The Looting of the Winter Palace in Peking in 1900-1901 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2008
This article examines the 1860 looting of the imperial Chinese palace of Yuanming Yuan by British and French forces. Complicating Orientalist models, it views the looting and its aftermath as a complex case of intercultural interaction, arguing that European observers generally viewed China as a parallel civilization whose imperial culture mirrored Europe’s own traditions even while it was considered politically and morally inferior. The first two sections of the article analyze the looting as a process of moral and aesthetic judgment based on evaluating the site and selecting objects to either take or destroy. One section examines accounts by French and British participants, who viewed the palace’s gardens and decorative arts as equal in quality to those of Europe while condemning the emperor as morally decadent. A second section details how various European agents selected objects using various scales of value – monetary, symbolic, aesthetic – that either mirrored or inverted Chinese values. Acts of destruction, including the British decision to burn the entire palace complex over French objections, reveal further tensions and ironies in Europeans’ evaluation of Chinese arts. Shifting focus to Europe, the last two sections discuss the reception of looted objects, especially in France. One section examines writings about Yuanming Yuan’s art, including texts by Victor Hugo and the scholar Guillaume Pauthier, who condemn the palace’s destruction and praise China as equal but exotic to France. The final section analyzes the “Musée chinois” that Empress Eugénie created at the palace of Fontainebleau from the army’s gifts. It explains how the museum reversed the meanings of many objects while simultaneously aligning the Second Empire with China’s empire through the common nostalgic link of 18th-century Chinoiserie, a partnership that ended with the fall of Napoleon III.
Documenting Looted Art: Perspectives from the Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter
2018
Adolf Hitler’s ideological henchman Alfred Rosenberg was beheaded at Nuremberg, condemned to death as a war criminal; the charges against him included the looting of cultural valuables by his “Special Task Force,” namely the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). The ERR was only one of the main Nazi agencies involved with looted cultural valuables during the war, and it operated only in Nazi-occupied countries, not those incorporated in the Reich (and hence not in Czechoslovakia). While French authorities may claim a figure as high as 100,000 art objects taken out of France, the ERR boasted the seizure of over 20,000 works of art from French and Belgian Jewish collections as quoted in the Nuremberg trial. As concerns us here, most important for recovery of art aZer the war and its return to victims or heirs in the West (some by then having taken refuge across the Atlantic), was the detail with which the ERR carefully documented their Western art loot and its destinations.
T'oung Pao, 2004
Few tourists can resist the three great audience halls of Beijing's Forbidden City. The spacious courtyards, marble terraces, imposing halls, red walls and gold roofs, these have had an enduring fascination that repeated exposure does not seem to diminish. This fabulous architectural complex is, moreover, also a storehouse for treasures from a vanished imperial age. It was open to public view only intermittently during the first half of the twentieth century, and even the tourists who went in person saw no more than a small portion of the halls or the grounds. Since the 1970s, however, the Forbidden City's Palace Museum has not only received millions of domestic and foreign visitors, it has also sent objects from its collection abroad, in dozens of exhibitions. The creation of the "Museum of the Old Palace" (Gugong Bowuyuan 故宮博物院) in 1925 was intended to bring under control the selling, pilfering, and neglect from which the building complex and its holdings had been suffering since the death of the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1908 and the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911-and to claim them for the new state. Open to the public until 1931, the Museum was increasingly threatened by the violence of domestic and foreign politics. Important parts of its collection were put in crates in 1933, and over the course of the next seventeen years were moved from Beijing to Nanjing to southwest China, and eventually to Taiwan in 1949. There, they reemerged to public view as the possessions of the Republic of China, first in Taichung (in 1957) and then in a new residence outside Taipei in 1965 as the National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院). 