New York:
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art said Wednesday it would investigate the provenance of “several hundred or more” objects that were possibly stolen from their country of origin, and then return them where necessary.
The move comes as Manhattan prosecutors work to repatriate hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of artifacts from dozens of countries around the world.
The staff will hire additional “original” researchers to study some of the museum’s 1.5 million works, director Max Hollin said in a letter published on the institute’s website.
“We will broaden, intensify, and speed up our research into all works that have come to the museum from the art dealers under investigation,” he wrote.
Hollin said that most of the suspected pieces were acquired between 1970 and 1990, “when less information was available and less scrutiny was done on the provenance of many of these works.”
The Mate has been cited in court cases relating to acts of piracy.
On Tuesday, Manhattan’s district attorney returned to China two 7th-century stone carvings worth $3.5 million that were smuggled out of the country in the early 1990s.
Authorities seized the artefacts from the Met earlier this year, where they had been since 1998.
The carvings were among 89 antiquities from 10 different countries purchased by Shelby White, a private art collector and Met trustee in New York.
Since January 2022, DA has returned more than 950 antiquities valued at more than $165 million to 19 countries.
“The Met has a long history of rigorous review of our collections and the return of art when appropriate,” Hollin said, citing returns in Egypt, Greece, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria, Turkey and India.
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