take home after eight months in Romania. We were told by a surly clerk that one whole area of the shop was off limits, namely, that section where items one hundred years old or older were displayed. Now, from where we stood it was obvious that much of the “stuff” over there was simple, homey, and utilitarian—such as little footstools, pillows, and baskets—and clearly, pretty cheap. But were these trinkets somehow forbidden because they had been nationalized by the Communist State and, much like Romania’s citizens at the time, they could not leave the country? This seemed to me not so different from that Communist radio we had in our Bucharest apartment that could get the Leipzig and Dresden stations but not those in Paris or London. And so here I am, in a stuffy conference room in Washington, DC, acting on behalf of the president of the United States, and it feels as if I’m basically in the same business as Nicolae Ceauşescu, of closing borders. People, cultural property, radio waves, and ideas had all collapsed into one, and it seemed to me I was on a committee that was doing the wrong work in the wrong way.

  As it turned out, I was not able to resolve my conflicting thoughts on looted antiquities in the context of CPAC. On April 17, 2003, in the wake of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq and the burning of the National Library, I resigned from the committee. I was angry: “Shock and awe” had not included today’s version of the Monuments Men.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “They’ll Scare Away the Rich Old Ladies”

  It was Wednesday, May 31, 2006. Everything about my career at the Walters Art Museum seemed to come together that beautiful spring day under an open tent in Druid Hill Park. True, the crowd watching me in my museum-director’s uniform of a blue blazer, khaki slacks, and a dramatic, hand-painted tie was very small. But the press was there, and the people who were must-shows, did show: Mayor Martin O’Malley and County Executive Jim Smith. The honorees were two sets of museum people taking a big step. They included me and my Board President, Bill Paternotte, and my counterpart at the Baltimore Museum
of Art, Doreen Bolger, and her Board President, Sue Cohen.

  The occasion was a press conference and a symbolic ribbon cutting; there were balloons and confetti. This was the day we announced, formally and to the press, what I had been working on for the previous six years—making the Walters free of charge. Free general admission to the museum would begin the following October 1st, twenty-four years to the week after the first admission fee was introduced at the Walters. It was a moment when I knew I had done the right thing, and I was pretty sure that for doing that, the world would take care of me. The politicians had made it possible with bridge grants to cover the lost revenue at the two museums over the next three years until we could adapt to the new reality and bear the lost income on our own. And then we could see what had been gained. They believed in us, and we believed in ourselves. It was a great day.

  I had reason to feel good that spring day, even before that announcement. The previous October we had opened the renovated and reinstalled Charles Street Building with its Renaissance and Baroque painting galleries and its signature “Cabinet of Wonders” with its natural curiosities and the marvels of human creativity they inspired—including rock crystal carved in the shape of a duck. Plus, on the wall there was a mounted alligator and on the table were trays of butterflies and beetles for kids to look at with magnifying glasses. Everyone loved it.

  Four years before we had opened to great acclaim the renovated Centre Street Building, with its ancient, medieval, and 19th-century galleries all reinstalled contextually to show how the works of art were originally experienced. We were on a roll and rapidly closing in on the matching funding for the last of the twenty endowed positions that I had spearheaded—up from just one when I began as director. I had the staff I had always hoped for and a board president with whom I was in full partnership. And the economy had come back. My public profile and my scholarly life were flourishing. I had just been invited to give the closing commentary at the International Byzantine Congress in London that August, and I had been asked by Dumbarton Oaks to update a book I had written while there in 1982. I had inaugurated a blog, the first by a museum director, and soon I was going to start my own weekly radio show, Postcards from the Walters, on the local NPR affiliate. The Getty had recruited me as a candidate for its directorship a year earlier; I made the short list but lost out to Charles Brand. That was okay, since I was ready to end my career in the place I loved. But I wanted the place I loved to be free to all.

  I suppose it was in my Midwestern, Hubert Humphrey “happy warrior” DNA to believe that art is for all, and that it can be an instrument for social change. But there was a second level to what motivated me: aesthetic evangelism. The idea I had absorbed as an undergraduate at Carleton in the ‘60s was that the art experience, the aesthetic experience, was by its nature a spiritual experience, even if it did not spring directly from a religious work of art. To contemplate Vincent van Gogh’s Church at Auvers aesthetically is, for me, devotional—not because the subject is a church but because the painting’s masterful combination of rich swirling colors, dramatic light, and profound mystery has an emotive power for me like that of Chartres Cathedral. In both cases (and many others), I spontaneously hear music in my head when there is in fact no real music to be heard. When I hear that phantom music, I know I am having an aesthetic experience.

  That transcendence, which is my version of religion, had fueled in me an evangelical zeal. I wanted everyone to have that powerful and enriching experience of art that I had, and there were two things I thought I could do to help make that happen. The first, which I felt I had addressed through the renovation of our galleries, involved presenting art in such a way as to release its spiritual power. This is the numinous. The second was the elimination of our general admission fee, which I believed was the biggest hurdle keeping many in our community from having a spiritually enriching encounter with the museum’s collections.

