The Morality of Mural Maintenance

An academic discovers breathtaking frescoes decaying in a distant land and takes them to a cultural hub for careful preservation and the enjoyment of the general public. Is he a hero to the art world, or is he a thief?

This is the question at the center of the thorny debate over repatriation of museum holdings at Harvard and across the globe: Over centuries, prominent museums have acquired art holdings from historians who have traveled abroad, discovered ancient works, and appropriated them for display back in their home countries. Now, many countries are requesting that pieces taken from their turf be returned. A Crimson Arts feature from last week detailed the challenges faced by Harvard museums in wrestling with this question. We appreciate Harvard Art Museums’ efforts to comply with repatriation requests to the best of their ability. At the same time, we are grateful that Harvard and other educational centers have such impressive collections of historical, foreign art for public enrichment.

According to the feature, Harvard Art Museums owns a dozen murals that art historian Langdon Warner brought to Cambridge from Dunhuang, China in 1924. These frescoes delighted Fogg museumgoers for decades, but some Dunhuang residents view Warner’s acquisition as a robbery, and many demand that Harvard send the works back to China. The same trend has plagued museums all over the United States. This summer, for example, the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art returned two ancient statues to Cambodia in response to an ownership challenge, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has been arguing with Turkey over a fifth-century artifact since 1995.

It may seem as if complying with repatriation requests is the only just path for a museum to follow. Pieces of art integral to the cultural history of certain countries lie in foreign hands, and those countries seem right in desiring their return. In particular, cases of Western civilizations claiming art from non-Western countries ring warning bells suggesting exploitation by imperialist powers. For this reason, certain frameworks—like international agreements made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—govern the ownership of items that have been illegally exported or that may be otherwise unethical for museums to display.

On the other hand, shipping fragile art thousands of miles overseas can pose practical problems. Warner’s murals, for example, were peeled off cave walls using an experimental process and will deteriorate if moved. And even when pieces can be delivered to their lands of origin without fear of damage, the museums that own them now can often promise better, securer preservation.

What’s more, ancient artifacts may gain more of the exposure and recognition they deserve in cultural hubs like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles than in some of their original homes. Established museums also have the ability to draw on their vast resources to provide viewers with substantial historical and contextual information about the pieces they see, information that preserves and honors the legacy of the art and the culture that produced it.

Given these considerations, we appreciate Harvard Art Museums’ attempts to work within existing legal repatriation frameworks and to honor repatriation requests when the museums can reasonably do so. We hope that museums everywhere will manage to strike a balance between ensuring artifacts’ care and respecting the wishes of the countries from where those artifacts came.