The Cleveland Museum of Art rarely publishes catalogs that try to stir broad public debate on politics, law, cultural identity and global diplomacy.
With the release of a new catalog on Friday, however, the museum is wading directly into the international controversy over collecting ancient works of art whose ownership histories, or provenances, remain partially or entirely unknown.
The book, “Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo,” authored by the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman art, Michael Bennett, accompanies a new exhibition opening Sunday that focuses on a controversial ancient bronze statue of Apollo purchased by the museum in 2004.
Using scientific evidence and art-historical analysis, Bennett builds the most forceful case yet that the life-size bronze is an ancient Greek original, not a later Roman copy, and that it is likely the work of Praxiteles, one of the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece.
In a press conference at the museum Friday, Cleveland museum Director David Franklin called the Apollo "arguably the greatest antiquity in a North American collection."
The book is also an impassioned critique of international laws aimed at halting trade in looted antiquities.
Bennett states that such laws – while correctly focused on halting illegal activity - have also cast a stigma on “orphaned” works such as the museum’s Apollo, whose time and place of excavation and recent history are unknown.
Archaeologists familiar with the Apollo have said on numerous occasions that when museums collect such works, they encourage looting and trafficking of antiquities.
Bennett, however, states that the Apollo was one of thousands of antiquities in private hands whose ownership histories are not completely documented. Lack of such documentation, Bennett writes, is not evidence that an object was looted. It’s not a case of guilty until proven innocent.
“Illegality cannot be presumed, or we are heading toward a repeat of the Spanish Inquisition or the McCarthy hearings,” Bennett writes.
In an interview earlier this week, Franklin said that he considered Bennett’s catalog and the Apollo exhibition the opening salvo in a debate that will culminate with a symposium at the museum in about a year.
“It’s stating our position on many things people have talked about,” Franklin said of the Bennett catalog. “It’s a very dramatic moment for the museum.”
Franklin said the symposium would include archaeologists and other experts who may not agree with the museum’s position on the Apollo and on antiquities collecting in general.
But he said he wanted to hold the symposium after giving scholars a chance to absorb Bennett’s arguments.
The opening of the Apollo show and the release of the catalog coincide with the opening of a second antiquities exhibition opening on Sunday: "Sicily: Art and Invention Between Greece and Rome."
The exhibition stirred controversy over the summer when Sicilian authorities threatened to cancel the Cleveland run of the show, which opened earlier this year at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, if the museum didn't pay additional loan fees imposed at the last minute.
Last month, the Sicilians relented in exchange for the Cleveland museum's agreement to exhibit works from its collection in Sicily in 2015.
Bennett called the simultaneous opening of the two shows on Sunday "an ancient art double feature."
The exhibition Apollo exhibition includes two ancient Roman copies of the Apollo sculpture, which help prove that the ancient bronze purchased by the museum was the original on which the copies were based, Franklin said.
The loaned works are the marble “Apollo Sauroktonos,” or “Apollo the Lizard-Slayer,” from the Louvre Museum, a first-century ancient Roman work, and a second, first-century Roman marble version of the same motif from the World Museum in Liverpool.
The museum has dated its bronze to 350 B.C. and believes it may be the original referred to as a work of Praxiteles by the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder.
In the sculpture, Apollo is depicted as an adolescent god in the act of slaying a reptilian creature crawling on a tree branch.
According to ancient Greek myth, Apollo, the god of light, reason, poetry, music and prophecy, destroys chaos by killing the creature.
Bennett’s catalog essay states that Pliny erroneously identified the reptile in the sculpture as a lizard. Instead, Bennett states, it's a mythical python - not to be confused with the enormous snakes of Africa and Asia.
The curator therefore retitled the work “Apollo the Python Slayer” and theorizes in the catalog that the sculpture may have been connected to the ancient Greek site of Delphi, where Apollo’s triumph over the python was regularly re-enacted in religious processions.
Ali Aboutaam, one of the firm’s two principals, was convicted in absentia in Egypt in 2003 on charges of smuggling and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The New York Times reported in 2007 that the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.
Ali's brother and partner, Hicham Aboutaam, pleaded guilty in New York in 2004 to a misdemeanor federal charge that he falsified a customs document.
Before the museum bought the sculpture from Phoenix Ancient Art, it obtained a written statement from German lawyer Ernst-Ulrich Walter stating that he found the sculpture lying in pieces in a building on a family estate he reclaimed after the fall of East Germany.
Walter also reportedly said he remembered seeing the piece on the family estate in the 1930s.
The museum has never released Walter's statement and has no plans to do so, Bennett said Friday.
Based on the statement from Walter, and on scientific tests, Bennett states in the catalog that the sculpture was excavated and removed from its original site as long as a century ago, placing the work beyond the reach of modern laws aimed at halting the looting of ancient artworks.
In 2007, Agence France-Presse reported that unnamed Greek officials stated that the Apollo was fished out of the sea between Greece and Italy. Greece never presented evidence, but in response to the country’s claims that the work was stolen, the Louvre canceled plans to exhibit the Cleveland sculpture in an exhibition.
Franklin said Friday that research by the museum proves conclusively that the Apollo "was not recently pulled out of the ocean but has been on dry land for some time."
http://www.cleveland.com/arts/index.ssf/2013/09/the_cleveland_museum_of_art_wa.html
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