  The idea of “going free” first occurred to me in the late ’90s on a visit back to Minnesota, when I learned that the Minneapolis Institute of Art—bucking the national trend to ever higher admission fees—had gone free a decade earlier. As a result, it had seen its attendance skyrocket and its relationship to its city profoundly change for the better. Together, these raised the MIA’s profile in the local philanthropic community to the extent that new donations far outweighed the loss of income at the door. I thought that could work for the Walters. And I recall thinking that the Walters’ reputation as remote and aloof behind imposing bronze doors and a place for academics, the intellectual elite, and wealthy older women, was also at odds, along with our admission fee, with Henry Walter’s mandate, in his will, that we act “for the benefit of the public.”

  A first step toward changing how we thought about the museum and what it should be doing came soon thereafter in the fall of 2000. Board and staff together changed the Walters Mission Statement to align with my evangelical spirit. We did this by shifting focus from the collection, which we had formerly been charged “to preserve, enhance, and foster understanding of,” to the visitor. And each staff member soon knew the first critical sentence of our new mission by heart: “We bring art and people together for enjoyment, discovery, and learning.”

  Eliminating our general admission fee was, however, much more complicated. After all, it represented $150,000 in predictable income and was a major ingredient in sustaining the revenue stream from our membership program. The Walters had started charging a fee in 1982 on the advice of Mayor William Donald Schaefer, who saw it as a quid pro quo on the museum’s part for his promise to raise significantly the city’s annual operating support. The Walters, in the years thereafter, followed the pattern of nearly all art museums nationally in periodically raising its admission fee to generate additional operational income. It was that simple and meant that getting rid of the fee to broaden our impact in our community was going to be an uphill battle.

  “THEY’LL AWAY SCARE THE RICH old ladies!” These words (or something close) from one of my most influential and articulate board members evoked and galvanized sentiments that I am pretty sure were shared to some degree by many others on the board and by many among the staff. It punctuated the protracted and sometimes heated exchange at the Walters board meeting on March 11, 2003. This was the day I called the question: Will the Walters eliminate its general admission fee, or not?

  These “old ladies” were the wealthy older women who were going to be scared away from our galleries if we went free. White women, of course. The “they” in “they’ll scare. . . .” were never explicitly described by anyone, but were clearly understood by all to be the demographic reality of Baltimore, which is overwhelmingly African America and substantially poor. Without being described, “they” could be talked about very easily and politely by referencing the troubling predicament of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, one short block south of the Walters on Cathedral Street. Opposite the front door of the Pratt Library is the great Latrobe Basilica and just beside it, in those days, was Our Daily Bread, one of Baltimore’s largest soup kitchens, which provided up to 750 meals a day. It was then believed, and it was pretty much true, that the poor and homeless who stood in line for hours at Our Daily Bread spilled over across the street and created havoc in the Pratt Library in their bathrooms, which now had to be locked, and throughout the reading rooms, by sleeping on seemingly any available surface.

  The connection was not difficult for anyone to make. If the Walters were free, that spill-over of homeless and their havoc would spread one block north to the museum. And when that happened, our traditional users and donors, whose financial support we desperately needed, would no longer feel comfortable and would stay away, along with their philanthropic dollars.

  Such fears were echoed by our chief of security, whom I had earlier asked to write up his own professional prediction. He quoted his counterpart at the Pratt Library, who said a free Walters would be a total mess. Also aired was the story of the day in the early ’80s when
a vagrant walked up the fire stairs of the then-free Walters to the curatorial offices on the fifth floor, entered the women’s bathroom, and accosted a staff member. And a tale of more recent vintage was circulating about the then-free Art Institute of Chicago, where a sexual predator was said to have molested a child in one of the museum’s bathrooms. (The evidence showed the child’s mother had made a totally false claim in order to extort money from the museum.)

  I simply didn’t believe that catastrophically bad things would happen. But conviction alone didn’t get me very far with the board or even with the staff. I needed to do some planning and orchestrating. Since the Minneapolis Institute of Art is not in the best neighborhood, I got the director of the MIA on the phone during that March 11th board meeting. Not only did he celebrate the impact of that move-to-free on attendance and on the position of his museum in the community, he went on to say that the MIA had never, in the fifteen years since then, had any problem with vagrants.

  The next voice the assembled trustees heard that day was that of the director of the recently-free Dayton Art Institute, which is in a tough part of a pretty tough town. He said that it was simple: at Dayton we don’t care what our visitors look like or how they smell, only that they are there in the museum to experience the art and not to sleep on a bench or trash the toilets. You should treat people with the expectation that they will behave well, and his experience in Dayton was that they did behave well—all of them. And I chimed in that this is what I thought would happen in a free Walters.