The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC said on Wednesday that it will return three antique bronzes to India: Shiva Nataraja (from 990 CE), Somaskanda (12th century) and Saint Sundarar with Paravai (16th century). All these used to be circulated in temple processions and disappeared from Tamil Nadu sometime in the 1960s. And now, over 20 years after the museum “acquired" them, they are finally being returned to India.

The NMAA comprises the collections the Arthur M Sackler Gallery and Charles Freer Gallery, and the three smuggled Indian bronzes are part of the former. Two are from Sackler’s personal collection (part of his initial donation to the museum in 1987) and the third was acquired by his gallery in 2002 from the Doris Wiener gallery. Since Sackler donated 1,000 pieces of “art" to what is now NMAA, a rigorous forensic examination of all their artefacts is certainly called for.

No matter how self-righteous the NMAA sounds now about returning the antiquities in its possession, illegally sourced from all over Asia, the truth is that it took considerable private efforts to “persuade" them to admit these were stolen. In fact, these bronzes are being returned 10 years after the antiquities dealer Nancy Wiener (Doris’s daughter) was arrested and charged with conspiring with smugglers to buy and sell stolen Asian art via prestigious auction houses.

The criminal complaint said that for 30 years Wiener bought stolen antiquities from smugglers, had them “restored" to hide evidence of their theft and then funnelled them through top auction houses, using false ownership histories. Her gallery sold these to private collectors and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asia Society, the Los Angeles County Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and the NMAA. How were they all so gullible?

Now, a decade after her arrest and four years after her conviction in 2021, the Smithsonian’s “provenance research" has discovered that the three bronzes were illegally sourced. Only in 2023 did the museum partner with the French Institute of Puducherry and found in the latter’s archives that the idols were photographed in temples in Tamil Nadu between 1956 and 1959. The question is, why was this due diligence not done before NMAA “acquired" those bronzes?

Clearly because there was a “nod-nod, wink-wink"........

© News18