1 © Brill, Leiden, 2004 T'oung Pao XC Also available online-www.brill.nl 1 This story has been told many times, but see Chang 1996. I have used a some-tp90-45_naquin.indd 3/2/2005, 9:13 AM 341 9 There were two greatly different catalogues for the 2000-02 Bowers show, a long one produced in Santa Ana, a short one in Salem. There was a Vienna edition of the 1985 Berlin catalogue (effectively identical). The 1996-97 Paris and the 1997-98 Mannheim catalogues were for the same show. Websites are a more recent and more ephemeral supplement to the catalogues. I have not cited the occasional review of these exhibitions. In this essay, the catalogues will obscure, even displace the ephemeral displays. Caveat lector. 10 This essay began as a book review, and I am grateful to Études chinoises for first asking me to assess the 1996-97 Paris catalogue, and for then permitting me to convert that review into this longer article. My sincere thanks also to James Cahill, Maxwell Hearn, Robert Hymes, Michèle Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens, and Evelyn Rawski for comments on earlier versions, and to helpful audiences at Princeton and Columbia Universities. The librarians at the Freer Gallery of Art were characteristically helpful with rare catalogues, and I continue to learn from museum curator friends. For a fine review of another series of exhibition catalogues, see Charleux 2000. 11 This account will cover only the public side of these exhibitions. I will not attempt an inner history, and will therefore not discuss a number of compelling but delicate topics: who carried out the negotiations for the selection of objects; who paid tp90-45_naquin.indd 3/2/2005, 9:13 AM
Nazi-Looted Art and Its Legacies: Introduction
New German Critique
In early 2012 German officials investigating violations of tax law discovered a trove of mainly nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European paintings and drawings in the Munich apartment and Salzburg house of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of the prominent art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The elder Gurlitt had worked for the Nazis but also counted a number of artists despised by them among his friends. Since then, the story of the Gurlitt collection has made headlines worldwide. Beyond the bizarre obsession of the aging son, who lived with and for his artworks hidden from public view, the case raises fundamental questions about the role of art dealers during and after the Third Reich, the mechanics of a largely secretive and insufficiently documented market in looted art, the complicity of art historians and business associations, the shortcomings of postwar denazification, the failure of courts and governments to adjudicate claims, and the unwillingness of museums to determine the provenance not just of Cornelius Gurlitt's holdings but of
Nazi-Looted Art from East and West in East Prussia: Initial Findings on the Erich Koch Collection
International Journal of Cultural Property, 2015
The article contrasts long-suppressed details of German art seizures during the Second World War from Ukrainian state museums and Western Jewish dealers, ordered to Königsberg by Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine. While most of the art from Kyiv was destroyed by retreating Germans when the Red Army arrived (February 1945), here we investigate "survivors." Initial provenance findings about the collection Koch evacuated to Weimar in February 1945 reveal some paintings from Kyiv. More, however, were seized from Dutch and French Holocaust victims by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and his cohorts, including Jewish dealers Jacques Goudstikker (Amsterdam) and Georges Wildenstein (Paris). Many paintings deposited in Weimar disappeared west; others seized by Soviet authorities were transported to the Hermitage. These initial findings draw attention to hitherto overlooked contrasting examples of patterns of Nazi art looting and destruction in the East and West, and the pan-European dispersal of important works of art.
Donatello and Berlin. Research, Memories and Rediscoveries. Edited by Neville Rowley. Predella journal of visual arts, n°50, 2021 Monografia / Monograph, 2021
This paper provides an insight into the destiny of translocated art objects from the Berlin Sculpture Collection after WWII. Numerous pieces of art were lost, damaged and moved to the USSR; some objects were returned to the GDR in the 1950s, others remained in the Soviet Union. The author explains a methodology for their identification. By studying the complex ways of their translocations after WWII the author analyses materials related to the activities of the Soviet trophy brigades, including condition reports upon the arrival of the German art works in the Soviet museums. The analysis is focused on the artworks from the Byzantine and Sculpture Collections of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin. The paper concludes with a plea for the continuation of research to enable filling the gaps in our knowledge concerning the destiny of translocated artworks and reconstruct their history.