The art dealer, the £10m Benin Bronze and the Holocaust

[jj23]

The art dealer, the £10m Benin Bronze and the Holocaust

This is the most shyt I have read in a looooong time.

Some quotes:

Ernest Ohly's death provoked a ripple of excitement at the lucrative top end of the ethnographic art world. He was rumoured to have an extensive collection. His statues from Polynesia and masks from West Africa were auctioned in 2011 and 2013. And that, dealers assumed, was that.

But his children knew otherwise. In old age, he had told them he had one more sculpture. It was in a Barclays safe box and not to be sold, he specified, unless there was another Holocaust.

Although they are called Benin Bronzes, they are actually thousands of brass and bronze castings and ivory carvings. When some were displayed in the British Museum that autumn, they caused a sensation.

Africans, the British believed at the time, did not possess skills to produce pieces of such sophistication or beauty. Nor were they supposed to have much history.

But the bronzes - some portrayed Portuguese visitors in medieval armour - were evidently hundreds of years old.

Frieda is too intelligent and sensitive not to appreciate the layers of irony behind her story. She had followed the arguments about whether the Benin Bronzes should be returned to Nigeria.

Britain has laws to enable the return of art looted by the Nazis, but there is no similar legislation to cover its own colonial period.

"Part of me will always feel guilty for not giving it to the Nigerians… It's a murky past, tied up with colonialism and exploitation."

Her voice trailed off.

"But that's in the past, lots of governments aren't stable and things have been destroyed. I'm afraid I took the decision to sell. I stand by it. I wanted my family to be secure."

sickening.