New York courts on Tuesday returned to China two seventh-century stone funerary sculptures worth $3.5 million, which were trafficked internationally and seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The justice of the State of New York has been conducting for more than two years a vast campaign of restitution of antiquities looted in twenty countries, which have landed in museums and galleries of the megalopolis, including the prestigious Met and its wealthy collectors and donors. After a restitution ceremony at the Chinese Consulate General in New York, the prosecutor for the Manhattan jurisdiction, Alvin Bragg, announced in a statement "the return to the Chinese people of two seventh-century stone sculptures of a funerary catafalque, worth nearly $3.5 million."
The works, "sawn" off graves in the early 1990s, were later taken out of China, Bragg said. Then, "from 1998 until their seizure in 2023, these antiquities were the subject of a loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) by Shelby White, a Manhattan collector." "It is a shame that these two incredible antiquities were stolen and that at least one of them remained hidden from the public for nearly three decades," Bragg said. One of the sculptures remained stored in the Met's reserves for 25 years.
See alsoAntiquities trafficking: Iran fights to recover its stolen treasures
Shelby White, 85, is an American administrator and philanthropist of the Met from whom the New York justice had seized in 2021 and 2022 about twenty stolen works of art, according to the specialized press. The Bragg prosecutor's office said Tuesday that it had "completed this year a criminal investigation into antiquities acquired by White and which concluded with the seizure of 89 works from ten different countries, worth a total of $ 69 million." Quoted in the statement, the Chinese consul general in New York, Huang Ping, considered that "the suppression of crimes against cultural heritage is a sacred mission".
Under the aegis of Prosecutor Bragg, since January 2022, more than 950 pieces worth more than $165 million have been returned to 19 countries, including Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece, Turkey and Italy. The most emblematic case of art traffickers in New York is the collector Michael Steinhardt who had to return, according to an out-of-court settlement reached in 2021, about 180 stolen antiquities worth $ 70 million.