A Shelter for Art Caught in the Crossfire

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/arts/louvre-shelter-for-art-caught-in-the-crossfire.html

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PARIS — Construction is scheduled to start this fall on a new building for the Louvre.

Costing an estimated 60 million euros ($63 million) and designed by the British architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, the building in Liévin, about 210 kilometers (about 130 miles) north of Paris, will be a storehouse and conservation base for 250,000 objects from the Louvre’s permanent collection.

It has also been offered by the French government as a haven for artifacts at risk of looting and destruction in conflict zones of the Middle East.

Saving that region’s heritage has become a high international priority, Western culture officials say. The Afghan Taliban destroyed the Bamian Buddhas in 2001, the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was looted in 2003, and Islamic fundamentalists and other fighters have ransacked historic Syrian and Iraqi sites since 2011.

The idea of a French sanctuary originated from a report by the Louvre’s president-director, Jean-Luc Martinez, commissioned by President François Hollande in June 2015 after Islamic fundamentalist fighters ravaged the Mosul Museum and the ancient sites of Nineveh and Nimrud in northern Iraq.

That November, Mr. Hollande presented the Martinez report to Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization based in Paris, with 50 proposals, including digital mapping of threatened sites, increased border controls aimed at seizing looted antiquities and the Louvre sanctuary plan.

“We’ve already done something like this,” Mr. Martinez wrote in an email response to questions. “France received endangered collections during the Spanish Civil War,” he said, referring to the conflict between Spanish republicans and nationalists from 1936 to 1939. “Works from the Prado Museum were transferred to the south of France and then to Switzerland before returning to Spain when the war was over.”

“Today, only France and Switzerland have passed legislation allowing them to set up safe-haven facilities,” Mr. Martinez said, adding that Libya was considering starting talks on sending some treasures into French protection.

Liévin could serve both as a temporary warehouse for smuggled Iraqi and Syrian antiquities recovered by French customs agents and as a refuge for objects sent by governments to keep them out of harm’s way, he suggested.

Yet some archaeologists and museum curators question the usefulness and suitability of France’s plan. For a start, they said, the building is not due to be completed until mid-2019. And the process of selecting objects for safekeeping and postconflict restitution could be tricky.

“The whole safe-haven idea is something which is extremely controversial,” said St John Simpson, an assistant keeper in the Middle East department at the British Museum in London. For outsiders to take responsibility for conservation “completely undermines national integrity” of the affected countries, Mr. Simpson, the senior curator of the museum’s Ancient Iran and Arabia collections, said in a telephone interview.

Removing objects from national control could raise problems involving the ownership of intellectual property and rights of access, particularly in the case of a subsequent regime change, he said.

“Who makes the decisions about what goes out and when and where it comes back?” Mr. Simpson said. “If other parties disagree about the legitimacy of the government in power, who decides?”

Sidestepping those potential disputes, the British Museum has taken another tack on conservation. In 2015, the year the Louvre project started to take shape, the British Museum began a training program for Iraqi archaeologists and curators. Funded by a 2.9-million-pound ($3.6 million), five-year grant from the British government, it aims to build the conservation capacity of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage by offering six-month training courses to 50 staff members, teaching them cutting-edge retrieval and rescue technologies.

The first group of trainees arrived in London last May and completed field training on two archaeological sites, Darband-i Rania in Iraqi Kurdistan and Tello, the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu in southern Iraq. A second group started training in January. A graduate of the program now heads the Iraq government’s assessment team, which is surveying damage to the recently recaptured site of the ancient city of Nimrud, near Mosul.

“What we’ve seen, in Kabul, and Iraq in 2003, and more recently Syria, is that although people dwell on what’s been lost or destroyed, local curators have done a remarkable amount to look after their own heritage,” Mr. Simpson said. “By burying stuff or hiding it in anonymous buildings, they’re doing a really successful job.”

Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, also highlighted the work being done locally and regionally to preserve threatened heritage. “In the past decade or so, there has been a concerted effort by Middle Eastern institutions to conserve and display art from the region,” he wrote in an email.

Glenn M. Schwartz, chairman of the Near Eastern Studies department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and professor at the University of Cambridge in Britain, each stressed the value of cooperation.

“Museums are valuing international partnerships and taking them far more seriously than they used to,” Mr. Thomas said.

“Partnership work and collaboration is absolutely a two-way street,” he added, by passing skills and expertise in one direction and broader cultural perspectives in the other.