‘Giving it back - restitution, repatriation and the deconstruction of the world museum’

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• Libby Howie
• Tuesday 30 May 2023, 13:10-14:00
• 1 Newnham Terrace, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Bea Simpson .

I was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Girton College Cambridge, where I read English Literature. On leaving Cambridge I joined Sotheby’s where I trained in the Department of Prints and Drawings, becoming, when I was 24, the first woman auctioneer (see photo for typical toe-curling press response). I stayed at Sotheby’s for nine years, then after a couple of rather terrifying years at Marlborough Fine Art learning the art trade from the gallery side, I started my own business as an art dealer, which I have continued ever since. I now work mainly as a private curator for a collector of 20th century paintings and sculpture whose collections I have been helping to build for many years. I have two children; Alice, who is a lawyer, and Tom, who is also in the art world.

Abstract This talk is about the much debated topic on restitution and Western museums – all the questions around collecting stuff, grabbing stuff, preserving stuff from other cultures and what happens when those cultures ask for their stuff back. How and when should Museums do restitution? Can we even have ‘world museums’ any more? Who decides what is a work of art and what is a piece of anthropological evidence? Do objects themselves acquire rights Unesco-style? I am especially interested in so-called ethnographical objects. I think the way that restitution has been carried for families whose works were taken in the second world war could be much more generally applied, but has up to now been largely confined to recent – and western – appropriation, except in the case of ancestral bones.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

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• 1 Newnham Terrace, Darwin College
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