Cambodia Says It’s Found Its Lost Artifacts: in Gallery 249 at the Met

Cambodia Says It’s Found Its Lost Artifacts: in Gallery 249 at the Met.

Cambodia, Its Lost Artifacts, Gallery 249

Cambodia suspects many items were looted and has concerns about a former curator’s business relationship with a Met donor later accused of antiquities trafficking. The museum is seeking evidence of the claims.

In the 1970s, long after its encyclopedic collection had been acknowledged as among the world’s finest, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recognized it had slender holdings in South or Southeast Asian art. One in-house estimate suggested that no more than 60 objects were worth exhibiting.

But over the next two decades it built a world-class collection, acquiring hundreds of artifacts for new galleries that now occupy the equivalent of more than a city block. The massive undertaking brought the glories of ancient Cambodia and India, Thailand and Vietnam to New York, where they took pride of place alongside the Western masterpieces that had long defined the museum.

Significant to this effort was Douglas A.J. Latchford, a British-Thai businessman who had become a leading collector, scholar and dealer in Khmer art — and would later be indicted as an illegal trafficker of Cambodian artifacts.

Starting in 1983, Latchford gave or sold the museum 13 artifacts, a modest amount but one that included premiere examples of Khmer sculpture. Two gifts were the torsos of massive, twin stone statues, the Kneeling Attendants, that guarded the doorway to Gallery 249, which focused on Khmer art. The wall label noted that they had been given “in honor of Martin Lerner,” the curator of South and Southeast Asian art who directed the Met’s collecting effort.

Cambodian officials now say they believe many of those 13 items were stolen. They suspect dozens of other artifacts in that gallery and others were also looted, often trafficked by Latchford, who died in 2020. They say they believe he often sold stolen items to other donors and dealers before they ended up at the museum.

The Cambodians have enlisted the help of the U.S. Justice Department to press for the return of dozens of artworks, basing their claim in part on the account of a reformed looter. The looter, Toek Tik, identified 33 artifacts in the Met collection as objects he recalled personally plundering and selling to intermediaries who often did business with Latchford.

The Met says it has a track record of returning items proven to have been looted, that for years it has been reviewing its Khmer artifacts and that it has updated several provenances as a result and turned that information over to Cambodian officials. But the Met has refused to show Cambodia a set of internal documents that might buttress, or undermine, the museum’s proper title to the objects, whose slim ownership histories are listed on the Met website.

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