An Observer I read an article about the latest turn of events in the dreadful conflict in the Middle East, a triumph of autocrats and bigots, hatred, occupation and oppression, over tolerance and humanity, mentioned a bookseller who has kept his shop open despite the bombing. This tale reminded me of an anecdote from 1977. A minor illustration from a publishing perspective of the absurdity and corruptibility of dictatorships, autocrats and oligarchies.
The team of art historians, indexers, translators, progress controllers and production experts with whom I had worked for eleven years had published the 36 volumes of The Dictionary of Art in late 1996. To my surprise, I noticed a sale to Iran of a substantial number (20 or so if my memory is correct) sets. Not only was this a large sale in cash terms (each set sold of some US $8,000), I was astounded that it has been possible to sell a book heavily populated with nudes, and the occasional of image of the Prophet, to a country ruled by intolerant theocratic dictators who used religion to oppress their fellow citizens.
I contacted the sales person, who told me that an enterprising bookseller in Tehran had worked out a way to circumvent Iran’s censors. By law, an importer of foreign books was required to send to the censors’ office a full translation in order to receive a license to bring the book into the country. The bookseller explained to the censor that this particular book was 36 volumes and more than 30 million words. Did the censor really want to read so much art history? The response exposed the vacuity of the regime’s claim to strict supposedly Islamic morality. The license was issued to import The Dictionary of Art sight unseen. Quite what has happened to all those books in the latest conflict I will never know.
I was also reminded of tales told me by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom of visits to Tehran during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) to receive prizes for their work on the history of Islamic Art (Sheila and Jonathan had been the principal editors of Islamic art in The Dictionary of Art). They told me that, when they left their hotel, they found students in the lobby waiting to ask them of what was happening in their fields of research in the West, so starved were students and scholars in Iran of information which circulated freely in scholarly communities elsewhere. Sheila and Jonathan also told me that when they received their prize money, although it was denominated in US dollars, they were paid the equivalent in Euros in cash because sanctions prevented the Iranians from sourcing dollars.
Curiously enough, many ripples of the fall of dictators reached the rarefied realm of art history through our shabby office at 112 Strand in London. For example, shortly after the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, I received a letter from the director of the national art museum in Bucharest informing me that his contributions would be late because his office had been burned during the uprising. He had apparently had to hide under his desk as bullets came in through the window. A few days later came a letter from a group of art historians who told me that the museum director was a lacky of the deposed regime. On no account was I to publish his texts. I consulted the British Council in Bucharest who advised me that the museum director had indeed been a sycophantic adherent of the old regime. We commissioned his articles from scholars now able to write an independent history.
We worked through the crumbling of the Soviet regime, via Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a considerable number of Russian art historians. We had been obliged to sign a contract with VAAP, the Soviet copyright agency, to cover all our Russian contributors. VAAP insisted that we undertake to show the agency all articles about Russian art written by non-Russian scholars in order to correct any “errors”. Of course, we refused and VAAP ceased to insist.
Then, during Glasnost, Dr Evgeny Zeymal of the Hermitage Museum contacted me during one of his visits to London where he was cataloguing the Oxus Treasure in the British Museum. He explained to me that he and his fellow scholars hated VAAP because it converted their fee (an ungenerous £60 per thousand words) to Roubles at a miserly rate and then took a large percentage as commission. Dr Zeymal suggested that, before each visit to London, he would send me a list of scholars to be paid. We would then meet and I would hand him the appropriate amount in cash, which he would distribute. Later, I mentioned to him that we could not get any of the illustrations we needed from the official source (VAAP again). He assured me that he would obtain all we needed at a price lower than the extortionate VAAP fee. Sure enough, when he next visited, he handed over all the photographs we needed for a very reasonable fee. When I asked how he had managed this, he chided me: “Dr Jacobs, in Russia a friend never asks such a question”. In other words, Russians had devised many ways to circumvent the system, but one never discussed how.
The reunification of Germany posed a particular problem. There were many references to works being in East Germany. Some of these references should stand (for example, an artist born in Leipzig in 1950 was born in East Germany, but a painting in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts was no longer located in East Germany but in the Federal Republic of Germany). This was a substantial task that required precision and judgement. I mentioned that Jan would be just the right person to do this, and after that we found other tasks that she accomplished with precision. They became known as Mrs Jacobs tasks.
Encounters with scholars in the Soviet Union and East Germany, taught me that not all was bad in those countries. During a visit to London by another Russian scholar, Dr Sokolov of the art history institute in Moscow, I took him to lunch with a visiting scholar from Harvard or Princeton (I forget which). The two art historians compared notes on the scale of their departments’ research. The number of art historians employed in Moscow considerably out-numbered the faculty in the Ivy League university – so much so that the American and I had to confirm that we had understand correctly the number of scholars in the Moscow institution. When asked what was expected of him, Dr Sokolov replied that he was free to carry out his research, and that in general he went to his office only once per month to collect his salary.
Curiously enough, those days of the Cold War, dictatorships, wars in Africa, Southeast Asia, the breakdown of nations in former Communist countries in Eastern Europe, and military dictatorships in much of Latin America and even in Greece, seem comparatively stable and normal. At least here was an international system, treaties and understandings that seemed to keep conflicts within some sort of bounds, or at least to attempt to do so. Now, unrestrained armed might and national self-interest can justify mass slaughter, and our pusillanimous democracies (or at least our leaders) engage in vacuous rhetoric to protect a rules-based order that seems to have abandoned any rules. I suspect that the current editors of The Dictionary of Art are busy recording the destruction of heritage as well as its history.
