05 November 2020
Looted Art
A lemon & light bulb moment.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Last month, a valuable work of art by the famous German avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys, belonging to the LWL Museum in Münster, was stolen from an exhibition in the Oberhausen theatre in Duisburg.
It was no ordinary theft, however, and the masked raiders who lifted the artefact from its glass case in the middle of the night were no ordinary thieves. They were artists themselves, members of the radical group Frankfurter Hauptschule (‘Frankfurt Secondary School’), and the theft was an act of protest against Germany’s appropriation of African works of art during its colonial past and its refusal to return them in the present.
The three miscreants, wearing old-fashioned tropical suits as the fancy-dress uniform of colonial-era imperialists, then flew to Tanzania with the purloined artefact and presented it to a museum in Iringa Boma as an act of reparation. It was put on display there, among works by the Hehe people who were brutally suppressed by the Germans when Tanzania was part of German East Africa in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth.
The director of the museum insists that he wasn’t aware that the sculpture had been stolen (“the artist group left it quite vague when they were explaining things” he said) and has graciously offered to discuss its return with LWL in Münster. He must have been gracious in its acceptance, too. Because you and I might have looked at the piece and said “What the hell is that? Is this some kind of joke? Are you lot pulling my leg?”
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) enjoyed an international profile based not just on his work (which “consisted mainly of assemblages of bits and pieces of rubbish” – Chambers Dictionary of Biography) but also on a carefully cultivated personal legend (he served as a pilot in the Luftwaffe in World War II and claimed he was shot down over the Crimea and rescued from the snow-covered wreckage by nomadic Tartar tribesmen who saved his life by wrapping his smashed body in felt and animal fat – claims which have been disputed since his death) and on a carefully curated personal appearance (he was never seen without the Hat, a homburg made of felt which he always wore, reputedly to cover scars from that crash). The piece stolen from the Oberhausen theatre was part of his Capri–Battery series. It was a yellow light bulb wired up to a lemon. Yes, a light bulb and a lemon. Valued at 15,000 euros.
“Thanks, but no thanks” the director of the Iringa Boma museum must have been tempted to say. “After all, we have lemons here in Africa – we grow lemons here in Africa – and I can buy a light bulb in the shop down the road here just as you can in Duisberg. Yes, I see that the acid in the lemon supplies the bulb with just enough current to give it a weak glow – I vaguely remember being thrilled by that experiment at school when I was ten years old – but here in Africa we’re building mega solar-panelled power-stations which will supply the whole world’s energy needs later this century.
“And frankly I’m not interested in an assemblage which requires hundreds of pages of scholarly footnotes to persuade me that it’s a work of art. And even if all those words prove that this thing here isn’t a case of the emperor’s new clothes, it does make ‘art’ a rather elitist business, doesn’t it? It’s a sad reflection on the West – is its culture now so irretrievably mired in sophistry, self-indulgence and self-delusion? No, you can have it back. I don’t want it in my gallery.
“And do you really think that a lemon and a light-bulb is any sort of reparation or restitution for pillaging our culture and plundering our artistic heritage for decades if not centuries? Those galleries full of African art in Berlin and Bonne and Cologne, that’s all they’re worth, is it, a lemon and a light bulb? It’s an insult, an outrage. Look, go back and grab some proper art, a Lucas Cranach (his Crucifixion in the Stadtkirche in Weimar, perhaps?) and an Albrecht Altdorfer or two (how about his Entombment and Resurrection in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum?) and a Matthias Grünewald (his Isenheim Altarpiece in the Colmar Museum in Alsace?) and an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (his Potsdamer Platz in Berlin’s Nationalgalerie?) and – best of all – an Albrecht Durer (his Self-Portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek?). And then I’ll listen to what you have to say about reparation!”
Albrecht Durer might have understood the project and even approved of it. After all, even he was amazed and impressed by what he saw of non-European art looted by Western imperialists. “In all the days of my life I have never seen anything that rejoiced my heart so much as these things” he wrote about the Aztec artefacts he saw in Flanders, after they’d been grabbed by Spanish conquistadores in Mexico and sent to the Habsburg Emperor Charles V. “I marvelled at the subtle genius of men in foreign lands.” He lamented the destruction of many of the gold items, melted down for bullion.
As it happens, Mexico has recently asked museums around the world to lend it what remains of those looted treasures for an exhibition which will be part of next year’s commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish. A sensible approach to this complex, difficult and sensitive issue; the essential thing, surely, is that such works are on public display in whatever country they have ended up in, and that the institutions that hold them are prepared to lend them to other institutions around the world. But that’s to reckon without the politicians; last week President López Obrador of Mexico announced that he’s considering appealing to the United Nations to compel museums to give artefacts back to the countries where they were made. His statement will almost certainly inhibit foreign museums from lending material to Mexico for that anniversary display for fear that they won’t get them back again. But it might well improve the president’s ratings at home, which have nose-dived in the last year.
England isn’t agitating for the return of the beautiful Codex Aureus (created by the monks of Canterbury Cathedral in the eight-century, looted by the Vikings, ransomed, but nevertheless now in the Swedish national library in Stockholm) or of the Barberini Gospels (made in Northumbria or Mercia in the eighth century but now in the Vatican library, sold off to Francesco Barberini perhaps in some dodgy deal following the Dissolution of our monasteries) or of the Bayeux Tapestry (created by nuns in Canterbury but now in Normandy); they’re all on public display and they’ve all been lent (or offered to be lent) to British museums in recent years. But if Boris’s ratings continue to plummet, he might consider demanding their permanent return. Although, considering its current record, I don’t suppose we’d be surprised if his government settled for a lemon and a light bulb in their place.
