June 02, 2012
The Jakarta Globe
New York. The Cambodian government is convinced that two life-size 10th-century statues that have anchored the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Southeast Asian galleries for nearly two decades were
looted from a jungle temple and plans to ask for their return, Cambodian
officials said.
“The government is very serious about moving
this forward, and we are getting much legal advice,” said Im Sokrithy, a
director of Apsara, the Cambodian agency that oversees heritage and
land management at the sprawling temple complex where, archaeologists
say, the statues stood for centuries. “We are taking a forceful
position, and we hope they can be returned.”
The twin sandstone
figures, called the Kneeling Attendants, flank the doorway of the
gallery where the Met displays its small but globally significant
collection of artifacts from the glory days of Khmer civilization.
Experts
say they appear to have been taken around 1970, at about the same time
as a companion piece, a mythic warrior figure that the US government
sought to seize last month on Cambodia’s behalf from Sotheby’s, where it
had been placed for sale.
Both cases illustrate Cambodia’s
growing interest in restoring its cultural heritage, but the debate is
somewhat different when a contested artifact is held by a museum rather
than a private collector or auction house. Many in the museum world and
beyond have argued that the higher profiles, larger audiences and
advanced security systems at some institutions make them more
appropriate places to house cherished artifacts and ensure they are
available for worldwide study and appreciation.
The Met has
previously returned a Khmer item, a 10th-century Shiva head that was
given to Im’s agency in 1997 at the urging of Martin Lerner, the Met’s
Southeast Asian curator at the time.
Anne LeMaistre, the UNESCO
representative in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, said her agency is
assembling a report laying out evidence that the Met statues and the
Sotheby’s warrior belonged to a 12-statue Khmer empire grouping broken
up when Cambodia was destabilized by civil war.
The Met, which
was given the statues by benefactors in four pieces between 1987 and
1992, said it has not been contacted by Cambodia and has no information
to suggest the works were stolen. The museum acknowledged that beyond
the names of the donors it has no records on the statues’ origins,
despite a longstanding policy to investigate the history of donated
antiquities.
“No one is concealing anything,” said Harold Holzer,
the Met’s senior vice president for external affairs. “I’d like nothing
better that to find more documentation.”
Holzer cautioned
against using current standards for museum collecting to evaluate the
propriety of acquisitions dating back more than two decades.
“There
were no real prevailing restrictions against accepting these works of
art,” he said of the period, “especially if, by doing so, they might be
protected from disappearance completely from public view and from
study.”
The Met’s policy in 1992 allowed it to accept works
without a detailed provenance. Such acceptance, though, was supposed to
come after an effort had been made to root out the history of a piece in
case it was illicit. In recent years, as countries have increasingly
sought to protect their cultural heritage, the Met and other museums
have adopted a stricter policy. It discourages the acceptance of
antiquities like the Kneeling Attendants if they lack a documented
history showing they left their country of origin before 1970.
In
the wake of the Sotheby’s case Cambodian officials have formed a task
force to return artifacts removed from their county and possibly held by
US and other foreign museums.
Prak Sonnara, deputy director
general for cultural heritage with Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and
Fine Arts, said that once the government has compiled evidence to
convince the Met of the validity of its claim, he would ask for the
statues back “on behalf of the people of Cambodia.”
Lerner, who
was the Met’s Southeast Asian curator from 1972 to 2004, said he could
not recall what was done to research the provenance of the attendant
statues. He said that contacting the Cambodian government by letter of
inquiry — as prescribed in rules laid down in 1971 by a former Met
director, Thomas Hoving — was not an option at the time of the gifts.
“Basically there was no government to send it to at the time,” he said. “It was all in a state of disarray at the time.”
Holzer
said the policy of sending such letters was discontinued years ago — he
could not say exactly when — because they drew a response so
infrequently.
Archaeologists believe the Kneeling Attendants
stood for about 1,000 years at the Prasat Chen temple in a vast site
called Koh Ker, about 200 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, said Eric
Bourdonneau, who directs a project at the site overseen by the French
School of Asian Studies. The Met statues, the experts say, stood a few
yards from the Sotheby’s warrior, a figure known as Duryodhana.
“They
belong to the government of Cambodia,” said Bertrand Porte, chief of
conservation at the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh, “and should
be returned and all reunited and allowed to be together just as they
were for 1,000 years.”
The attendants, about 4 feet tall and
weighing more than 200 pounds each, were put on display in 1994 when the
Met opened its new Southeast Asian galleries. The heads of the two
statues had been donated in 1987 and 1989, and the two torsos were given
together to the museum in 1992.
Holzer said he would be
surprised if Cambodia sought the return of the statues, because they
have been on display for so long and a number of Cambodian officials
have toured the galleries without ever raising a claim.
Three of
the items — a head and both torsos — are listed as gifts from Douglas
A.J. Latchford, a British citizen living in Thailand who has a vast
collection of Khmer antiquities and has been knighted by the Cambodian
government for returning 14th-century Khmer cultural treasures.
In
a telephone interview from Bangkok, Latchford, 80, said that he came
upon the three items when they were the property of Spink & Son, a
London dealer known for its sales of Asian art.
“Spinks had had
the pieces for some time,” Latchford said, “and they had not sold, so in
honor of the curator, who was Martin Lerner, they requested that I
would provide financial aid to donate them, and that’s what I did and
why they are in my name.”
Latchford said that he did not know
where Spink had gotten the items, that he never took possession of them,
and that he does not have any documents from the transaction. He
recalled spending about 10,000 pounds. A spokesman for Spink said it no
longer has any of the paperwork from that era.
The family that
donated the head of the other statue in 1987 also found it at Spink, a
year before the gift, and said it had not come with any information on
its provenance. Marsha Vargas Handley, the wife of Raymond G. Handley,
one of two donors, who has since died, said the purchase price was
$42,000.
Im, the director of Apsara, and Porte both said the
pieces were unique treasures from a brief period in Khmer history when
the seat of the empire shifted from Angkor to Koh Ker and the craft of
statuary flourished.
Federal prosecutors, in arguing for the
return of the Sotheby’s piece, have laid out evidence for why they
believe the temple was looted after 1970, during Cambodia’s chaotic and
bloody years of civil war, genocide and Vietnamese occupation. They are
compiling testimony from villagers who say the temple was virtually
unmolested until the 1970s, and the prosecutors noted that until the
late 1960s the area lacked the roads needed to carry away large and
heavy statuary.
Latchford, an author of “Adoration and Glory,” a
book of Khmer antiquities, who said he has studied their history and
origins for more than 40 years, noted that Khmer artifacts have been
pillaged for centuries.
Asked whether he thought the three items
might have been stolen more recently from Cambodia, he said: “I have no
reason to believe it is true or not true. I don’t know.”
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