Erin L. Thompson
@artcrimeprof
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Art crime prof @CUNY . Author: Smashing Statues @wwnorton . Also: art forgery; repatriation; museum shenanigans. Queer; she/her.
John Jay College (CUNY), NYC
Joined April 2015
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I’m a professor who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage and I just have to say... use chain instead of rope and it’ll go faster.
Members of the American Indian Movement are preparing to tear down the statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State capitol
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This guy is cracking me up. Some American anthropologists came to China in 1901, said "show us how you eat rice!" and my man really delivered.
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Does anyone else have something a teacher said burned into their brain? Mine is when I answered a question in a seminar my first semester of grad school and the professor responded, “Ah, Thompson. Quick but wrong, as usual.”
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Just walked past a Restoration Hardware that has apparently decided that a body cast from Pompeii is a chic coffee table ornament…?
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My kid, trying to explain how bad her stomach ache feels: “I’m museum sick. Like when you’re so bored from just looking at things.”
She’s 4. I’m an art historian. Low blow, kid, low blow.
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Visiting an ancient Cambodian deity in the
@metmuseum
. Last summer, I saw her feet at the site from which she was looted. And guess what?…
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Remember in 2021 when I was politely reminding the Metropolitan Museum that the upper half of a stolen shalabhanjika/yakshi/nature goddess sculpture they had in storage belonged back with its lower half in a monastery in Kathmandu? Guess what happened today?!?
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In c. 1940, a student named Katja Meirowsky cut the swastika out of a stolen Nazi flag, sewed the rest into a dress, and wore it to her Berlin art school. This act nearly led to her death - and shows how important art for protest can be, if only to save the artist's own soul. 🧵
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As we protest statues that glorify racist ideology, we also need to think about the things that ended up inside of museums because of assumptions about white superiority. Here's one story - of meteorites, pandemic, and Minik, the boy who lost his parents and his whole world.
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The museum label doesn’t even pretend she came from anywhere else. It names the site of Koh Ker. And yet the museum keeps claiming it needs more information before it will repatriate this and the other artifacts claimed by Cambodia.
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Took my friend Alisha, who’s been working for the repatriation of stolen heritage from Nepal, to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin without telling her it’s full of huge chunks of removed heritage. Got a lot of photos of her reacting like this…
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Went to a restaurant in the French countryside for lunch and asked if it was possible to get something vegetarian. I got rice, vegetable peelings, and spaghetti without sauce.
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The label on this stunning sculpture in London's Victoria and Albert Museum notes it was "collected by the Ex Younghusband Expedition to Tibet, 1904." A short 🧵 about the horrors this polite wording conceals.
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I’m thinking about writing a travel advice article called “Want to Skip Rome’s Lines? Settle for Second Best,” with lists of the alternate sights that are infinitesimally less beautiful but extremely more pleasant to experience because everyone’s packed into the
#1
version.
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For more on this statue and these claims:
Today, the Manhattan DA repatriated a Vishnu stolen from a Cambodian temple for the antiquities trafficker Doris Wiener. The
@metmuseum
still holds 15 sacred sculptures from Cambodia, India, and Nepal that passed through her - including one whose feet remain in Cambodia:
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When you turn around and realize German archeologists took home a whole wall of an ancient marketplace
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For a breakdown of how to mismantal racist statues I MEAN move an obelisk from my fellow archeologist,
@indyfromspace
, check out:
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This mural celebrating the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn gets a lil’ awkward when the grate goes up…
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Just met someone who’s a set designer and keeps $500k in fake movie money in her medicine cabinet to fuck with her Tinder dates.
#hero
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FYI the question was what was the relation between Kant's Critique of Judgment and the weekend trip to Connecticut the professor had just taken.
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Our museums are filled with objects that were taken from people who were considered not worthy of retaining them. Objects have hidden histories, and it's hard to find the Miniks under the Ahnighitos.
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Taken during the "Jacob H. Schiff Chinese Expedition" (1901-1904).
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The specialized language used on museum labels can be confusing! Here’s a tip: sometimes “case in process of installation” means “the Manhattan DA recently seized the looted antiquity from here so 🤷”
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90% of the time in France, asking for something vegetarian gets me all the delicious side dishes. The other 9.9% of the time, they say they can’t make something, and I get a delicious cheese plate. This is the 0.1% occurrence of straight “go f*** yourself.”
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My 7-year-old was unusually well behaved during our Colosseum tour - I was afraid she would be bored/hot/whiny. She later revealed she had spent most of the time thinking about ways in which she would kill various wild animals if she were a gladiator.
