Social policy – Page 8 – The History Blog

Giant 50-ton replica of Ramesses needs new home

October 6, 2011

Memphis — the one in Tennessee — has a 50-ton, 25-foot-tall homeless pharaoh on its hands. It’s a fiberglass replica of a colossal statue of Ramesses the Great found in pieces in Memphis — the one in Egypt — and is the only officially permitted replica of the original Colossus of Ramesses in the world. It stands outside the Pyramid Arena, a sports arena in downtown Memphis on the banks of the Mississippi which is no longer in use as a sports venue and will instead be the locus of a new Bass Pro Shops megastore (plus other retail outlets, office space, even a river museum). Neither Bass Pro Shops nor the Memphis City Council think Ramesses the Great should have a second career as a mall cop, so the city is looking for a new home for their giant.

The City Council ran multiple advertisements in local press outlets looking for any takers who would keep Ramesses on display for the benefit of the people of Memphis. Only the University of Memphis, whose men’s basketball team once played in the Pyramid Arena, responded. The university offered to pay a token dollar and move the statue to its campus. Some people on the City Council are not thrilled with the idea, though, because the university is state-owned rather than city-owned. Also, the campus is in East Memphis; the ideal location would be more centrally located.

There’s also the small matter of the original agreement with Egypt. The Memphis City Council brought in Glen Campbell, the former curator of the Wonders series that brought the ancient limestone Ramesses colossus to Tennessee, and former Memphis mayor Dick Hackett to testify to the stipulations of the deal.

Campbell said that he, Hackett and the rest of Memphis delegation first saw the original statue in the Egyptian city called Memphis in 1986. It was lying in a ditch in about three big pieces and about a thousand smaller pieces.

When Hackett proposed moving it to the Bluff City for what would become the first Wonders exhibit, he suggested that it be displayed in pieces, just as it was in Egypt. Campbell recalled the response from an Egyptian antiquities official: “Pharaohs do not recline outside of the sands of Egypt.”

So the Memphis delegation agreed to restore the statue with funds from the Coca-Cola corporation, display it in Memphis and send it back to Egypt when they were done. They also won agreement to create a fiberglass replica to keep in the city. But there were conditions. The Americans had to agree to destroy the mold used to make the statue and send the Egyptians a videotape of the destruction, Campbell said.

And there were stipulations that are relevant to the current discussion: They also had to agree to keep the statue on public display somewhere in the city of Memphis, not to sell it and not to give it away, Campbell said.

Shall we bet on who that pithy Egyptian antiquities official was? I won’t name names, but I’m guessing his initials are Zahi and Hawass.

The agreement was signed by Hosni Mubarak, so an argument could be made that it’s invalid now and Memphis can do whatever it wants with the replica, but thankfully they’re not taking it that way. Keeping the statue on display for its educational and aesthetic value to the city of Memphis is their priority.

Bass Pro Shops is scheduled to begin renovations and construction of Pyramid Arena this month. The statue will remain in place until the matter is resolved.

Art looted from Warsaw museum by Nazis returned

September 24, 2011

Looting, Modern(ish), Social policy

Two important works by Polish impressionist painter Julian Falat that were looted from the Polish National Museum in Warsaw by Nazis in 1944 and then disappeared for over six decades are on their way back to Poland. Representatives from U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office officially returned the paintings to the President of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski in a ceremony at the Polish Consulate in New York City. At the same ceremony, President Komorowski presented the Presidential Medal to ICE Special Agent Lennis Barrois and retired Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt in gratitude for their efforts in investigating the theft.

In August of 1944, German SS Obersturmbannführer and “Reichsbeauftragter für die Mode” (Reich Agent For Fashion) Benno von Arent took charge of the National Museum in Warsaw and looted the most valuable pieces, including “The Hunt in Nieśwież” and “Before the Hunt in Rytwiany,” two oil-on-panel winter scenes by Julian Falat (1853-1929), a top Polish impressionist painter known for his landscapes. These pieces are considered the finest examples of his hunt-themed work.

“Those paintings are two magnificent and very important pieces of art,” said Bogdan Zdrojewski, minister of culture and national heritage, Republic of Poland. “If you think about all the Falat paintings, these two are definitely the most interesting and most valuable ones.”

The paintings first came to light in New York City in 2006. Polish authorities found out in 2006 that these two masterpieces had been put up for sale at two different New York auction houses. They notified ICE and INTERPOL who conducted an investigation into their history. According to the ICE statement, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a civil complaint in Manhattan federal court in December of 2010 asking that the paintings be forfeited on the grounds that they constituted stolen property illegally imported into the United States.

It’s unclear what happened between 2006 and 2010, nor do we know who put the paintings up for auction in 2006 or where they may have been before that. If any arrests have been made or criminal complaints filed, they haven’t been announced.

