Museums & Provenance: Speaking at the Book Launch of ‘Provenance and Possession’ by Dr Kate Lowe

Summary of the Remarks  by Michael Backman at the launch of Dr Kate Lowe’s Provenance and Possession: Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy at the Warburg Institute, University of London, November 27, 2024.

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Quite often when you’re asked to endorse something – you think, oh well – I’ll do it – your heart really isn’t in it but you kind of feel obliged to, and you do it anyway.

But this is not the case with Kate Lowe’s Provenance and Possession. It is without any doubt the best book I’ve read all year.

It has changed my thinking about provenance, and in my view, it should help to re-orient the discourse on provenance more generally – something which I feel is sorely needed.

We live on a world of extremism right now. And in the museum sector, extremism has manifested itself as provenance extremism.

In the last few years we have sold to around 40 museums worldwide, and so provenance matters are something that I have to look at very carefully on a regular basis.

The book’s main premise is that today provenance is regarded as critically important, but provenance was barely important in Renaissance Italy (if not more broadly).

Today, curators, academics and collectors tie themselves in knots about where precisely in the world an item was made, but in the 16th century, as Kate so brilliantly shows, almost no-one cared about provenance.

What mattered was that an item was beautiful, exotic and that no-one else had it.

Possession was everything; provenance, was not.

For me, one of the great findings in Kate’s book, is that provenance information in Renaissance Italy is incomplete, but not because records have been lost – there’s always this sense that if only researchers would try that little but harder then they would find those missing records – but because often they never existed.

Not only were the origins of kunstkammer-type items of little interest to collectors, but that those responsible for record keeping had little idea of how to describe the items they were cataloguing.

They simply lacked the words to describe origins often because those words did not exist.

This is something I can attest to. I have just written a book on Malay Silver and Gold and in my research, it became clear that in the 18^th century, Malays generally did not know that they were Malay. They did not have a word to describe themselves as a group.

As Kate says, “Provenance is now held to be an almost inalienable part of any object or possession of any value, without which, not only the authenticity, but also the moral worth of the object is called into question. Provenance defines the object, and defines reactions to it.”

This is refreshing, radical stuff. And it is very so true.

It shows how today, we are willing to condemn an item – to rule it out even for academic consideration – simply because it does not have the right paperwork, regardless of the intrinsic merits of the item itself.

As James Cuno, the former head of the Courtauld, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty, has said, we now treat objects as guilty unless proven otherwise.

The genesis for today’s craze for provenance probably was the very necessary and well intentioned the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, for which the original intent largely was to protect archaeological sites and their contents.

But the Convention ever since has been subject to what I would term function creep, and so today, I find myself having to demonstrate to museum legal departments why, for example, a teapot made in India in the 19^th century for export to England – has been outside India since before 1970. It is a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time.

There was a time when the safest place for an item to be, was in a museum. But instead increasingly museums are becoming dangerous places for the world’s material culture.

Back in September for example, the Netherlands decided to send 288 items ‘back’ to Indonesia. Transparency Indonesia ranks the Netherlands as the 8^th least corrupt country in the world. Indonesia is ranked at 115.

And this was after a fire at the National Museum in Jakarta a year ago, in which officials still refuse to detail what was destroyed.

Where is the morality in putting the world’s material culture at risk?

Doesn’t it makes sense to geographically disperse a society’s material culture as type of insurance – why collect it all in one place, and then wait for something like a fire? Or a tsunami? To wipe it all out.

It might seen counter-intuitive but concentrating a country’s material culture in that country puts its entire cultural history at risk – be it the Indonesia’s material cultural history, England’s or New Zealand’s.

Ironically, it is private collectors who are now stepping in to protect and save objects, when increasingly it looks as if museums are being neutered in this role.

It takes us back full circle: Kate shows us how in Renaissance Italy, it was private collectors who built up the great collections that we all love so much today.

Now I’d like to end on a completely different note.

We all know that Kate is an absolutely brilliant researcher. But she’s much more than that.

The lead singer of U2, Bono, once described the Icelandic singer Bjork as having a voice like an ice pick. And as a writer, Kate has a voice like an ice pick. Each word is chosen with such utter precision – and she chips away to develop a story so clean, so pristine, allowing the reader to effortlessly glide through.

So there are two streams to Kate’s talent. She is a brilliant academic and archival researcher. But she is also a very, very gifted writer – and she absolutely deserves to be known for both.

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