Following dozens of high-profile artwork seizures by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Manhattan District Attorney’s (DA) office over the past year, the New York institution has announcement plans to hire four new employees who will be dedicated to provenance research. A manager and three other employees will be responsible for reviewing the individual stories of the works in the museum’s collection of 1.5 million objects.
The provenance research manager will report to Director Max Hollein’s office, and the three additional workers will “build on work already underway.” The roles have yet to be posted on the Met’s notice board.
“To be clear, this initiative is complementary, as our curators, curators and other researchers have been deeply engaged in researching the collection for many decades,” Hollein wrote in yesterday’s announcement. “The emergence of new and additional information, as well as the changing climate on cultural property, demands that we dedicate additional resources to this work.”
Hollein outlines three other initiatives to help remedy the museum’s collection problems, the first of which is to “broaden, accelerate and intensify” research into works related to art dealers subject to investigation. He believes this will encompass the examination of “several hundred” objects, most of which were acquired between the 1970s and 1990s. He also says the Met will meet regularly with advocates in the cultural property sphere and share their work through channels such as reports and public lectures.
Finally, Hollein announced that the museum has formed an 18-member corps of curators, curators and other staff to reconsider the museum’s provenance and collection policies. The director added that last month, the board of directors created a working group to offer advice on collection practices.
Even if the Met may correct its collecting practices in the future, events of the past year suggest the museum will have its work cut out as it delves into its immense trove of artifacts.
In the spring of 2022, the Manhattan DA grasped five ancient Egyptian antiquities worth a staggering $3 million. Only a few months later, The Met rendered 21 ancient Greek and Roman antiquities and a 6th century Hindu statue in the office. Another case involved one of the museum’s benefactors: the DA confiscated 23 antiquities looted from the collection of Met admin Shelby White late last year.
In March, the Met announcement that he would return 15 items to India. Recent reports have also drawn attention to the museum. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has found more than 1,000 items in the Met’s collection to be linked to people accused or convicted of antiquities crimes. End of April, ProPublica published an article indicating that approximately 85% of the 139 items of Aboriginal art donated to the Met by Charles and Valerie Diker (some of which are currently on display) lacked complete provenance information.
While the inquests and foreclosures have grabbed headlines, other issues have arisen related to the Met’s relationship with the nations and people it represents through its objects. Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro has been expelled from the museum after performing a traditional Cambodian dance on a statue of the god Harihara. In an editorial for Hyperallergic, Cheam-Shapiro discussed the importance of performing this ritual and the paradox of having to do it at the Met rather than Cambodia. And in an article from last September, researcher Elizabeth Marlow suggested that the Met intentionally withheld information about looted antiquities from Bubo in Turkey. These works were eventually repatriated in March 2023 through the Manhattan DA office.
