In 2021, a Nepali monastery told the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that the museum possessed a sacred painting stolen from the monastery in 1967. The museum responded by offering to give the monastery a replica... if they would sign away their rights to the original. A 🧵

In August 1967, the American scholar Mary Slusser photographed the painting during an annual festival at the Yempi Mahavihara (also known as I Baha) in Patan, Nepal. In September, , as her diary shows, a dealer offered it to her.

Every Carlo Crivelli painting is bonkers, but this one from 1481 in the Vatican Museums is especially over the top. Let me show you some details… Virgin giving side-eye to the pervy Mr. Bean donor figure who looks like he’s trying to get a peek up her skirt.

So this is happening There’s a lot going on in this branding

Another must-read on NAGPRA and repatriation from @propublica! propublica.org/article/delaye… “by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”

Arlington National Cemetery is removing its Confederate Memorial - no more "loyal slave" myths! Here's a thread about this incredibly problematic monument:

https://twitter.com/artcrimeprof/status/1599869009884692480?s=20

Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.) So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.

The Art Institute of Chicago knows about this photograph from 1970 of its Buddha sculpture embedded in the wall of a shrine in Nepal. It knows Nepal prohibited the export of such antiquities in 1956. And yet it's still working on whether to repatriate it... This and other repatriation claims are detailed in this powerful article from @propublica: propublica.org/article/art-in…

Even I didn’t think it was this bad: “Reporters reviewed the [Metropolitan Museum’s] catalog and found at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes; 309 of them are on display.” nepalitimes.com/here-now/in-se… This article is the product of a massive investigation by @ICIJorg, and is published simultaneously there and in the Nepali Times and The Guardian: icij.org/investigations… and theguardian.com/culture/2023/m…

🚨 Deal Alert! 🚨

This 9th century Nepali Buddha sculpture is up for auction Wednesday at Christie's NYC. I've rarely seen so many indications of theft+smuggling in one small package. Act now to show your hypocrisy to all your friends and invest in a future repatriation claim! If you go to an auction preview, as I did on Friday, you can see the jagged lower edge where he was ripped off something. A larger sculpture? A base with an inscription that revealed too much? In any case, it's an indication that he was hastily removed from a shrine.

The Metropolitan Museum says this head was carved in the 6th century BCE. I think it was made in Greece in the early 20th century. Why? Let me explain... The man on the right in this 1895 photo is John Marshall. From 1905-1928, the Met Museum paid him to buy antiquities for them in Europe. His archives, with info about many of these purchases, were just put online last November (thanks, British School at Rome!).

I've spent months trying to figure out how the famed 6th c. BCE kouros ("youth") sculpture got to the Metropolitan Museum (any many Art History 101 textbooks), and I think I figured it out. A thread: Let's start in 1932, when the kouros made his debut, his left leg "slightly advanced as if her were preparing to board a taxicab." Newspapers around the world were gaga for him - and no wonder, as one of only around a dozen well-preserved sculptures of this type from Greece.

A European collector who feels a "sensual" connection to sacred Himalayan artworks bought enough of them to surround his bed - and then fill a private museum. A thread on my review for @hyperallergic, in which I get very🤢and😡 - and then ask where these artifacts came from... A new book contains some of c. 350 6th-18th century artifacts from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, and northern India held in the "Tibet Museum–Fondation Alain Bordier" in Gruyères, Switzerland, which bills itself as one of the world’s largest collections of historical Buddhist art.

Let me tell you a little story about a stolen Buddha head that was up for auction this week in Paris and the time I met a living deity who was watching a Western in the corner of his shrine... When I went to Nepal, I had the great privilege of visiting a shrine of Dīpaṅkara Buddha in the town of Bhaktapur with Birat Raj Bajracharya, a scholar of Nepali Buddhism. He explained that the shrine's priest is considered a living deity - always on call for the Buddha.

In c. 1940, a student named Katja Meirowsky cut the swastika out of a stolen Nazi flag, sewed the rest into a dress, and wore it to her Berlin art school. This act nearly led to her death - and shows how important art for protest can be, if only to save the artist's own soul. 🧵 Katja had already been denounced by a fellow student for making a joke about Hitler. She arrived at her interrogation in borrowed silk stockings and high heels; the Gestapo officer released her after she promised to go sailing with him on the Wannsee. (She didn't.)

[snaps on rubber glove] Let's dissect this museum press release!

Did the Met really determine antiquities in its collections were stolen from Nepal and offer to repatriate them all on its own, as they claim?!?

(Spoiler alert: 🙄) First up, a 10th c. stone relief of Shiva. The Met claims "recent Museum research" based on a book, Bangdel's Inventory of Stone Sculptures of Kathmandu Valley, "determined" it belonged in a specific temple in Nepal. This book? Published in 1995.

The Met Museum is complaining that Cambodia won't give it all the info they have about the theft of the art they're claiming. Let's talk about why that's a massive act of solidarity with other countries seeking repatriation. 🧵 nytimes.com/2022/08/18/art… Background: thanks to the confessions of former looters, archeological investigation of sites to discover remaining fragments, and the files of a big former dealer, Cambodia can trace the route of many antiquities exactly: theft to dealer to buyer. But... nytimes.com/2021/11/21/art…

The label on this stunning sculpture in London's Victoria and Albert Museum notes it was "collected by the Ex Younghusband Expedition to Tibet, 1904." A short 🧵 about the horrors this polite wording conceals. In 1903, Sir Francis Edward Younghusband led a British force to invade Tibet on the flimsiest of pretexts. At Chumik Shenko, his troops used Maxim machine guns to kill c. 600 Tibetan soldiers armed with matchlock muskets.

Last week, I saw a sculpture become a god.

Stolen in 1984, the deity Lakshmi-Narayan spent decades as a work of art at an American museum before it returned to its shrine in Nepal. My story is up now at hyperallergic.com/700760/returne… - here's a thread with more of my photos. The 10th c. Lakshmi-Narayan, a cojoined avatar of Vishnu and his consort, spent centuries in a small temple in the town of Patan (near Kathmandu), draped in garlands of marigolds and adorned with the vermilion powder dabbed onto its forehead by worshipers.

This morning, activists from the Indigenous Environmental Network used the Andrew Jackson monument in front of the White House to send a message. Here's a thread about the cruelties concealed by this monument, made in part by slave labor and used to purchase more human lives. First: here's @IENearth's statement: ienearth.org/expect-us-on-i…

Saddle up, fans of fake antiquities! It’s time for the Case of the Mysterious Multiplying Mold-Made Artifacts. How did these “Scythian” quadrupeds gallop from Russia to London to China, via eBay and Timeline Auctions? Let’s investigate! First:
- invaluable observations by others kicked off this research + aided it along the way. I won't tag anyone, since some auction houses send nasty (although legally… questionable) cease and desist letters to scholars
- I’ll put source links at the end of the thread

I promised a thread on auction house shenanigans today... but I underestimated how much shenaniganery I would uncover. So much that I'm too tired to write the thread. So I'll just leave some of my visuals here, and you'll have to wait till tomorrow again... ;) You want some more hints? Here ya go...