Met Cancels Kremlin Museum Loan as Cold War Over Lubavitcher Trove Drags On
By Julia Halperin
Published: August 11, 2011
NEW YORK - The Metropolitan Museum of Art has canceled plans to loan items by fashion designer Paul Poiret to the Kremlin Museum, making that show the latest casualty in an ongoing legal and diplomatic dispute that has suspended Russian loans to American museums. The conflict centers on an archive of thousands of religious books and documents that has been held in Russia since World War II. Last July, a United States court ruled that the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement had rightful ownership to the trove, and Russia banned all exhibitions traveling to the United States in response.
"It is going to be the policy of the museum that there has to be some equity for lending to be resumed," Met spokesman Harold Holzer, the museum's senior vice president for external affairs, told ARTINFO. He added that the institution will not lend to Russian museums as long as that country's loan embargo remains in place. Russian officials had warned museums that artworks traveling to the U.S. could be seized and used as leverage to force the release of the trove of documents, though it is unclear whether Russian museums are holding off on loans for fear of U.S. seizure or - considering that the U.S. 1965 Immunity From Seizure Act protects foreign works that are on loan - of government reprisals in Russia.
The Met had planned to lend 35 Poiret works to the Moscow museum's show, "Paul Poiret - King of Fashion," which opens on September 7. Holzer said there aren't any other large-scale Russian loans on the immediate horizon, but that "Poiret was always one of the major ones facing this kind of decision." The museum will send over some of the scenic backdrops from its own Poiret exhibition in 2007 "as a gesture of goodwill," according to the new York Times.
This isn't the first time that the Met has canceled loans to Russian museums since the ban. As ARTINFO previously reported, an upcoming loan slated for a Dior show at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts was canceled in May.
On the home front, the embargo has already disrupted two exhibitions at the Met as well. Both "Cézanne's Card Players," which closed in May, and "Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," which closed in July, were deprived previously planned loans. The lending of several Gauguin Tahitian paintings for a National Gallery exhibition was also canceled. Perhaps the most dramatic intervention, however, occurred in March, when 37 icons were pulled from a show at the Museum of Russian Icons in Massachusetts. A Russian curator showed up to personally oversee the objects' return to the Andrei Rublev Museum in Russia.
The ongoing fallout may affect the Met's forthcoming exhibition "Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India," to open on September 26 in the galleries previously occupied by "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty." Of the over 200 works in the exhibition, eight paintings were to come from the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies, according to Holzer.
Holzer said the embargo had no effect on Russian museum staff and scholars working in the United States. "The exchange of conversations continues," he said. "At any time, there are emissaries from museums around the world at the Met."
The religious archive at issue, containing 12,000 books and 50,000 other documents, was assembled by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn. Part was seized during the Russian Revolution; the rest was seized by the Nazis and, after the war, by the Russian Army. A federal judge ruled on July 30 of 2010 that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, led by Schneersohn's son-in-law until his death in 1994, was the rightful owner. Russia claims Schneersohn had no heir at the time he left Russia. "One American organization made a completely illegitimate claim on this collection of books," Russian culture minister Alexander Avdeyev told the Straits Times in January. "We have our own believers who respect these books no less."
“Court Calls Russia’s Fear of Chabad Art Seizure Legitimate”: http://rublev-museum.livejournal.com/188032.html
See also: http://rublev-museum.livejournal.com/187890.html