An investigation identified hundreds of artifacts linked to indicted or convicted traffickers. What does this mean for the future of museums?
Last modified on Mon 20 Mar 2023 09.01 GMT, above an ancient spring, stand two stone shrines and a temple. On the side of one of those shrines is a large hole where a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, the Hindu protector god, used to be.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1880, long after its counterparts in Paris and London. The museum started out with a purchase of 174 paintings, placing it far from the scale of France’s palatial Louvre’s galleries already holding thousands of works, many inherited from the nation’s colonial exploits.
Reporters reviewed the museum’s catalog and found 1,109 pieces – of which fewer than half have records describing how they left their country of origin – previously owned by people indicted or convicted for antiquities crimes or their galleries, and 309 of those are currently on display. What the Met decides to do about these concerns will have consequences not just for the museum itself, but possibly for what the public can expect from museums all over the world.
The Met’s dealings with accused antiquities traffickers predated Hoving’s tenure. In the 1950s, the Met began acquiring pieces from Robert E Hecht, an American-born antiquities dealer who spent decades running afoul of authorities and was ultimately put on trial on charges of antiquities smuggling in Italy. In 1959 and 1961, Italian prosecutors charged Hecht with antiquities smuggling and issued an arrest warrant for him in 1973, which was later revoked. But the Met kept buying from him anyway.
McNall said he avoided the underworld that supplied his business partner with relics. “This is a mafia-run business, and you have to be kind of careful,” McNall said of Hecht’s dealings in Italy and Turkey. “These are tough guys, so my view of it always was: ‘Let Bob handle it.’ I don’t want to deal with that shit. I’m not going to go over there and deal with these kind of guys.”
The charge against Rosen in Italy was cited in a sprawling criminal case against Giacomo Medici, a notorious antiquities smuggler convicted in Italy in 2004. The Italian judgment against Medici states that Rosen had helped sell the J Paul Getty Museum a stolen ancient tripod. The Met’s publicly available origin records for Celestial Dancer do not give any hint of how the work left India. An archived version of the Met’s website from 2016 states that the piece “ornamented a north Indian Hindu temple” in present day Uttar Pradesh. This language no longer appears on the museum’s website.no information about how the museum knew where it had come from and provided no information on how it believed the piece had left the country.
“The Met was established to be in competition with the major museums around the world,” said Erin Thompson, professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It wants one of everything. When you put those conditions together, it’s pretty dangerous in terms of making the most ethical decisions.”
“It’s very, very rare for objects to have the level of provenance that we would need to be able to ethically acquire them,” said Bronwyn Campbell, the National Gallery’s senior provenance curator.More than 40 years later, the citizens of Bungmati, in Nepal, still go without their original statue of Shreedhar Vishnu.
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