Chapter 8

LOS ANGELES

The Contest over Art

• LOS ANGELES. A CONFERENCE ROOM. 2014.

A grueling day of negotiation was winding down. Attorneys, paralegals, researchers, and assistants had haggled over details, checking things on their laptops, leafing through files, raising questions, deflecting inquiries, redirecting requests, skirting issues, reframing problems, proposing ideas, turning over every possibility, thinking up various permutations for solutions. The applicable laws were complex enough without everything else they had to juggle: the specifics of the Canon Tables case, other cases that hinged on similar issues, the implications and precedent any resolution would entail, but more broadly, the weight of history, the pressure of public opinion, and further, the ticking clock of billable hours and the relentless drive to succeed. They all had an interest in finding a resolution but also a duty to vigorously serve the interests of their clients. The Getty’s attorneys worked to ensure that the artwork remain with the museum, and highlighted any weaknesses or ambiguities they could find in the opponent’s arguments. The lawyers for the church held firm in demanding remedies for property stolen from Armenian Genocide victims. Amid all the rational thinking, the intricate legal maneuvers, the creative uses of law and statutes, there also lurked intense emotions: anger, hurt, hope, pride, ambition, compassion, and resentment. As the day wound down, the attorneys collected their things and left for the dreaded drive home, maybe swinging by the office for a late strategy session. At the Getty Museum, a forgotten napkin flew around the deserted grounds. In a climate-controlled storage locker the Canon Tables waited without sleep.

.   .   .

In the twentieth century the Zeytun Gospels, in whole and in part, intersected with key moments and figures of Armenian history. The manuscript morphed from a liturgical object, to an object of memory and a monument of national history, to a work of art. In the twenty-first century, the Gospels acquired yet another function in the movement for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and for reparations. Its story became entwined with that of the Armenian community of California.

In June 2010 the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against the J. Paul Getty Museum, seeking the return of the Canon Pages of the Zeytun Gospels, which it maintained had been stolen during the Armenian Genocide. The church now demanded the return of the pages as well as millions of dollars in damages. A dramatic suit, filed against the city’s most prominent cultural institution, thrust the medieval pages into the public eye. Five years later, following litigation and intense behind-the-scenes negotiation, the church and the museum reached a settlement.

Neither the timing of the lawsuit nor its location was accidental. The suit was filed in one of the most self-confident Armenian communities in the world, in a city that has emerged as a center of civil litigation of acts committed during genocides and atrocities. With this lawsuit, one of the last vestiges of a forgotten Anatolian mountain town connected with contemporary American law, cultural activism, the art market, and museum politics, evidencing the continued relevance and urgency of cultural heritage.

ARMENIAN LOS ANGELES

Since 1994 the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels resided at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. There the pages took turns rotating within the secure art storage lockers and the galleries, where exhibitions put the pages from Zeytun in conversation with manuscripts and fragments from eastern and western Europe, the Islamic world, and East Africa.

The terrace of the Getty campus in West Los Angeles affords expansive views of the immense city spreading along the Pacific shore, crisscrossed by endless freeways. A city celebrated for its multicultural human landscape nevertheless also conceals a long history of inequality, exploitation, discrimination, and intercommunal violence. This storied city sells the fantasy of reinvention and novelty, but it is also the “big nowhere,” a dystopian space of disappointment, failure, and exploitation.1 Despite the ubiquitous presence of the popular culture industry and its products of fantasy and celebrity, Los Angeles is also home to wealthy institutions that carry out some of the most academic and rigorous art research and conservation in the world. Here one of the last vestiges of Armenian culture in exile and contemporary American legal practice entwined.

California is home to the third-largest Armenian community in the world, with an estimated half a million Americans of Armenian origin. The first and second concentrations of Armenians are in the Republic of Armenia and the Russian Federation. Today’s Armenian community in California has resulted from over one hundred years of immigration in distinct waves.² It is anything but monolithic. Armenians began to arrive to Central Valley towns like Fresno in the late nineteenth century. A century later, distinct immigration patterns shaped the powerful community in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. The community is so ubiquitous that it has been featured in TV police procedurals, such as The Shield or Ray Donovan, in rather stereotypical depictions that reveal little of its diversity. Perhaps more than anywhere else, the California Armenian community is a microcosm of the global Armenian diaspora. Transplants from Armenia, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Russia, and Bulgaria throng community picnics and argue not only in Eastern and Western Armenian but also in Arabic, Rumanian, Russian, and Turkish. In a typical church hall, there will be the attorney from a family generations removed from immigration, whose ancestors may have planted vineyards of raisin grapes in the Central Valley, who speaks no Armenian and is fully assimilated into mainstream American society. Think Kirk Kerkorian, George Deukmejian, or Kim Kardashian. There will be the Lebanese-born homemaker, fiercely devoted to her children’s education and a pillar of the Armenian Relief Society, who speaks four languages, raises funds for the school, and knows how to make the best choereg. There will be the young man from Armenia, full of swagger in a dark suit, smoking a cigarette at the church door. There will be the cosmopolitan, sophisticated engineer from Iran, a virtuoso pianist in his spare time and a great conversationalist late into the night. There will be the recent transplant from Aleppo, from the latest community to experience the heartbreak of being forced from home by war, and to face the daunting challenges of making their lives anew. There will be small business owners and real estate agents. There will be students and scientists. There will be heart surgeons and grocers of ethnic foods. There will be gang members and lawyers, accountants and teachers, members of the Russian Armenian mafia as well as judges, policemen, and veterans. There will be those who waited for years to receive a visa to America. And there will be native-born citizens of the United States who have never left the country and never even obtained a passport—because eventually the world comes to California.

Armenian communal identity in the United States is steeped in genocide commemoration and activism for the recognition of the genocide. Armenians in the Los Angeles area have a very American sense of their hyphenated ethnic identity and the kinds of gestures that go with it, like the planned Armenian American Museum in Glendale. The church, ethnic food, and memories of lost Anatolian towns are among this heterogeneous community’s bonds. Above all, however, the community rallies around the shared experience of the genocide and its aftermath, its commemoration and the struggle for its official recognition. In April, when Genocide Memorial Day comes around, cars displaying not one, not two, but three Armenian flags cruise around East Hollywood and La Crescenta. Armenian Americans from every walk of life join politicians and celebrities to solemnly mark the anniversary of the genocide. Every year on April 24, tens of thousands march from Little Armenia in Hollywood to the Turkish Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard. Southern California is also home to permanent memorials to the Armenian Genocide. Most are located in community centers, schools, churches, or private places, while some occupy public spaces. Indeed, the earliest and most spacious Armenian Genocide memorial in the United States was erected in 1968 in Montebello.3 In 2011 the monument received its own exit sign on the Pomona Freeway, cementing the Armenian Genocide’s visual presence in the specific Los Angeles cityscape.⁴ Most recently, Los Angeles County installed a permanent memorial in its civic center at Grant Park, conceived by the artistic collective iWitness Project.⁵ A mural in Little Armenia depicts a lacerated arm clutching a rosary, with the slogan “Our Wounds Are Still Open (1915).”

Community movements that have long called for official acknowledgment of the genocide are not monolithic either, and debates continue regarding the pitfalls of anchoring communal identity on the memory of trauma.⁶ Likewise, the calls for justice for the genocide have a long lineage. Community organizations, individuals, and experts have weighed in on what reparations should mean in the Armenian case, what they should entail, and how they can be attained. No Turkish state entity has participated in these debates, as Turkey remains steadfast in its denial of the Armenian Genocide. While they have not led to direct action or implementation, these debates nevertheless indicate the way in which the Armenian community and others continue to engage with the genocide and its long-term effects. The Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group has taken the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach, considering among other issues the moral and ethical imperatives for reparations, legal frameworks, and distinctions between reparations to individuals and reparations to the Armenian nation as a whole, including possible mechanisms and recipients of restitution. The group emphasizes the imperative to craft a model of reparations that is transformative and forward-looking.7

The vocabulary of reparations had certainly entered popular culture by the late 1990s, as evidenced by “P.L.U.C.K.,” a 1998 hit song about the genocide by the metal band System of a Down, made up of four Armenian American artists from Southern California. The song names and reiterates these notions:

Recognition, Restoration, Reparation,

Recognition, Restoration, Reparation,

Watch them all fall down.⁸

Nevertheless, only recently did a wave of litigation related to the Armenian Genocide convert the calls for reparation into legal action—with great legal, symbolic, and monetary repercussions.

