The fruits of the abduction – Newspaper Kommersant No. 164 (7365) of 09/07/2022

Investigators at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York have seized 27 antiquities worth more than $13 million from the famed Metropolitan Museum (The Met). According to the warrants, all confiscated artifacts from the collections of the art departments of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt turned out to be stolen. Tells Kira Dolinina.

The news, first released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, concerns 27 individual items from the museum’s collections. Items seized under three separate warrants issued within the last six months will be returned to their countries of origin: 21 items to Italy, six to Egypt. The handover ceremony is scheduled for this week.

This group of objects does not have a single origin or source of entry into the museum. This indicates that the investigation did not proceed from the “root cause” – one or another dishonest dealer or antique dealer known to law enforcement officers, but from the museum’s collection itself. There is nothing surprising in this approach: for the last thirty years, all self-respecting museums, especially American ones, which have always had money to buy more and more new works of art, shake up their collections in search of “impure” things. This process began in the 1990s with the intensification of the process of restitution of works of art and other valuables belonging to Jews who died in the Holocaust. The first, in 1996, then the museums of France “suffered”, followed by the Dutch, the Austrians, and then the snowball rolled all over the world. Databases have been created, special organizations have been created to search for works of art stolen from Jews, crowds of lawyers specialize in such claims, and all museums swore and swore that they would strictly check their collections.

This process has yielded results – the most high-profile cases, most likely, have already been resolved. However, behind the wave of stories of completely shamelessly robbed Jewish families, an ugly situation with museum purchases in general came to light: there was a lot of stolen art in the best collections of the world, and some of its purchases were made even in those years when they were looking for “Jewish” art with might and main.

The problem of provenance (history of origin) of a work of art has several implications. On the one hand, provenance is being investigated in order to have additional evidence of the authenticity of the subject. This mainly applies to works of painting, graphics, sculpture and everything else related to the New and Contemporary times. With antiquities, the situation is much more complicated: the ways of their distribution are worse documented, black archaeologists have never been translated, wars and other cataclysms lead to the looting of museums, private collections, archaeological sites, etc. This situation plays into the hands of both sellers and museums – up to for the time being, it was possible to turn a blind eye to where exactly this or that thing came from, because often it was not recorded anywhere before it was placed in the museum collection.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art fell victim to this very situation. And also their frivolity – they knew, after all, that the process of searching for stolen items was on the rise. For example, the owner of a gallery in Switzerland, Gianfranco Becchina: an investigation launched in Italy in 2001 confirmed that Becchina received stolen antiques from Greece. In 2011, a hoard of 6,300 Greco-Roman artifacts, which had been stolen in the early 1970s, was confiscated from him. The Metropolitan also bought things from Bekkina – for example, among the confiscated items is a terracotta kylix from 470 BC. e. worth $1.2 million, which was bought from Beckina in 1979. What prevented the New York museum from verifying its purchases from Bekkina’s Galerie Antike Kunst Palladion in Basel after the dealer was found to be a marauder? In total, there are eight things on the Manhattan prosecutor’s list that originate from Beckina. Or another item confiscated today: a terracotta figurine of a Greek goddess from around 400 BC. e. worth $400,000 was a 2000 gift from Robin Simes, a British antiquities dealer. On cooperation with Simes, the Getty Museum has already burned down, having bought from him in 1988 for $ 18 million a giant statue of Aphrodite, which had to be returned to Italy in 2007 as stolen.

Today, the Metropolitan is forced to make excuses. For example, his statement says that information about Italian items was only recently provided to the museum by DA investigators, that the museum cooperated diligently with investigators, and that the museum’s internal checks on acquisitions have become more stringent in the decades since the items went on sale. “Collection norms have changed significantly over the past decades,” the museum said in a statement. “And The Met’s policies and procedures in this regard have been continually reviewed over the past 20 years.” As for changes, the remark is correct, but 20 years is quite enough to pay more attention to innovations.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg rightly pointed out that, given the work of his antiquities department alone, which repatriated about 2,000 artifacts, it should be no secret to museums, collectors, and auction houses that some of those that ended up in their the hands of the items could be stolen. “My office’s investigations have clearly exposed these networks,” he said, “and have released a wealth of information to the public that the art world can actively use to return antiques to where they rightfully belong.”

It doesn’t take a visionary to predict that stories like this will come to light more often. Before the Met closed the story, it became known that the prosecutor’s office had issued a warrant for the confiscation of another item from its collection: a sixth-century stone sculpture depicting the Hindu mother goddess, or Matrika, which was acquired in 1993. The reason for the confiscation has not yet been announced.