In 2015, the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) received a generous donation to the museum’s collection: an argillite stone sculpture of the Buddhist Goddess Tara.
Though the sculpture was a stunning addition to the university’s collection, Antonia Bartoli, the YUAG Curator of Provenance Research, had questions.
Bartoli oversees provenance for incoming art acquisitions and existing collection pieces in the YUAG. Provenance is not simply understanding when and where an object was created; it is also about tracing the ownership of that object across time and location so that when an institution such as the YUAG acquires such an object, it does so in a legal and ethical way.
Bartoli was alerted to a potential issue with the donated Buddhist Goddess Tara sculpture when Nepalese artifacts in other collections were investigated. She launched an internal inquiry at the YUAG into the object.
“Very quickly through my own research, I was able to show beyond a reasonable doubt that it had originated from a temple in the Kathmandu Valley and disappeared sometime between the 1970s-1990s,” Bartoli explained.
“[The sculptures] were taken or lost at a time when Nepalese tourism opened up to the West and, sort of with the hippie trail, as more Westerners came to Nepal, they developed a taste for these objects. The fairly ubiquitous stone sculptures that you found across the Kathmandu Valley started disappearing,” Bartoli said.
The YUAG was soon contacted by the Consul General of Nepal in New York. Both parties came to an agreement that the object had been unlawfully smuggled out of Nepal. Up until at least 1976, the object had resided in the Bir Bhadreshwor Mahadev Temple in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, where it was worshiped in daily ritual. The YUAG transferred the object to the Government of Nepal for repatriation in May of 2022.
The Buddhist Goddess Tara is one of a number of objects that have been displayed at the YUAG with illegitimate origins. In April 2022, the Department of Homeland Security seized 13 antiquities valued at $1.29 million from the YUAG that had been looted from South Asia. The objects are connected to Subhash Kapoor, one of the world’s most notorious antiquities smugglers. Kapoor has been incarcerated in India since 2011 for his crimes, and he faces conviction in the United States for running a multinational ring that traded objects valued at more than $145 million.
Beyond the YUAG, in 2022 alone, the art world has undergone a reckoning as authorities have seized stolen antiquities from some of the world’s most prestigious art museums. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 27 Roman, Greek, and Egyptian objects were seized between February and October of 2022. Cambodian officials have accused museums of housing looted Cambodian and Khmer objects, including over 100 in the British Museum and 50 in the Victoria & Albert Museum.
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Museums have been collecting art and objects for centuries, but efforts to investigate and validate their origins have scarcely begun. After centuries of neglect, provenance research became its own subfield of museum work in the early 2000s when a concentrated effort emerged to examine art transactions during the Nazi regime.
At a museum like the YUAG, which was founded in 1832 and has a current collection of over 300,000 objects, the history that this research needs to cover is vast. “If you consider the age of this institution, provenance research is very much in its infancy here,” Bartoli said.
“Provenance research is lengthy, time-consuming work,” she said. Because access to information about objects becomes more available over time, “provenance research is rarely finite. It’s ongoing.”
Victoria Reed is the Senior Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston and oversees all of the museum’s curatorial departments’ research documentation. Her role, like Antonia Bartoli’s at the YUAG, is important but rare among art museums.
“There have been a few additional roles that have been created, but I think funding remains a challenge,” said Reed.
Unlike the YUAG and MFA, smaller museums have significantly less funding and resources dedicated to provenance and do not necessarily have the capacity to take steps towards internal investigations or restitution efforts. Since provenance research is new territory, there is not a universal expectation of provenance research for institutions, leaving museums to determine their own roles in navigating investigations.
Furthermore, because there are so many ways in which objects end up in museums illicitly, there have been glaring gaps in provenance research for particular artifacts. Reed points out that European paintings are more likely to have reliable paper trails that have been put into inventories or mentioned in wills.
Objects that have been taken from colonized communities do not enjoy the same privileges.
“Works of art from African countries, for example, came to the United States without certain details reliably recorded,” Reed said. “We don’t have the same level of documentation because we may not have an artist’s name, or maybe people in the United States or in Europe didn’t understand what the object was.”
For many years, these problems of historic neglect, understaffing, and lack of resources have (and in some cases will) hampered museums’ progress. However, as records have been digitized and become more readily available in recent years, other actors have taken more active approaches to redressing problems of stolen objects.
Some of those actors are governments, such as the seizures mentioned above. However, much work is also done by private organizations of volunteers like Vijay Kumar. For Kumar, museums’ efforts and progress are presently too little and too late. He is a co-founder of the India Pride Project, a network of multinational art lovers who return stolen antiquities to India. The group uses social media and its volunteer network to build archival databases of objects that they believe are stolen. Then they work with law enforcement and institutions to repatriate art. The India Pride Project has had great success, contributing to the repatriation of 157 artifacts during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States in 2021.
Kumar emphasizes that stolen art is not a victimless crime. He wants to draw attention to the physical violence that occurs in areas where objects are looted.
“You had murders, killings, lynchings to security guards, who were protecting the sacred sites. We’ve had whistleblowers gone missing,” Kumar said.
By collecting objects that have entered the art market in this way, faraway art museums create demand. Kumar notes that museums make up only 5% of the antiquities trade, but pay high prices for the art they collect.
“By not doing the right thing, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, you are aiding and abetting and becoming complicit in the illicit trafficking racket,” Kumar said.
Beyond the physical damage, stolen objects are often imbued with religious or cultural significance. Some were not intended to be pieces of art at all, and their removal – such as from burial sites and tombs in India, Cambodia, and Nepal – causes great damage.
