The statue is alleged to have been looted from an ancient temple at Koh Ker, Cambodia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
The controversy over a 1,000-year-old Cambodian sculpture that came up at a Sotheby's sale points to the murky trade in looted artifacts
Tom Mashberg & Ralph Blumenthal
business-standard.com
Mar 03, 2012,
Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby’s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The statue, a sandstone masterwork with a catalogue estimate of $2 million to $3 million, was pulled from auction at the last minute last March after the Cambodian government complained it had been “illegally removed” from the country.
The Department of Homeland Security has opened an investigation, but Cambodian officials say they have held off asking for the piece to be seized while they negotiate with Sotheby’s for a private purchase. The auction house says that the seller is a “noble European lady” who acquired it in 1975. Although it was severed from its feet and pedestal, which were left behind at a remote Cambodian archaeological site, Sotheby’s says there is no proof that it was taken illegally.
The quiet tussle over the relic reveals the swampy terrain of auctioning antiquities with incomplete or disputed pedigrees. Sellers with a good-faith belief in their ownership rights enter a landscape in which ethics and regulations are evolving, governments are increasingly assertive, and lawyers versed in arcane statutes are as necessary as jungle guides.
“Whatever the letter of the law may state, in the end you have to ask yourself, ‘Does the item pass the smell test?’” says Matthew F Bogdanos, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a lawyer, who was awarded a National Humanities Medal for leading the hunt for treasures ransacked from the Baghdad Museum in 2003.
Archaeologists and Cambodian officials say the case of the footless statue is poignant because researchers have found the very pedestal and feet belonging to the artwork. The discovery was made in Koh Ker, 60 miles northeast of the Angkor Wat temple complex; Koh Ker, another city in the Khmer empire, was at one time a rival capital to Angkor, which was once the largest city in the pre-industrial world, perhaps more than three times the area of New York City today.
The sculpture, which is five feet tall and weighs 250 pounds, is one of a pair of scowling athlete-combatants in intricate headdresses from the mid 900s and come from one of Koh Ker’s temples; it is about 200 years older than the sculptures at Angkor Wat.
Archaeologists say all clues suggest the work at Sotheby’s was plundered in the 1970s amid the chaos of power struggle and genocide, when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia, and looters hacked their way into long-inaccessible temples, pillaged priceless antiquities and sold them to Thai and Western collectors. “Every red flag on the planet should have gone off when this was offered for sale,” says Herbert V. Larson Jr., a New Orleans lawyer and antiquities expert who teaches legal issues involving smuggled artifacts. “It screams ‘loot.’ ”
Laws governing the repatriation of disputed artifacts are complex and differ from nation to nation. In Cambodia’s case, because the statue was exported “long before the passage of a 1993 Cambodian law that nationalised cultural heritage,” says Jane A. Levine, senior vice president and worldwide compliance director for Sotheby’s, there were no restrictions on its sale or auction.
Nonetheless, the global controversy surrounding looted artifacts has led many American museums to adopt ethical guidelines. In 2004 the Association of Art Museum Directors declared “member museums should not acquire” any undocumented works “that were removed after November 1970, regardless of any applicable statutes of limitation.”
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Sotheby's trying to resolve Cambodia relic dispute
Written by ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press
Friday, 02 March 2012 11:44
The statue is alleged to have been looted from an ancient temple at Koh Ker, Cambodia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
NEW YORK (AP) – Sotheby's is working to help return an ancient statue to Cambodia after the government claimed it had been illegally removed from the country decades ago.
The auction house said Wednesday it took the 1,000-year-old relic off the auction block a day before a sale scheduled for March 24, 2011, after Cambodia sent a letter asking Sotheby's to do so and arrange for its return.
The 5-foot-tall sandstone sculpture of a mythical warrior in an elaborate headdress had been estimated to sell for up to $3 million.
Sotheby's identified the seller as a European collector who purchased the work from a London dealer in 1975, almost two decades before a 1993 Cambodia law prohibited the removal of cultural artifacts without government permission.
The auction house said it informed Cambodia about the statue in writing months before the sale, in November 2010.
Jane Levine, senior vice president and worldwide compliance director for Sotheby's, said the government did not respond until March 23, 2011, a day before the auction, when the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO contacted the auction house on Cambodia's behalf.
Cambodia “did not allege that the statue constituted stolen property, did not identify any basis to contest the owner's title to the property and did not allege that it would be unlawful for Sotheby's to sell the statue or that Cambodia owned the statue,” said Levine.
The Associated Press was not immediately able to obtain the letter.
