Sicily may pull plug on antiquities show leaving Getty to foot the bill

Sicily wants its art back, and the demand -- which the J. Paul Getty Museum said it would honor -- would leave the museum on the hook for an extra $300,000.

A major exhibition of antiquities, “Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome,” is at the center of an international art mishap. The show of more than 100 ancient treasures that opened April 3 at the Getty Villa was to move to the Cleveland Museum of Art in late September, with the two museums sharing exhibition costs.

Sicilian cultural authorities, however, have canceled the Cleveland show, requesting the return of the ancient objects because they say their absence has hurt Sicily’s tourism dollars.

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The Getty now must absorb the entire financial responsibility for the show, a total investment of about $990,000 -- approximately $300,000 more than it had planned, said Ron Hartwig, the Getty’s vice president of communications.

More than 100,000 people have seen the show so far in Malibu, but that doesn’t affect the Getty’s revenue since admission at the museum is free. Though the Cleveland cancellation leaves the Getty with a financial burden, it won’t affect the show’s run dates; it will close as planned on Aug. 19.

“Sicily: Art and Invention” is the first major show to come from the Getty’s 2010 cultural agreement with Sicily, a long-term collaboration meant to initiate not only new exhibitions, but also object conservation, earthquake protection of collections, scholarly research and conferences.

The agreement is meant to smooth relations between Italy and the museum. The Getty has been returning objects that Italy said had been looted and/or handled by traffickers. In 2007 the Getty agreed to return 40 items from its antiquities collection; the 2010 cultural agreement with Sicily was the next step in promoting cultural collaboration.

“This will unfortunately take funds away from future Getty collaborations with Sicily,” Hartwig said by email, “limiting or even preventing the kinds of joint research, conservation and exhibitions that were anticipated in our 2010 Agreement. This will be an unfortunate loss to scholarship and to the presentation of Sicily’s extraordinary archaeological heritage.”

Mariarita Sgarlata, Sicily’s highest cultural official, was not available for comment.

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Objects in the “Sicily: Art and Invention” show aim to highlight ancient Sicily as a mecca of artistic, literary and scientific innovation. Two focal points are a gold libation bowl, or phiale, and an imposing 6-foot-tall charioteer statue -- items that Sgarlata has said the island especially wants back, the New York Times reported last month.

“How would an American tourist react who, trusting his Frommer’s travel guide, has gone out of his way to visit the island of Mozia to admire this work of art [the charioteer] in its original setting, only to discover that the statue is in Tokyo or St. Petersburg?” Sgarlata wrote in an email to the New York Times.

The original partnership agreement between the Getty and Sicily was signed by former Culture Minister Gaetano Armao in 2010. Since the show’s inception more than four years ago, however, Sicily has had five different ministers of Culture. Sgarlata, the latest one, reportedly said that Sicily never signed a contract guaranteeing loan of the items to the U.S. museums.

The exhibition features 58 items that were on loan from Sicily, from 11 different institutions there. Twenty-three Sicilian scholars contributed to the exhibition’s book. The primary advantage of sharing the exhibition with the Cleveland museum, the Getty said, was mitigating basic costs such as shipping and couriers. In addition to the $990,000 estimate of the show’s total cost, the Getty spent about $200,000 on research, analysis, development and construction of a special seismic base that the museum created for the charioteer statue.

The Cleveland museum -- which this December will see the completion of an eight-year, $350-million expansion and renovation -- now has a major hole in its fall exhibition schedule; the Sicily show was set to run there through Jan. 5, 2014.

Cleveland museum director David Franklin said he was “deeply disappointed” about the cancellation.

“We have worked closely with our colleagues at the Getty in order to resolve what quickly became an impasse with the government of Sicily,” Franklin said in a statement. “Despite the best efforts of the Getty and the assistance of the Embassy of the United States in Rome and the Embassy of Italy in Washington, the government of Sicily has been unwilling to reverse its decision to not allow the exhibition to travel beyond Los Angeles.”

Franklin says the Cleveland museum will announce a new exhibition in the coming weeks.

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