The Metropolitan Museum of Art to Examine Provenance of Potentially Stolen Works and Return Them to their Countries of Origin if Necessary

AFP, published on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 6:34 p.m.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the most prestigious museums on the planet, will “examine” the provenance of some of its possibly stolen works of art and, if necessary, “return” them to the country of origin, the establishment said.

In a letter unveiled Tuesday evening by the New York Times and which the museum posted on its website on Wednesday, director Max Hollein announced that “it is incumbent on the ‘Met’, one of the greatest museums in the world and which holds a prominent place in the global art market, to become more intensely and proactively involved in the examination of certain parts of our collections”.

Concretely, the museum will allocate more “resources” to this inventory work by recruiting a team of researchers on the “provenance” of certain works of art and antiquities among the 1.5 million pieces it holds.

“We are going to broaden, accelerate and intensify our research on all the works that have reached the museum via art dealers who have been the subject of an investigation” by justice, assured Mr. Hollein, estimating that most of these suspect pieces were acquired by the Met “between 1970 and 1990”.

“The Met has a long history of carefully examining our collections and, where appropriate, returning works of art,” assured the director, citing the return of antiquities in recent years to “Egypt, Greece, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria, Turkey, and last month to India”.

Like all major Western museums, the Met is under pressure from a “changing climate on cultural heritage”, acknowledges Mr. Hollein, and the establishment has also been cited in court cases of possibly stolen works.

New York justice on Tuesday returned to China two 7th century stone funerary sculptures worth $ 3.5 million, which were trafficked internationally and seized at the Met. .

Manhattan prosecutors have been leading a vast campaign since 2020 to return antiquities looted from around 20 countries, which have landed in New York museums and galleries, including the Met and its wealthy collectors and donors.

The Chinese funerary sculptures had been the subject of a “loan from 1998 to 2023” to the Met by Shelby White, 85, administrator and philanthropist of the museum and from whom justice had seized in 2021 and 2022 about twenty works of stolen art.