Denver Art Museum a laundromat for stolen art from Cambodia, Thailand

via Denver Post, 01 December 2022: Part two of the Denver Post expose on Emma Bunker, the Denver Art Museum and Douglas Latchford, looking at the museum’s role in handling looted antiquities.

The Post’s year-long investigation calls into question how much the Denver Art Museum should have known about the consultant helping fill its glass cases, and why officials there continue to celebrate Bunker’s contributions in the face of criminal suspicion.

And the series details the largely unknown story of how Latchford, through Bunker’s scholarship, directed a hidden trove of stolen Thai treasures from the hands of poor rice farmers to galleries in Denver and around the globe.

The Denver Art Museum became one of Latchford’s primary landing spots as he sought to burnish his reputation. The institution housed more looted pieces of his than any other collection aside from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the “Pandora Papers” investigation found last year.

All told, the Denver museum spent more than a half-million dollars on Latchford pieces, and he loaned, gifted or sold the museum more than a dozen ancient artifacts — deals made possible and shepherded along by Bunker, court records and previously unreported emails show.

Bunker helped Latchford falsify provenances — or ownership history — for pieces known to be stolen, the records show. She gave presentations about his collection, wrote scholarly articles and books highlighting his works and talked to wealthy collectors as her friend negotiated six- and seven-figure sales.

Source: Denver Art Museum a laundromat for stolen art from Cambodia, Thailand