Cahn’s Quarterly 1/2020 English Edition
Editorial Making Joins Dear readers While tidying up just recently I came across some photographs and documents relating to the history of the Cahn Gallery. I was especially touched by a photo dating from 1995. It shows my father, Herbert A. Cahn, and the then director of the University of Leipzig’s Antikenmuseum, Eberhard Paul, in one of the museum’s galleries. They are holding two groups of fragments: the upper one shows three centaurs careering to right, the lower one horses’ legs galloping over a rock to right. They were painted by Epiktetos, who was active between 520 and 490 B.C. and is one of the most important painters of the Pioneer Group. The fragments with the centaurs had been given to the museum by the archaeologist and collector Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928) back in 1911. The other, having been identified by Robert Guy as belonging to the same object, was gifted to the museum by my father in 1995. The photograph documents the moment when these fragments, which had been separated for de-
Eberhard Paul (left) and Herbert A. Cahn (right) at the Antikenmuseum of the University of Leipzig, 1995.
Fragments of a cup by Epiktetos are reunited after decades apart. The five fragments with the hooves of the centaurs (gifted by Cahn) form an exact join with the fragments belonging to the University of Leipzig’s Antikenmuseum.
cades, were reunited. My father had acquired his group of fragments in the 1960s. Had he done so just a few years later, after 1970, the museum would not have been able to accept his gift – which all goes to show the absurd outcomes to which excessive political correctness can lead. The sight of this image sparked off various thoughts, not least about the vital contribution made by Robert Guy, who was a friend of my father and who in the last years before his retirement worked for the Cahn Gallery. Only someone with an outstanding memory, a profound knowledge of the painters’ distinctive hands and a remarkable faculty for visualisation would notice that certain discrete fragments in fact belong to the same object – all the more so when they are housed in different collections. It is vital that this kind of connoisseurship, which is premised on a broad knowledge of countless objects,
be kept alive and not neglected in favour of other scientific approaches in archaeology. Furthermore, to my mind, the two archaeologists’s interlocking hands on which the reunited fragments are laid out, have a powerful symbolic meaning. They are a forceful metaphor of how the preservation of ancient cultural artefacts and works of art can be furthered – and with it, of course, our knowledge of Antiquity – if museums and the art trade work hand in hand. That the various players in the field of archaeology do not go their separate ways, that after the discord and difficulties of the past few years they find a way to join forces and work together towards the same goals is a matter very close to my heart.
The Debate
Changing Values By Marc Fehlmann Societies revise their values all the time. Just as gender-neutral toilets, flight shame and climate change have become a topic of public debate, so the values underpinning our handling of cultural property have changed CQ
fundamentally over the past few decades. Although it is said that later generations find it easier to judge the deeds and mores of the past than those of the present, finding a consensus over what is ethically acceptable
or reprehensible is often difficult. Yet most of us would agree that when an incumbent US president sees fit to ponder a retaliatory strike on cultural sites in Iran, a new low in the debasement of our civilizing principles – even by the standards of the chaotic Trump administration – has been reached. Thus the fragility of our hard-won norms and rules is exposed for all to see. Not only did the leader of a major Western democracy sink, at least rhetorically, to the level of the terrorists he is 1