John Walsh : Buying Art for the Getty to Define a National Heritage

As possessions of a ruling class, great works of art were for centuries considered legitimate booty for conquering warriors: To the victor went the spoils. But the modern era, which saw the rise of the nation-state, has fostered a belief that certain works of art rightly belong to a people or a culture as a whole. Disputes among nations over control and ownership of national heritage, or patrimony, are common.

Perhaps the most famous example is the so-called Elgin Marbles. On a diplomatic mission to Constantinople in 1800, Thomas Bruce, 7th earl of Elgin, arranged to bring to England the Parthenon frieze by Phidias and other sculptures from Athens’ Acropolis. Their 1806 arrival at London’s British Museum created an enormous stir, fueling a classical revival in everything from art to politics and establishing the foundation on which modern culture in Europe and the United States was built.

Greece has long insisted that the sculptures be returned to Athens, where they were made. Great Britain replies that the Elgin Marbles are already in their rightful home, because in that context they helped to shape the modern world. The long-simmering dispute rests on the two most common uses of patrimonial claims: that a collection of art preserves the history of a people; and that a collection of art creates a people’s ancestry.

John Walsh is no stranger to the complex legal and ethical questions that swirl around issues of national patrimony. The widely respected director of the youthful J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu is charged with building a collection that both preserves significant examples of Western art and, for Los Angeles and the region, creates a patrimonial legacy. Soft-spoken and circumspect, Walsh routinely weighs claims of foreign nations against masterworks his museum seeks to acquire, and must decide whether to pit his institution’s formidable buying power against the possibility of international reproach.

Walsh, 52, has been director of the Getty since 1983, and last year served as president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors. A specialist in 17th-Century Dutch painting, he has been curator of European art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities. A Fulbright graduate fellow at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands and a graduate of Yale, the lanky Washington native is married and the father of three.

Question: Several years ago, the Getty Museum had an opportunity to acquire a great German manuscript at auction, but deferred to patrimonial claims on the part of a German state. How did you reach that decision?

Answer: Well, that was the case of the so-called Gospels of Henry the Lion. It was created in the Middle Ages for a great prince, and was one of the most important manuscripts ever made--the finest and most sumptuous manuscript of its kind, just of tremendous importance to the region of Saxony. It had gotten out of Germany--evidently under dubious circumstances--and was coming up for auction. We had just bought the Ludwig Collection (of 144 medieval manuscripts), and were looking for the best manuscripts that could be found on the market. And here it was, free and clear--or arguably free and clear--and simply the best thing we’d have to buy in a long time. We resolved to buy it.

The fact that the manuscript had gotten out of Germany was considered right from the beginning a real disaster, a terrible thing, because if it were back in Germany, it would be one of the greatest of all national treasures. The Germans were beginning to mount a campaign to buy it somehow. The campaign was put in the hands of the retired president of Deutschesbank--one of Adenauer’s collaborators in the rebuilding of Germany, a very powerful man who managed to put together a whole consortium of people with money for a strong bid. Collections were even being taken in churches.

We thought very hard about whether we wanted to go to the auction and duel with a German consortium that was trying to bring back a national treasure. Their effort was exactly what we would do if we were in their position, and we were a very young museum with a long future, and a lot of dealings with Germany in the future--we hoped. We were not interested in having that shoot-out, under the television lights. We came quietly to the Germans, offered to be useful to them if we could be, instead of going against them. And I think we were useful to them. The dealer who would have acted for us in the end acted for them.

Q: So everyone’s happy?

A: Well, I’m still unhappy we don’t have the manuscript.

Q: Some say that if a fair price is negotiated, any art ought to be available for sale to anyone. Can international disputes over patrimony be settled strictly through free-market principles?

A: Well, I think that goes too far. I’m no straight free-marketeer. A straight free-market system costs you dearly in some ways. The most important things of all can be ensembles--full collections of things painstakingly put together by collectors, sometimes over generations. Sometimes a house, its contents and landscape make up a single, very rich artifact. And the free market has been operating, sadly in many cases, because individual objects that may look to be of lesser importance are broken up (and sold off). The integrity--the richness and variety of the interconnections--gets sacrificed.

I’m very much in favor of a system that protects national heritage, putting some real emphasis on maintaining these ensembles, even if they come from abroad.

Q: Would that include the Elgin Marbles, the ancient sculptures removed from the Parthenon and brought to England by Lord Elgin? The Greek government has repeatedly called for their return.

A: Oh, boy; that’s a good debate. Well, I think so. My own opinion is that those statues have acquired, for several hundred years, new layers by virtue of their importance to society, to art and to literary culture by having been in the British Museum. The absorption of Greek ideals by Europe in the 19th Century we now take to be a very important historical phenomenon.

Are they better off? Will they be better seen and understood, better cared for, if they’re moved to a museum in Athens? I doubt that. But it’s a tough case. If you’re looking to conserve something, the more important thing to conserve may be the association of those pieces with the British Museum, rather than the association of those pieces with a ruin in Athens.

Q: So one preserves not just the Elgin Marbles, but their social and cultural connection to an event, a country, an era?

