Latest news with #LucianSimmons
New York Times
22-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Corrections: March 22, 2025
An article on Friday about beef tallow misstated the nature of a $1.5 million payment received by the American Heart Association. It was a donation from listeners of a radio program sponsored by Procter & Gamble, not a corporate sponsorship from Procter & Gamble itself. A picture caption with an article on Tuesday about Lucian Simmons, the new head of provenance research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, misstated the era of a bronze griffin being returned to Greece. It is from the seventh century B.C., not the seventh century. A picture caption with an article on Friday about the Frick Museum reversed the identities of the painter and subject in a portrait. The image was Sir Anthony van Dyck's portrait of Frans Snyders, not Snyder's portrait of van Dyck. An article on Page 8 this weekend about the actress Ellen Pompeo misstates the type of work that her husband, Chris Ivery, does. Ivery works in marketing; he is no longer a music producer. An article on Page 30 this weekend about solidarity transcribes incorrectly a line from Sarah Schulman's forthcoming book, 'The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.' The line is 'Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams,' not 'Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are the only people with dreams.' Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@ To share feedback, please visit Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@ For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@
New York Times
18-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Art Seizures at the Met Caused Concern. His Job Is to Address It.
From his office on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucian Simmons has a vantage point from which to survey the huge mission he has undertaken. Below him in gallery after gallery are the artworks and artifacts that the museum has collected across its 155 years in business. Formerly, as head of the restitution department at Sotheby's, Simmons confronted questions about the histories of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of works a year that the auction house sought to sell. Now as the Met's head of provenance research, a new position created last May, he is responsible for a collection of 1.5 million objects that span 5,000 years of human history. And he has assumed the role at a time when the museum faces questions about how it collected many of them. Since 2017, the Manhattan district attorney's office reports it has seized some 74 works of art, including 22 on loan, as well as 55 Etruscan amber carvings and an assortment of other ancient fragments and carvings, from the Met, asserting they had been looted. Those seizures, and others by federal authorities, have led some academics and others to question the collecting practices of the past and to wonder whether other objects in the museum have shaky provenance. Into this maelstrom steps Simmons with a job to correct earlier errors, to prevent new questionable acquisitions and to ensure that the museum's reputation for integrity and scholarship is not further damaged. 'My reception at the Met has been incredibly generous,' Simmons, 62, said in an interview at the museum. 'People have been open to talking about provenance and turning over rocks because people realize it is part of being this museum.' To illustrate its new seriousness in this regard, the museum now posts two inventories on its website — one for antiquities it has restituted and the other, on a separate page, for artworks that are no longer part of the collection after it was determined they were likely looted during World War II. In addition, the Met has expanded the team of analysts dedicated to provenance research from six to 11. One new initiative the researchers have undertaken is to focus on items in the collection with histories that include some contact with tainted dealers. 'We no longer want the answer' to a provenance or restitution inquiry 'to be, 'We lack the resources.' It's not a good answer,' said Max Hollein, the Met's director and chief executive. Last month, the Met made its first antiquities repatriation since Simmons' arrival as it returned to Greece the ancient bronze head of a griffin, the mythological creature. It had determined that the artifact, which entered the Met in 1972, was likely stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. Museum officials said Simmons has helped introduce a stricter culture in evaluating works for possible acquisition. 'I'm paranoid, and I'm paid to be paranoid,' Simmons said. He said he has told curators ''You can do better,' meaning, 'Go back, go back. More questions. More research.'' Since his arrival, museum officials said, it has blocked the acquisition of works with gaps or 'red flags' in their provenance, including one antiquity and other items from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. But they declined to provide any further detail about the number or type of objects, because they said dealers and collectors who offer works to the museum do so under an agreement of confidentiality. For the Met and other museums, the past few years have been a moment to account for collecting practices from an earlier era when they competed to secure remarkable objects without much scrutiny or restraint. Until recent decades, the art market seldom put many strictures on sales, countries did little to enforce their own patrimony laws, and many museums posted provenance research protocols they had adopted but often did not follow. That has changed in recent years. Many countries have begun to enforce their laws, to demand the return of stolen cultural heritage and to point to the damage commercial looting causes to the world's archaeological sites. Now the Met has joined other museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which appointed a curator of provenance in 2010, in creating a position at the top executive rank that demonstrates a seriousness about the topic. 'They have really stepped up,' Leila A. Amineddoleh, an art and cultural heritage lawyer, said of the Met. 'All institutions are stepping up. Collecting standards have changed.' In Simmons, the Met picked an executive with a long history of leading research in this area, albeit in a corporate setting. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Simmons, who was born in Britain, studied and practiced law in London before joining Sotheby's in 1995. He said he had been interested in art since childhood — he traded in old master prints and drawings at school — and worked during his student days for the American collector Stanley J. Seeger, developing a passion for Modern art, especially Francis Bacon and late Picasso. 