Has the second domino tipped over?

Is the German Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters triggering a chain reaction in the international museum world with the fundamental decision announced on April 30th that there will be "substantial returns" of Benin bronzes to Nigeria?

The major world museums in London and Paris have so far shown no inclination to follow the German example. But now there's news from New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art will return Benin bronzes to Nigeria. More precisely: two Benin bronzes, portrait reliefs of a warrior and a court official from the sixteenth century.

Like most of the top pieces in the Benin collections, they come from the booty the British took when they conquered the capital of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897.

But when the Nigerian colleague of Ms. Grütters picks up the two pieces in New York, it will be a return not only in the moral sense.

The reliefs belonged to the Nigerian state before and were part of the collections of the National Museum of Lagos.

In 1950 the British Museum handed over 25 works to what was then the British colony of Nigeria.

The two New York records were lost to the museum in Lagos at an unknown date.

Integrity of the collection

Whether through theft or embezzlement, is irrelevant for the Metropolitan Museum's decision to treat the two pieces donated by a collector in 1991 as looted art.

Museums have a fundamental interest in the integrity of museum collections, which in France even has legal status.

Naturally, the Metropolitan Museum also owns a number of items from the booty from 1897, which ended up in New York without going through another museum.

Their provenances tell stories of the aesthetic appreciation of the testimonies of the royal cult of the Edo Empire.

A king's head belonged to the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the famous ivory mask of a queen mother belonged to the anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman.

Apparently, New York is not thinking of selling this museum property just because the chain of employment began in a colonial war.

There is no lack of symbolic staining of individual objects: Seligman acquired the mask from the estate of Sir Ralph Moor, the British consul general who captured the King of Benin in 1897 and committed suicide in 1909.

When the two reliefs return to Nigeria, you will certainly not lose sight of them there, even if a substantial delivery from Germany is soon to be added.

Nevertheless, it remains true that universal museums guarantee the accessibility of world art because they are scattered around the world.