On a recent Thursday afternoon, a Virginia Beach couple strolled into an upstairs gallery at the Chrysler Museum of Art. They’d come to see the anguished expression of the sculpture “The Wounded Indian.” The near-life-size marble statue dominated the room.
“This is my favorite piece of art,” said Gabriel Bashford, 30, as Mija Chenoweth, 24, placed her hand on his shoulder.
“My mom showed it to me for the first time when I was 5, ” he said. Chenoweth cooed. In elementary school, he even sneaked away from a class tour for a peek. “Every time I come here, I have to see it.”
If he wants to see it again, he will have to go to Boston.
The Chrysler is returning the statue, completed by Peter Stephenson in 1850, to the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association after decades of allegations that it had been acquired improperly. The Boston-area nonprofit has stated that it owned and exhibited the statue for over six decades and believed it was destroyed during a move in the 1950s. Until it learned in 1999 that it was on display at the Chrysler.
Since the 1990s, museums and other cultural institutions have more frequently been returning artworks and relics that were obtained through illegal or dubious means, such as theft from an archaeological site. The Norfolk case is “unusual,” according to Erin Thompson of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who studies art crime.
“It’s not unusual for art to leave a museum,” she said during a phone interview. “What’s unusual is for a stolen piece to end up in a museum that had been on display elsewhere.”
Erik Neil, director of the Chrysler, declined an interview, but the museum issued a statement:
“The Chrysler is pleased with the amicable resolution, and we wish the best for the MCMA.”
Thompson, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, has worked to return cultural artifacts and artworks to Nepal that Western art collectors began taking from the country’s shrines and heritage sites since it opened its borders in the 1950s. But antiquities theft happens in more developed and Westernized countries as well.
In 2008, the highly publicized case of the Euphronios krater concluded with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returning the terra cotta vase to Italy after a court ruled that the 2,500-year-old piece had been seized from the country by tomb raiders. In 2017, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles returned the “Statue of Zeus Enthroned,” a marble statuette from the first century B.C., to Italy.
Earlier this year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported that New York officials had gotten warrants to seize at least 18 allegedly stolen antiquities from the Met. Those pieces originated in Turkey and India.
Meticulously vetting the authenticity of an object or work of art and mapping its history is not only standard practice for museum curators, but also far from new.
Laura Barry, the Juli Grainger Curator of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said that all historical items or art that Colonial Williamsburg considers for acquisition undergo thorough examination by an accession committee. The items’ materials — fabric, wood, paint, canvas or framings — are securitized, sometimes under microscopes, to determine legitimacy.
When it comes to artifacts’ ownership and transaction histories, she said, “The impetus is really on us to go back through auction and sale records.”
“Then,” Thompson said, “there is the Nazi-looted art.”
Nazi Germany stole priceless artworks from individuals and from countries it occupied, and organizations like The Antiquities Coalition are still working to return the works to the owners. It’s often far more time consuming to trace a stolen artwork back to its proper origin when it came from a private collection. It’s normally easier to return pieces to museums, as public institutions have accessible records.
“So this is what is unusual about this case,” Thompson said, referring to “The Wounded Indian” having been stolen from what can be considered a public institution. The MCMA is a nonprofit founded in 1795 by Boston artisans, including a silversmith named Paul Revere.
It received “The Wounded Indian” as a donation in 1893 and exhibited the statue for 65 years until its building was sold in 1958. The organization relocated, and the MCMA was told the sculpture had been accidentally destroyed.
A press release by the MCMA’s lawyer, Greg Werkheiser, asserts the statue was stolen while being moved and ended up in the possession of James Ricau, an art collector with “questionable ethics,” before being acquired by the Chrysler in 1986.
Thompson said the case is intriguing because the group was told the piece had been lost, not stolen.
The MCMA hadn’t been aware that “The Wounded Indian” survived the move between buildings until 1999, when a researcher who’d seen the statue on a trip in Norfolk happened upon photos of it in the MCMA’s records.
After media attention and an FBI investigation, the Chrysler announced Aug. 9 that it would return the sculpture by the end of August.
Bashford and Chenoweth learned the news the day they visited the museum.
The “Wounded Indian” sat on a marble base, a floor of fallen flowers and oak and maple leaves. He gazed at an arrow pulled from his side, the wound oozing onto the stone.
“He looks peaceful, but you can tell that he is accepting inevitable death,” Chenoweth said.
“I can feel him,” Bashford said.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
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2023-08-19 18:48:15Z
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