‘The stuff was illegally dug up’: New York’s Met Museum sees reputation erode over collection practices

via The Guardian, 20 March 2023: An investigation has identified hundreds of artifacts linked to indicted or convicted traffickers in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Reporters have pinpointed the pieces, from India to Italy to Cambodia, in North America’s largest museum.

Hoving, who served as the museum’s director from 1967 to 1977, is credited with transforming the Met into a world-class museum of major works. In his 1994 memoir, he describes how his decade of aggressively acquiring for the Met drew upon an array of illicit sourcing. He wrote that his address book of “smugglers and fixers” and other art world acquaintances “was longer than anyone else’s in the field”. Being an accomplice to art smugglers, he wrote, was a necessary role for a Met director.

He had approved the purchase of a large batch of Indian and Cambodian antiquities that he suspected had been smuggled, and hid diary entries detailing his misgivings about the origins of a stolen Greek ceramic work. When Turkish authorities asked for the return of allegedly stolen relics from the Met, he made a striking admission of guilt to a fellow curator.

Source: ‘The stuff was illegally dug up’: New York’s Met Museum sees reputation erode over collection practices | Museums | The Guardian