In a letter released Tuesday night by The New York Times and posted Wednesday on its website, director Max Hollein announced that "it is incumbent upon the Met, one of the world's largest museums and one of the world's leading museums in the global art market, to become more intensely and proactively involved in reviewing parts of our collections."
Concretely, the museum will allocate more "resources" to this inventory work by recruiting a team of researchers on the "provenance" of certain works of art and antiques among 1.5 million pieces it holds.
"We will expand, accelerate and intensify our research on all works that have reached the museum through art dealers that have been investigated," Hollein said, adding that most of these suspicious pieces were acquired by the Met "between 1970 and 1990."
"The Met has a long history of conscientious examination of our collections and, where appropriate, restitution of works of art," the director said, citing the return of antiquities in recent years to "Egypt, Greece, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria, Turkey, and last month to India."
Like all major Western museums, the Met is under pressure from a "changing climate on cultural heritage," Hollein acknowledges, and the institution has also been cited in court cases of possibly stolen works.
Thus, the New York justice on Tuesday returned to China two funerary stone sculptures of the 7th century worth $ 3.5 million, which were the subject of international trafficking and were seized at the Met.
Since 2020, Manhattan prosecutors have been conducting a vast campaign to return antiquities looted from twenty countries, which have landed in museums and galleries in New York, including the Met and its wealthy collectors and donors.
The Chinese funerary sculptures had been the subject of a "loan from 1998 to 2023" to the Met by Shelby White, 85, administrator and philanthropist of the museum and from whom the justice had seized in 2021 and 2022 about twenty stolen works of art.
© 2023 AFP