Mythic Warrior Is Captive in Global Art Conflict

By TOM MASHBERG and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby’s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge
The statue, a sandstone masterwork with a catalog estimate of $2 million to $3 million, was pulled from auction at the last minute last March after the Cambodian government complained it had been “illegally removed” from the country.

The Department of Homeland Security has opened an investigation, but Cambodian officials say they have held off asking for the piece to be seized while they negotiate with Sotheby’s for a private purchase. The auction house says that the seller is a “noble European lady” who acquired it in 1975. Although it was severed from its feet and pedestal, which were left behind at a remote Cambodian archaeological site, Sotheby’s says there is no proof that it was taken illegally.

The quiet tussle over the relic reveals the swampy terrain of auctioning antiquities with incomplete or disputed pedigrees. Sellers with a good-faith belief in their ownership rights enter a landscape in which ethics and regulations are evolving, governments are increasingly assertive, and lawyers versed in arcane statutes are as necessary as jungle guides.

“We live in a different world, and what was acceptable 50 years ago is no longer so,” said Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a lawyer, who was awarded a National Humanities Medal for leading the hunt for treasures ransacked from the Baghdad Museum in 2003. “Whatever the letter of the law may state, in the end you have to ask yourself, ‘Does the item pass the smell test?’ ”

Jane A. Levine, senior vice president and worldwide compliance director for Sotheby’s, said the auction house was “aware there are widely divergent views on how to resolve conflicts involving cultural heritage objects.”

“Sotheby’s approach to the Khmer sculpture is one of responsible and ethical market behavior and international cooperation between private and public entities,” she said.

Archaeologists and Cambodian officials say the case of the footless statue is all the more poignant because of the country’s recent history of genocide and plunder, and because researchers have found the very pedestal and feet belonging to the artwork. The discovery was made in Koh Ker, 60 miles northeast of the Angkor Wat temple complex; Koh Ker, another city in the Khmer empire, was at one time a rival capital to Angkor, which was once the largest city in the preindustrial world, perhaps more than three times the area of New York City today.

The sculpture, which is five feet tall and weighs 250 pounds, is one of a pair of scowling athlete-combatants in intricate headdresses from the mid 900s who were positioned in battle-ready stances and come from one of Koh Ker’s temples; it is about 200 years older than the famous sculptures at Angkor Wat.

In 2007 archaeologists matched the other statue, on display since 1980 at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., to its similarly detached pedestal.

Archaeologists say all clues suggest the work at Sotheby’s was plundered in the 1970s amid the chaos of power struggle and genocide, when the Khmer Rouge ravaged Cambodia, and looters hacked their way into long-inaccessible temples, pillaged priceless antiquities and sold them to Thai and Western collectors. The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

“Every red flag on the planet should have gone off when this was offered for sale,” said Herbert V. Larson Jr., a New Orleans lawyer and antiquities expert who teaches legal issues involving smuggled artifacts. “It screams ‘loot.’ ”

When asked whether the statue could have been stolen, Ms. Levine countered that the statue could have been removed any time in its thousand-year history, and said the word stolen was often “used loosely.”

To write the catalog entry for the statue, Sotheby’s hired the scholar Emma C. Bunker, a co-author of the authoritative book “Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art.” She called it an unrivaled example of Khmer sculpture, and the lot was promoted on the catalog’s cover and in a Sotheby’s news release. It was withdrawn on the day it was to be sold, March 24, 2011, after a Cambodian official working with the United Nations, Tan Theany, complained in a letter “that this statue was illegally removed from the site” and asked Sotheby’s to “facilitate its return.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/arts/design/sothebys-caught-in-dispute-over-prized-cambodian-statue.html?_r=2&hp