A Change of Guard

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Wednesday 3 October 2012

The Cambodian Government Wants Its Footless Statue Back from the Norton Simon Museum

October 2, 2012, 
www.artinfo.com
 
The Cambodian government is asking the United States to help it recover two works of thousand-year-old Hindu art it says were stolen from their rightful home in northern Cambodia in the 1970s. The first, which it began to publicly seek in February, is in the hands of Sotheby’s. Now, the Asian nation is going after the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena to claim the two-ton warrior sculpture’s twin. 
Identifiable by their sawed-off feet — the remains of which are said to be found at the Prasat Chen temple complex in Koh Ker — the two statues were purchased in 1975 from the British auction house Spink for approximately $9,000,000, according to court papers.
According to the New York Times, several obstacles stand in the way of bringing the statues back to southeast Asia. To begin with, their purchaser, the husband of a Belgian woman referred to as Ms. Ruspoli di Poggio, has been otherwise impossible to identify. The Cambodian government admits that it’s been aware that one of the statues has been display at the Norton Simon since 1980, but has made no effort to reclaim it until now. “This isn’t the strongest case of knowledge of stolen property and ownership by clear and unambiguous language,” Judge George B. Daniels told prosecutors in federal district court in Manhattan on Thursday.
— Reid Singer

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