PORTLAND, Ore. — The Portland Art Museum is offering up a 36-inch-tall stone sculpture with little ownership history for international scrutiny by placing it on a Web site where Southeast Asian cultural organizations and governments can examine it and possibly make a claim for the work.
If somebody can prove that the sculpture of Ganesha, a revered deity in South and Southeast Asia, was stolen from them or illegally exported out of their country, the Portland museum will return it.
No one knows yet what will happen to the statue, but its mysterious origins have prompted an ethical discussion.
“It raises, in high relief, what we should do about works in circulation without provenance,” said Maxwell Anderson, the Melvin &Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Maribeth Graybill, the Portland Art Museum’s curator of Asian art, saw the Ganesha for sale in the Christie’s auction catalog and sensed an opportunity to expand the museum’s modest collection of Asian art. That expansion, she imagined, would help bolster the museum’s reputation among local collectors who might one day donate their own work to the museum.
What’s more, the modestly priced idol was the best Ganesha of its type on the international market.
She recommended that the museum buy it.
In September, the museum paid between $50,000 and $100,000 for the piece with little insight into its history before 2000, when auction houses had come to own it.
Graybill and the museum believe the chance that the statue was stolen is slim. “We didn’t make this decision (to buy) frivolously.”
Incomplete histories are not unusual when dealing with antiquities; legal, ethical and cultural issues often erupt about them.
These disputes, including those about artworks looted by the Nazis before and during World War II, have created a desire for clarity about how to responsibly deal with the source of antiquities.
In June, to address this concern and others, the Association of Art Museum Directors revised their guidelines for sacred objects. In those new guidelines, the association said that if museums could not trace a work’s provenance to November 1970, the date countries of origin were granted rights and protection for stolen or illegally exported artworks, they must register the work on the association’s Web site. The idea is that the international community then has an opportunity to scrutinize the history of an object and make a possible claim.
The Portland museum is the first to have posted an object since the June revisions.
“This is about transparency,” said Brian Ferriso, the Portland museum’s executive director. Ferriso was a member of the museum directors committee that revised guidelines for acquiring sacred objects.
Though Mimi Gaudieri, the association’s executive director, also thinks the likelihood of a claim for the Ganesha is slim, if one is made, she said, things could get interesting.
“The process to resolve these things is case by case,” Gaudieri said. “There is no rule of thumb. It depends on the object and the parties involved.”
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