US Museums' About-face on Dodgy Acquisitions

Julia Halperin and Javier Pes, 'US museums' about-face on restitution' The Art Newspaper, Issue 254, February 2014

In January 2013, the American Association of Museum Directors (AAMD) revised its rules, requiring its 217 member museums to post details of any new acquisition of antiquities that lacks ironclad provenance stretching back to 1970, along with an image. In the past year, museum purchases of ancient art “have slowed to a trickle”, says Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and the chair of the AAMD task force on archaeological material and ancient art. Feldman admits that some potential donors are frustrated and dealers “very frustrated”. [...] Some critics feel US museums are now too willing to relinquish ownership. 

And most of those criticisms are coming of course precisely from the dealers who have all those objects they insist are licitly obtained from "old collections", but - by some small oversight- they do not seem to be able to find the documentation which convinced them of that when they bought them. The dealers' problems are increasing as more enlightened and responsible institutions are setting the bar even higher.

The MIA, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others, employ full-time provenance researchers to vet potential acquisitions and fill gaps in museum records.  [...] “I’m not eager to sit back and wait for the mail, if I’m suspicious about something,” Maxwell Anderson says [...] “In the past museums would not have acted without concrete evidence that would stand up in a court of law,” Anderson says. “Today museums are amenable to looking at persuasive circumstantial evidence.” [...]  Catalogue information can be minimal. David Gill, the British archaeologist and author of the blog Looting Matters, says: “We need to be more rigorous with documentation.”

How long can the Saint Louis Museum of Art hold out over the Ka Nefer Nefer mask. A spokesman for the museum says its “position on its legal ownership of the mask has not changed”. But what about the moral position? Does that count for nothing in St Louis?