"The dam Has Broken", Another Khmer Statue Goes Back

Virtual reconstruction of part of the group by French School of
Asian Studies (EFEO) (from "Chasing Aphrodite" blog)

Readers of this blog will know that a subject of concern has been the fragments of a group of statues scattered in a number of foreign (mostly US) collections from the Prasat Chen (Koh Ker) temple, about 75 miles northeast of Angkor Wat, a site pillaged during the upheaval of Cambodia’s civil war. The group, until it was looted consisted of nine characters from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The looting which took place at Koh Ker was organized and the pieces were all stolen by the same group and following the same patterns of clandestine excavations, illicit export and sale over time. Over the past weekk there have been a number of pieces of good news to report (see Tom Mashberg and Ralph Blumenthal, 'Christie’s to Return Cambodian Statue', New York Times May 6, 2014):

Yet another ancient Prasat Chen statue looted in the 1970s from a single remote temple in the jungles of Cambodia has turned up in the United States, this time at Christie’s, which is voluntarily paying to return it to its homeland. Christie’s sold the statue, a 10th-century sandstone depiction of a mythological figure known as Pandava, to an anonymous collector in 2009, but bought it back earlier this year after officials determined that the sculpture had been looted.[...] Christie’s declined to discuss how it had determined the sculpture it sold had originally been looted. It had auctioned the Pandava statue twice, once in 2000 and again in 2009 for $146,500. It declined to identify the name of the second buyer, but said it contacted that person after reviewing the sale and determining that the statue was stolen. “The purchaser was cooperative, concerned about these issues and ultimately is pleased with the outcome,” Erin McAndrew, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said.

Chan Tani, Cambodia’s secretary of state, is quoted in the article, praising Christie’s for “a very generous approach” to the case. The auction house had reportedly worked out a complex and costly deal with the owner to recover the object and pay for its return to Cambodia. One of the directors of the legal department of the Christie's International is quoted as saying that although "that repatriation issues can be difficult":

“Christie’s believes it has a useful role to play in facilitating the resolution of cultural property issues between source countries and collectors in specific circumstances”.

Another comment reported in the article is guaranteed to send a shudder through the British Museum, stalling over the return of the Parthenon Marbles, afraid that it would "open the floodgates" which will drain the Museum: 

 “The dam has broken,” Helen Ibbitson Jessup, an expert on Khmer sculpture who is helping Cambodia recover the statues, said of the returns, now totaling five items. “One assumes they were looted at the same moment, then widely distributed,” she added. [...] Ms. Jessup credited the Metropolitan Museum for starting the trend by returning its two statues, called the Kneeling Attendants. Those colossal statues, obtained in the 1980s, flanked the entry to the museum’s Southeast Asian exhibition hall. She said that, with the Met’s decision, “a moral precedent was established and the tide of opinion clearly flowed towards restitution.” 

This is the fifth such repatriation of a statue from the same group. As mentioned above, the Metropolitan Museum of Art voluntarily returned two of them last year and Sotheby’s, after a lengthy court battle that ended in a settlement, has agreed to return a third. On Tuesday, after reviewing a Cambodian claim for more than a year, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., said it too would return a huge statue that was stolen from the same temple. Cambodian experts say that two other American museums, the Denver Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, have statues from the temple, but "officials at those museums say they have received no evidence that their works were illicitly taken". Several others are apparently in several secret private collections. The Cambodians hope to get all the looted statues back and reattach them to their pedestals, which were left behind by the looters, and place them all together in a special display area in the national museum.