THE HOLOCAUST RESTITUTION MOVEMENT AS A MODEL

Armenian Genocide litigation took inspiration from and modeled itself after the success of the recent phase of the Holocaust restitution movement. Vartkes Yeghiayan, the first attorney to file an Armenian Genocide restitution lawsuit in the United States, said it explicitly: “Holocaust victims’ heirs ‘showed me the way.’”⁹

The effort to secure restitution for the Holocaust has a long and variegated history. In the aftermath of World War II, as the full extent of the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes became gradually known, the victorious allies shouldered the responsibility of caring for survivors, negotiating a new political order, and dispensing justice for wartime offenses. Among these crimes was the dispossession of civilian victims of Nazi persecution. The taking of the victims’ property constituted a component of the crime of genocide, as it deprived them of the means to survive, thereby helping ensure the destruction of the targeted group.10 This in turn prompted the long and fraught process of recovering and identifying wealth and other assets unlawfully acquired by the Nazis from Jews and other groups throughout Europe, and of returning stolen assets to their rightful owners or heirs. Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, international agreements for reparations were executed that involved states like West Germany and Israel, and also between West Germany and Jewish groups representing Holocaust survivors. Important as they were, these reparations eventually proved to be uneven and incomplete. Fifty years after the war’s end, a wave of reparation litigation gained momentum.¹¹ The locus of this movement was not Europe, where the Holocaust took place, but rather the United States. Its tool was civil litigation. The American judicial system allowed claimants to seek redress for material losses resulting from crimes against humanity. This litigation did not address other kinds of losses like murder, injury, or rape. It thus sought to achieve a “measure of justice” for the massive theft of wealth that was part and parcel of the Holocaust. Indeed, by the 1990s the American courts constituted the only forum for the pursuit of Holocaust claims after the lapse of so many years.¹²

Holocaust litigation in the United States seized upon American judicial procedures not available in other legal systems, such as civil litigation and class action lawsuits, where one person may represent a putative class of clients. In a series of high-profile cases, the movement sued corporations that had, in one way or another, colluded in or profited from the massive Nazi theft of Jewish wealth. Thus lawyers sued Swiss banks that had withheld assets deposited by Jews during the Nazi period or had traded in assets, including gold, looted from Holocaust victims. Other cases addressed Holocaust-era slave labor, unpaid insurance claims, and confiscated property. Some cases were settled for significant sums, though many were unsuccessful.

The Holocaust litigation of the 1990s benefited from the convergence of legal action with political processes and the activism of nongovernmental organizations. It concerned well-known historical crimes—indeed, only the marginal few deny the Holocaust—and capitalized upon the revulsion that Nazi crimes inspire. Newspapers reported the legal battles, capturing the imagination of a public that rooted for the underdogs, namely the sympathetic Holocaust survivors or heirs who sought to obtain, years later, a measure of justice for the enormous crimes of the Holocaust, from which greedy corporations seemingly continued to profit. Jewish community leaders lent support to the movement and mobilized the backing of influential politicians. The legal battles called attention to unresolved issues and poignant stories that made their way from the courtroom to the court of public opinion. Accordingly, the entities sued, such as Swiss banks, soon found that they had a public relations problem to solve as well as legal challenges to confront. The pressure often spurred negotiation and settlement. As a prominent law professor and a lead counsel in Holocaust litigation put it, “The Holocaust litigation was an untidy mixture of law, politics, and raw emotion.”13

In the judicial sphere, this litigation established new legal precedents as it overcame obstacles around questions of jurisdiction, statutes of limitations, and interpretations of the principle of sovereign immunity of foreign states.¹⁴ The movement scored important successes, including before the Supreme Court and dramatic victories in favor of plaintiffs. Yet the movement registered its share of setbacks and failures as well.¹⁵

The Holocaust litigation of the 1990s extended to efforts to seek the return of works of art and cultural objects, sometimes of tremendous value, to their rightful heirs.¹⁶ Litigation over Holocaust-looted art can be pursued in the United States because the law holds that a thief cannot transfer title, even when the buyer of the allegedly stolen property acted in good faith.¹⁷ In other legal jurisdictions, as in Europe, a good-faith buyer enjoys some protections. Among the litigated cases of Holocaust-looted art, Altmann v. Republic of Austria stands as the most successful. It included a successful argument before the Supreme Court and resulted in the restitution of stunning paintings by Gustav Klimt to the heir of Holocaust survivors. Yet it was also exceptional: most similar cases experienced setbacks, delays, or outright failures.

The implications of this legal movement ranged far beyond Holocaust heirs. Survivors and heirs of other instances of genocide, mass theft, slave labor, or atrocity sought to build upon the legal precedents to obtain redress for the crimes they had suffered. They met mostly with failure, prompting one observer to declare the Holocaust-era cases “a legal cul-de-sac.”18 Myriad issues help explain why Holocaust-era suits met with success while failure transpired in suits to redress other wrongs—for Germany’s genocide of the Herero, for South Africans under apartheid, for the slave laborers exploited by Japan during World War II, or the enslavement of African Americans in the United States. All of these historical wrongs have moral weight and deserve recognition and reparation. Yet the plaintiffs were unable to mobilize sufficient political support outside the courtroom and to leverage it to force settlements.¹⁹

By contrast, Armenian Genocide litigation scored some successes. As attorney Yeghiayan indicated, Armenian Genocide-era litigation effectively followed the playbook of Holocaust litigation. It all began in the late 1990s when Yeghiayan built a case for about 2,400 unpaid insurance claims against New York Life Insurance Company. Prominent Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos soon joined Yeghiayan, along with others who had experience with Holocaust and insurance cases.²⁰ After protracted legal motions and negotiations, New York Life settled in 2004 for around twenty million dollars, in addition to three million dollars earmarked for Armenian religious and charitable organizations.²¹ The class action lawsuit Marootian v. New York Life, widely covered in the media, was hailed with great emotion as a victory for justice in the Armenian American community. The success of this case prompted others. A class action suit against a French insurance company regarding Armenian Genocide-era unpaid insurance claims was settled in 2005 for $17.5 million.22 Then the tide seemed to turn. Subsequent suits against other insurance companies and European banks, with the aim of recovering assets the banks allegedly withheld from their Armenian depositors during the genocide, did not prevail.²³ Other lawsuits filed in U.S. courts took on the Republic of Turkey and state-owned banks, seeking compensation for real property taken during the Armenian Genocide, involving notably a large area of land near the city of Adana, Turkey. On this land stands the massive Incirlik Air Base, which is central to NATO operations throughout the Middle East and supports a U.S. Air Force station.²⁴ The suits are still ongoing.

