Investigators this month seized dozens of ancient artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their latest effort to return antiquities to Italy, Turkey, Egypt and other countries where they are believed to have been looted.
With the items removed in June, investigators since 2017 have seized more than 120 artifacts from the Met ranging in value from $20,000 to $26 million, plus hundreds of smaller items, such as rare pottery fragments, belt clasps, ax heads, safety pins and goddess figurines, according to an inventory by the office of Manhattan district attorney Alvin L. Bragg.
All told, the seized artifacts, including some objects that were on loan to the museum, are valued at more than $95 million, according to the inventory.
Investigators said the pace of their efforts has been enhanced by their ability to track the work of underground international trafficking rings that dominated the post-World War II supply of antiquities to museums and collectors in the United States.
Among the items removed from the museum was a 3,700-year-old terra-cotta beak-spouted jug and a marble head, both from Greece, a 2,000-year-old bronze statuette of Hermes from Turkey and a golden headpiece from ancient Egypt. Independent appraisers working for the investigators said these four items ranged in value, from the jug at $80,000 to the statuette at $500,000. The loss of the items, under a stipulation dated June 9, has not been previously disclosed.
In a statement, the Met characterized the returns as part of a collaborative effort in which it had exchanged information with investigators and agreed to part with the items after a review by the museum’s leaders. It called attention to its increased efforts to research objects in its care, which is being handled by a recently expanded 12-person team of provenance experts.
“The Met doesn’t want any stolen art in our collection,” Lucian Simmons, the Met’s head of provenance research, said in the statement, adding: The district attorney’s office “has been an invaluable partner to us in this work — particularly their ability to unlock information that would otherwise be inaccessible.”
Investigators expressed some impatience at the pace of the museum’s own review. Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the district attorney’s office, said the recurring seizures at the Met “spoke for themselves.”
“The question has to be asked, ‘Why are we the ones doing this?’” he said.
The tension between the Met and the district attorney’s office is evident in the different accounting methods they each use to measure the number of artifacts involved. The Met says that investigators have seized 198 items, including objects on loan, since 2017 while investigators tally the number as 348.
Part of the discrepancy stems from the fact that, for example, the Met treats 20 pottery fragments from a kylix, an ancient Greek drinking cup, as one item, while investigators view them as 20 because each has its own distinct museum inventory number.
In his statement, Mr. Simmons defended the Met’s progress in its provenance review. “Determining which corresponding present-day country a work came from, and the object’s unique ownership history, is not always straightforward, which is why this work takes time and every individual object deserves to be studied and assessed,” he said.
Some of the items that recently came under scrutiny had been on display at the Met for years. The objects had originated in several countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Greece, and had arrived at the Met as early as 1971 and as late as 2001.
Investigators said that, as part of their process of reviewing potentially illicit artifacts, they had subpoenaed records on objects the Met had acquired that had ties to networks of dealers long suspected of having been associated with art that had little or questionable provenance. They said they then shared with Met officials any evidence that they felt indicated the objects had been looted or smuggled. This evidence included private correspondence obtained from dealers’ archives as well as statements from known looters.
In some cases, investigators said, the museum’s curatorial records provided important evidence, such as notations that some artifacts had arrived encrusted with dirt, often an indication that the object could have been dug up illegally.
The Met said none of the items had actually been physically removed by investigators from its galleries; instead, the Met packed and delivered the items to the district attorney’s office.
The museum said it was committed to transparency about the returns and was updating its website to show that objects had been repatriated. The museum posts two inventories — one for antiquities it has de-accessioned and the other, on a separate page, for artworks that were restituted after it was determined they were likely looted during World War II.
In 2023, the Met announced its own efforts to review its holdings and policies with the intention of returning any items it discovered with problematic histories. A year later, it appointed Mr. Simmons, a former Sotheby’s executive, to lead the team of provenance experts.
The Met said that since 2017, it has initiated on its own the return of 18 antiquities to their countries of origin, and helped the transfer of ownership of Cycladic marble artifacts from the private collection of Leonard N. Stern, the businessman and philanthropist, to Greece.
The Met said the problematic acquisitions had not damaged its relationships with the source countries from which they had originated. In nine cases, some countries had agreed to leave items with tainted provenance on loan at the Met rather than insisting on their immediate return. In addition, Met officials pointed to continuing loan programs with institutions in countries such as Italy or Greece.
Among the people associated with the tainted antiquities in the latest seizures is Robert Hecht, a major American dealer who was involved in one of the most famous returns, that of a 2,500-year-old Greek vase known as the Euphronios krater.
He sold the vase to the Met for more than $1 million in 1972. The Met returned it to Italy in 2008 after years of negotiation. Hecht, who died in 2012, was accused several times by authorities of antiquities trafficking but was never convicted.
A year ago, the Met said its collection contained 56 works associated with Hecht, his galleries or family members. Now, it said, the number had dropped to 49, some of which were just small fragments. The Met said it had determined that some of the Hecht artifacts had been exported legally and that the research is ongoing.
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