National Gallery of Australia returns ‘looted’ art to India

The NGA will return 17 artworks worth more than $3m after acquiring them through jailed dealer Subhash Kapoor.

One of the items to be returned — an arch for a shrine that is more than 800 years old.

The National Gallery of Aus­tralia will return 17 artworks worth more than $3m to India and other countries as the institution finally wipes its hands of tainted acquisitions made through jailed US antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor.

A bronze sculpture of the dancing child-saint Sambandar and a sandstone sculpture of Lakshmi and Vishnu are among the pieces the NGA purchased through Kapoor’s New York company Art of the Past and which are to be returned to India.

With the restitution of the final 16 works from Kapoor, the NGA says it will have de-­accessioned all remaining pieces in the national collection that were associated with the disgraced dealer – a process that started with the return to India of Dancing Shiva in 2014.

Another sculpture had been purchased from late New York dealer William Wolff.

Kapoor is accused of masterminding an illicit global trade in Indian and Asian antiquities, worth more than $US145m ($196m).

He is on trial in India and ­officials in the US are seeking his extradition to face charges there.

The NGA council, chaired by Ryan Stokes, decided in June to deaccession the works, and gallery director Nick Mitzevich said he was working with the Indian high commission to return them.

“We are sorry that this situation arose,” Mr Mitzevich said of the NGA’s unintended purchase of smuggled artworks.

“It’s unfortunate, and the institution is sorry for this development. We are doing all we can to avoid any future missteps of this kind. It’s a historic issue … The NGA was part of an international fraud campaign that affected more than a dozen of the world’s leading institutions.”

Tainted artworks sent home

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In total, 24 works have been deaccessioned by the NGA because they were sold improperly by Kapoor or other dealers, or because of insecure provenance. Their combined price at the time of acquisition was $A10.82m.

The 17 works announced by the NGA on Thursday include six bronze or stone sculptures, a brass processional standard, a painted scroll and six photographs.

Fourteen pieces will be returned to India, with their final destination to be determined by the Indian government.

The photographs were not deemed to have been stolen but were being returned to India as a gesture of goodwill.

Three sculptures purchased from Kapoor required further research to determine their country of origin.

They join seven large sculptures that already have been repatriated to India, including the Dancing Shiva, a pair of stone temple guardians, and a sandstone Seated Buddha, sold to the NGA by Nancy Wiener.

Mr Mitzevich said the NGA council’s decision to deaccession the latest 17 works was guided by a new framework that the gallery had developed over the past year and which came into effect last month.

The gallery would take steps to return artworks where, on the balance of probability, it was considered likely that an item was stolen, illegally excavated, exported in contravention of the law of a foreign country, or unethically acquired.

“That means we can make timely decisions to respect the cultural property of individual countries and work with those countries to make sure that works are under the most appropriate stewardship,” Mr Mitzevich said.

“It’s an important step and is part of an international development that both the legal and ethical aspects of managing a collection need to be weighed up.”

The repatriation of the final works associated with Kapoor closes a painful chapter for the NGA that has persisted for almost a decade, after Kapoor’s arrest in Germany in October 2011 and reporting by The Australian that brought to light the problematic works in the NGA collection.

An inquiry by former High Court judge Susan Crennan into the NGA’s Asian collection considered the provenance of 36 works acquired from 1968-2013.

Of the 36 works in that report, the NGA said 16 had been deaccessioned, nine were found “satisfactory” and the remaining 11 were subject to ongoing research.

Mr Mitzevich said the NGA had a compensation claim against Kapoor for $US8.59m.

“Kapoor is on trial and it doesn’t appear that he has any identified assets, however we are still pursuing the matter,” he said.

The Indian high commissioner to Australia, Manpreet Vohra, welcomed the decision by the Australian government and the NGA to return the works.