These suits featured similarities to Holocaust litigation. They all focused on property or assets rather than other war crimes. Many of them were class action lawsuits. Thus far they all have concluded with settlements rather than trials, or they have failed on technical grounds. The targets chosen were similar to the defendants named in the Holocaust lawsuits: insurance companies and banks. In some cases the targets were the very same ones previously sued for Holocaust-era issues—as in the case of Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.²⁵ These targets were “tangential actors,” parties that profited from the events and effects of the genocide rather than being its main perpetrators.²⁶

Similarly, the Armenian Genocide-era lawsuits had to contend with some of the same legal challenges as Holocaust suits. The Armenian Genocide had occurred decades before the Holocaust, exacerbating concerns about statutes of limitations and rendering many legal remedies time-barred. Gathering evidence at a remove of a century proved equally difficult. Ottoman-era archives in present-day Turkey are not easily accessible, especially regarding sensitive subjects like properties confiscated from Armenians. Archives of other states or corporate entities tend to be sparse, long destroyed, or difficult to access. Even obtaining United States government records proved daunting, as Yeghiayan resorted to filing Freedom of Information Act claims. Another challenge involved finding clients around whom attorneys could build strong cases. True, there was no shortage of families afflicted with genocide-era losses and their long-term consequences. However, the lawyers needed to locate heirs of Armenian Genocide victims who not only had suffered documentable losses but were also in possession of the requisite paper trail for insurance claims or bank accounts. Families that had often suffered several episodes of forced relocation and expulsion rarely preserved unpaid insurance records for nearly a century. The attorneys also faced battles over jurisdiction and the issue of statutes of limitations. As in the Holocaust restitution movement, the lawyers sought the aid of legislation to remedy some of these issues. They benefited from a legislature generally friendly to the populous and well-organized California Armenian community, which mobilized to support the litigation movement. In 2001 the California Legislature enacted a statute that extended the limitations period for the insurance cases of heirs of Armenian Genocide victims.27 This made California the best, and perhaps only, jurisdiction for litigating property crimes related to the Armenian Genocide.

The attorneys who took on these cases fascinated Californians, and especially California Armenians. In this small group of high-powered Los Angeles lawyers, some, like Yeghiayan, were longtime practitioners with deep ties to the community. Born in Ethiopia, Yeghiayan (1936–2017) pioneered Armenian Genocide litigation late in his career, partly because he had an abiding interest in history and had closely followed Holocaust litigation.²⁸ Brian Kabateck is a highly successful Los Angeles lawyer of Armenian descent.²⁹ The best known and most dramatic figure is Mark Geragos, one of the top criminal defense lawyers in the United States. The media call him a “celebrity lawyer” as he has defended famous clients such as the artists and public figures Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, Winona Ryder, and Susan McDougal. He is also a television personality and best-selling author. In courtroom appearances, the dapper Geragos exudes confidence, with the rapid-fire speech of an experienced litigator. This descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors from Adana has had a deep engagement with the Armenian community in California, on occasion taking cases that are neither media-friendly nor lucrative.30

Attorneys experienced in Holocaust litigation have also participated in Armenian Genocide restitution cases; for example, Michael Bazyler, a professor of law and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University, who has published widely on Holocaust litigation. One of the few women litigators is the former law professor Lee Crawford Boyd.³¹ In courtroom appearances, she is precise in her parsing of issues of jurisdiction and thoroughly in command of the facts and the judicial intricacies of the cases. With such personalities, the courtroom can sometimes become a form of theater where rhetorical flourish and quick-witted repartee accompany the parsing of minute points of law. Courtroom sessions in California are available as podcasts and have become popular among attorneys, law students, and even the public.

The success of the cases against the insurance companies contributed to the public recognition of the Armenian Genocide, and the settlement funds helped support the study of genocide. The payouts from the settlements benefited not only the plaintiffs in the class action suits but community institutions and charities as well. In addition, the payouts contributed to legal education: in 2008 the Armenian insurance settlement funds helped fund the Center for the Study of Law and Genocide at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, the alma mater of Geragos and Kabateck, as well as many other Armenian American attorneys.³² The community press chronicled the court cases and profiled the attorneys. Geragos and Kabateck made presentations about their cases at community centers and church halls filled to capacity.³³

For the Armenian community, the significance of settlements far exceeded their monetary value. The success of the litigation was highly symbolic. The settlements constituted a public acknowledgment of the suffering of their ancestors, of the irreparable losses of the Armenian people as a whole. The settlement funds underscored the seriousness of the acknowledgment.34

Even further, the court cases constituted the only kind of formal justice for the crime of genocide that any Armenian was likely to see. By contrast Germany has acknowledged its guilt in the Holocaust, apologized, paid reparations, and made the Holocaust and genocide prevention a cornerstone of its contemporary identity. In addition, the Holocaust is a widely acknowledged fact of history, which is commemorated publicly in the United States, and whose memory is enshrined in institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, Turkey, the successor state of the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, continues to proactively deny the genocide as a state policy. An entire diplomacy of genocide denial and international pressure ensures that Turkish diplomats or supporters contest any public commemoration or mention of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian restitution movement proceeds in the shadow of this denial.

This has many implications. The Turkish state and its infrastructure of denial hover over the legal proceedings. They persistently cast doubt about the historical events. They labor to make it appear controversial to use the term genocide to describe these events. The context of denial means that the Armenian Genocide restitution movement bears an additional burden, one that constitutes a form of activism for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide above and beyond the movement’s goal of seeking justice for victims and their heirs. One of the achievements of the litigation, indeed, has been to make public the fact of the Armenian Genocide, to call attention to it and its historical occurrence and unresolved issues. The attorneys realized acutely the responsibility they shouldered. As Yeghiayan articulated, the litigation moved Armenian Genocide activism to a new sphere, “beyond liturgy and lamentation to litigation.”35

Around 2013, however, litigation over Armenian Genocide-era restitution began to stall. Suits ended in dismissal.³⁶ Politics intruded again, this time to the detriment of Armenian plaintiffs. Turkey took active steps to undermine the Armenian plaintiffs’ claims. Despite the fact that the Republic of Turkey was not a named party in the insurance lawsuits, it filed an amicus brief with the court that supported the insurance companies against the genocide survivors’ heirs, and argued that the case harmed the foreign relations of Turkey and the United States.³⁷ In addition, Turkey’s representatives lobbied behind the scenes at the highest levels of government in Washington to influence the legal proceedings.³⁸ American politicians, wary of endangering the U.S. relationship with their NATO ally Turkey, consistently shied away from adopting the locution “Armenian Genocide” and urged the courts to do the same through amicus briefs of their own.³⁹ Judges became reluctant to endorse the term “Armenian Genocide” for fear of interfering in foreign affairs. One of the unintended effects of the Holocaust-era restitution cases had been to increase judges’ deference to and compliance with political pressures. This cut both ways; now, with an absence of support from the political realm, the Armenian plaintiffs’ leverage waned.⁴⁰ Here was the insidious power of genocide denial at work. The Turkish state was hounding heirs of genocide survivors all the way to California as they tried to get European insurance companies to make good on unpaid insurance claims. Many lawyers and supporters of the Armenian Genocide litigation movement came to feel that increasingly the deck was stacked against them.

WESTERN PRELACY V. GETTY

On June 1, 2010, attorney Vartkes Yeghiayan instituted a suit against the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles County Superior Court. His client was the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, acting on behalf of its mother church, the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, based in Antelias outside of Beirut. This was the first—and so far only—time a suit was filed for the restitution of cultural heritage looted as a result of the Armenian Genocide.41

In the complaint, the plaintiff asserted that Toros Roslin’s Canon Tables is holy and belongs to the church. The Canon Tables was stolen and removed from the mother manuscript, the Zeytun Gospels, during the Armenian Genocide. The Getty “knew or should have known that the . . . pages were stolen,” the complaint alleged. As a thief cannot transfer title lawfully, the Getty does not have title. The Getty either knew the pages were stolen or failed in its obligation to conduct due diligence to ensure they were not stolen. After pressing its claim with the Getty without satisfactory results, the church sued for the return of the pages as well as millions of dollars in damages and attorneys’ fees.⁴² The Getty retorted that it has title free and clear, that it owns the pages as works of art, and had acquired them legally. The Getty maintained that the pages have been in the United States for nearly ninety years with no one questioning their legal status, and that the suit should be dismissed.⁴³

Unlike the insurance lawsuits, Western Prelacy v. Getty was not a class action suit. It focused on a single object, and it had a single plaintiff in the Armenian Church. Similar to previous litigation, however, the lawsuit did not target a perpetrator of the genocide. Rather, it alleged that the Getty had acquired an artwork stolen in the fog of genocide. The suit’s target, the Getty Museum, was well chosen. It is high profile, has deep pockets, being the wealthiest art institution in the world, and it has faced and sometimes lost many claims for the recovery of artworks with dubious provenance.

