by Steve Mills

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced recently that it had returned to Nepal a sculpture that had been in its collection for at least a quarter century. Conspicuously left out of the press release: that the sculpture had been a gift from a wealthy Chicago donor.

That omission obscured a simmering controversy about whether Chicago philanthropists Marilynn Alsdorf and her husband, James, both of whom are dead, improperly built their collection of hundreds of South Asian works and why the Art Institute, which houses some of that collection in its Alsdorf Galleries, has been reluctant to return those works to countries with compelling claims for them.

The 12th-century sculpture the museum returned to Nepal is called “Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda” and is about 17.5 inches tall. The Art Institute said it was stolen from the Kathmandu Valley, although it’s unclear when the theft occurred or how or when the Alsdorfs acquired the piece.

It was among more than a dozen pieces identified by ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business in 2023 as having claims on them by other countries, including Nepal. At one time, each piece had belonged to the Alsdorfs, the investigation found.

The Art Institute devotes a page online to works that have been removed from its collection, a process museums call deaccessioning. But unlike other pages on its site about artwork or pieces on display, pages for deaccessioned items don’t include ownership........

© ProPublica