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| Vol. 5 No. 1 |
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Collections in the Balance by Elizabeth Casale China and Russia are becoming increasingly powerful presences in the global art world: on the auction market, in legal maneuvering around the import and export of artworks and in repatriation initiatives. The profound shift in the global balance of economic and political power from West to East that underpins this parallels in many ways the shift between Europe and the United States that occurred between 1900 and 1920 – the golden age of American collection building – when plutocrats such as J. Pierpont Morgan, Benjamin Altman, and Henry Clay Frick went on a shopping spree that “stripped Europe of her treasures,” as the New York Times reported in 1911. 1 Supported by the press, who largely saw the phenomenon as a patriotic metaphor for America’s “coming of age” and for the virtues of American free market capitalism, and by a permissive tax and legal system, they laid the foundations for America’s greatest museums. A critical difference between then and now, however, is that the current generation of economic and political leadership is motivated not simply by the acquisitive instincts of the super-rich but by powerful national sentiment as well. The Chinese and the Russians are both increasingly focused on repatriating their countries’ cultural heritage. Repatriation, through both legal claims and the market, is a component of broader ambitions to situate their countries unequivocally within the modern, global economy. In both cases, China and Russia are consciously reverting to a pre-Communist stance that not only accepts collecting as a legitimate pursuit but also encourages it as part of a larger strategy that recognizes how a robust art market and strong support of high culture can help position a country domestically and internationally. As part of its strategy, Beijing recently removed the restriction on foreign auction houses operating on the mainland and instituted new policies that allow Chinese art and antiquities acquired legally and exported in earlier periods to be brought back for auction and then re-exported if bought by an overseas buyer. In 2005, China also formally requested a U.S. embargo on all Chinese art made before 1911, a move that has evoked not only predictable skepticism within the art market, but also among some experts in cultural property protection.
In Russia and the Ukraine, a small group of billionaires and a larger class of newly-minted millionaires are eager to flaunt their elite status through the acquisition of cultural artifacts. They are rapidly forcing the development of the art market there, especially the market for Russian art. While oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky frequently make headlines, new “mystery” buyers seem to appear at every sale, such as the unidentified Ukranian buyer who spent a cool £12 million at Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and Modern art last summer. In addition to stimulating private collecting, some efforts within China and Russia are deliberate repatriation strategies, spearheaded either by individuals or the state itself. China’s People’s Liberation Army, through its art recovery effort, is spending tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of dollars in a calculated plan to repatriate Chinese art treasures, often paying prices far above market value. The International Herald Tribune reported in October that the PLA, operating through a corporate subsidiary, The Poly Corporation, is even targeting particular items now owned by American collectors including Ronald Lauder, Jack Wadsworth and Leon Black. The effort is driven in part by China’s plan to build 1,000 new museums by 2015 and the concomitant need to fill them with something, but the drivers are deeper. Li Nan, a former army major who now heads Poly Culture and Arts, has said: “The current mission is simple: repatriate China’s heritage.”2 By some estimates, the Poly Group has assembled a collection worth more than $100 million in less than ten years. Recently, they paid $8 million for a single Imperial bronze jar, and millions more for three important 18th century bronzes looted by the British and French during the Opium War. Considered national treasures, the loss of these masterworks (which are also traditional symbols of power) was a national humiliation, and their return was heralded by state-run media as a sign of China’s growing power. In Russia, billionaire Viktor Vekselberg has established the Link of Times Cultural-Historical Foundation, which has an explicit mission “to search for, acquire and bring back home to Russia historically significant works of art. The time has come to retrieve them.”3 Vekselberg made headlines in 2004 when he purchased the Forbes Fabergé Collection for an estimated $120 million. The long term rise of the China and Russia as collecting powers poses a triple threat to collections in Europe and the museums that house them. Many of the leading museums in Europe today lack sufficient acquisitions funds and the tax framework to encourage gifts of art; their economies are not minting the plutocrats and “hedge fund collectors” who donate collection items and funds; and their collections lend themselves increasingly to restitution claims. And that means that today they risk being “stripped”, no longer by Americans, but by individuals, governments, and even armies from the East.
1 “How We Strip Europe of Her Treasures of Art,” The New York Times Magazine, (February 19, 1911): 9. |
According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, the auction industry in 2004 did US$24 billion in business, a 45% increase in just one year. Record prices are regularly paid by new collectors from mainland China, sending prices rocketing and edging some Americans and Europeans out of the market. 
Russia is also easing restrictions on import and export to encourage collecting, as prices for Russian art have escalated in the past few years. Similar to the U.S. in 1909, a new regulation that took effect January 1, 2004 eliminates the 30% tax on art imports and allows Russians to import art they have acquired abroad free of all customs duties. The government recently moved to relax exports as well, an even more significant development.