The media loved to cover the Getty, especially its scandals. Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, who reported on the less savory aspects of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s management and particularly its art acquisition practices for the Los Angeles Times, became finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting in 2006.44 As the Getty museum exists at the nexus of Los Angeles entertainment culture, the Zeytun Gospels case found an immediate echo in the news media, even the tabloid press.⁴⁵ It seemed the Getty was embroiled in yet another scandal where antiquities it proudly displayed turned out to be stolen and had to be returned. True, as a result of past instances of restitution, the Getty had instituted stricter acquisition policies and had been forthcoming about making available information on the provenance of objects in its collections. Yet in the public mind the Getty remained tainted by its previous actions and therefore vulnerable to new allegations. In addition, the Getty had bought the Canon Tables in 1994, during the era when the museum made some unscrupulous purchases, which have come back to haunt it since.⁴⁶

When the case was first filed, rumors swirled in the Armenian community as to whether other possible plaintiffs affiliated with the Armenian Church could claim to have standing. The Western Prelacy acted on behalf of the catholicosate in filing the suit. The Prelate of Los Angeles, Archbishop Moushegh Mardirossian, recognizes as his ultimate hierarchical superior Catholicos Aram I Keshishian of the Great House of Cilicia, whose seat is Antelias in Lebanon. Aram I, a leading advocate for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, has been proactive in wielding the weapon of international litigation in this regard.⁴⁷ Naturally the suit would not have proceeded without his approval or his direction. The supreme head of the Armenian Church is the Catholicos of All Armenians in Echmiadzin. Some observers wondered whether he ought to be the one pursuing a claim for the Canon Tables. In fact, the Catholicos of All Armenians, Karekin II Nersessian, met with the Western Prelacy’s attorneys, blessed their endeavor, and clarified that he had no intention to participate in the suit.⁴⁸ Ultimately, then, the appropriateness of the Western Prelacy as the plaintiff went undisputed.

The Republic of Armenia was not a party to the suit either. Armenia is a small, newly independent nation that has not campaigned internationally for the recovery of cultural artifacts lost during the genocide. Church attorneys met with relevant Armenian government figures to ensure that everyone was on the same page. The state institution where the mother manuscript of the Zeytun Gospels is housed, the Matenadaran, likewise was not a participant in the suit, even though scholars there expressed a wish to see the two fragments of the manuscript reunited.49 The Matenadaran’s director at the time, the late Hrachya Tamrazyan, wrote to the church attorneys that the effort to return the Canon Tables to its rightful owner was in the interest of the Matenadaran: “We have asked you to represent . . . the interest of the Republic of Armenia . . . including the Matenadaran, using your best efforts to obtain the return of these treasures . . . to their rightful owners.”⁵⁰ Grigor Hovhannissian, the then-consul general of Armenia in Los Angeles, clarified that the Armenian government was taking “a wait and see position” on the dispute. He did note that the case generated a great deal of “emotion” in the former Soviet Republic, where it was widely reported and followed.⁵¹

In principle any of the entities referenced above could come forward in future cases involving Armenian cultural heritage. At present, however, it appears that the campaign for restitution of Armenian Genocide-era losses is a pursuit of the diaspora rather than the Armenian state. Clearly, the centrality of the genocide to Armenian identity in the diaspora plays a role. Indeed, the Zeytun Gospels dispute, like the other cases of Armenian Genocide-era litigation, is part of the new wave of activism for genocide recognition through the courts.⁵²

CONTESTING PROVENANCE IN THE COURTROOM

The lawsuit hinged on the issue of rightful ownership, that is, of title. Was the Canon Tables stolen, or were the pages the rightful property of the Getty? If the pages were stolen at any time in the past, this would imply, given that a thief cannot transfer title in American law, that the Getty had never lawfully obtained title in the first place. To verify good title, provenance and its interpretation became the evidence. The church and the Getty laid out the known facts about the Zeytun Gospels’ provenance, highlighting some episodes over others and providing legal interpretations in the service of different arguments.

The plaintiff fired the opening salvo by narrating a provenance for the Canon Tables.53 The church argued that it was the rightful owner of the Canon Tables. The deportations and crimes that characterized the Armenian Genocide constituted the historical context for the theft of the Canon Tables. The Zeytun Gospels left the Church of the Holy Mother of God in Zeytun when Asadur Surenian brought it with him in exile to Marash in late 1915; Dr. Harutiwn Der Ghazarian obtained the Gospels from Surenian before he too was further exiled in 1916, never to return; Dr. Der Ghazarian and his sisters lost the Gospels on the fateful night of the Battle of Marash in 1920; an unnamed Turkish man, picking up the Gospels, offered them to Melkon Atamian in Marash, who stole the Canon Tables from the manuscript then returned the manuscript to the Turk; the Turk gave the book, now missing the eight pages, to Father Khachadur Der Ghazarian in Marash; Father Khachadur entrusted the Gospels to American missionary James K. Lyman upon his final departure from Marash. In due course, the mother manuscript made its way to the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul, then the Republic of Armenia; while the Canon Tables arrived in the United States with the Atamians as stolen goods and were sold to the Getty in 1994.

The Getty’s demurrer multiplied counterarguments.⁵⁴ The Zeytun Gospels was not the property of the church in the first place, but rather was privately owned by the Surenian family. The pages were not stolen, and thus the Getty had rightful title to them. In addition, the existence of the Canon Tables with the Atamians had been common knowledge for decades, including to leaders of the church. This knowledge was public, as seen in then-Archbishop Karekin Hovsepian’s 1943 article, in Sirarpie Der Nersessian’s 1952 article in a church-owned publication, Shoghagat, and finally in the catalog of the Morgan Library exhibition of 1994. The Atamian family, the Getty maintained, had owned the Canon Tables openly, showing it to priests and even exploring the possibility of gifting it to the church. All this had taken place over decades, without the church questioning the status of the Canon Tables or asking for its return. Therefore, the Getty had indeed exercised due diligence at the time of purchase in 1994. Furthermore, since then, it published and exhibited the work openly and without challenge.

Both the prelacy and the Getty threw immense resources into the task of researching the all-important points in the work’s provenance, as the lawsuit made research urgent. The attorneys mobilized every known document or fact in the complex history of the Zeytun Gospels to construct arguments in support of their respective clients’ interests.55 Nevertheless, ambiguities and contradictions remained. Some lacunae in the chronological movements of the Canon Tables and the mother manuscript persisted. For instance, neither side provided a satisfactory accounting of precisely when and where Archbishop Ardavazt Surmeyan examined the Zeytun Gospels as a complete book, including its Canon Tables, before penning his detailed description of 1936. This and other questions remain “perplexing.”⁵⁶ As the Getty curator Elizabeth Morrison expressed it, it is difficult to “put a straight line” through all the known facts, much less through the rumors and family lore that continue to swirl around the Zeytun Gospels.⁵⁷

Some as-yet undiscovered piece of evidence may one day elucidate the unresolved points in the trajectory of the manuscript and the fragment. Until then, however, “the provenance of the Gospel now is necessarily the subject of speculation, as the relevant events took place decades or centuries ago and first-hand witnesses have died.”⁵⁸

LITIGATION AND NEGOTIATION

The attorneys mobilized what was known about the artwork’s provenance to make a claim of lawful title. But the case also depended on procedural matters, most importantly the statute of limitations. As with any dispute about the recovery of art stolen long ago, one of the areas of dispute was whether the suit was time barred.

