The end of the Cold War is commonly associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; since then, however, it appears that another Cold War of sorts is emerging from beneath, in the art world. It reached its peak last August when Russia announced a ban on all art loans (paintings, sculpture, installations, the list goes on) to museums in the United States. Although seemingly out of the blue, the origins of this move date back to over 80 years ago.
Until the First World War, the Chabad community (a sect of Judaism) lived mainly in modern Belarus, then Imperial Russia. As you can imagine, the increased tensions during this time forced the movement underground. The most significant member of the community to flee was the then-leader, Sholom Dovber Scheersohn. What he left behind is of central importance to this cultural Cold War. He was unable to take the communal library containing over 12,000 books and manuscripts. Nonetheless, he did manage to transfer the collection to a storehouse in Moscow, the contents of which were taken in 1920 and moved to a state institution.
Scheersohn did secure an export license for a section of the library to be sent to Warsaw, containing 25,000 pages of previous leaders’ teachings, correspondence and other records. However, come the Second World War, these documents were also seized, first by the Nazis and later by the Red Army, who returned the documents to the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow.
Today the majority of the Chabad community live in Brooklyn and, during the 1990s, campaigned against the Russian government for the return of their collection. This is of massive importance to them; the community liken the significance of their collection to our Crown Jewels. The Russians had other ideas. They considered the collection a national treasure and part of their national heritage. The Russian Embassy in Washington echoed these sentiments by stating that both the Jewish movement and collection came out of Russia. The Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications concluded that the collection was intrinsically a Russian cultural property and that the 1970 UNESCO convention authenticated its retention.
A new chapter to the conflict was written in August 2010, when a Washington court judge sided against Russia and ordered the return of the 12,000 books and manuscripts as well as the 25,000 handwritten texts, now housed in Russia. Despite this, the Russians seem to have had no intention of returning the collection; moreover they don’t even recognise the judge’s decision in the first place, seeing it an unlawful one which cannot be enforced on them.
In August 2010, Russia announced a ban on art loans to US museums. Crucially, they feared that any art sent over, mainly for special exhibitions and such like, would be seized by the Chabad community as a means to enforce the return of their sacred collection. Russia’s cultural minister Alexander Avdeyev added that the ban would continue until they were given a 100% guarantee from the movement that they would not be seized. Since then, the ban has resulted in the cancellation and delay of exhibitions throughout America.
The Houston Museum of Natural History was forced to delay indefinitely the opening of their exhibition titled “Treasures from the Hermitage: Russia’s Crown Jewels” because, esentially, they no longer had anything to exhibit. The Museum of Russian Icons in Massachusetts also experienced the effects of the strained relations. 37 icons on loan from the Andrey Rublev Museum were withdrawn last minute. A sign of Russia’s seriousness can be understood by the sending over of a curator from the museum to oversee the icons’ return to Russia.
It would appear that the Museum of Modern Art in New York would feel most aggrieved by the ban. Russia prevented one of Cezanne’s famous ‘card players’ paintings from being transferred from London (where the exhibition was shown in the Courtauld Institute) to its new destination in New York. The Museum, otherwise known as MoMA, is one of the most prestigious museums in the world and does not take kindly to being played with. As a result, the institution responded by not loaning works for a Dior exhibition taking place in the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Despite the Chabad guaranteeing that they will not attempt to seize any of the art work that is loaned to America, the cultural Cold War continues to unravel, pulling in more institutions, judges and diplomats, with no immediate end in sight. What is most staggering is that the actions of Russian soldiers in 1920 are directly affecting art galleries across America, more than eighty years on.