Chasing Aphrodite, 'Rebuilding Koh Ker: A 3D Reconstruction Restores Context to a Looted Khmer Temple', April 10, 2014
A new virtual reconstruction has been made archaeologists with the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) of the missing statues from the important 10th century group that was looted from the temple complex of Koh Ker in Cambodia in the 1970s and sold to prominent museums and collectors.
Koh Ker was the source of several iconic Khmer sculptures that were looted in the 1970s and sold to prominent museums and collectors. We’ve previously written about ties between the looters and the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. The most famous of these stolen masterpieces is the Bhima’s companion, Duryodhana, which Sotheby’s attempted to auction in March 2012 on behalf of a Belgian collector. After a lengthy legal fight, Sotheby’s agreed to return the sculpture to Cambodia last December. Months earlier, the Metropolitan Museum agreed to return two Kneeling Attendants looted from the same site. Additional sculptures from the site have been identified at The Cleveland Museum and the Denver Museum of Art. [Complete coverage here.]At EFEO’s website you can watch a remarkable video showing what the site might have looked like soon after its construction by Jayavarman IV.
The Chasing Aphrodite blog contains an interview with French archaeologist Eric Bourdonneau. It presents a few more details about the linking of the Sotheby's and Met objects with the site and addresses the "Good Collector" argument attributed to the dealers who peddled this looted stuff:
"It is important to remind what we are talking about: a deliberate destruction that did not care about the integrity of the artworks, provided that there were people ready to purchase them [...]. It is maybe not useless to say again, as Elizabeth Becker rightly wrote in NY Times, that the fury of the Khmer Rouge was, sadly, directed much more against people than stones: in Koh Ker, the only traces of vandalism, of which there are many, are those left by the modern looters whose spoils fed the art market (some of them can be seen on the knees of the two “MET statues”, cut hastily and coarsely from their pedestals with dozens of blows of a chisel). It is hardly understandable how the purchasers of the objects could be “rescuers” working for the protection of heritage, as it has been said. As you know, they actually were those to whom the damaged statues were destined and the unique raison d’être of this vandalism. For this same reason, they are certainly not working for a better “understanding of Khmer culture.” The so-called Sotheby’s or MET statues, like many of their kind extracted from their original surroundings, have remained impossible to understand as long as we have not been able to replace them in the temples where they were erected, that is, as long as we have not restored what was destroyed forty or thirty years ago by the looters. What is at stake here is not only “heritage” but history.
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