Thievery, Power, and Cracked Golden Paint

These thoughts were written by Bella, one of our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

If your Twitter feed is full of activists, and you have scrolled through Twitter in the past month or so, you may have seen a Tweet not unlike this one:

We all know that Museums like the British Museum, The Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have a long history of stealing artifacts from vulnerable peoples, obtaining the sacred and everyday both directly and through shady sources. But what about our art history scene here in St. Louis?

From its beginning, St. Louis has been a town which has profited off the exploitation of Indigenous peoples from around the world. The 1904 World’s Fair, for example, is touted as the crown jewel of St. Louis history, a portrait of our glamorous Edwardian past. But at this same fair which brought so much to our city, there were several human zoos, the largest of which was dubbed a “Phillippine Reservation” and featured over a thousand Filipino natives who were forced to perform sacred ceremonies nightly for the entertainment of the many St. Louisans and Americans that attended the fair.

A short drive from these now-suburban “Reservation” grounds, the St. Louis Art Museum sits atop Art Hill with its Corinthian columns, silver tree, and the Apotheosis of Saint Louis striding forward in its front lawn. Being a complete art history fiend, this is one of my favorite places to visit in the city. But inside of this building lives the funerary mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, a New Kingdom noblewoman from Memphis, Egypt, obtained by the Museum in March of 1998, according to Museum records. Maybe it was her deep, dark, glass eyes which drew in the curators from the St. Louis Art Museum. Maybe it was her intricate hairstyle, or her colorful adornments, or the curious cracks in the reddish-gold paint on her face. Or perhaps it was the sheer desire to show this beautiful sculpture’s beauty off to St. Louisans young and old. Intentions aside, the purchase turned into a federal court case between the St. Louis Art Museum and the American government.

Essentially, the U.S. government attempted to forfeit the mask from the St. Louis Art Museum, claiming that since there was a chance it had been stolen before being transported into the United States, it violated our international trade policies. The St. Louis Art Museum, which purchased it from a historically-shady private collection in Switzerland, claimed that the mask had entered the European art market in the 1950’s by an unknown Belgian dealer, insinuating that the mask was indeed purchased in Egypt. Seeing that there were no records of this purchase, the museum claimed that the Egyptian authorities simply lost track of the mask due to disorganization. But there was a revolution in Egypt in 1952, which made Egypt vulnerable to the huge powers of the West for some time before their current government was established. Combine that with the sleaziness of the 1950’s artifact trade and the low ethical standards for archaeology at the time, as well as how we don’t exactly know where Ka-Nefer-Nefer was for much of the 1960’s, Egypt has itself a good case for potential theft.

And there are thousands of Ka-Nefer-Nefer’s around the world; we see her same spirit in the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles—both housed in the British Museum. Proponents of keeping these objects will argue that they bring education and information about an artifact’s culture to museum-goers. And besides, finders keepers, right? But I would argue that a child in Britain seeing the Benin Bronzes on a school trip would value that experience much less than a child in Southern Nigeria who bears the generational trauma caused by the colonization of her people, who was robbed of her own culture’s magnificent metalwork long before she was even born. There are most likely many children like this in Egypt who feel separated from their country’s history, or perhaps attached only to caricatures of Pharaohs and Pyramids. The world often forgets that Egypt was, too, a victim of Europe’s hunger for colonization.

We might never know exactly what happened with Ka-Nefer-Nefer, but she is here now, in Gallery 313 at the St. Louis Art Museum. It is a beautiful piece of art, but I can’t help but feel a sense of sorrow looking at it. Her eyes are piercingly dark, like little voids of glass. What have those eyes seen? Maybe they have seen a thieving Belgian art dealer con an archaeologist. Maybe they simply saw an innocent transaction. But most importantly, they have seen empires rise and fall. They have outlived every ruler, every war, every civilization we know of today. They were meant to see the real Ka-Nefer-Nefer’s journey through the Egyptian afterlife, in the tombs of Saqqara along the ancient river Nile. But for now, they have been damned to look at a wall for years, living eyes peering into them, worlds away from their home, among those Corinthian columns along the Mississippi.