Thailand Claims Rights to Items Removed to Foreign Museums

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
from Northern Thailand.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Ministry of Culture in Thailand is intensifying its efforts to recover cultural property now housed in museums all over the world, primarily in museums in the US, the UK and Australia (Javier Pes, Thailand Is Ramping Up Efforts to Recover Cultural Heritage From US Museums, Including the Met. artnet News  November 6, 2018)

Thailand has stepped up its efforts to reclaim bronze and stone sculptures that have been in US museum collections for decades. The Kingdom of Thailand’s culture minister announced last week that the country is seeking the return of 23 antiquities, some of which have been housed in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art since the late 1960s. Unnamed Institutions in the UK and Australia are also in the Thai government’s sights as it intensifies its efforts to recover sculptures and other artifacts it claims were illegally removed from temples and archaeological sites. Culture Minister Vira Rojpojchanarat is leading a task force to recover more than 700 artifacts in collections abroad that Thailand claims were stolen, the Bangkok Post reports.

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
from Northern Thailand.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Among the works being contested are an 8th-century statue of the four-armed Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased in 1967,  and carved stone lintels in the collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. They came from temples in Northern Thailand (and include one from the collection of Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage whose vast collection was donated to the city in the 1950s and 60s on the condition that a museum was built to house it).  The Norton Simon Museum is also on the list and says that the works from Thailand in the museum’s collection “were properly purchased in the 1970s and 1980s or donated”.

 Joyce White, the executive director of the Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology in Philadelphia, tells artnet News that the Thai government’s current push to recover objects they consider to have been illegally exported means that museums and collectors “can no longer assume disinterest on the part of the Thai concerning these activities.” She urges institutions to be more transparent about their past acquisitions, including by publishing collecting histories. “Shining a light on this murky area of the museum world will hopefully be a trend in the 21st century,” White says. “If museums have clear legal backing for particular acquisitions, they can make their case in a court of law. Transparency should not be a problem for them.”

We will see what documentation they produce.