The Manhattan prosecutor’s office continues its seizures at the Met

The cumulative value of antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met, New York) seized or turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office since 2017 has now reached $95 million, according to the New York Times. In June, several antique objects, acquired by the museum between 1971 and 2001 and coming in particular from Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey, left its collections after being reported by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU), the unit specializing in the fight against antiquities trafficking. The Met insists on the cooperative nature of the procedure: it is not a question of seizures in the rooms of the museum, but of transfers carried out after presentation by the prosecution of elements calling into question their provenance. A 3,700-year-old terracotta pouring jug from Greece, a gold headdress from ancient Egypt, a two-thousand-year-old statuette of Hermes from Turkey… All these objects have joined the inventory of the ATU, headed by Matthew Bogdanos.

In recent years, the collections of the Fifth Avenue museum have been singled out on several occasions by the prosecutor while the successive seizures have been widely publicized. The Met opened a service dedicated to provenance research in 2024, headed by Lucian Simmons, a former executive at Sotheby’s.

Since its creation in 2017, the ATU has identified numerous artifacts of illegal or illicit provenance in New York collections. In 2022, 192 works were returned to Pakistan following the investigation “Hidden Idol”after being linked to the smuggling network of Subhash Kapoor, an Indian-American art trafficker. The same year, around thirty Greek and Egyptian antiquities were seized from the Met. Eight of them were acquired directly from Gianfranco Becchina at the end of the 1970s, convicted of illegal trade in antiquities by the Italian justice system. Last May, Italy had more than 300 cultural assets returned, 221 of which were seized by the Manhattan prosecutor.

By following an offensive mode of action, the Manhattan prosecutor shows rare efficiency in the restitution of works, which has raised critical voices. In 2023, after the repatriation of several statues to Greece, Kate Fitz Gibbon, American specialist in art and heritage law, criticized Matthew Bogdanos’ unit for exceeding the legal framework set by the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the illicit circulation of cultural property. Targeted in particular, a Cycladic marble statuette, whose provenance the expert documented from the 1930s, before the import of art objects into the United States was subject to strict regulations. Contacted by the JdA, she specifies: “the prosecutor’s office evaluates old acquisitions against contemporary standards of provenance”.

More generally, Kate Fitz Gibbon is skeptical of the methods of the prosecutor’s office: “The prosecutor’s office considers defects in provenance as criminal clues. Although these elements may constitute significant red flags, the prosecutor considers them to be “legitimate reason” to believe that the item is stolen property under New York criminal law.she explained to the JdA. This former member of the government’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property also denounces an abuse of influence exercised over museums: “The prosecutor’s office often resolves disputes through pressure, an out-of-court settlement, or a negotiated surrender, rather than through a trial.”. Finally, she highlights a lack of expertise on the part of the ATU investigators, who “systematically claim that objects are authentic and worth many times their real value, even though much of what is seized is fake”referring in particular to the Kapoor affair and the restitution to Lebanon in 2024 of mosaics disqualified by several academics.

A unique system in the world, the Manhattan ATU concentrates scientific, judicial and penal skills, which allow it to act proactively. In France, “States must first have targeted what is stolen, whereas it could be the other way around”explains Magali Dufau, researcher specializing in heritage studies at the University of Toulouse, to the JdA. “The first problem with these laws is that the State must know what it is going to ask for. If France were to adopt a proactive approach, it could carry out transfers of ownership of objects acquired illicitly, and inform the States concerned so that they can, if they wish, request their return..