Momentum is gathering for a loan arrangement between the UK and Greece over the Parthenon Marbles after the British Museum’s interim director, Mark Jones, told the UK newspaper the Times that he supports the plan.
Jones was appointed interim director in September, taking on a raft of problems at the beleaguered institution including renewed calls to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece in an ongoing restitution row that has still not been resolved. The fifth-century-BC statues have been housed in the British Museum since 1816 after they were removed from the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens by agents working for the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin.
In the The Times interview Jones was asked if he were “still the BM’s director in a couple of years’ time, could he envisage supervising an arrangement to return the Elgin [Parthenon] Marbles to Greece?”
“Yes,” Jones said. “I could easily imagine a relationship between us and the Acropolis Museum [in Athens] that included mutual loans. Why not? They have some rather fabulous objects as well.”
The Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis put pressure on the museum to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece late last year; crucially the museum chair, George Osborne, has reiterated that “we can reach an agreement with Greece”.
Jones also defended the recent £50m donation to the museum from British Petroleum (BP), which caused concern amongst some of its trustees (the controversial ten-year agreement with the oil and gas company will contribute towards the institution’s ambitious refurbishment plans).
“Nobody’s pretending it’s not a difficult decision, but it’s the right one,” Jones said. “To turn down that very major act of generosity would imperil our chances of doing work that is badly needed. I don’t think it’s a sign of a serious attitude to complain about a lack of funding and then reject funding that is offered from perfectly respectable sources.”
Jones replaced Hartwig Fischer who stepped down in August following the revelations that 2,000 items had been stolen from the collection (a Greek and Roman curator was fired in July and is now facing a police investigation).
Ten of the stolen items are due to go on show in the exhibition Recovering Gems (15 February-15 June), including a Roman glass cameo inscribed with a bust of Cupid. According to the BBC, both were returned by Ittai Gradel, the dealer and collector who alerted the British museum to the thefts. “We’ve recovered 351 items and have identified more than 300 others,” says a British Museum spokesperson.