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This is Mansoor Adayfi, held at Guantanamo for 15 years, touching for the first time since he left an artwork made by another detainee to illustrate their degredation. Neither were ever charged with a crime.
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Katja had already been denounced by a fellow student for making a joke about Hitler. She arrived at her interrogation in borrowed silk stockings and high heels; the Gestapo officer released her after she promised to go sailing with him on the Wannsee. (She didn't.)
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This ancient Cambodian goddess was stolen from this pedestal. How do we know? The looters left behind her broken feet. Retweet to tell
@metmuseum
she belongs back home.
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Me, an art historian: “Don’t touch the art!”
Me, a human being: “Ok, fine, Arnold can hold hands with his ancient Egyptian muscle bro.”
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Katja kept protesting as much as she could, in a Berlin where even a joke could land you in jail. When she walked into school in her new red dress, fellow student Cato Bontjes van Beek said, “My God, there’s the revolution in person” - and recruited Katja to the Red Orchestra.
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For the past year, I've been investigating an auction house that's make millions selling thousands of likely looted or forged undocumented antiquities. They're so shady it's hard to know where to start. The time they faked a shipwreck? The past fraud conviction of the owner?
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Many Red Orchestra members were artists, and many carried out what now seem like such small acts, at incredible risk, to remind each other of their humanity. For example, Cato and her younger sister Mietje passed notes to French prisoners of war being transported on the subway.
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Restitution of carved strut and flying gandarbha (returned by Rubin Museum) from National Museum at Chhauni to Itum Bahal community members. This afternoon, thank you to the line of activists who made it possible.
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Sending each other poetry; flirting with strangers on the subway; making a dress. These might be small acts, but they show the power of joy, creativity, and love in the fight against the compliance, fear, and silence upon which fascism still depends.
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Let me tell you a little story about a stolen Buddha head that was up for auction this week in Paris and the time I met a living deity who was watching a Western in the corner of his shrine...
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Remember how the AMNH invites visitors to touch Ahnighito? Their signage explains it's ok to do that because the surface is already so damaged from centuries of hammering. In this scientific display, the history of the people who used and lost the meteorite doesn't matter.
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The loose network of anti-Nazi resisters now known as the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) communicated info to Allied and Soviet forces about Hitler’s secret preparations to invade Russia, distributed leaflets advocating revolution, and helped Jews, deserters, and dissidents flee.
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Cato was sentenced to death. In a last letter to her family, she insisted that they “mustn’t think of me crying, because my joy always wins.”
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The Inughuit - the Inuit group living in Greenland. These meteorites had been their sole source of iron since the 12th century. They trekked for days to reach the site, bringing basalt stones heavy enough to hammer off flakes of metal to make blades.
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Mietje explained in a later oral history interview that contact with foreigners was forbidden, but when “life was a powder keg,” this exchange of small flirtations became necessary for their survival, because “it was joy.”
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Some of my sources for this thread are the great
@AllisonCMeier
's
@Narratively
piece, , and also and .
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The American Museum of Natural History holds the remains of 12,000 people from around the world. Most of them are Indigenous. I've spent a year learning the horrifying stories of how these bones got to New York - including talking to a man who found his grandfather in the museum:
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Cato recruited Katja to help shelter people fleeing the Nazis. The code words came from a fairy tale: when a man rang the bell and introduced himself as Hans, or a woman as Gretel, Katja lent them her art studio for a night or two, in a chain of refuge that stretched to Poland.
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In fall 1942, more than 120 Red Orchestra members were arrested. The oldest was 83, the youngest only 16. More than a third were women. Members came from all social classes, ranging from aristocrats to laborers. They had formed the largest civilian resistance to Hitler.
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Rainer kept his promise, becoming a painter and portraying Cato “the way I felt her. Well, the way you love someone who disappears.” Many of his paintings feature abstracted figures, still recognizably human, but lacking hands and faces.
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Want to know more about how white supremacy is baked in to the US Capitol Building? Let's think about the statue topping its dome. She symbolizes Freedom... and was made in part by Philip Reed, an enslaved man. (Thread)
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There's more about the artists of the Red Orchestra and Stefan Roloff's incredible research in my review for
@hyperallergic
of his current exhibition in Berlin:
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Today, the Manhattan DA repatriated a Vishnu stolen from a Cambodian temple for the antiquities trafficker Doris Wiener. The
@metmuseum
still holds 15 sacred sculptures from Cambodia, India, and Nepal that passed through her - including one whose feet remain in Cambodia:
This ancient Cambodian goddess was stolen from this pedestal. How do we know? The looters left behind her broken feet. Retweet to tell
@metmuseum
she belongs back home.