In Cambodia, for example, Kumar said, “everything is linked to [the object’s] worship… once the gods have left, grains have failed or plagues have come in. By destroying the very object of faith, by cutting away whom they worshiped and [whom] their ancestors have worshiped for generations together, you shake the pillar of faith.”
When objects turn up in museums, the displays often compound cultural violence by insensitivity and ignorance. Today, one-third of the Amaravati Stupa, the sacred Buddhist monument built at Amaravathi village in the third century, is housed in the British Museum.
Kumar paints a dismal image of the museum display: “The collection is totally devoid of context, parts that are on the floor should have been on the roof. You basically destroyed a third of the site. How do you justify such a pillage?”
Sara Petrilli Jones, a PhD candidate at the Yale Department of the History of Art, said, “I think one can pose the question provocatively of whether these the museums that claim to be the ultimate only caretakers of these objects truly are.”
In 2016, four years before Antonia Bartoli came to Yale, Kumar visited the YUAG. He remembered identifying likely problems with the art on display. “I had looked at the collection, and I noticed that most of them did not have clear provenance,” she said. Kumar sees his work as essential for protecting and restoring the history, culture, and identity of plundered communities.
“This is not some random theft, this is targeted looting on an industrial scale where robbers and smugglers pick and choose the best of Indian art that will sell in Europe or America,” Kumar said. “You realize so much of the best of Indian art, if we allow this to continue, will be in Europe or America. And who does history belong to? I firmly believe that history belongs to the community.”
With organizations like Kumar’s investigating works around the world, as well as some governments and museum employees, many more objects with violent histories will come to light. Yet determining what to do with a stolen object is not always an easy process itself.
“Do you go to the nation, the country of origin, do you go to the community? Do you go to the temple? Do you go to law enforcement?” Bartoli asked.
Generally, if provenance research reveals that art has been obtained through illicit means and a museum decides to act, they can either take steps towards restitution or repatriation. Repatriation involves the museum’s collaboration with official government entities to return an object to a nation or community of origin. Restitution works slightly differently.
“More broadly, [restitution] can take a number of forms and when it comes to lost, stolen, or misappropriated art, restitution can mean an acknowledgement. It can mean a long term loan, it can mean an exchange of objects, it can mean financial compensation, it can mean exchanges of information, or expertise,” said Bartoli.
Reed also said the MFA may choose to make a financial settlement, rather than physically returning the art. “The gesture is sort of tantamount to repurchasing the object from its rightful owner. And then a museum could keep the object in the collection,” Reed said.
These decisions about restitution and repatriation are challenging, and Kumar suggests that the identities of the looted communities often affect the outcome of the process.
“If the Met were to be caught with a Holocaust painting for example, they will drop it like a hot cake and handle the case with gloves. Whereas for us, when it’s stolen from a temple site or from a conflict zone like Kashmir, nobody seems to be bothered about it. Both of them are stolen; both of them have resulted in genocide,” Kumar said. “I think people have to realize that you have no right to parade these objects bought illicitly.”
Though efforts in collections around the world vary in magnitude and effectiveness, Kumar, Bartoli, and Reed believe that provenance research is becoming an increasingly powerful force.
“[Provenance research] has the ability to reveal very meaningful, profound social narratives, tracing threads, lines of inquiry from past to present, the life of an object… At the end of the day, it can connect us globally through time and space and remind us of our shared humanity,” Bartoli said.
Curators also point out the potential for collaboration amongst experts as a pathway for restitution and academic scholarship. Pertilli-Jones points to James Green’s conference at Yale in 2018, which brought together curators from various institutions from different countries. “This was a four, five day event where people could share expertise, and speak and begin to form relationships with one another,” she explained. “This is something that Yale in particular, but university museums in general, which have a lot of resources, could do to think about restitution as being part of a broader program of exchange and collaboration across geographies and cultures.”
On a larger scale, museums have a responsibility to collect responsibly to ensure that they do not harm the communities from which they collect art from, or to mislead the general public. “If we look at the role of museum professionals, we’re stewards of cultural heritage, and this is something that entails significant public trust,” Bartoli said.
Kumar agrees. By collecting objects that have illicitly entered the art market, faraway art museums create demand and perpetuate a malicious industry. He noted that museums make up only 5% of the antiquities trade, but pay high prices for the art they collect. This demand perpetuates the looting and causes harm when cultural heritage is removed from its people.
“By not doing the right thing, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, you are aiding and abetting and becoming complicit in the illicit trafficking bracket,” Kumar said.
Beyond provenance itself, collections have a responsibility to display ethically their legitimately-obtained objects.
Raymond Clemens is the Curator for Early Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. “Throughout most of Western Christianity, the Bible wasn’t a particular value in terms of a religious relic or icon. It was important in terms of what it said, but the object itself wasn’t as important. That’s different with different cultures, in Judaism, the Torah does have to be treated respectfully. And the same is true with the Koran. When we display these works, or use them in a museum or a library, we do need to treat them with the cultural importance that they had for the people that originally created them,” he said.
At the Benicke, the Torah and the Koran are elevated on higher platforms amongst other objects to designate respect for the books.
As restitution efforts continue to ramp up across art museums, there have been mixed opinions about how far museums should go. “I think a lot of people are afraid of this process of repatriation of materials, they’re afraid that they won’t be there for people to study, to use, or to consult. And I think what people need to know is that when these objects are returned, they don’t go into a vacuum,” Clemens said.
Case in point: look no further than to Vijay Kumar. “In the last two years, we have restituted almost four idols in my home state of Tamil Nadu,” Kumar said. “They’re called living gods; they call it Romanian Tamil.” The pieces were returned to India from Australia earlier this year, after they were illegally smuggled by William Wolf in 1965.
“To see them becoming the gods that they once were, from being showpieces,” said Kumar. “That’s our payday.”