the British Museum, an institution at the heart of the scandal – L’Express

You should always be wary of Danish antique dealers. When Ittai Gradel sent an email to British Museum deputy director Jonathan Williams on February 28, 2021, he did not yet know that he would shake one of the United Kingdom’s most respectable institutions to its foundations. In his message, Gradel reports having acquired on eBay, at a low price, what he identified as a Roman cameo dating from the 2nd century BC belonging to the collections of the British Museum. The work in question appears in the catalog of antiquities of the prestigious museum, there can be no doubt. The seller would be, according to his PayPal account, a museum official. Silence.

Four months later, having identified two other questionable sales, the art dealer contacted the museum director, Hartwig Fischer, directly. “Checks have been carried out and no part is missing,” he was told. Gradel is not discouraged. He wrote to other members of the institution – and even to George Osborne, former chancellor of the Exchequer, now chairman of its board of directors. In vain. Until this summer, when he chose to warn the police and the press. The voice of this Dane speaking in wonderfully old-fashioned English finally manages to be heard. And the scandal breaks out.

Tip of the iceberg

It therefore took two and a half years for his revelations to precipitate the dismissal of the head of the antiquities department, the resignation of the director of the British Museum and his deputy, and for the police to take over the investigation. Gradel had only seen the tip of the iceberg. At least 2,000 artifacts have been sold on online sales platforms over the past twenty years.

“For two years I couldn’t penetrate the fortress of the British Museum, so today I’m happy, it’s cathartic.” This September 11, Ittai Gradel has just landed in London. In the lobby of his Bloomsbury hotel, he shows BBC journalist Carolyn Atkinson a canvas bag in which he has delicately packed 70 fragments of Roman and Greek jewels, precious stones and engraved glass belonging to the British Museum, acquired on eBay since 2014. “My first purchase was a cameo with a sculpted Medusa head. The seller offered it for 20 euros and did not seem to know that it was an original. I asked him questions about its provenance. His explanations were convincing. He claimed to have inherited the collection from his grandfather, an antiques dealer in York between the wars. I checked the records and the identities, it was all true.” But in 2016, when Gradel saw that another Roman cameo appeared in the British Museum catalogue, he understood the deception. He then begins a careful investigation into his previous purchases. He is now convinced that another batch of around 292 artefacts, which he acquired in 2008, came from the British Museum. But in the absence of an exhaustive catalog (the British Museum has to date only cataloged half of its vast collections), it cannot provide formal proof.

Restitution requests

The affair obviously did not fail to relaunch the debate on the restitution of works of art acquired during the colonial conquests. For Jason Felch, author of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, the scandal raises a moral question: “If an institution like the British Museum fails in its fundamental duty to protect the treasures it is supposed to preserve for humanity, how can we justify continuing to keep the works taken from other countries ?” The collections of the British Museum, amassed during the British Empire, total more than 8 million objects. Only 1% of these collections are visible to the public. Difficult for Jason Felch to accept: “It no longer makes sense. There is nothing civilized about keeping the culture of the world in warehouses, where it can neither be seen nor protected.”

A reflection that many countries are making today. Nigeria has again officially requested the return of the Benin bronzes, while The Global Times, a Chinese government tabloid, has opportunely called for the restitution of 23,000 Chinese works of art. But the most burning subject remains the return of the Parthenon friezes to Greece. As Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni says, “These deplorable thefts raise questions about the security of the British Museum’s collections. Why would the Parthenon friezes be better protected in London than in Athens?” A truth that hurts. Moreover, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was so offended by an interview with his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the BBC on the subject that he canceled at the last minute a bilateral meeting which was to be held in London at the end of November…

Arrogance of institutions

In Great Britain, the affair fuels another conversation, that of the arrogance of institutions and the contempt in which they too often hold citizens – and not only in the cultural domain. This year, Lucy Letby’s trial confirmed that the young nurse had killed seven infants and tried to murder six others between 2015 and 2016, despite warnings from pediatricians at Chester hospital, where she was operating. Hospital management waited more than a year before contacting the police. This is just an example. The London police force has estimated that around sixty of its officers could potentially be dismissed from duty each month for serious misconduct! Since the start of the year, around a hundred have already been fired, 201 have been suspended and 860 others have had their powers reduced. Some are guilty of discrimination, violence against women, but also rape. Last February, police officer David Carrick was sentenced to life in prison for 85 sexual assaults, including 48 rapes. Here again, the warnings of his colleagues within the institution were not heard by their hierarchy. It took one of his victims having the courage to sue him for others to do the same, triggering the opening of an investigation.

Proof that the subject is monopolizing minds, former Prime Minister Theresa May has just published Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life, in which she draws up a list of serious failings at the origin of the public’s growing distrust of its leaders and institutions. Some critics like Andrew Rawnsley have not failed to point out the irony of the exercise, Theresa May having been in office for six years as Minister of the Interior when some of these scandals broke out. The fact remains that institutional arrogance, which others would define as systemic, has become a subject of debate across the Channel. The British Museum scandal now gives it international resonance.