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Roloff writes that even then, in her 80s, “you couldn’t spend an evening with her without drinking less than six to eight gin and tonics” — and that her hair was highlighted with red streaks. She was still the revolution in person.
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In 1903, Sir Francis Edward Younghusband led a British force to invade Tibet on the flimsiest of pretexts. At Chumik Shenko, his troops used Maxim machine guns to kill c. 600 Tibetan soldiers armed with matchlock muskets.
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Do I know what should change about the
@V_and_A
's holding/description of the Bodhisattva? No. But I think it must - because "acquired" is not the word to describe a transaction in which one party probably rightly feared being whipped or machine-gunned if they said no.
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Holy moly - the
@metmuseum
is hiring 4 provenance researchers to look at “all works that came to the museum from art dealers who have been under investigation” + those acquired 1970-90, "a period of rapid growth" with "less scrutiny on provenance":
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When you find a ‘40s tux that fits you like a dream…
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Katja, after trying to help others escape the crackdown, fled to Poland. She became a painter and performance artist, but did not speak about the Red Orchestra until the artist Stefan Roloff tracked her down in 2006 to interview her for his research on the group.
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So, before his assassination sparked WWI, Archduke Franz Ferdinand posed like a mummy during a trip to Cairo. Extreme mummy’s curse???
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Cato replied, telling him to “keep living, dear Rainer, seek beauty in art and in every person.” He kept this note, which he calls “my motivation,” wrapped in waxed paper in his waistband for the years he spent in a Wehrmacht penal battalion after his arrest.
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In his last note to Cato, Rainer promised to become an artist so he could paint her: “Cato, I won’t paint you the way I saw you but just the way I felt you.”
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The Met Museum is complaining that Cambodia won't give it all the info they have about the theft of the art they're claiming. Let's talk about why that's a massive act of solidarity with other countries seeking repatriation. 🧵
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Otherwise, they had to use less efficient blades made from bone or tooth. The Inughuit were so protective of their metal source that they refused to tell James Ross, the first European explorer who reached them (in 1818), where it was.
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I recently went to the Metropolitan Museum to say goodbye to this stele, which was stolen c. 1985 from a community in Nepal and donated to the museum in 1995. But then I walked into the next room and lost my mind with rage. Let me explain…
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The Red Orchestra's warnings about Hitler’s invasion were dismissed. The only result was that, when Soviet authorities finally sent an agent to make contact with the group in 1942, the Nazis intercepted the report he radioed home. The report listed member's names and addresses.
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Only... it wan't "discovered in 1894." That's just the first time a white man, the explorer Robert Peary, laid eyes on it. He vowed to take Ahnighito and two other pieces of the same Cape York meteorite back to New York, for scientific study. So, who cares?
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My 7-year-old, totally owning me as a classicist mid-meltdown: “Why do you have to go to so many museums? It’s just the same gods, again and again!!!”
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If the Inughuit wanted any more iron, they would have to get it from the south. Scientific collecting left this previously isolated, self-sufficient community dependent on Europeans.
But the meteorites weren't the only thing Peary took. He also took Inughuits.
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The counter-espionage branch of the SS gave the group a derogatory code name during their investigation: “red,” for their alleged Communism, and “orchestra” because they operated secret wireless transmitters that were known as “pianos.”
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G. LeMoine, View of the grave of Minik Wallace. Indian Creek Cemetery, Pittsburg, New Hampshire, 2018. Arctic Museum Collection.
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Rainer Küchenmeister, the youngest arrestee, fell in love with Cato. Held a floor above him, she smuggled him notes and books by Goethe and Hölderlin, and whistled and hummed tunes for him, including “Solveig’s Song” from Edvard Grieg’s opera Peer Gynt.
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For those of you who are thinking “what, those are julienned vegetables!” - they had no sauce, salt, oil, or flavor.
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Younghusband eventually withdrew, chided by his superiors and excoriated by the English public for the needless violence. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica is still giving him side-eye:
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Sixty-five of these men and women were executed in prison. Hitler ordered the women guillotined and the men hanged from meat hooks by piano wire, to make their deaths slower.
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This idea may have come to me in a lounge chair, looking at a ceiling fresco in the air-conditioned and practically deserted Palazzo Barbarini, congratulating myself for not having herded into the Sistine Chapel.