At this point, the prelacy’s case benefited from an unexpected gift from California lawmakers. The state legislature had a history of passing special statutes to support claims brought in California by plaintiffs resident in the state, such as heirs of survivors of the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide.59 Once incorporated into the California Code of Civil Procedure, such statutes could bolster plaintiffs’ claims, but they could also be challenged in court, where they could be invalidated or deemed unconstitutional. Just a few months after the Zeytun Gospels suit was filed, the lawmakers signed into law a stolen art recovery statute in September 2010. The statute concerned the recovery of works of fine art from museums or dealers and was intended to allow lawsuits for the recovery of Nazi-looted art. It extended the time period in which stolen art claims could be filed, adopting a statute of limitations that begins from the time a plaintiff actually discovers the whereabouts of the stolen work.⁶⁰ The extension of the statutory limitations is crucial. The provenance of looted artworks, as in the case of the Zeytun Gospels, is often convoluted and requires time and expertise to disentangle. In addition, rightful owners of a looted artwork might not even be aware that the artwork still exists, perhaps lying dormant in private hands or in poorly documented museum collections.⁶¹

The attorneys for the prelacy amended the complaint to reflect their reliance on the new statute.⁶² They indicated that the catholicosate had been unaware that the Canon Tables was at the Getty until 2006 when attorney Yeghiayan, on a visit to the Getty Museum, noticed the artwork on exhibition, became intrigued, researched it, and informed the catholicosate.⁶³ Asserting this chronology was important; the catholicosate’s discovery of the theft of the Canon Tables around 2006 placed the lawsuit within the statute of limitations.

The Getty’s attorneys, of course, argued that the suit was time barred in their effort to get it dismissed.64 They avowed that the plaintiff waited too long to bring the claim. They maintained that the church had numerous opportunities to learn of the existence of the Canon Tables and its separation from the Zeytun Gospels. They pointed to Hovsepian’s 1943 publication, to Der Nersessian’s 1952 article, and to the Morgan Library exhibition in 1994. From this point of view, “it’s a little disingenuous for lawyers representing the Armenian church to argue both that the manuscript is one of its great historic treasures and, at the same time, that church officials did not even realize the canon tables were missing until 2006. . . . That’s a convenient argument that allows the church’s claim to fall within the statute of limitations.”⁶⁵ Once again, attorneys combed the available evidence to pinpoint when the church could have known about the location of the Canon Tables, or when it should have known. This implied speculating about what someone knew or did not know sometime in the past. Attorneys for the church counterargued that none of these instances could have caused the catholicosate to have actual and unambiguous knowledge about the theft of the Canon Tables from the Zeytun Gospels.⁶⁶ They also pointed to broader historical trends, arguing that in the aftermath of the genocide, the church had been uprooted; it was in a weakened and divided state; it was burdened with the urgent needs of survivors and refugees and the establishment of safe havens and new communities outside of the Ottoman Empire. The task of finding works of art became secondary to ensuring the survival of the Armenian Apostolic flock.⁶⁷

Attorneys, priests, journalists, and law students thronged the courtroom of Los Angeles Superior Court judge Abraham Khan for a hearing on November 3, 2011. The judge disagreed with the Getty’s assertion that the claim should be dismissed. He was not swayed by the museum attorneys’ arguments that the suit was time barred. Instead, given the complex and emotionally fraught facts in the case, he ordered the parties to enter into mediation. The judge’s decision made it clear that this case would not go away easily, that there was enough basis to proceed with negotiation or, failing that, litigation.68

When a judge orders mediation in a case, it is often understood that he or she is encouraging the parties to settle—or even pressuring them to do so. As ordered by the court, lawyers for the parties duly began the process. They put on a brave face, but mediation efforts were not going well.⁶⁹ The differential of power was stark. A midsized Los Angeles faith group was trying to claim a sacred object from the world’s wealthiest art institution, with a $5.3 billion endowment and a $250 million annual budget. The Getty with its funds and resources could afford to stretch out the process, but how long could the church keep financing expensive legal work?

There were other shifts in the background. After a rough patch, the Getty changed leadership. Two respected museum professionals took its helm. They also happened to be vocal opponents of the restitution of looted antiquities: James Cuno became CEO of the Getty Trust, the parent organization to the museum, and Timothy Potts became director of the Getty Museum. Critics of Cuno’s anti-repatriation views expressed dismay at his appointment.⁷⁰ Thus the most powerful voice against restitution was designated to lead the Getty at the height of the Western Prelacy v. Getty case. Cuno stated that he supported the Getty’s strict acquisition policies: “I have argued against the laws, but I haven’t broken the laws.”⁷¹ Nevertheless, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cuno reiterated his views against repatriation and evinced an inflexible stance on the Canon Tables, specifically: “We claim clear title . . . there’s no case here.”⁷² In 2011 the Getty featured a bifolium of the Canon Tables in an exhibition on medieval Gospel illumination.⁷³ It was as if the church’s claims never existed.

Meanwhile, California’s Stolen Art Recovery Statute was making its own way through the courts. If it could pass muster without being challenged, the statute could lend great support to the prelacy’s claims. With so much hinging on the career of the Stolen Art Recovery Statute, the parties jointly requested, and the judge granted, a stay in the Zeytun Gospels case in October 2012. They agreed to await the results of another case that was further along and where the Stolen Art Recovery Statute was being contested.74 In that case the California-based heirs were seeking the return of a valuable impressionist painting by Camille Pissarro that had been extorted from the family during the Holocaust and was now in the possession of a state-run art collection in Spain.⁷⁵

About a year later, in December 2013, a ruling in that case affirmed that the Stolen Art Recovery Statute would stand up in court.⁷⁶ Arriving at a point when other ongoing Armenian Genocide-era cases were stumbling over procedural obstacles, this news boosted the Armenian Church’s position and took away some of the Getty’s legal ammunition. In February 2014 the judge lifted the stay in Western Prelacy v. Getty. Attorneys set to work on discovery and other legal proceedings.⁷⁷ Public statements from the parties reaffirmed their positions. The church spokesperson wrote: “The Armenian people have finally realized that only they can initiate action to stop the final destruction of the remnants of the Armenian culture . . . the lawsuit will soon determine if Getty will stand to answer for its dishonesty in the court of public opinion or a court of law.”⁷⁸ As for Getty CEO James Cuno, he reiterated his stance against repatriation, updating it in light of current events.⁷⁹

The judge scheduled the trial to begin on November 3, 2015.⁸⁰

SETTLEMENT

Weeks before the trial date, in September 2015, the parties announced that they had reached an amicable agreement.⁸¹ The Getty Museum acknowledged the church’s “historical ownership” of the Canon Tables; in turn, the church acknowledged the Getty’s “decades-long stewardship” of the Canon Tables and agreed to donate the pages to the Getty “to ensure their preservation and widespread exhibition.”82 Accordingly, the Getty officially changed the artwork’s provenance. The Canon Tables’ attribution now reads, “Gift of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia.” The full settlement is confidential, and some of the legal materials in the case are likewise sealed. The Getty reportedly paid the attorneys’ fees.⁸³ While the amount is undisclosed, it is safe to speculate that five years of litigation by prominent attorneys in Los Angeles are bound to cost a substantial sum.

The negotiations leading to the settlement were extremely complex and difficult. Both parties made concessions, and both parties scored successes. The settlement announcement carefully balanced the issues of “ownership” and “stewardship,” crucial concepts in the broader debate about repatriation. The fact that the Getty changed the Canon Tables’ provenance is hardly a small matter; it indicates recognition that the Canon Tables had belonged to the church all along. Though not stated explicitly, that implies that the Getty’s previous representations about the ownership of the pages were inaccurate. The church agreed to donate the Canon Tables to the Getty. But the donation would occur in 2016; therefore, in 2015, the highly symbolic year of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the church would have ownership of the holy pages, even if they remained in the Getty’s custody.⁸⁴ By agreeing to donate the Canon Tables to the Getty, the church seemed to acknowledge, though not explicitly, that nagging questions about the provenance and procedural challenges would have probably made further litigation long and unpredictable.

