Monumental Mix-up

Dimitrios Pandermalis, the president of the museum project, says the first visitors will be allowed in early next year. At which point, perhaps, arguments about the building will give way to the building’s basic argument. Which is simple: Greece wants the marble sculptures that the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, chiseled off the Parthenon more than 200 years ago.

Tschumi’s new museum is an attempt to use architecture to shift the terms of a debate about who should possess one of the world’s most cherished collection of antiquities. There is increasing pressure on established museums to consider the return of art that, in many cases, has helped define them as institutions for decades. For many people, a visit to the British Museum means a visit to the Elgin marbles.

Tschumi’s museum, an austere building, is designed to make a direct emotional appeal. The entire museum is centered on a concrete core, the same length and width as the core of the Parthenon. The Elgin marbles, which represent roughly 60 percent of the surviving sculpture that was originally on the Parthenon, will be represented by plaster casts. The idea, according to Pandermalis, is to allow visitors to see the marbles in their original narrative sequence.

Jonathan Williams, a curator who oversees the British Museum’s European department, praises the new Athens museum as “an extraordinary achievement.” But he adds, “The position of the trustees remains that the current distribution in Athens and London provides an important opportunity for different stories about this monument to be told.”

“The sculptures from the Parthenon have come to act as a focus for Western European culture and civilisation, and have found a home in a museum that grew out of the 18th-century ‘Enlightenment’, whereby culture is seen to transcend national boundaries,” reads a museum statement.

The marbles “transcend national boundaries” in part because Lord Elgin used the Royal Navy to spirit them out of Greece. But his removal of the marbles was baldly colonialist behaviour.

Arguments in Elgin’s defence have run like this: The marbles would have been stolen anyway; the British appropriation of them secured them against neglect; and the Turks, at the time, showed little or no interest in saving these vital works. Elgin had sound reasons to believe he was acting in the best interests of the art.
-Philip Kennicott (LAT-WP)