A: Yes. I think that these ideas are a growing force. Obviously, if something is stolen, torn from the fabric from which it came, something that’s not been put in some rich new context--if it can go back, it probably should.

Q: What we’re discussing is a form of national art collecting. What motives can a nation have for collecting?

A: Nations that are trying to conserve a patrimony can be doing it for a whole spectrum of reasons. In the ideal, that kind of collecting is done to retain a body of material that illustrates the history and artistic achievement of the people--and to not only retain but to exploit it, to use it for some active public benefit.

There are also countries, and institutions within countries, that collect in order to create a patrimony. You can say that’s what America has been doing since the 18th Century. Not merely trying to conserve the art made in America for America--hardly!--but to acquire works of art from other cultures for various motives, ranging from social ambition to genuine, almost religious, belief in the power of objects.

Q: The British system for preserving the national patrimony has been widely admired. Perhaps you can explain their so-called Waverly Criteria for determining the availability of a work of art for export, which has been used since 1952.

A: Objects that have been in England for more than 50 years are viewed by an adviser to the government, usually a museum director or curator. If the adviser objects to (a proposed sale and) export, the case is reviewed by a reviewing committee of intelligent laymen and art professionals. That committee makes a recommendation to the minister for the arts, to let the thing go or to stop (export) for a period of months. The idea of a stop is to allow a national institution to acquire the object at the same price. And that’s how it worked for 35 years.

They’ve got in trouble in the last seven or eight years because the money wasn’t there--from the government treasury, from heritage bodies, from fund-raising bodies--to always buy the things that were stopped. So they had them sit out, three or six months, and in the end they got exported because money couldn’t be raised.

Q: How has the British system been changing?

A: Under the Thatcher regime, not only has no money been provided for the purchase of things, but there’s an urge to try to get private people to do what traditionally the government’s always done in supporting national museums.

This last round, in the case of (Antonio Canova’s sculpture) “The Three Graces,” basic elements of fairness were violated. An export license was denied (to us to acquire it). The government’s minister for trade, the person who gives licenses, decided in midstream, after the case had been pending a long time--and no national money had been raised to speak of to buy the object--to change the rules and allow private buyers to step in and buy objects held up for export.

Q: So a private British citizen could acquire the Canova, or any other work of art the government put a stop on, if a national museum couldn’t raise the money?

A: Yes. There was no guarantee that the private owner, once having bought the thing, couldn’t sell it to somebody else and make a profit. So it was a subversion of the system. We didn’t have to open our mouths, the outcry in England was fierce enough. But we, of course, protested.

Q: So a system devised for public good was being turned to private benefit?

A: Yeah, I think you could put it that way. In any case, that change subverted the fairness that always encouraged foreign buyers to go to England to buy. Now no one can count on an object being released from England after the stipulated length of time. I think foreign buyers are going to be very discouraged. And have been already.

Q: What will this mean in 1992, with the European Economic Community?

A: I don’t think anybody knows that. I can’t believe that the countries of Europe are really going to change their export systems very much. And if they don’t, they’re not going to be in sync with each other. I don’t see Great Britain getting any more cooperative, on that score. And I can’t imagine the Spanish and the Italians and the French going for much more liberal ones, either. Positions seem too fixed to me.

Q: What is the current status of the Canova sculpture?

A: The owners still own it. The license has been denied. They can’t export it. As far as I can see, they’re not inclined to sell it to the various private buyers who came forward. And they--like everybody else, except maybe Mrs. Thatcher--consider this really a terrific breach of the intention to favor the national collection, favor the citizen (and) the national museums. So I guess they’ll just keep it in a box, where no one can see it. That may go on for years and years and years.

Q: There are no strict laws in the United States regulating the export of art. Why?

A: Our public institutions are already very rich in American art. Where America hasn’t succeeded very well is in exporting to the rest of the world. Only at the Louvre, so far as I know, can you see a few American 19th-Century paintings. It’s true that in museums of contemporary art all over the world you see American postwar painting and sculpture. But that’s absurd. How is it that the National Gallery in London, with an enormously broad collection of European and British art, has nothing of the art that Europe and England fathered? It seems to me that their having American art on view is long, long overdue.

Q: So one protection for the United States is that the rest of the world doesn’t want our art?

A: It has been true. Most sophisticated Europeans saw American 18th- and 19th- Century art as essentially a provincial product. American art has had great strengths, quite undiscovered for a long time.

Q: Would the original interpretation of the Waverly Criteria be a good model for protecting the patrimony of most countries, including the United States?

A: Yes. I think it would be a good model for most countries that have a rich accumulation of material over many centuries.

About America, if you’re asking whether we ought to have a system like that, I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure that so much has been here for so long as to be really part of the fabric of national life. It’s hard for me to think of much material of that kind (except) native American art.

About American painting, there could come a point where you get alarmed, although what would that point be? Would it be, say, a Japanese businessman offering the Jefferson Medical College $250 million for the (Thomas) Eakins (painting,) “The Gross Clinic”? Will we then wish we had some export laws? And what would we do if we had those export laws? Hold up the sale of that picture for a year while a consortium of museums tries to raise $250 million?