Kimerly Rorschach, incoming president of the Association of Art Museum Directors
There’s going to be no honeymoon period for the new president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
Kim Rorschach, the director of the Nasher Museum, Duke University, takes the reigns from Peabody Essex Museum director Dan Monroe at the association’s annual meeting, now in progress in Chicago.
AAMD was a prime mover in crafting a now controversial bill, passed by the House and pending in the Senate, that would strengthen the longstanding principle that cultural objects
loaned from abroad to American museums should be immune from seizure by
possible claimants.
In today’s NY Times, Doreen Carvajal delineates the growing controversy over the opaquely named Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act (text of the bill on pp. 11-12), a proposed law that would reinforce the federal government’s current safeguards for cultural exchange as embodied in the 1965 federal Immunity from Judicial Seizure statute, administered by the State Department. To be granted immunity from seizure for loaned objects under the existing law, cultural institutions must apply to the State Department for protection of specific objects or groups of objects.
Stronger safeguards regarding works loaned to U.S. institutions by foreign governments were deemed necessary in the wake of a dispute in which the heirs of Malevich sued the City of Amsterdam in U.S. court for return from the Stedelijk Museum of 14 works by the artist that had been loaned to a 2003-2004 exhibition at the
Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston.
The parties arrived at a settlement in 2008, whereby the heirs would received five of those works and the Stedelijk would keep the rest on permanent loan. Although the court case was never decided, the very fact that such an action could be brought spooked foreign lenders. Why risk loaning works if they may become embroiled in U.S. litigation?
In a written statement about the pending bill, issued earlier this month, AAMD asserted:
This legislation will help ensure that foreign museums do not stop lending works to U.S. museums. Bringing these loans to a standstill would be a great loss for the American public.
Although “standstill” may be an exaggeration, I agree that strengthened federal protection is needed. We have already seen—from the current withholding of loans from Russia—that cultural exchange may be severely hobbled if American museums can’t provide airtight guarantees to foreign lenders that their objects will be returned.
Museums, as temporary custodians of the property of others, should not be dragged into unresolved disputes over rightful ownership between claimants and foreign governments. Nor can they be reasonably expected to exhaustively vet every loan in advance for possible legal disputes between outside parties, although the current guidelines (see #6) for museums applying for immunity from seizure seem to expect them to do so.
As much as I believe that Nazi-expropriated works should be returned to rightful owners, I don’t agree with the controversial provision in the pending bill that would make a special exception for Nazi-era claims. The bill would allow Nazi victims or their heirs to claim foreign-loaned objects in U.S. courts, even if they were granted federal immunity from seizure.
From my personal point of view, Nazi depradations do feel like the most egregious injustice of all. But from the points of view of other aggrieved claimants, the wrongs done to them probably seem equally reprehensible. I feel that museums are not the appropriate agents for righting possible wrongs regarding objects that are loaned to them for temporary display and that this principle should be applied across the board. But one can only imagine the uproar that would ensue if anyone now tried to delete that provision from the bill.
Good luck with navigating these minefields, Kim. You’re going to need it!