Yet another ancient statue looted in the 1970s from a single remote temple in the jungles of Cambodia has turned up in the United States, this time at Christie’s, which is voluntarily paying to return it to its homeland.
Christie’s
sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological
figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought
it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture
had been looted.
On
Tuesday, after reviewing a Cambodian claim for more than a year, the
Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., said it too would return a huge statue that Cambodian officials have said was stolen from the same temple.
“The
dam has broken,” Helen Ibbitson Jessup, an expert on Khmer sculpture
who is helping Cambodia recover the statues, said of the returns, now
totaling five items. “One assumes they were looted at the same moment,
then widely distributed,” she added.
Cambodian
experts say that two other American museums, the Denver Art Museum and
the Cleveland Museum of Art, have statues from the temple, but officials
at those museums say they have received no evidence that their works
were illicitly taken.
The
two latest returns coincide with a ceremony on Wednesday at which
federal officials in New York will return a statue to Cambodia that
Sotheby’s had hoped to sell for $3 million in 2011. Sotheby’s pulled the
item from sale, and, in late 2012, the United States Attorney’s Office
in Manhattan sued the auction house on Cambodia’s behalf, contending that it had trafficked in stolen property. In a settlement reached last December,
the auction house agreed to surrender the statue and the federal
government said it found no fault with the auction house’s conduct.
The
Christie’s statue depicts a character that antiquities experts say sat
on a pedestal only a few feet from the Sotheby’s statue, a far larger
sculpture representing a mythic Hindu warrior known as Duryodhana. Both
were part of a unique grouping of 10th-century sandstone works created
at the height of the Koh Ker dynastic period, known for its huge yet
sophisticated statuary.
The
Norton Simon work, known as Bhima, stood in a fighting posture against
Duryodhana in the original grouping, which consisted of nine characters
from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. It had been in the museum’s
collection, identified as a “temple wrestler,” since 1976 when it had
been purchased from the New York dealer William H. Wolff, the museum said.
The
museum has previously said that Cambodian representatives had seen the
statue on display in California and had not raised any objections. In a
statement on Tuesday the Norton Simon said it continues to have “a
good-faith disagreement” with Cambodia over ownership of the Bhima, but
after sending representatives to Phnom Penh in March to meet with
government officials, it has “worked directly with Cambodia to come up
with a mutually acceptable solution,” and agreed to give it back as a
gift.
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Christie’s
declined to discuss how it had determined the sculpture it sold had
originally been looted. It had auctioned the Pandava statue twice, once
in 2000 and again in 2009
for $146,500. It declined to identify the name of the second buyer, but
said it contacted that person after reviewing the sale and determining
that the statue was stolen. “The purchaser was cooperative, concerned
about these issues and ultimately is pleased with the outcome,” Erin
McAndrew, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said.
Martin
Wilson, co-head of legal for Christie’s International, said that
repatriation issues can be difficult but added, “Christie’s believes it
has a useful role to play in facilitating the resolution of cultural
property issues between source countries and collectors in specific
circumstances.”
Chan
Tani, Cambodia’s secretary of state, praised Christie’s for “a very
generous approach” to the case. He said that the auction house had
contacted him in December and then worked out a complex and costly deal
with the owner to recover the object and pay for its return.
Sotheby’s
is prepared to pay for the return of its statue as well, according to
Andrew P. Gully, Sotheby’s worldwide director of communications. “We
have provided information about several professional moving companies
familiar with transporting antiquities,” he said in a statement, “and
have offered to pay reasonable and documented costs of the transfer to
Cambodia.”
Ms.
Jessup credited the Metropolitan Museum for starting the trend by
returning its two statues, called the Kneeling Attendants. Those
colossal statues, obtained in the 1980s, flanked the entry to the
museum’s Southeast Asian exhibition hall. She said that, with the Met’s
decision, “a moral precedent was established and the tide of opinion
clearly flowed towards restitution.”
Mr.
Chan Tani said that recovering all the statues from the Prasat Chen
temple is a national priority. The goal is to reattach the statues to
their pedestals, which were left behind by the looters, and place them
all together in a special display area in the national museum.
Anne
LeMaistre, the Unesco representative in Phnom Penh who is involved in
the Koh Ker recovery efforts, said: “It just demonstrates that the
looting which took place at Koh Ker was an organized one and that all
pieces were stolen by the same group and following the same patterns of
clandestine excavations, illicit export and sale over time. By chance
for the looters, the site of Koh Ker owned an extraordinary
concentration of exceptional sculptures absolutely untouched because of
its remote and inaccessible location.”
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