What was at stake for the attorneys for the church were the larger goals of genocide recognition and justice for the victims and survivors. They aimed to set the historical record straight about the church’s ownership of the Canon Tables, as well as demonstrate that the holy pages were taken during the genocide. To them the case proved the depth of “unfinished legal business” for heirs of Armenian survivors or institutions whose property was stolen or confiscated during the genocide. For Lee Crawford Boyd, the lawsuit constituted a form of commemoration of the genocide and a way to achieve some form of restorative justice.85

In addition to convoluted legal issues, the process of litigation and negotiation was rife with emotions—stress, anxiety, and hurt feelings. Litigation can be bruising and rancorous. Negotiation stretched over agonizing months. Getty director Timothy Potts described it as “a lot of handwringing and trying to do the right thing by all parties.”⁸⁶ Attorney Lee Crawford Boyd likened the process to “threading the needle.”⁸⁷

The public scrutiny of the process must have weighed on the negotiations as well. The Los Angeles press covered the dispute frequently. For the Getty, the weight of its past remained inescapable, with the lingering effects of the bad publicity that accompanied previous disputes over artworks in its collection. Nevertheless, the Canon Tables case was not the last time the Getty faced issues related to acquiring works with a traumatic past. In June 2017 it returned an ancient statue of the Greek god Zeus to its source country, Italy.⁸⁸

Many hope the settlement in the Zeytun Gospels case will open a new period of cooperation and mutual respect between the Getty, the Armenian Church, and the community. The archbishop on occasion visits the Canon Tables. In November 2015 the Getty hosted a reception in honor of the settlement; Archbishop Mardirossian pronounced a moving prayer before the framed Canon Tables, brought out for the occasion. Community leaders, attorneys, and priests attended. This might translate into artistic collaborations between the Getty’s many institutional divisions and Armenian art and culture writ large.

The settlement resonated far beyond Los Angeles. The art press hailed it as an important precedent in disputes between museums and religious communities.⁸⁹ The settlement, along with decisions in other cases, also seemed to vindicate California’s Stolen Art Recovery Statute. The statute’s judicious phrasing, which avoids naming any specific victim group, affords it wide applicability for the victims of a number of historic wrongs. Further, the statute’s success signals to museums and the art market that they may face claims for the return of stolen artworks long after they have acquired them.90 A measure of the statute’s wide-ranging impact is that it served as the model for a new federal law: the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016.⁹¹

Whether the Canon Tables case will prompt further claims for the recovery of art looted during the Armenian Genocide remains to be seen. Attorneys certainly view it in that way.⁹² In such cases the payoff can be enormous and highly symbolic, but failure is always a looming possibility. In each case they will have to face the same challenges: to find the right plaintiff, to research events shrouded in time, to battle jurisdictions and statutes of limitations. Michael Bazyler has highlighted the critical work of independent groups such as the Holocaust Art Restitution Project that document Jewish cultural property losses and can lend assistance and expertise in locating and studying looted artworks.⁹³ Thus far, no similar project exists to document the cultural destruction brought about by the Armenian Genocide. It would be a daunting task. One recalls Catholicos Karekin Hovsepian’s unrealized vision of a comprehensive history of Armenian art, which despite the great scholar-priest’s monumental labor was hampered by the long-term effects of the genocide that destroyed the culture of Ottoman Armenians: “The fate of ruins, the fate of ancient manuscripts.”⁹⁴

ECHOES WITHIN THE ARMENIAN COMMUNITY

The settlement reverberated within the Armenian community, taking place as it did in 2015, the highly symbolic year of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians worldwide commemorated the centennial with great solemnity. While secular leaders predominated in the organization of the commemoration, some of the most poignant and spectacular commemorative events involved the Armenian Church. In the largest canonization ceremony in the world, held at Holy Echmiadzin on April 23, 2015, church leaders declared all the martyrs of the genocide saints of the Armenian Church. Given how rarely the church grants sainthood, this was a historic and momentous event. It reiterated the centrality of the church in Armenian life. It also indicated the growing influence of the church within the Republic of Armenia, a far cry from its muted presence under Soviet rule. Clerics mobilized the full pomp and ceremony of the 1,700-year-old church, complete with haunting hymns and the ringing of ancient liturgical instruments (ripidion), burning incense, the deployment of multicolored banners adorned with sacred images, and priests in resplendent regalia. They also brought out the church’s fourteen most sacred and oldest relics to bless and witness the ceremony.95 The Zeytun Gospels was included, the only manuscript so honored, alongside the Holy Lance that pierced the side of Jesus on the Cross, the Relic of the True Cross, and the Right Hand of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, founder of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Also present was the Reliquary of Skevra, a container of ancient relics that Cilician jewelers had reshaped to mourn and commemorate the fall of Hromkla. Emerging from its storage cabinet at the Matenadaran, the Zeytun Gospels participated in a procession and witnessed the canonization ceremony. The manuscript assumed its original sacred function, albeit for a day. Its missing pages, of course, remained in Los Angeles.

Given the enormous importance of 2015 as the year of the centennial commemoration of the genocide, it was perhaps surprising that the Armenian community’s reaction to the settlement in the first cultural heritage lawsuit over the Armenian Genocide was muted. Perhaps people were overcome by “commemoration fatigue” by the time news of the settlement came at the end of the year. Perhaps the settlement did not capture their imagination as much as the struggle had. Like the scholars at the Matenadaran, perhaps too many had assumed, or hoped, that only the physical reunification of the fragment and the mother manuscript would constitute an Armenian victory in this case. Attorney Yeghiayan had painted a sympathetic portrait of the suit as a quest to reunite family members sundered by the genocide: “What we are doing is reuniting the orphans with their family.”96 While the lawsuit over the holy pages had tremendous support within the Armenian community, it was by no means unanimous.⁹⁷ By contrast, the success of the insurance cases had yielded cash payments to heirs of the victims as well as to community institutions. That was concrete, quantifiable, understandable. In this case, however, a victory that consisted in changing a provenance was perhaps less tangible, less easily comprehensible.

An opinion piece in the popular Los Angeles Armenian-language newspaper Asbarez critiqued the Zeytun Gospels settlement and untangled some of these intertwined thoughts and feelings.⁹⁸ Vatche Proodian’s article is consistent with the biting criticism of Armenian public life and politics for which his column is known.⁹⁹

Proodian’s response to the settlement was bitter disapproval. To him juridical determinations were irrelevant. He declared that the Canon Tables constitutes the patrimony of the Armenian people, and its proper place should be in the Matenadaran with the mother manuscript: “Who gave the [prelacy] the right to ‘donate’ a piece of the wealth that belongs to the Armenian people, even if the ‘gift’ is being received by a world-famous museum?” He linked what he considered the prelacy’s relinquishment of Armenian patrimony to other instances where in his view the government of the Republic of Armenia failed to preserve and appreciate historical sites.¹⁰⁰ He concluded that the only ones to benefit were attorneys, “who returned to their offices after [pocketing] neat sums.”

Proodian’s view may reflect a broader sense of dissatisfaction in the community. The stereotype of the greedy, high-priced lawyer he evokes is a familiar one, especially in Los Angeles. Critics of the Holocaust restitution movement also raised this issue.101 Undoubtedly, in addition to the historical, legal, and ethical arguments, the looted-art restitution cases can also be motivated by the enormous sums that some recovered art masterpieces, like Klimt’s paintings, may fetch when sold. Attorneys who take cases on contingency certainly benefit from such payouts. Yet such successes are hardly the norm. Genocide-era litigation in the United States is only possible because of the American system of litigation, which is entrepreneurial, and it can be lucrative. But lawyers are also taking a risk, as many cases continue for years, require long hours of legal work and expensive research and court costs, and sometimes end in utter failure.

The article also questioned how the settlement constituted a form of restitution, since the Canon Tables remained at the Getty instead of being returned to the Armenian Church. Proodian viewed the Canon Tables as the patrimony of all Armenians; indeed, in a broad sense the Canon Tables is part of Armenian cultural heritage. The Canon Tables, more than Holocaust-looted paintings like the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, has a resonance that is deeply communal and religious rather than private or individual. Yet in his view this implied that the Canon Tables belongs to the community or the nation as a whole rather than to the church alone.

