There’s very high interest in art loans

In its bid to settle its antiquities custody battles with Italy, the J. Paul Getty Trust is running a few months behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which made its Italian deal in February. But in their strategies -- handing back contested works in exchange for the promise that like items can be borrowed later -- both institutions are putting new faith in a long-standing and ever-evolving museum-world practice: the art of the loan.

“As really great works of art become harder and harder to find, museums have to turn to options like that,” said a museum-world veteran who now works at a Los Angeles institution. “It’s a very, very tangled web of relationships that has developed over the years.”

To be sure, museums have been lending art to one another for a long time, and well before Egypt sent the blockbuster “King Tut” show to America for the first time in 1976, globally coveted masterpieces occasionally made their way across oceans.

In 1963, the French even allowed “Mona Lisa” to visit Washington and New York for seven weeks -- a gesture that required $100 million in insurance and reportedly sparked threats of resignation by curators at the Louvre Museum. That loan, critic Lisa Liebmann has written, “marked the beginning of a sort of cavalcade of risky, armored loans of never-before-traveled, shrine-like masterpieces” including Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” which made an appearance at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens.

Forty-two years later, the proposed Getty-Italy deal arrives in a museum world full of lenders and borrowers. To gather the roughly 70 artworks at the current show at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Grand Avenue main space -- “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” -- curator Paul Schimmel spent five years negotiating short-term loans from more than two dozen institutions, along with more than a dozen individuals.

The Getty’s proposal, likely to last years and requiring somebody to decide what artifacts are of comparable value and importance, is another animal entirely.

Skirmish settlement

After more than a year of skirmishing over 52 items in the Getty collection that Italian authorities contend were looted, the two sides announced a tentative pact Wednesday. Getty officials said they would return “a number of very significant” pieces, including several masterworks, and receive loans “of comparable visual beauty and historical importance.” But neither side identified any pieces. Those and other details still need approval from Getty trustees, officials said.

Meanwhile in Italy, government attorney Maurizio Fiorilli, who has been at the forefront of the case but was at a medical appointment when the deal was struck, has argued that a true deal won’t exist until there’s more explicit agreement on which artworks are going where.

Still, some experts close to the global antiquities debate are already giving the pact’s loan element their tentative nods of approval.

Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago and president of the Washington-based Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, said she sees “significant advantages” in loans like those proposed in the Getty and Metropolitan talks with Italy.

“If nothing else, it means that the public in both countries will see changing material,” Gerstenblith said. One key to loans, she said, is for borrowers to keep them long enough “to be seen as part of the museum’s collection but at the same time provide a change that brings a new public in, or brings the public in again. It gives the American museum a chance to make a big splash.”

Moreover, she said, “there are advantages from a research and scholarship perspective. When objects are seen through different eyes and put in association with different objects, professionals may learn new things, have new insights that they wouldn’t have had if the collections stayed relatively static.”

Until a few years ago, Gerstenblith noted, Italian institutions by law couldn’t make international loans lasting more than six months. Now, she said, that ceiling is four years, and “I would encourage Italy to make that even longer. Particularly for material that is less spectacular than the Aphrodite” -- a sculpture the Italians want the Getty to return -- “or the Euphronious krater” -- which the Met recently agreed to return -- “Italian museums probably have enough things already on display that they could make long-term loans of those things without great loss to what their viewing public will be able to see.”

Though long-term loans have been around for decades, said Timothy Potts, an archeologist and director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, “the new twist is that the loan is becoming part of a resolution. That has to be a good thing, in that it allows the object still to have a very broad degree of public access in more than one country. That’s what museums are all about: providing a way for people to experience great works of art directly -- unmediated through their computer screens and books and other things -- in the context of other great art.”

While most museums lend individual works to temporary exhibitions at collegial institutions, often waiving standard rental fees when dealing with regular trading partners, some make special arrangements for larger groups of artworks.

In an ambitious plan to establish worldwide satellites, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum entered into a partnership with Bilbao, Spain, stocking a new building designed by architect Frank Gehry and funded by the Spanish city with artworks from the New York museum’s collection.

Other art-rich museums have arranged long-term loans to institutions with more money than art. A three-year partnership between the Louvre in Paris and the High Museum in Atlanta, to be launched in October, will bring hundreds of works from the venerable French institution to Atlanta in a series of exhibitions occupying 10,000 square feet of gallery space. The total cost to the High is $18 million, including a $6.4-million payment to the Louvre for restoration of its 18th century decorative arts galleries. The rest of the money will pay for special programs, insurance, transportation and marketing.

The San Jose Museum of Art made a similar arrangement with the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1994 through 1999, the California museum presented four long-term exhibitions of works from the New York museum’s holdings at a cost of $4.4 million.

From 1991 to 2002, the Dallas Museum of Art borrowed almost 400 Egyptian antiquities from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in a three-way deal that sent an undisclosed fee to Boston from the Dallas-based Marcus Foundation.

Peripatetic Picassos

In a variation on that theme, the Museum of Modern Art in New York put 90 Picassos on the road in 1998 and 1999. “Picasso: Masterworks From the Museum of Modern Art” went to the High Museum, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, giving MoMA roughly $1 million per stop. The cash-strapped Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., sent the best of its collection on a fund-raising mission in 1993, despite the indenture of founder Albert C. Barnes, which prohibited the art from leaving the premises or changing positions in his idiosyncratic displays.

In other cases, museums mobilize large groups of artworks in traveling exhibitions to raise money and reduce storage costs while their facilities are under renovation. That was the motivation for the two-year exhibition, “Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces From the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,” a show from the nation’s oldest art museum, in Hartford, Conn., which appeared at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art this past spring.

When museums make individual loans, they may not ask for direct payment from the borrower, especially if the museums cooperate frequently. But there are other ways to reciprocate.

The Getty’s conservation lab has been at work since March on a pair of Tunisian mosaics that will be among 27 to be shown beginning in October. Getty spokesman John Giurini said the extensive conservation work was built into the loan agreement with Tunisia’s national museum system.

From what he knows of the Getty-Italy talks, the Kimbell Art Museum’s Potts said, the only downside is technical -- the “inherent dangers in transporting delicate objects on any regular basis.” And though Potts notes that advances in technology have made travel “much less difficult than it was a generation ago,” things still go wrong.

In 2000, Russia’s Hermitage Museum sent Matisse’s famous painting “La Danse” to Italy for a show -- then briefly took it back after a man with family history in pre-revolutionary Russia attempted a legal challenge to the Hermitage’s ownership. In 2001, the National Gallery of Scotland sent a landscape by Gainsborough to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, only to learn that an attacker had put a three-centimeter gouge in one corner. (It was repaired.) The same year, a Chagall painting on loan from a private owner in Russia was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York. (It was recovered.)

“These things happen from time to time,” said LAPD Detective Don Hrycyk, who specializes in art crimes. In fact, Hrycyk noted, “there actually was an incident over at the Getty” during a 2003 photography exhibition. “Somebody just went crazy and smashed an acrylic covering that was supposed to protect the photograph. But this guy beat on the display so hard that it damaged the photograph underneath.”

The photograph, “Leipzig, Germany,” by Lee Miller, was on loan from the Lee Miller Archive. Hrycyk arrested the vandal.

“Our conservators repaired the damage, and returned it to the archive,” said Giurini. “But in 2004 we purchased it, and now it’s a part of our collection.”