In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, an official in charge of Ministry of Culture's heritage department confirmed that Cambodia had sent a letter asking for the statue's sale to be halted. The official, Hab Touch, said the 10th-century statue was looted from the Koh Ker temple. He had no details on when it was taken or who allegedly took it, saying only that it had been smuggled abroad.
The story was first reported in New York Times on Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that it was working closely with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the Cambodian government “to look into the matter and determine the proper course of action.”
Spokeswoman Danielle Bennett declined on Wednesday to answer further questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
After the seller and Sotheby's voluntarily withdrew the statue from the sale, the auction house said it asked Cambodia to come up with a solution agreeable to both parties.
In May, Cambodia endorsed a plan to seek a buyer to purchase the statue and donate it to Cambodia. It subsequently identified a Hungarian antiquities collector as a potential buyer, with whom Sotheby's has been in talks, the auction house said.
“We are also very interested in hearing from anyone else who would be interested in participating in such a sale process,” added Levine, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who was appointed to President Barack Obama's Cultural Property Advisory Committee last year. “Sotheby's would like to find a solution that is fair to both Cambodia and to the owner who bought the sculpture in good faith almost 40 years ago.”
Cambodian diplomatic officials in the United States were not immediately available for comment Wednesday. Anne LeMaistre, a Phnom Penh-based UNESCO representative who is involved in the talks, told The Times “buying back such items can seem distasteful, but sadly it is not unusual when the country's aim is return of the property.”
The work is one of a pair of statues from a temple in Koh Ker, north of the famous Angkor Wat complex of temples.
Archeologists have matched the footless statue to a pedestal and feet at a Cambodian archaeological site. The other statue has been at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., since 1980, and also has been matched to its base at the site.
Many ancient artifacts were looted and damaged in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge ruled the country.
Eric Bourdonneau, the archaeologist who matched both statues to their pedestals, told the Times the relics were looted in the early 1970s.
Levine said Sotheby's was aware before accepting the statue for sale that it had come from Koh Ker. But she said it did not know when and how it was removed “as the circumstances of that are to date unknown.”
She said the statue was purchased in “good faith” and exported long before the 1993 Cambodian law was passed, “and Cambodia has not claimed otherwise.”
Levine said a law dating to the 1920s may have provided certain export restrictions but did not nationalize ownership of Cambodian relics, and therefore could not retroactively “redefine clearly established legal title rights.”
___
Online: www.sothebys.com
___
Associated Press writer Sopheng Cheang contributed to this report from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
business-standard.com
Mar 03, 2012,
Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby’s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The statue, a sandstone masterwork with a catalogue estimate of $2 million to $3 million, was pulled from auction at the last minute last March after the Cambodian government complained it had been “illegally removed” from the country.
The Department of Homeland Security has opened an investigation, but Cambodian officials say they have held off asking for the piece to be seized while they negotiate with Sotheby’s for a private purchase. The auction house says that the seller is a “noble European lady” who acquired it in 1975. Although it was severed from its feet and pedestal, which were left behind at a remote Cambodian archaeological site, Sotheby’s says there is no proof that it was taken illegally.
The quiet tussle over the relic reveals the swampy terrain of auctioning antiquities with incomplete or disputed pedigrees. Sellers with a good-faith belief in their ownership rights enter a landscape in which ethics and regulations are evolving, governments are increasingly assertive, and lawyers versed in arcane statutes are as necessary as jungle guides.
“Whatever the letter of the law may state, in the end you have to ask yourself, ‘Does the item pass the smell test?’” says Matthew F Bogdanos, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a lawyer, who was awarded a National Humanities Medal for leading the hunt for treasures ransacked from the Baghdad Museum in 2003.
Archaeologists and Cambodian officials say the case of the footless statue is poignant because researchers have found the very pedestal and feet belonging to the artwork. The discovery was made in Koh Ker, 60 miles northeast of the Angkor Wat temple complex; Koh Ker, another city in the Khmer empire, was at one time a rival capital to Angkor, which was once the largest city in the pre-industrial world, perhaps more than three times the area of New York City today.
The sculpture, which is five feet tall and weighs 250 pounds, is one of a pair of scowling athlete-combatants in intricate headdresses from the mid 900s and come from one of Koh Ker’s temples; it is about 200 years older than the sculptures at Angkor Wat.