Nevertheless, the lawsuit was about good title to the Canon Tables, and the plaintiff was the church instead of the Armenian people, the Matenadaran, or the government of Armenia. Further, Proodian conflates, perhaps unfairly, church decisions in Los Angeles with government actions in Armenia regarding vastly different cultural heritage issues. Yet the writer’s concern over Armenian cultural treasures withering away or being given away by national institutions without the input of individual Armenians is poignant and deserves consideration. In hindsight, perhaps the prelacy could have been more effective in communicating how the settlement constituted a success. The restitution took the form of Getty’s acknowledgment of the church’s title. The church, having reclaimed the holy pages, made its own determination for their location, exercising its own decision-making and sovereignty over the holy pages. Further, as many heirs of Holocaust-looted art who have succeeded in reclaiming their patrimony know, determining the best location for a fragile and priceless work of art is a tremendous responsibility. One does not simply hang Roslin’s Canon Tables from a wall in the prelacy office or a church lobby. The highest standards of care and conservation are necessary for the work of art to be preserved for future generations. The church’s attorneys never alleged that the Getty had been a poor custodian of the Canon Pages. To the contrary, the Getty’s conservation facilities are among the best in the world and easily surpass those of the Matenadaran, however worthy that institution and its dedicated staff. Finally, gifting the pages to the Getty no doubt also helped settle the case rather than continue with years of litigation with no certain outcome.

The settlement is also forward-looking. The Getty indicated its commitment to greater engagement with the Armenian community, both in Los Angeles and globally. This promises to bring the benefits of collaboration between Armenian cultural institutions and the Getty, with attendant benefits of sharing information and resources, of goodwill, and greater dividends of cultural capital and exchange. Signs indicate that this is taking place. Getty officials participated in Armenian community events. James Cuno spoke at the University of Southern California’s Armenian Studies Program’s public event, “Innovate Armenia,” in April 2016. Senior curator of manuscripts Elizabeth Morrison’s lecture on medieval Armenian art co-organized by the Armenian American Museum in Glendale received a standing ovation from the capacity crowd. The Getty Conservation Institute awarded a grant toward the renovation of a Soviet Armenian Writers’ Colony on Lake Sevan.102 But other signs suggest that the Getty’s engagement with the Armenian community might fade once the leverage of litigation is dissolved. As the settlement was announced, many raised the possibility that the Canon Tables and the mother manuscript would be reunited in an exhibition. And yet the director of the Getty appeared to equivocate: “It could happen . . . but that hasn’t been a part of the [settlement] agreement.”103 The Canon Tables may have prompted a lawsuit, but perhaps its legendary power of protection can now extend to the promotion and appreciation of Armenian art in Los Angeles and beyond. Time will tell.

HISTORY AND ART HISTORY IN THE COURTROOM

With Western Prelacy v. Getty, the history of Armenian art entered the twenty-first-century courtroom. The suit may also play a role in shaping the history of the genocide.

In 2015 attorney Vartkes Yeghiayan donated the archive of documents from the historic Marootian v. New York Life Insurance Company class action lawsuit to the Center for Advanced Genocide Research of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California.¹⁰⁴ It consists of court papers, legal research, family trees, and photographs. Treasured heirlooms, yellowed papers saved by survivors and heirs for decades with little hope of receiving the money they had been owed for a century, have become historic documents in a public repository. What was private pain for so long is now a matter of public record, of recognition. These materials—and the legal research that organized them and made them meaningful again—now provide the raw materials for writing a history of the Armenian Genocide.

Court cases and trials discover and bring to light historic documents. They also generate new documents. Extensive court cases or class action lawsuits create their own archive of materials. Lawyers work with historians and conduct historical research themselves as well. In addition to finding documents in archives and repositories, court cases create forms of documentary evidence. Lawsuits compel discovery. They prompt the airing of little-known or even sealed documents—indeed, the Armenian Genocide insurance lawsuits enabled lawyers to research insurance companies’ long-forgotten corporate archives. Witnesses are deposed under oath. Lawyers and judges take these materials and fashion them into arguments, opinions, and rulings. As long as Western Prelacy v. Getty was proceeding, the lawyers and scholars were throwing everything they had at uncovering the past history of the Canon Tables and the possible legal implications of each step in its journey from Zeytun to Los Angeles. The manuscripts department at the Getty conducted in-depth research, just as the prelacy’s attorneys performed their own, assisted by the eminent art historian Dickran Kouymjian.

Thus restitution lawsuits write the history of the atrocities for which they seek justice and compensation. American-style discovery can make it possible to discover new facts and enter them into evidence. This acquires a poignant urgency in the case of Armenian Genocide litigation, which is explicitly driven by the necessity to affirm the suppressed history of the Armenian Genocide and to make it a matter of public record. The urgency is exacerbated by the enormous burden of genocide denial. Here the goal is not only to achieve a measure of justice for descendants of the atrocities, but also to make the Armenian Genocide public in a new arena. To enter the genocide into the record, to make it a known truth, to make it incontrovertible, to present evidence of a crime denied, even a century later: this is what is at stake.

The process of writing the history of the Armenian Genocide began as the Medz Yeghern was still ongoing. Armenians on the road of exile sought to record their experiences, to memorize them, and to transmit them to others. Just after World War I, the courts-martial of the Young Turk perpetrators in Istanbul prompted the gathering of immense documentation that would have otherwise been concealed or in danger of being lost or destroyed. While many of the sentences were not carried out and most perpetrators escaped justice, the materials assembled for these trials continue to inform the work of historians today.105 As the years went by and any hope of bringing the génocidaires to justice faded, survivors persisted in their drive to amass evidence. Aram Andonian, an intellectual who lived through the death marches, recorded survivor testimonies and collected evidence as if for an eventual accounting of the truth, even if it could not be in a court of law. It was as if “history could be substituted for justice.”¹⁰⁶ The Armenian Genocide restitution movement today follows the postwar prosecutions in Istanbul, albeit within the limits and opportunities that the legal landscape in the United States affords a century later. Still other legal cases, in the United States and internationally, have focused not on reparations but squarely on conflicts over the denial versus the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide—bringing the very writing of history into the courtroom.¹⁰⁷

But Armenian Genocide litigation can contribute much more than mere recognition and the assignment of responsibility to perpetrators and their heirs. In comparison, historians of the Holocaust have debated whether the Holocaust restitution litigation has aided history or hindered and distorted it. Legal professionals were involved in writing the history of the Holocaust as early as the end of World War II. Some argue that the restitution litigation in the American courts constitutes a way of writing Holocaust history. As a matter of fact, the suits since the 1990s have shed light on aspects of the Holocaust that were little known or forgotten, such as the complicity of banks, railway companies, and corporations.¹⁰⁸ At the same time, Holocaust suits have clear limitations, driven as they are by a focus on entities that can be pursued in U.S. courts. Some historians object that legal filings reflect a distorted image of the Holocaust’s full history, that the Holocaust becomes “misshapen to fit the idiom of the law.”¹⁰⁹

The Armenian Genocide restitution movement in the twenty-first century has certainly contributed new facts and perspectives to the still-incomplete history of the genocide. Western Prelacy v. Getty has shed light on overlooked aspects of the Armenian Genocide: the dispersal and loss of artworks. Prior to that suit, the destruction of churches and cultural heritage sites in the Republic of Turkey and the confiscation of real property constituted the better-known aspects of the cultural dimension of the genocide, rather than the fate of objects within these sites—the works of art, religious items, and other valuables. The recent history of Armenian art objects has not been usually a part of art history. Even the great art historian Sirarpie Der Nersessian was reticent about discussing the recent provenance of Armenian artworks that had ended up in private or public collections. By contrast, the Getty case showed that any history of Armenian art is incomplete without a discussion of the genocide, and further, that the provenance of an Armenian work will often intersect with the history of the genocide. The writing of the history of Armenian art cannot be separated from writing the history of the Armenian Genocide. The Medz Yeghern is the reason why Armenian art is passed in silence or excluded in the historiography of Turkish or Islamic art in the Republic of Turkey. The twentieth century’s most important scholars of Armenian art saw their lives distorted and transformed by the genocide and its long-term effects. It is ultimately because of the genocide that works like the Canon Tables have ended up where they are today—on display in a Los Angeles museum, a fragment washed up on the Pacific shore, instead of on the altar of the Church of the Holy Mother of God in Zeytun during the celebration of Mass.

