SHARING STORIES OF STOLEN CULTURES
The First Perspective, Canada
Nov 4 2013
By Karen Seidman, GAZETTE universities reporter
Montreal Gazette
With several European museums recently facing scandals involving
looted art, Concordia University’s exploration of plundered cultures
at an international conference this week couldn’t be more timely.
But where the focus on most stolen material concerns Nazi-looted art
from the Second World War era, Concordia’s conference on Wednesday and
Thursday will aim to push the envelope by expanding the issue beyond
the Holocaust era to talk about injustices to the First Nations and
Armenian communities as well.
People often think of European masters when the topic of looted art
arises, but what about the suppression of the carving of totem poles
of First Nations people, or the assault on religious art experienced
by the Armenians in Turkey?
Frank Chalk, director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human
Rights Studies at Concordia, is one of the driving forces behind the
conference and he says these communities have a lot to learn from
each other.
“This will help consolidate the lessons learned and share the burden
these communities carry,” he said in an interview.
Plundered Cultures, Stolen Heritage will open a chapter in
multidisciplinary human rights studies integrating research on history,
cultural studies and the memory of atrocity.
It will bring together leading experts on the cultural destruction
and mass atrocities suffered by the First Nations, Armenian and Jewish
peoples to discuss the motives of the perpetrators of these assaults –
and the impact.
Rather than a competition of suffering between groups, it will focus on
learning from the shared experiences of these communities with the aim
of helping all groups confront crimes against humanity and genocides.
It will open with a keynote address by Morley Safer (which is sold
out), a correspondent for CBS News’ 60 Minutes, who is very interested
in the subject of looted art.
Although it wasn’t timed to coincide, the issue of looted art had a
local angle last week when the beneficiaries of Max Stern, a Jewish
art dealer who fled Nazi Germany for Montreal after he was forced to
close his gallery, recovered a painting looted by Nazi officials 76
years ago.
His estate was left to Concordia, McGill University and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, and the colleges began a campaign to recover
the lost art. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project, administered by
Concordia, has recovered 11 paintings of about 400 being traced.
And in October, several controversies swirled in European art circles
centred on looted art (see sidebar).
Hollywood will even document its version of the subject with the movie
The Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney, which
centres on a group of art historians and museum curators charged with
rescuing art treasures taken by the Nazis. It is set to be released
in February.
The Nazi regime systematically plundered hundreds of thousands of
art works from museums and individuals.
More recently, Chalk said, the wars in the Middle East illustrate
that assaults on culture are still being waged – and are often a
precursor to genocide.
“You just have to look at the attacks on Christians in Egypt and
Syria, where churches are being destroyed,” he said. “And the Buddhist
statues, great treasures, destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan
(just over a decade ago).”
Clarence Epstein, director of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project,
said the conference marks a pivotal point for Concordia, which is
chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance this year.
“It will be a symbolic and important week for us,” he said. “The
university has been spearheading this issue with regards to one
subject, which is WWII restitution issues, but this is the first
conference that goes beyond WWII issues and talks about injustices
as varied as those of the First Nations and Armenian communities.
“It’s an important conference which will attract a lot of attention –
at a time when there is a groundswell of interest in this issue.”
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