Who Owns Beauty?

Bénédicte Savoy is Professor of Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin.

• Publisher’s NoteAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1. The bust of NefertitiCairoBerlinRestoring an international icon?Chapter 2. The Pergamon AltarA translocation in spare partsTo take and to understandA model of reconstruction with a universalist vocation?Chapter 3. The Altarpiece of ‘The Mystic Lamb’ by the Van Eyck brothersAn annexed heritageFrom dismantlement to reconstructionEvacuation, looting, restorationChapter 4.  Raphael’s 'Sistine Madonna'The advent of the public museumThe Dresden ‘Madonna’Saving or appropriating a ‘treasure of humanity’?Chapter 5. The bronze heads of the Summer Palace in BeijingMoney, nation, heritageThe price of pillageRepairing history?Sharing, giving back or leaving behindFull circleChapter 6. Watteau’s ‘L’Enseigne de Gersaint’The diplomacy of exhibitionsPotsdam, the 1740sCrime, art, and punishmentChapter 7. The statue of the ‘Bangwa Queen’ of CameroonA massive cultural extractionInvisible in BerlinInternational careerChapter 8. The ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer’ by Gustav KlimtCollectors, donors, patronsThe world of yesterdayDiscriminations, dislocations‘Ciao Adele’Chapter 9. Benin’s ‘Royal Treasures’Heritage moved, heritage replacedReconnecting through the artsIntellectual reappropriationConclusionNotes

"Bénédicte Savoy writes beautifully about beauty. From the sacking of the Beijing Summer Palace to the bust of Nefertiti, and from the 'Sistine Madonna' to the 'Bangwa Queen', Who Owns Beauty takes the reader on a series of journeys that follow the translocation of iconic artworks. The book maps geographies of extraction and desire, encountering along the way claims to possession, acts of looting, and pathways towards return."Dan Hicks, University of Oxford"Once provenance — the documentation of how things get into museums — was a sleepy corner of art history. In this intriguing book, Bénédicte Savoy shows how it has become one of the most challenging and interesting intersections of contemporary visual culture. In lapidary prose, she deploys insightful methodological advances alongside detailed, fascinating, and entangled histories of the fate of imperial subjects and objects at the hands of Western museums. Everyone concerned with the future of museums and what they contain needs to read this book."Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University"Fertile"Lola Salem, The Critic"Intriguing"The Irish Times"a bracing new book written by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy"The New Yorker"Savoy's useful and beguiling new book, Who Owns Beauty?, addresses itself not to the logistics of repatriating works of art but to the question of 'what happened to the places where they were no longer to be found.'... it is an object lesson—or rather nine object lessons—in how bright lines between right and wrong fade to gray."The New York Review of Books