The Rietberg Museum in Zurich, which dates to the early Nineteen Fifties, owes its origins to a group largely amassed within the Twenties and 30s by German-Swiss banker Eduard von der Heydt, who regarded his objects as artwork relatively than anthropological specimens or colonial souvenirs. Nonetheless, amongst his holdings have been items originating within the Kingdom of Benin, now in present-day Nigeria, whose outstanding sculptural heritage was looted after which dispersed after its capital, Benin Metropolis, was raided by British forces in 1897.
Now, the Museum Rietberg will be part of its fellow European establishments—amongst them Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum and Holland’s Wereldmuseum Leiden—in restoring possession of a number of of those works to Nigeria. In the present day, town of Zurich, which owns the Rietberg, is asserting that 11 objects in its everlasting assortment are being transferred to the Republic of Nigeria, represented by the Nationwide Fee for Museums and Monuments.
Two of the objects are of specific significance, says Rietberg director Annette Bhagwati.
A commemorative bronze head, from round 1850, is a illustration of the ancestor of a chief and would have been positioned within the king’s ancestral shrine. Looted in 1897, it later handed into van der Heydt’s assortment someday earlier than 1927. An 18th-century ivory tusk, additionally positioned on an ancestral shrine within the Royal Palace in Benin Metropolis, was mounted on a bronze memorial head and advised the story of an Oba, or chief, from the seventeenth or 18th century. Its wayward path from Benin Metropolis to Zurich took it by numerous British collectors and a Sotheby’s London sale in 1962, earlier than lastly reaching the Rietberg, by way of a Zurich seller, in 1993. These two works, that are “ritual objects of nice significance”, says Bhagwati, will likely be despatched again to Nigeria, doubtless this summer season. However the different 9 objects, despite their modified possession, are staying put.
“The Nigerian facet was very thinking about the concept the historical past and the artistry of Benin would nonetheless be advised in Switzerland,” Bhagwati tells The Artwork Newspaper.
One other object looted in 1897, whose possession will change however whose location will keep the identical, is a pendant bronze masks courting way back to the seventeenth century. Additionally present in Benin Metropolis’s sacked Royal Palace, it didn’t arrive on the Rietberg till 2011. After an public sale in 1902, it was offered to German and American collectors, earlier than returning to Europe after a Dutch seller acquired it in 2009. Now it is going to keep on in Zurich as a everlasting mortgage.
The switch of those objects is an outgrowth of the Benin Initiative Switzerland (BIS), launched in 2021 underneath the management of the Museum Rietberg. The BIS sought to establish the connection of dozens of Benin objects in Swiss museums to the looting of 1897. The initiative concluded that 55 objects have been most likely related indirectly to the occasions of 1897.
