The Denver Art Museum (DAM) has found itself at the center of a massive international art looting scandal. On March 10, representatives of the museum issued a statement announcing their decision to remove the “Bunker” name from the Arts of Asia gallery after returning donations worth $185,000 from the late scholar, museum trustee and volunteer Emma C. Bunker. A decision which follows the growing revelations concerning the falsified provenance and the trafficking of antiquities. The “Bunker” signage had been contractually enacted in 2018 to remain on the The walls of DAM until 2071.
A year investigation speak Denver Post revealed that Bunker, who died aged 90 in 2021, helped and encouraged her friend and collaborator Douglas Latchfordnotorious British antiques dealer and smuggler, peddling the provenance of looted Cambodian artifacts and using his six-decade relationship with DAM to legitimize his dealings. Bunker helped broker the sale of 14 Latchford antiquities to the DAM, as well as donating over 200 pieces to the museum itself – 40 of those items are technically considered “antiques”; the aforementioned official statement from the museum claims that the DAM is “cooperating with US authorities” while conducting “research into the ownership histories of these objects.”
Latchford died in 2020 while being charged by the US government for fraud and smuggling, among other crimes (his overseas accounts were also revealed in the Pandora Papers leak in 2021). By the end of his life, he had become well known for paying poor residents of rural Cambodia – an area that suffered from widespread looting amid civil strife from the 1960s to the 1990s – to detach segments of sculptures in situ. to sell them. abroad. Bunker helped cover up this illicit business by writing three books with Latchford in which she provided false provenance for the forced fragments. Bunker has even been publicly thanked by Phnom Penh officials for her work promoting Cambodian culture in the United States.
The return of Cambodian cultural heritage objects has been a topic of engagement for US officials since the early 2010s, and the process has accelerated since Latchford’s death. In August 2022, the US returns 30 looted antiquities, many of which are sales from Latchford, Cambodia. DAM representatives contacted US authorities after learning of Latchford indictment in 2019but the museum has still not opened its archives to the lawyer representing Cambodia, Bradley Gordon, who suggested that there are up to 4,000 Khmer sculptures still housed in museums and private collections around the world.
In an anonymous 2013 meeting with US officials about the Duryodhanaa looted statue sold by Sotheby’s by Latchford, Bunker – who wrote a catalog entry and gave an accompanying lecture for the auction house – described Latchford as “the brother she never had”.
