When Deaccessioned Art and Antiquities Have Nowhere to Go

“There are a lot of loudmouths out there, people saying ‘repatriate, repatriate—get all this looted stuff out of museums and give it all back to the people it was looted from,’” said Christopher Marinello, founder and chief executive officer of Art Recovery International, a London-based organization whose clients are varied but some of whom possess cultural objects that were stolen from somewhere in the developing world. Would that private and museum repatriation were so simple.

One of those clients is a private collector who purchased from a dealer several 19th-century wooden Congolese masks belonging to the Luba tribe in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This collector “knows that they probably were taken out of the country illegally and that they really shouldn’t belong to him, and he wants to give them back.” The problem is that Marinello has tried to find responsible people—perhaps someone from the Luba tribe or a government official—to take them, and no one will. “I contacted the embassy in London and in the Congo, and no one returns my calls or answers my letters.”

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has experienced intermittent civil war for much of the last 30 years, and the most likely recipient of these masks would be “a warlord who will sell the pieces.” Otherwise, he noted, “I just can’t find anyone from the Congo or a suitable museum to accept them.” So these masks remain in a legal limbo, unable to be sold, since no U.S. auction house or dealer will touch them, and unable to be repatriated.

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This isn’t Marinello’s only piece of art or artifact that has nowhere to go. Another client, a former U.S. military officer, has a Buddha head he bought while stationed in Indonesia that had been cut from a temple there. That ex-soldier found auctioneers in the U.S. leery of placing it up for sale, which convinced him that his purchase of it and taking it out of the country made him culpable of violating national and international export laws. He sought out Marinello to arrange its return, but as with the Congo, no one at the Indonesian embassy or at the nation’s capital in Jakarta responded to his entreaties.

This is a problem that well-meaning museums face when they seek to repatriate art or artifacts from their permanent collections that do not have adequate provenance—a reasonably complete history of ownership dating from when the items were made to when they were sold by the last dealer—and strike curators and researchers as likely to have been stolen, looted or exported illegally. Possession of stolen property is against the law in the U.S., and no amount of time can turn theft into legal ownership. (European law is different in this regard: statutes of limitation in most of these countries are between 20 and 30 years, after which an owner can be legitimately described as a good faith buyer.) Researching a potentially looted object, determining that it should be repatriated and then returning it to the country from which it came can take years. It takes so long because “no one wants to give objects to the wrong person,” said Sally Yerkovich, adjunct professor of Museum Anthropology at Columbia University and author of A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics. “There are legal and ethical issues to resolve, and it would embarrass a museum to give something to someone who doesn’t have a right to it.”

It is unknown how many museum objects cannot be returned because museums are unable to find their rightful owners—individual museums do not post objects on their websites or elsewhere specifically about objects in their collections that have missing or questionable provenance, and the principal museum associations, such as the American Alliance of Museums and the International Council of Museums do not survey their members on this, but Yerkovich claimed that “museums are trying hard to make sure they don’t make mistakes. This is especially true for art looted during World War II.  Some museums have chosen to create exhibitions highlighting paintings whose provenance can’t be established in the hope that people might come forward to provide further information.” The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam mounted such an exhibit in 2015, and in 2018, the Louvre in Paris put together its own exhibition of paintings with unclear provenance. “Our objective is very clearly to restitute everything we can,” Louvre chief curator of paintings Sébastien Allard said on a tour of the show. Critics at the time argued that the restitution effort was too little, too late, but it’s worth noting that the museum has continued its investigations into the works in its collection known to have been looted in the hopes of finding the heirs of the original owners.

The older the object, the more complications may arise, in part because borders are different now than they were centuries before. An ancient Greek vase may have been produced in Egypt, Italy, Turkey, North Africa or Greece because the Greek empire extended over 1,000 miles. An object identified as “Mesopotamian” could be claimed by half a dozen countries today. “We have a short list of archaeological materials that came to us with what we later realized were falsified provenances, but we don’t know the country of origin,” said Victoria Reed, senior curator for provenance at the MFA in Boston. “They could have come from anywhere in the Roman Empire. Since nobody knows what is in the ground before it’s looted, it’s hard for ministries of culture to know, either. In these cases, the museum will hold onto the objects and publicize them, online or in our galleries, until the correct claimant can be determined.”

In the absence of full documentation, the process of determining where something came from may require the services of an archaeologist or, in the case of art, researchers might also attempt to find the last sellers of the object who may know how it came to them. But sellers may be unwilling to acknowledge that they handled looted property, according to Arthur Brand, a Dutch art crime investigator, “and those sales probably go back to the 1960s and ‘70s. Are these people still alive?” Like Christopher Marinello, Brand recommended “going to the embassy of the country” where it is likely the objects came from to see if that country claims the items and will take them. “It’s a mess, really a mess,” Brand said.