On her book The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice
Cover Interview of April 03, 2019
In a nutshell
In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul
Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian
Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun
Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist,
Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript
had followed the waves of displaced people killed during the Armenian genocide.
Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First
World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way
to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty in California.
The Missing Pages is the biography of the Zeytun
Gospels, a medieval manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural
heritage. The book follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven
centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the
refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a
Los Angeles courtroom. The story of how the pages came to be missing unfolds
the entire tragic history of the Armenian people in the 20th century.
The tale of this beautiful and meaningful object and its
extraordinary journey embody some of the defining elements of art history in
the 21st century. I take the much-publicized legal battle as a point of entry
to explore how contests over art objects are framed, what cultural heritage
signifies to survivor communities, and how institutions like museums curate and
display works of art with painful histories.
Reconstructing the path of the pages, I sought to uncover not
only the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork, but also the individuals
and communities touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of
unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human
costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people killed during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty in California.
The Missing Pages is the biography of the Zeytun Gospels, a medieval manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. The book follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. The story of how the pages came to be missing unfolds the entire tragic history of the Armenian people in the 20th century.
The tale of this beautiful and meaningful object and its extraordinary journey embody some of the defining elements of art history in the 21st century. I take the much-publicized legal battle as a point of entry to explore how contests over art objects are framed, what cultural heritage signifies to survivor communities, and how institutions like museums curate and display works of art with painful histories.
Reconstructing the path of the pages, I sought to uncover not only the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork, but also the individuals and communities touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art.