Archaeologists say all clues suggest the work at Sotheby’s was plundered in the 1970s amid the chaos of power struggle and genocide, when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia, and looters hacked their way into long-inaccessible temples, pillaged priceless antiquities and sold them to Thai and Western collectors. “Every red flag on the planet should have gone off when this was offered for sale,” says Herbert V. Larson Jr., a New Orleans lawyer and antiquities expert who teaches legal issues involving smuggled artifacts. “It screams ‘loot.’ ”
Laws governing the repatriation of disputed artifacts are complex and differ from nation to nation. In Cambodia’s case, because the statue was exported “long before the passage of a 1993 Cambodian law that nationalised cultural heritage,” says Jane A. Levine, senior vice president and worldwide compliance director for Sotheby’s, there were no restrictions on its sale or auction.
Nonetheless, the global controversy surrounding looted artifacts has led many American museums to adopt ethical guidelines. In 2004 the Association of Art Museum Directors declared “member museums should not acquire” any undocumented works “that were removed after November 1970, regardless of any applicable statutes of limitation.”
---------------------
Sotheby's trying to resolve Cambodia relic dispute
Written by ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press
Friday, 02 March 2012 11:44
The statue is alleged to have been looted from an ancient temple at Koh Ker, Cambodia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
NEW YORK (AP) – Sotheby's is working to help return an ancient statue to Cambodia after the government claimed it had been illegally removed from the country decades ago.
The auction house said Wednesday it took the 1,000-year-old relic off the auction block a day before a sale scheduled for March 24, 2011, after Cambodia sent a letter asking Sotheby's to do so and arrange for its return.
The 5-foot-tall sandstone sculpture of a mythical warrior in an elaborate headdress had been estimated to sell for up to $3 million.
Sotheby's identified the seller as a European collector who purchased the work from a London dealer in 1975, almost two decades before a 1993 Cambodia law prohibited the removal of cultural artifacts without government permission.
The auction house said it informed Cambodia about the statue in writing months before the sale, in November 2010.
Jane Levine, senior vice president and worldwide compliance director for Sotheby's, said the government did not respond until March 23, 2011, a day before the auction, when the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO contacted the auction house on Cambodia's behalf.
Cambodia “did not allege that the statue constituted stolen property, did not identify any basis to contest the owner's title to the property and did not allege that it would be unlawful for Sotheby's to sell the statue or that Cambodia owned the statue,” said Levine.
The Associated Press was not immediately able to obtain the letter.
In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, an official in charge of Ministry of Culture's heritage department confirmed that Cambodia had sent a letter asking for the statue's sale to be halted. The official, Hab Touch, said the 10th-century statue was looted from the Koh Ker temple. He had no details on when it was taken or who allegedly took it, saying only that it had been smuggled abroad.
The story was first reported in New York Times on Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that it was working closely with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the Cambodian government “to look into the matter and determine the proper course of action.”
Spokeswoman Danielle Bennett declined on Wednesday to answer further questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
After the seller and Sotheby's voluntarily withdrew the statue from the sale, the auction house said it asked Cambodia to come up with a solution agreeable to both parties.
In May, Cambodia endorsed a plan to seek a buyer to purchase the statue and donate it to Cambodia. It subsequently identified a Hungarian antiquities collector as a potential buyer, with whom Sotheby's has been in talks, the auction house said.
“We are also very interested in hearing from anyone else who would be interested in participating in such a sale process,” added Levine, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who was appointed to President Barack Obama's Cultural Property Advisory Committee last year. “Sotheby's would like to find a solution that is fair to both Cambodia and to the owner who bought the sculpture in good faith almost 40 years ago.”
Cambodian diplomatic officials in the United States were not immediately available for comment Wednesday. Anne LeMaistre, a Phnom Penh-based UNESCO representative who is involved in the talks, told The Times “buying back such items can seem distasteful, but sadly it is not unusual when the country's aim is return of the property.”
The work is one of a pair of statues from a temple in Koh Ker, north of the famous Angkor Wat complex of temples.
Archeologists have matched the footless statue to a pedestal and feet at a Cambodian archaeological site. The other statue has been at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., since 1980, and also has been matched to its base at the site.
Many ancient artifacts were looted and damaged in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge ruled the country.
Eric Bourdonneau, the archaeologist who matched both statues to their pedestals, told the Times the relics were looted in the early 1970s.
Levine said Sotheby's was aware before accepting the statue for sale that it had come from Koh Ker. But she said it did not know when and how it was removed “as the circumstances of that are to date unknown.”
She said the statue was purchased in “good faith” and exported long before the 1993 Cambodian law was passed, “and Cambodia has not claimed otherwise.”
Levine said a law dating to the 1920s may have provided certain export restrictions but did not nationalize ownership of Cambodian relics, and therefore could not retroactively “redefine clearly established legal title rights.”
___
Online: www.sothebys.com
___
Associated Press writer Sopheng Cheang contributed to this report from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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