Despite the delay and many missing pieces of this puzzle, Poland’s Ministry of Culture is delighted to have the Falats back. Approximately 60,000 works of art that disappeared from Polish collections during World War II are still missing.

“The two World Wars that we experienced and numerous uprisings … left Poland’s national heritage really impoverished,” said Bogdan Zdrojewski, Poland’s culture minister. “That is why every object that returns to our country has huge value that is both spiritual and emotional.”

State, collectors vie for Gypsy fortune teller machine

August 30, 2011

Modern(ish), Social policy, Treasures

A 1906 verbal gypsy fortune teller machine in the gold rush ghost town of Virginia City, Montana, is being tussled over by private collectors, the state, historians and citizens. The fortune teller machine is one of no more than three remaining that used a recording to “speak” fortunes to whosoever fed it a nickel. Magician and collector of historic penny arcade games David Copperfield thinks it may be the only one of its kind remaining, and of course he wants to buy it. He’s not the only one.

Until recently the fortune teller machine lived in relative obscurity, one dusty game artifact among the multitude collected by General Mills heir Charles Bovey. It was Bovey who began to buy up properties in Virginia City in the 1940s so they could be restored and the town kept intact as living Montana history. He did the same for neighboring gold rush ghost town Nevada City. He dedicated thirty years of his life to preserving the state’s 19th century history, and while he was it, he used the buildings to store his ever-burgeoning collection of antique games and musical machines.

Founded in 1863 as a gold rush boomtown, just two years later Virginia City had a population of 10,000 and was made capital of the newly created Montana Territory. Population followed the gold, though, and that was already moving west towards Helena. In 1875 the capital was moved to Helena where it remained when Montana joined the Union as a state in 1889. In 1942, the last mine in the area closed. Bovey jumped on the opportunity and start buying.

That boom and bust cycle not only makes Virginia City a classic example of a gold rush town, but it also ensured there was little interest in knocking down old buildings to make new ones. Bovey was able to restore a great many structures from the first decade or so of Virginia City’s life. Of almost 300 structures in town, almost half were built before 1900. The largest proportion of the 200 historic buildings in town date to the 1870s, and even the later construction is of great historical value in that it illustrates the growth and decline of frontier mining-dependent communities.

Virginia City was designated National Historic Landmark on July 4, 1961. Charles Bovey continued buying and restoring until his death in 1978. After that, his wife Sue and son Ford continued to preservation and restoration efforts until Ford sold Virginia City and Nevada City, properties, land and contents, to the State of Montana for $6.5 million in 1998. Since then, Virginia City has been under the aegis of the Montana Heritage Preservation Commission.

Bovey’s historical games and machines stayed in town, adding to its tourist appeal. There are hundreds of thousands of these games, most of them in curatorial storage. The fortune telling machine was used by visitors through the early 1970s when its deteriorating condition necessitated its removal to storage. It was put back on display in 1999, but it was for looking only, no touching. Conservators finally began to restore it to function in September of 2004, finishing in June, 2006. In 2008, the gypsy returned to public display (again, no touching allowed) in the Gypsy Arcade, a turn-of-the-century gadgetry museum on Virginia City’s main street.

It was that successful restoration that brought the fortune teller to the attention of collectors. Around that time, Copperfield approached the Montana Heritage Commission offering a reported $2 million for the machine, including enough money to replace the gypsy with another non-verbal historical fortune telling machine for display purposes. They turned him down.

The pressure is back on now, though, because like most every other state-supported institution, the Heritage Commission has been kneecapped by budget cuts. You know it’s a bad sign when your curator of collections, Janna Norby, gets laid off due to budget cuts just two weeks after giving the AP a great quote for their article about the gypsy: “If we start selling our collection for money, what do we have?”

Thankfully she’s not alone in her sentiments. The current staff, skeleton though it may be, of the Heritage Commission insist that they would never sell of any of the antiques under their stewardship. This makes the private collectors grumpy because they think they can do a much better job of maintaining it and conserving it using the latest technology money can buy. Collector and restorer Theo Holstein is putting together a consortium of private collectors to bid $3 million for the gypsy. David Copperfield is revving back up to bid too, and those figures being bandied about could go even higher into the stratosphere.

Since the Montana Heritage Commission is overseen by the state Department of Commerce, which, needless to say, has slightly different priorities involving commerce rather than preservation, those millions of dollars just might be enough to pry the gypsy away from Virginia City after all. Don’t worry, though. If it disappears into a private collection never to be seen by the public again, Theo Holstein assures us that sale would be the equivalent of rescuing a precious gemstone from the dark bowels of a mine.

“They don’t have any idea what they have. It’s like they have the world’s best diamond and they just pulled it out of their mineshaft. It’s good that it’s there and it survived, but now it really needs to be part of the world.”

Part of the world = hidden forever in some rich guy’s creepy basement gameland.

Did restorers castrate the penis tree?

