[Throughout history, conflict,
political and religious upheaval, and abrupt changes in government have forced
the artistic and intellectual class to conceal cultural creations both as an
act of survival and to preserve the heritage itself.]
Now the Islamists are back in
power, and Afghan artists and filmmakers — many who flourished during the past
two decades — are scrambling to hide, protect or even destroy books,
paintings and other works of art.
Throughout history, conflict,
political and religious upheaval, and abrupt changes in government have forced
the artistic and intellectual class to conceal cultural creations both as an
act of survival and to preserve the heritage itself.
Sometimes people safeguard art and
artifacts to shield them from physical destruction during war — or in the hopes
that others won’t plunder them for money. In some cases, art and cultural
heritage are targeted as threats to authoritarian regimes.
Here are some places in past
decades where art, artists and culture went underground.
Iraq: 2003
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
Europe’s art market was flooded with treasures plundered from Iraqi museums by mobs
opposed to Saddam Hussein’s government. So when the United States geared up to
lead an invasion of Iraq in 2003, staff at the National Museum in Baghdad moved
quickly to protect some of the most important artifacts.
Museum personnel scrambled to tuck the
relics away in secret storage, blocking doors and lining them with sandbags and
foam, said Corine Wegener, director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue
Initiative. Some items were stored deep and sealed off behind painted concrete
walls.
“There was some sense that they
didn’t know what U.S. soldiers might do. They didn’t know what their own people
in the area might do” amid the chaos of war, said Wegener, who deployed to Iraq
as arts, monuments and archives officer in the Army Reserve.
“As in any major disaster or
political instability, things can turn pretty quickly from safe to not safe —
depending on what certain bad actors in the population thought they could get
away with,” Wegener said.
Some of the subterfuge worked, but
not all of the artifacts were protected. Looters still made off with some of the country’s most
significant vases, tablets and statues — such as the Mask of Warka, one of the
oldest depictions of a face, or a duck paperweight from 2070 BC.
At the Smithsonian, Wegener now
helps train institutions on emergency planning for evacuations or safe storage
of art and artifacts in times of human conflict or natural disasters.
Her work included helping store
movable collections from the Mosul Cultural Museum ahead of the Islamic State
takeover of much of northern Iraq in 2014. By that time, most of the collection
was already in storage, she said.
“So what ISIS was able to
intentionally destroy in that museum, it was tragic, it was many, many, many
objects,” she said. “But it could have been so much worse.”
Cambodia: 1975
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime seize
power in 1975 and systematically targeted artists, intellectuals and musicians
as part of a brutal campaign to remake the country as a classless agrarian
society.
Some people targeted by dictator
Pol Pot’s genocide — painters, writers, performers and others — survived by
posing as taxi drivers or stashing away evidence of their crafts. The regime
allowed some musicians to continue to perform, as long as the music served its
interests.
“We almost lost our cultural
identity because the Khmer Rouge targeted the artists,” according to Phloeun
Prim, executive director of Cambodian Living Arts, an organization dedicated to
reviving Cambodian art and cultural identity. The organization was founded by a
musician who survived the Khmer Rouge because he was forced by the regime to
perform propaganda.
But “we never lost our artistry,”
he said.
Even as Cambodian refugees fled
between 1975 and 1979, some people were gathering children in camps to teach
them music and traditional dance.
“We were leaving behind our
country,” Prim said. “But we had to preserve our cultural identity.”
Mali: 2012
The Malian city of Timbuktu was
long home to libraries full of ancient manuscripts — collections of scholarly
works, poetry, letters and copies of the Koran.
When Islamist insurgents seized the
city in 2012, they began burning libraries with texts that they deemed
“idolatrous.” But an ambitious operation to evacuate and protect the precious
manuscripts was already underway.
Using cars, carts, canoes and even
fruit crates, groups of librarians, book collectors and local families
transported the texts in metal boxes to private homes and other safe places
around Timbuktu, the BBC reported. They rescued their city’s heritage
piece by piece, ferrying it out first in vehicles and then later by boat, according to National Geographic.
[The
Louvre is showing Nazi-looted art in a bid to find its owners. Some wonder why
it took so long.]
Germany: 1933
Adolf Hitler, as German chancellor
in the early 1930s, opposed modern art as “degenerate” and
said that it was a mark of society’s moral decline. But his move to confiscate
art was motivated by both commercial and ideological concerns.
His Nazi regime seized radical art
pieces from state-owned museums, destroying some while selling others to
prepare for war.
As a result, some modernist artists
and collectors began hiding their art to prevent confiscation by Nazi troops. A
stash of roughly 1,500 modern works were found buried “among stacks of rotting groceries” in Munich
in 2013.
Both before and during World War
II, many museums in Europe and Britain moved, hid and stored parts of their
collections to protect original or irreplaceable works from air raids and
firebombing.
“Hide them in caves and cellars,
but not one picture shall leave this island,” Winston Churchill said in
1940 of the collection at the National Gallery in London.
Some paintings were stored safely
underground in slate mines in Wales. The British Museum also sent precious
works by Michelangelo and Raphael to an underground cave equipped with a
heating system, the BBC reported.
The Louvre in Paris almost
completely emptied its collection into scattered safe houses in the French
countryside. Notably, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was sent to five different
evacuation locations during the war.
Iran: 1979
In Iran, one of the world’s
valuable collections of modern art is on display deep underground, accessible
via a spiral staircase.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary
Art is the permanent home to Van Goghs, Picassos and at least 15 pieces by Andy
Warhol. Some of the paintings — such as Jackson Pollack’s “Mural on Indian Red
Ground” and works by Mark Rothko — are valued in the hundreds
of millions
During the revolution of 1979, the
museum took its 1,500-strong collection into a basement vault. There are double
doors: first, a heavy door with a deadbolt and then another six-inch steel door
with a combination lock, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The main gallery was used
to display propaganda after the revolution. The vault-protected collection
remained largely intact.
Sudarsan Raghavan contributed to
this report.