Furthermore, the litigation brought to light dimensions of the cultural history of the postgenocide Armenian community that had slipped into obscurity, such as the immense work of intellectuals and community leaders to take stock of the loss of Armenian culture and to salvage and preserve whatever remained. Surmeyan’s catalog of dispersed manuscripts, Hovsepian’s unfinished history of Armenian illumination, just like Der Nersessian’s studies of medieval art, acquired a new life as evidence in the courtroom.

Litigation also demonstrated that Armenian art remains vital, that it commands value in the public mind and in the marketplace. The impact of the litigation on the artwork and its reception is enormous. The lawsuit has added an important chapter to the life of the Gospel Book from Hromkla.

Certainly, there are crucial distinctions in the way lawyers use art history in court documents, and in the way art historians practice their craft. With Western Prelacy v. Getty, the studies by Hovsepian and Der Nersessian were resurrected for facts that could be entered into evidence to buttress arguments, and less for their interpretation of Roslin’s style and iconography. Thus the legal documents pursue very different goals from those of the writings of the art historians. It is sobering to think that art history can become evidence, that interpretation can be entered into fact, that complex arguments can be mined for actionable words.

The fields of history and the law have a long entanglement. They both make use of evidence in order to reconstruct past events and interpret motivations and effects. They are both in search of the truth. But the truth in historical interpretation and truth in the courtroom are not the same. The historian Carlo Ginzburg reflected on the roles of judges and historians, and distinguished between historical and legal understandings of proof.110 Both judges and historians consult and interpret evidence. Historians make use of court records and legal documents to write history, but they do not approach them as judges or lawyers. A historian must distinguish between truth and possibilities but can include both in her interpretation of the past. A judge, however, must consider available documents to determine whether they constitute acceptable proof in accordance with evidentiary rules. What is to be done when the historical record is fragmentary, or when available documents do not lend themselves to a seamless reconstruction of past events—as for example the Zeytun Gospels’ provenance? Historians are not bound by the legal rules of evidence or by the legal standard to evaluate matters by a preponderance of evidence. Unlike a judge, a historian may utilize not only historical records but also fragments of records in order to reconstruct past societies’ mentalities or culture. As long as the historian makes clear her method as well as the types of evidence she uses, she may include educated guesses and hypotheses in her reconstructions, what Ginzburg has called the historian’s intuition.111 Yet historians are also concerned with truth and must tread carefully when filling the gaps between documents. Ginzburg likened the work of such historians to the modern art-restoration technique of the rigatino (hatch), in which the restorer does not conceal lesions or gaps in a painted surface by repainting, but rather makes them distinguishable by marking them with hatches. The painting is repaired, but not repainted; the gaps, breaches, and disparities remain visible.¹¹² Art historians, too, can infer and speculate on the basis of fragmentary evidence, as long as inferences and speculations are clearly marked, or hatched. When legal filings use the art historical tool of provenance and enter it into evidence, it is to resolve issues about ownership title in the present. By contrast, art history today sees provenance not only as a collection of substantiated facts but also as a “social history of art.”¹¹³

REPARATIONS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

Western Prelacy v. Getty is also inscribed in the greater context of twenty-first-century art history and issues of restitution and reparations. The public has a greater awareness than ever of cultural rights in their many forms, including the right to access and contribute to cultural life, as well as the importance of preserving cultural heritage from destruction in peace or wartime.

Claims by minorities or persecuted groups to control their own cultural heritage are ascendant, to the detriment of art museums and institutions that once collected such materials as if they were above the law and ethical considerations. The long history of contests over cultural heritage has finally produced a changing climate in which these types of cases are viewed with utmost seriousness. Museums, private or public, are adopting more thoughtful standards for collecting and display.

The Getty Museum was the American institution most affected by allegations of buying recently looted antiquities. It remains haunted by its past acquisition of artworks of dubious provenance, some of which it has returned to rightful owners or source countries. In response, the Getty adopted one of the museum world’s most stringent collecting policies, even more careful than the UNESCO convention regarding cultural property.114 The convention, which was ratified by the United States, restricts museums from purchasing works of art without a documented provenance that goes back to 1970 at least. In recent years, the Getty has made public efforts to reexamine the provenance of objects in its collection and to make that information publicly accessible, and it has voluntarily and proactively returned objects to their rightful owners.¹¹⁵ Yet many challenges persist.

Just as issues of art restitution remain fraught, reparations also prompt strong reactions. Fierce debates rage around reparations and allied processes that seek acknowledgment and redress of past wrongs, such as truth commissions, apologies, restitution, compensation, and reconciliation efforts. Few doubt that persons and groups that have been subjected to wrong-doing in the past deserve to see their experiences acknowledged, remedies sought, and justice restored—at least a measure of justice. Nevertheless, few deny that globally in the last century movements for restitution and reparations have been imperfect, uneven, and sometimes deeply flawed. Reparations processes unfold in real time with real constraints, rather than in accordance with abstract ideals. Inexorably, reparations are caught up in global imbalances of power. Crimes against some groups never receive commensurate consideration, especially when groups are on the losing side or are marginal to postconflict geopolitics. Reparations invariably prompt complex questions about ethics, law, history, and personal experience. What are the political, legal, economic, and symbolic repercussions of reparations processes? The anthropologist Susan Slyomovics asked difficult questions about German reparations, the largest comprehensive redress program in history, estimated around sixty billion dollars. Digging deep into her own family members’ past ordeals during the Holocaust and their encounters with the bureaucracy of reparations, she connected their experience to broader historical and political issues.116 How can suffering, trauma, loss be quantified, indemnified, or monetized? Slyomovics considered these difficult issues in the case of Holocaust reparations and asked how these experiences could be applicable to other injustices, such as colonialism.

John Torpey critiqued the tortured history of reparations in a provocative book, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed.¹¹⁷ He observed that the global trend of righting past wrongs through reparations gained momentum during a post–Cold War, postmodern historic juncture, where the future no longer holds the promise of progress, justice, and equality. At a time when grand projects for remaking society, like socialism, prompt skepticism and few still believe in utopian futures, campaigns for reparations that focus on the past have gained ground.¹¹⁸ Torpey cautioned that reparation movements’ emphasis on past wrongs “may encourage a pursuit of the past that can only be understood as a response, at once compensatory and escapist, to ‘the collapse of the future.’”¹¹⁹ In other words, reparation’s focus on the past may get in the way of envisioning a more just future. Instead, Torpey advocated a political commitment to contend with the past while also working toward a better political future.

Indeed, any reparation movement ought to be mindful of its many implications for the present and the future. Reparations address past wrongs, but they unfold in the present and have implications for the future. A politics of the future is perhaps especially pertinent in the case of reparations having to do with cultural heritage. The idea of bequeathing something to future generations is a cornerstone of contemporary notions of world heritage and patrimony, an idea expressed in the very terms heritage and patrimony. Reparations claims regarding heritage do not merely aim at obtaining monetary restitution for the value of a work of art, be it millions or a couple of hundred dollars (though persons or groups whose culture has been stolen should be entitled to restitution). Rather, these claims are ultimately about restoring a whole culture, recovering collective memory, celebrating art, retrieving persecuted religions, recreating histories that have been obscured, undoing denial, and ending discrimination. These are projects directed toward the future—toward ensuring that our generation bequeaths better circumstances to future generations. Here is perhaps also a way in which, akin to the fictional character Toros Roslin of Davoyan’s novel of the same name, the victim of spoliation gifts to the world that which has been stolen, the “light” which endures even as its creator is pushed down ever deeper into the earth. Broad movements to safeguard the cultural heritage of indigenous or persecuted communities, to restore their ability to control their own heritage for the sake of making it part of their present and future—what some Native American communities term “visual sovereignty”—these are projects that creatively engage with objects from the past for new uses, meanings, and inspiration for the present and future.

Much as Davoyan’s novel envisioned, Toros Roslin’s glorious Canon Tables continues to carry the light of its creative force far from Cilicia’s shores, all the way to Los Angeles.