ROM artifacts in fraud probe
Dozens of famous museums bought expensive antiquities from New York-based dealer
A U.S. investigation into a tangled web of stolen antiquities that has uncovered dozens of illicit objects in the collections of museums all over the world has snared the Royal Ontario Museum in its net. On Monday, CBC News reported that Operation Hidden Idol, an investigation initiated in 2012 by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, had identified a secondcentury stone urn currently in the ROM’s collection as being one of many objects smuggled out of India by New York-based antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor.
The ROM revealed Tuesday that another object in its collection, an 18th-century statue of the Indian god Krishna, was also acquired from Kapoor.
The museum is co-operating with U.S. authorities to determine whether or not the objects were fraudulently obtained by Kapoor, said Marnie Peters, the ROM’s assistant vicepresident of public relations and publications. If the investigation shows either piece to be part of Kapoor’s illegal activity, they will be surrendered using the museum’s deaccession protocol.
The ROM paid $125,000 for the urn in 2004; it was unable to determine the price paid for the statue, acquired in 2006.
Kapoor, a New York-based antiquities dealer, was arrested in Germany in 2011. He was extradited to India in 2012, where he is awaiting trial on trafficking charges. The case against him alleges he was involved in smuggling antiquities worth more than $100 million (U.S.).
Since it began seizing objects believed to have been illegally obtained by Kapoor, authorities have recovered some 2,600 objects from his storage facilities.
But, with the exception of a handful of objects, museums have been slow to surrender objects on the investigators’ list as they do their own provenance research.
Until spring 2015, only one object in a museum collection had been surrendered to investigators: the Toledo Museum of Art last year returned a statue it purchased from Kapoor in 2006 for $245,000 (U.S.). It had acquired as many as 63 objects from the dealer’s Manhattan-based gallery, Art of the Past.
Then, in April, the Honolulu Museum of Art returned seven objects, and the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass., returned one. Toledo has since given up four more pieces it bought from Kapoor, and more than 100 the dealer donated to the museum.
The Peabody Essex, incidentally, is currently under the leadership of Josh Basseches, who was named the ROM’s new CEO and director in November. He arrives here early in 2016.
The ongoing revelations regarding the breadth of Kapoor’s alleged illegal antiquities trade have stunned the global museum community. “This is somebody who supplied museums all over the world,” Peters said. “His gallery was on Park Avenue for more than 40 years.”
For years, Kapoor was an established dealer believed to maintain high standards of provenance for the antiquities he imported. As a result, his client list included an elite group of American museums. Fifteen of those have been contacted about works that investigators believe to be part of Kapoor’s smuggling enterprise.
They include such places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
U.S. authorities released a statement saying that the stupa acquired by the ROM, which would have been used to store the ashes of a Buddhist monk, was sold using fraudulent papers fabricated to portray its acquisition by Kapoor as legitimate.
Investigators have yet to locate a set of four bronze sculptures of Hindu deities believed to have been in Kapoor’s possession at the time of his arrest.
Valued at $14.5 million, investigators believe they were stashed by Kapoor’s sister and girlfriend following the initial raids on his storage facilities in 2012.
Kapoor has pleaded not guilty to all charges.