The New York Times reported on Friday that museums were just learning of the government’s request that they review their collections of Indian art for works donated by Subhash Kapoor who was recently arrested for having stolen artefacts in a storage facility after an earlier raid in January also produced stolen works:
- “The only thing we own that the Freer-Sackler purchased either from Kapoor or the gallery Art of the Past is a 20th-century necklace from India, acquired in 1992,” Allison Peck, a spokeswoman, said. “Fortunately neither an antiquity nor sculpture.”
- A spokesman for the Met, Harold Holzer, said it had 81 pieces that had either beendonated by or purchased from Mr. Kapoor, starting in 1991, including several antiquities that are on display. But the bulk of the donations were a set of drawings from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that Mr. Kapoor gave to the museum in 2008 and were the subject of an exhibition in 2009, “Living Line: Selected Indian Drawings From the Subhash Kapoor Gift.”
- The Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which received a gift of 44 Indian antiquities from Mr. Kapoor in 2007, said those small terra cotta figures were not on display.
- Officials at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, where Mr. Kapoor lectured last April 2011, just months before his October arrest in Germany, said that their Asian curator was out of the office Friday but that the museum would review the provenance of any piece it had received from Mr. Kapoor.
- A spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum said Mr. Kapoor had donated two small terra cotta sculptures in 1997. Leslie C. Denk, the spokeswoman, said, “The museum plans to cooperate with any investigation by federal authorities.”
Museums Studying Dealer’s Artifacts (New York Times)
