Tang Chhin Sothy/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prasat Chen temple, which may be the home of some statues being returned to Cambodia and others in legal limbo.
By
TOM MASHBERG
Published: May 15, 2013
Buoyed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s decision this month to return two stolen statues,
Cambodia is asking other museums to examine any Khmer antiquities they
acquired after 1970, when a 20-year period of civil war and genocide
gave thieves free range to loot the country’s ancient temples. “We are calling on all American museums and collectors, that if they
have these statues unlawfully or illegally they should return them to
Cambodia,” Ek Tha, spokesman for the Council of Ministers, the nation’s
governing body, said this week. They “should follow the Metropolitan’s
lead,” he added.
Hundreds of Cambodian antiquities are in American museums, as well as in
the hands of foreign institutions and private collectors. Many were
acquired after 1970 and lack paperwork showing how they left Cambodia.
Cambodian officials said they are particularly interested in statues
they believe came from the same temple where the Met’s pair stood and
are thought to have been taken illegally after 1970.
That thousand-year-old temple, called Prasat Chen, featured two
narrative groupings of sculptures illustrating tales from Hindu epics.
The groupings had about a dozen statues in all, and six of them have
been traced to the United States.
Cambodia says the Denver Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the
Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., each have one statue connected
to Prasat Chen. Two other statues, a pair of kneeling attendants that
had flanked a doorway in the Met’s Southeast Asian galleries, are to be
returned next month.
A sixth statue, which is the subject of a federal court case in New
York, is held by Sotheby’s, which withdrew it from auction in 2011 after
a complaint from Cambodia. The United States Justice Department is
seeking to seize the statue on Cambodia’s behalf, but Sotheby’s
officials say it was acquired legally by its owner.
The auction house said it does not believe the Met’s decision will
affect its case. Experts say, however, that the return will likely
create pressure on the other three museums to review the provenance of
their statues.
“If other museums are confronted with the kind of evidence that the Met
was provided, I believe the Met’s actions will serve as an appropriate
example for them to follow,” said Stephen K. Urice, an associate
professor and expert on cultural heritage and museum law at the
University of Miami School of Law.
The Norton Simon Museum says it is cooperating with federal officials who inquired about its statue as part of their investigation into the provenance of the statue held by Sotheby’s.
Cambodian officials have yet to contact the Denver or Cleveland museums,
but said they plan to. Spokesmen for those museums said they could not
comment fully until an actual claim on their statues was made.
There has been no suggestion of impropriety on the part of any of the
museums, nor have the museums acknowledged, as the Met has, that the
items come from Prasat Chen and their provenance might be questionable.
Many collectors of Khmer art say that their efforts and those of museums
actually served to safeguard statues that might have been destroyed
during Cambodia’s war years.
The Met’s decision came after two officials visited Cambodia and came
away convinced that its items were looted from Prasat Chen, part of a
vast complex in the jungle called Koh Ker. It was the seat of the Khmer
empire from 928 to 944 but is now a remote collection of ruins
surrounding a 120-foot pyramid about 200 miles northeast of Phnom Penh.
Eric Bourdonneau, an archaeologist and expert on Koh Ker with the French
School of Asian Studies who works in Cambodia, said he made the
connection to the Denver and Cleveland items after studying the remnants
of the statues — bases and feet — that at the temple. “It was
deliberate destruction by modern looters whose spoils fed the art
market,” he said.
Cambodians say the statues in Denver of the god Rama and in Cleveland of
the monkey god Hanuman — came from an ensemble that once depicted a
fierce fracas between monkey kings as recounted in the Ramayana, a Hindu
epic. The statue of the battling monkeys, Valin and Sugriva, is in a
national museum in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.
Kristy Bassuener, a spokeswoman for the Denver Art Museum, said the Rama
statue was acquired in 1986 with money from several patrons. She said
the museum does not have any other information about its provenance.
“The museum is committed to further research regarding the history and
provenance of objects in its collection,” she said. “If the museum
learns new facts related to this piece, I would be happy to share that
information.”
Asked about the Hanuman’s provenance,
David Franklin, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, pointed to
information on the museum’s Web site, which says the figure was acquired
in 1982 with money from by the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund.
“It is the museum’s policy not to discuss publicly the substance of
these types of inquiries,” he added, “unless and until there is a
definitive resolution.”
The fund did not return a call seeking comment.
Experts say the Norton Simon statue, known as the Bhima, or wrestler,
comes from a second grouping, about 200 feet away, that depicts his
brawl with Duryodhana, as told in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The
Duryodhana statue is now held by Sotheby’s.
The Met’s two statues represent brothers of Bhima who knelt in
attendance during the fight. The Met’s statues were acquired in four
pieces from donors between 1987 and 1992. Those statues, plus the one
from Sotheby’s, are known to have gone through a London art dealer,
Spink & Son, in the early 1970s.
Cambodian officials say the broken pedestals of all those sculptures were left in the ground by the looters.
Norton Simon, who died in 1993, bought the Bhima in 1976 from a Madison
Avenue Asian art dealer and gave it to the museum in 1980. “In more than
three decades, the foundation’s ownership of the sculpture has never
been questioned,” the museum said in a statement.
The Sotheby’s statue was shipped to New York in 2010 to be sold at
auction by its Belgian owner, Decia Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa. Her
husband, who has since died, acquired it in 1975 and Sotheby’s estimated
its value to be $2 million to $3 million.
Experts on antiquities trafficking say teams of bandits used ox carts to
trundle their trophies along jungle trails and into Thailand, 15 miles
north, during Cambodia’s war years.
In their case against Sotheby’s, lawyers for the United States
attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York say the statue
was one of many shipped illicitly from Bangkok to the United States and
Europe after 1970.
Sotheby’s says the statue was legally purchased in good faith from a
reputable London auction house in 1975 and it “denies knowledge that the
Duryodhana statue was stolen.”
Cambodia’s secretary of state, Chan Tani, said the looting of Koh Ker is
especially crushing because its style of statuary exists nowhere else.
“They are part of our soul as a nation,” he said, “and they were brutally stolen.”
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