Bénédicte Savoy

Bénédicte Savoy in 2018

Bénédicte Savoy (French: Bénédicte Savoy [beneˈdiktə savˈwa] (listen), born 22 May 1972 in Paris) is a French art historian, specialising in the critical enquiry of the provenance of works of art, including looted art and other forms of illegally acquired cultural objects.

Savoy is professor of Modern Art History at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and professor for the cultural history of European art from the 18th to 20th century at the Collège de France in Paris. Commissioned by the French President in 2018, she and academic researcher Felwine Sarr from Senegal are the authors of a report on the restitution of African cultural heritage.

Biography and career[]

As a high school student, Savoy attended the Beethoven-Gymnasium in West Berlin in 1988/89. She then studied German language and civilisation at the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay, France, which she completed in 1994 with a master's thesis on the visual artist Anselm Kiefer. In 1996, she received the agrégation (license to teach in French highschools).

From 1998 to 2001, she was research assistant at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and lecturer both at the Technical University and the Free University in Berlin. In 2000, she received her doctorate from the University of Paris VIII with a dissertation on French art theft in Germany. From 2003 to 2009, Savoy was junior professor at the Institute for History and Art History at Technical University of Berlin. Since 2009, she has been professor of modern art history at the same university.^[1]

Savoy is a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.^[2] After a series of lectures as a guest lecturer in June 2015, Savoy was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 2016: She holds the chair of Histoire culturelle du patrimoine artistique en Europe, XVIIIᵉ-XXᵉ siècles.

Expert on the ethics of cultural collections[]

Savoy is internationally known as an expert on the ethics of ownership of cultural collections and research on the provenance of cultural heritage in the context of 'translocations' of artworks.^[3] Since her 2003 study of the cultural heritage looted in Germany by French troops during the Napoleonic wars (French title: Patrimoine annexé. Les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800),^[4] she has published several books, academic papers and articles on the illicit transfer of cultural goods.^[5]

Commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron in 2018, Savoy and Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr investigated the possibility of returning cultural items from French state-owned museums to African countries. This resulted in their report on the restitution of African cultural heritage in November 2018, which presents a detailed analysis of the African cultural heritage in France as well as recommendations and an outline for possible restitutions.^[6][7]

As member of the academic community of art historians in Berlin, she has been involved in the debates on the restitution of African cultural heritage in German collections and actively participates in research and public discussions about this issue. Until 2017, she was member of the advisory board of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, but resigned from this committee, because of her negative assessment of the future museum's handling of art objects that originate from Germany's former colonial territories.^[8][9]

In 2020, Savoy and other art historians at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum were appointed to carry out a joint research project called Restitution of Knowledge to study, how art and cultural assets from other countries were collected in major museums of Europe.^[10]

Since 2019, Savoy has also been a board member of the newly established Junge Akademie, an interdisciplinary research organisation, which is jointly supported by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the two oldest academies for sciences in Germany.^[11]

See also[]

• Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage
• Decolonization of museums

Further reading[]

• Meyer, Andrea, Bénédicte Savoy (2014). The museum is open: towards a transnational history of museums 1750-1940. Berlin. ISBN 978-3-11-029882-6. OCLC 874163864.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
• Sarr, Felwine; Savoy, Bénédicte (21 November 2018). "Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle" [The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics] (pdf) (Report) (in French and English). Paris. p. 240. ISBN 978-2848767253.
• Savoy, Bénédicte, Charlotte Guichard, Christine Howald (2018). Acquiring cultures: histories of world art on Western markets. Berlin. ISBN 978-3-11-054508-1. OCLC 1039210631.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
• Savoy, Bénédicte; Bodenstein, Felicity; Lagatz, Merten (2020). Translocations Histories of Dislocated Cultural Assets. ISBN 978-3-8376-5336-6. OCLC 1153525839.

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bénédicte Savoy.

• Official webpage of Bénédicte Savoy at the Technical University of Berlin
• Publications by Bénédicte Savoy in worldcat library catalogue
• Article on Provenance research and German colonial ethnographic collections today