Khmer Sculptures
Today we went to activate our new 2024 membership cards at The Metropolitan Museum.
Actually we went to see the Khmer sculptures that have been much in the news as of late, and were forced to use the Member Entrance because nearly all of the museum's annual 3.2 million visitors seemed to be queued up out front. In the rain.
But, back to the point of our visit.
In case you haven't been following, a few weeks ago The Met agreed to de-accession a number of works associated with dealer Douglas Latchford in order to repatriate them back to their countries of origin - Cambodia and Thailand.
They are now (still) on temporary display in The Met’s Southeast Asian galleries, re-labeled to indicate the change in ownership while arrangements are made for their return.
The story of how these sculptures wound up in The Met’s collection would make a great movie.
At the very end of an illustrious career buying objects and rubbing-elbows with thankful culture ministers and museum board members, Latchford was indicted in 2019 by federal prosecutors in New York, accused of trafficking looted relics and falsifying documents.
The charges were based the testimony of a reformed looter who identified dozens of objects in The Met collections that he personally plundered from Khmer shrines and sold to intermediaries of Latchford’s.
The indictment was dismissed on Latchford’s death, but acting on the new information that came to light from the investigation, the museum signed an agreement to return everything that he had touched.
De-accessioning is rare, and not linked to the fashionable (and false) narrative that "the whole collection is looted". For example, more-recently, The Met moved to de-accession a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, a work they have a clear provenance for and ownership of.
The Met is taking responsibility and announced a slate of new initiatives related to the Museum’s collecting practices including a focused review of its holdings, hiring additional provenance researchers, and using its platform to support and contribute to public discourse on the topic.
More here ...
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2023/return-of-khmer-works
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/arts/met-return-ancient-treasures.html
