Whatever Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Museum in Baltimore, thinks of the larger world, he has a somewhat jaundiced view of the art world itself, or at least that corner of it that forms his main area of expertise, medieval and Byzantine art. And the impression we are left with from this lively volume is that the holy and the unholy rub elbows rather more frequently than we imagine.
In his autobiography, which is not really an autobiography, Vikan reveals himself to be a man of paradoxes. A lapsed Lutheran from Minnesota who converted to Judaism when he married a Jewish woman, he claims to have no strong religious convictions, but has devoted much of his career to the examination and publicizing of spirituality in art. At the same time, although he is an exacting scholar who has devoted much of his professional life to one of the most rarefied and least “popular” of disciplines, Byzantine art, he has written a fast-paced account of his years in the trade. Indeed, even his scholarly writings on Byzantine art reveal a liveliness and accessibility that are rare among scholars in his field.
If Sacred and Stolen is not really an autobiography, that is because the personal details it provides about the author and his family are subordinated—perhaps at his editor’s suggestion?—to narrating the juicier bits of art world gossip. As he describes his formative years, Vikan went from a mildly undisciplined Carleton freshman to one of Princeton’s star graduate students in Byzantine art. One would be interested to have a somewhat fuller sense of his intellectual evolution. All the same, we can be grateful for the pungent portraits Vikan provides of such giants in the field as Kurt Weitzmann and Ernst Kitzinger, among others.
This book really comes alive when the author turns, with manifest relish, to the wheelings and dealings that go into the sale of antiquities and the creation of exhibitions. Each one of the stories Vikan tells comes with head-spinning twists and turns, and nothing is ever as it seems. Serving for some time as an adviser to Dominique de Menil, the heiress who created the Menil Collection in Houston, Vikan recounts the drama leading up to her purchase of a hoard of Byzantine treasures from a dealer in Geneva and her rescue of frescoes looted from the Church of Saint Euphemianos in Cyprus.
Among the sundry tumults that Vikan encountered at the Walters, one episode involves the theft of a priceless peach bloom vase (as well as many other objects of Asian art) by a deranged security guard who simply wanted to live with them. Another has to do with the return to the museum, of a Renoir that had been stolen from the Walters a half-century earlier. Some of the most entertaining accounts here have to do with the travails of mounting an exhibition—or more precisely, coaxing recalcitrant governments into coughing up the objects they had promised to send. One of these involves medieval Ethiopian manuscripts, the arrival of which was imperiled when the monks who owned them began “vomiting blood,” clearly a sign from God that the objects must never leave the country. When they finally did arrive, the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church came to the opening of the show, trailed by protesters and threatening to place a curse on Vikan and his family for some perceived slight or double-dealing.
At least that exhibition, a great show entitled “African Zion,” came to fruition. The same cannot be said for “The Land of Myth and Fire: Art of Ancient and Medieval Georgia,” which had to be canceled at the last minute, despite the energetic intervention of Eduard Shevardnadze, then president of Georgia, because of the religious compunctions of the Georgian people.
Through these anecdotes, Vikan manages to pull back the veil and reveal what really happens behind the scenes at an art museum. Most people walk into museums feeling that they have entered a world of serenity and elevated orderliness. But if we are to believe Sacred and Stolen, that is far from the case and what we are really seeing is that same tangle of chaos, compromise, and anxiety that characterizes all things human. Many of the purest works of antiquity—objects enthroned and canonized in their hermetically sealed display cases—have entered the country through dubious means, and many of the finest loan exhibitions have had to be negotiated with distinctly unsavory governments. Of course, the art world is no more unsavory than any other province of human activity: Only its appearance of being otherwise, of being above all earthly concerns, provokes that visceral sense of shock when we ultimately learn that it isn’t so.
Indeed, the title of Vikan’s book captures the author’s divided sense of his chosen profession. Significantly, it is Sacred and Stolen, not Sacred or Stolen, and Vikan, who seems to have a great appreciation of human frailty—he even had drinks, years later, with the guard who stole the peach blossom vase—concludes that the two often go hand-in-hand. Ultimately, he believes that, often if not always, it is the same impulse that leads a crackpot security guard to steal a vase from the Walters and leads Dominique de Menil to purchase (and thereby rescue) frescoes looted from Cyprus: a response to the spiritual beauty of art, and of the larger world. As he writes toward the end:
Out of context, the two sentences might sound like the sort of boilerplate any museum director would say. But it is a tribute to Sacred and Stolen that by the last page, you have no doubt about Gary Vikan’s sincerity, or the force with which he defends his convictions.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