August 28, 2011

Medieval, Social policy, Treasures

In 1999, workers restoring a medieval communal fount called the Fountain of Abundance in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima discovered a curious mural hidden behind a whitewash layer. It depicts a tree heavily laden with heavily laden phalluses under which eight or nine women stand in various poses and large black birds fly. Expert thinks the fresco dates to 1265, the same year inscribed on the fountain itself.

According to George Ferzoco, the director of the Centre for Tuscan Studies at the University of Leicester whose summer program was in Massa that year, the townspeople’s initial reaction to the find was mixed.

“They considered it to be somehow dirty or erotic, one or the other. Those who saw it as erotic looked at it as being a symbol that mirrored the reality of the water and the place. Water gives life; Phalluses give life: Isn’t this a unique and interesting way to portray the life-giving properties of water? The porn camp, if we can call it that, saw it as being somehow deliberately obscene and thus believed that as little attention as possible needed to be drawn to it.”

Over a decade later, that ambivalence has long gone and locals are furiously protective of their Tree of Fertility. In 2008 a program of restoration was undertaken to fully clean the mural which had suffered not just from its whitewashing but also from water damage and concretions. The restoration finally ended in early August and the public were allowed back in to view the mural, only to find to their dismaythat there were parts missing. Male parts.

The experts who carried out the restoration have been accused of sanitising the mural by scrubbing out or altering some of the testicles, which hang from the tree’s branches along with around 25 phalluses.

“Many parts of the work seem to have been arbitrarily repainted,” said Gabriele Galeotti, a town councillor who has called for an investigation after seeing the finished work. “The authenticity of the fresco seems to have been compromised by a restoration effort that did not respect the original character of the work.”

The restorers deny categorically having painted over any phalluses. They claim any paint loss was the result of salt and calcium concretions lifting paint as they were removed during the cleaning. If any repainting gets done, restorers say, it’ll be done to put the lost phalluses back in, not to remove them.

Councilman Galeotti is not at all satisfied with that explanation.

“What the restorers say is absolute nonsense. As far as we are concerned they have compromised the authenticity of the fresco. The work was intended as a symbol of fertility with the penises being crucial to the intention of the art but now these have been removed and the message is therefore no longer there.

“We intend to make a formal complaint to the local prosecutor so that he can open an investigation into this disrespectful slaughter of an artistic work. There was obviously no intention to respect the original artist.”

Unfortunately, I can’t find any before and after images of the tree so we can assess the phallic loss with our own eyes, but judging from some of the old pictures I found (see this one from 2003), the fresco was in truly awful condition when uncovered. Recent pictures show it in far superior condition, figures, phalluses and tree.

It’s probably not actually a fertility symbol, btw. George Ferzoco’s studies suggest that the fresco is a political allegory, negative advertising, if you will, writ large in a highly trafficked location: the public fountain where people drew their water for daily use. Ferzoco notes:

“The fact of the matter is that there is, with regard to the phalluses on display in this painting, nothing whatsoever to do with fertility. It’s one thing to have a symbol of a phallus on its own. That can stand for good luck, fertility, what have you. It’s another to put it in a different context, one in which it’s seen to be quite literally growing on a tree. The Medieval culture, more than ours, was one that was extremely sensitive to what was perceived as the goodness of nature, the goodness of what is natural, and they would have put two and two together in a way which involved seeing this particular tree bearing fruit that is not natural fruit. Those two elements of the equation would have added up to be something which is not natural and hence not good.”

While the phalluses in the tree are, by the context, strange and shocking, there are other phalluses in the painting which add currency to Ferzoco’s hypothesis that this is anything but a mural celebrating fecundity. “We have an image of two women who appear to be locked in serious combat over one of these phalluses, so this supposed fertility symbol that ought to bring life and goodness is in fact bringing strife to the people fighting over it. More importantly, there is a woman on the left side of the mural, standing in what I call her ‘Lady Di’ pose, standing quite demurely, until you realise that she’s being sodomised by one of these phalluses. You can’t get pregnant by sodomy – it’s the ultimate in non-fertility. There’s something going on in the mural that subverts notions of fertility.”

But why would one display such an extravagant, and no doubt expensive, symbol of non-fertility in such a central place? What message is it conveying? “The key to that subversion – according to Ferzoco – is shown with the symbol of one of the two competing political factions of the time, which is displayed prominently in the mural. This is the Eagle, a symbol of the Ghibelline party. The juxtaposition of this party symbol along with another symbol being used unnaturally, in a non-fertile way is meant to create in the viewer a kind of relationship between what is unnatural or not good on the one hand and the Ghibelline party on the other. It makes even more sense when you consider that during almost all of its history as an independent city republic, Massa Marittima was controlled by the anti-Ghibelline Guelph party.”

Stick with us, is the message, or prepare for a society in which perverted trees grow phallus fruit and women tear each other’s hair out trying to have non-reproductive sexual congress with them.