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After trying unsuccessfully for years to get his father's body back, Minik returned to Greenland in 1909. In 1916, he returned to the US. He was working as a lumberjack in New Hampshire when he died of the Spanish flu in the 1918 pandemic.
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In 1907, Minik read newspaper reports claiming his father's funeral had been a sham. They said he had watched the burial of a log wrapped in a shroud on Museum grounds, while his father's body was dissected and preserved in its storerooms.
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Will never not retweet Ancient Anxiety Hippo
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That time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono tried to loot an ancient Egyptian tomb, but it was full of fakes planted by their art dealer?!?
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And what about the Bodhisattva in the V&A? The museum's webpage gives just a scrap of info about how it left Tibet, leaving you with the impression that it was a willing sale.
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Peary promised he would bring them back to Greenland after a year. But only one man returned. Four others died of TB and other diseases unknown to them. Minik, orphaned, was adopted by William Wallace, the AMNH's superintendent. The Museum paid $40,000 for Ahnighito.
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This is the Ahnighito Meteorite, in the American Museum of Natural History (NYC). They invite visitors to touch this "object that is nearly as old as the Sun. Discovered in 1894 in Greenland, this iron meteorite slammed into Earth some 10,000 years ago."
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But Ross collected iron-bladed tools and wrote about how they must have come from a meteorite. That inspired Peary, who vowed in 1894 to find and take them. It took multiple expeditions, but he finally succeeded.
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In October 1897, 20,000 New Yorkers paid 25 cents each to come on board Peary's ship in the Brooklyn Naval Yard and see Ahnighito... and the 6 Inughuit Peary brought with it, including a 7 year old named Minik and his widowed father.
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As Charles Allen showed by researching British primary sources (in his 2015 book Duel in the Snows), the invaders looted monasteries along their route, in supposed reprisal for inciting resistance to the invasion.
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A captain wrote his wife that he had secured a "few
trifles" from the monastery, including paintings that fetched high prices when auctioned at Christie's
later in 1904. The Brits then burned the monastery to the ground.
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Peary promised a gun to an Inughuit man to show him where the meteorites were and then hired more to load them on his ships. Here's Ahnighito coming on board, draped in an American flag.
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Have just realized that the New York Public Library's inter-library loan request platform is named "the ILLiad."
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The Inughuit called this meteorite "Tent," but Peary renamed it "Ahnighito" - which both is and isn't an Inuit name. He named it after his daughter Marie's middle name - she was born during one of his expeditions, and a woman named Ahnighito sewed her a baby snowsuit.
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At the Tsechen monastery, "I at once made for the cel-
lars," one soldier wrote his mother, "where we found some things hidden away.... I got rather a nice gong which no doubt you will find useful when I am able to get it home."
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A European collector who feels a "sensual" connection to sacred Himalayan artworks bought enough of them to surround his bed - and then fill a private museum. A thread on my review for
@hyperallergic
, in which I get very🤢and😡 - and then ask where these artifacts came from...
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A belated announcement, but since I've finally visited, it seems real: I was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, achieving my dream of having more letters after my name than in it...
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Knud Rasmussen took the last remaining piece of the Cape York meteorite mined by the Inughuit to Copenhagen in 1925 (and another unworked piece, presumably unknown to the Inughuit, was taken to Copenhagen in 1967).
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FYI, many people have written much more about looting during the Younghusband Expedition, for example,
@oxfordtim
's articles , , and (which includes Tibetan primary sources).
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An astounding instance of looting happened at the Pelkor Chode Monastery at Gyantse, Tibet. Major William Beynon described it in a letter to his wife, which I'll quote at length: "Ross 2nd Gurkhas was in the big monastery here and was looking for grain with his coolie corps...
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This priceless work of ancient heritage is better off in my Halloween costume…
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"Even the sleek Lamas brought out their sacred scrolls and books and images and bargained them for cash, and everybody seemed supremely pleased, never having had so much money in their lives before" - without regard to what they feared might happen if they said no.
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I've spent months trying to figure out how the famed 6th c. BCE kouros ("youth") sculpture got to the Metropolitan Museum (any many Art History 101 textbooks), and I think I figured it out. A thread:
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(I will also add by thanks to my friend
@_MTAnderson
, who first told me about looting during the Younghusband Expedition, and looked through his notes to find these quotes when I sent him the photo of the V&A label.)
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(end quote). This man who collected for the British Museum was L. Austine Waddell, who wrote home sneering about how "there was nothing the people were not willing to sell in exchange for rupees." He claimed that
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