'I joined Sotheby's because I could combine my hard legal and research skills with an involvement in the arts,' he said. At Sotheby's, he was vice chairman and worldwide head of the restitution department, starting a team that, by the time he left, had five full-time staff members dedicated to guarding against dealing in looted art. He also served as a senior specialist for the Impressionist and Modern Art and Global Fine Art departments. Some say it remains to be seen whether Simmons, who came from a world dominated by the commercial imperative, will be able to adjust to a museum provenance role. Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor of art and director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, said the moral and ethical bar and the need for transparency is higher for a public institution than a private corporation. 'It's that moral landscape that's completely different at a museum than at a private auction company,' she said. 'It's hard to know whether someone coming from the auction world has what it takes for that particular mission. It requires a willingness not to let sleeping dogs lie but to wake the dogs up.' But Carla Shapreau, an expert on looted musical instruments, said she had been impressed by Simmons' transparency when she approached him in her research. 'He was generous with his time and knowledge, and when we got into complex issues of provenance he would address those openly,' said Shapreau, who is a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 'He seemed very straightforward and genuinely concerned with these questions of past ownership and with trying to reconstruct these objects' histories.' In his new role, as a researcher who helps determine whether the Met has rightful possession of various objects, Simmons will undoubtedly have some contact with Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the Manhattan district attorney's Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The prosecutor was diplomatic in responding in a statement to a request for his impression of Simmons' appointment. 'We appreciate the professionalism of the Met's staff and their respect for a criminal-justice process that is always based on our long-term, thorough and complex criminal investigations that enable this office to repatriate looted antiquities,' he said. But in court papers last year, Bogdanos was critical of Simmons' role in a disputed transaction that took place at Sotheby's in 2005. The dispute involved the sale of a work by Egon Schiele that Sotheby's had allowed to go forward despite questions as to whether it had been looted by the Nazis. Bogdanos criticized Sotheby's for having relied on sources who it said attested that the work had been legitimately sold to a Swiss dealer. In fact, Bogdanos said, the Swiss dealer had been accused of trafficking with the Nazis, and the auction house's sources were only repeating information they had gleaned from the dealer himself. 'That Sotheby's London called such parroting an independent source speaks volumes about Sotheby's London's due diligence at the time,' he wrote. A spokeswoman for the museum said Simmons declined to comment on the assertion in the court papers. In his work at Sotheby's, Simmons was typically more involved with issues of Nazi restitution than antiquity repatriation, and objects possibly lost or stolen during the Holocaust will continue to be a focus of his role at the Met. For the Met, he is spending time researching in the Rosenberg & Stiebel gallery archive in the Frick Art Reference Library and the Rothschild family archives in Britain, focusing on art looted during World War II that eventually entered the Met's collection, including pieces that have already been restituted and were later acquired by the museum. His work is leading to the updating of hundreds of provenance records, he said. Simmons said, for example, that he recently changed the labels on an 18th-century British tea casket and a 14th-century terra-cotta sculpture to fully represent in their provenances that they had once been confiscated by the Nazis and restituted before entering the Met's collection. Part of the Met's job is not only to perform this kind of vetting but also to show the world that it is. To that end, the museum has held panels to discuss issues of provenance research, one of them only the other day involving its loaned collection of ancient Cycladic art. Simmons has also gone on the conference circuit — speaking in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere — advertising and explaining the Met's new push deeper into provenance research. As well as Nazi looted art, Simmons is pursuing looted antiquities, investigating the provenance of all ancient objects acquired since the 1970 UNESCO convention, in an era when the museum admits standards were laxer. (The convention, signed by 147 nations including the United States, seeks to halt trafficking in stolen cultural property and encourage its restitution to countries of origin.) The Met's priority is the examination of antiquities acquired from commercial dealers who have since been associated with looted art, such as Robert Hecht, a longtime international art dealer who died in 2012. The Met said its collection has 56 works associated with Hecht, his galleries or family members. In some cases, the Met has arranged to retain items that authorities identified as looted, such as the Etruscan carvings, after negotiating a loan agreement with the country to which they were repatriated. Marlowe said it will be important going forward to see whether outside researchers will be able to communicate with the provenance team if there are objects they are concerned about. 'Everyone acknowledges it's an enormous job,' Marlowe said. 'But if they want us to put their faith in them, they should be open with their priorities and what burden of proof they are using.' One issue currently on the table is a request from Cambodian officials for the return of additional items they say were looted during the years of civil war and upheaval that ravaged the country from the 1970s to the late 1990s. In 2023, with the help of federal officials, the Cambodian government was able to secure the return of 14 Khmer-era artifacts they viewed as looted. But Cambodian officials say there are dozens more that belong to Cambodia. 'We are researching another group of Cambodian works,' Hollein said. Simmons defends a gradual, thorough approach because the museum has a fiduciary responsibility 'to get it right,' he said. His boss is clear that the new head of provenance research is the person to do it. 'We have an extremely strong filter now,' Hollein said.
Observer
27-02-2025
- General
- Observer
Met Museum Returning Ancient Bronze Thought Stolen from Greek Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning to Greece the bronze head of a griffin, a mythological creature, after determining that the artifact from the seventh century B.C. was probably stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. The museum said the head, which entered the collection as a gift from a former trustee in 1972, would be turned over to Greece's minister of culture at a ceremony scheduled for Monday at the Met. Although discussions about the provenance of the piece have been underway since 2018, the museum said the decision to return it was finalized only a few months ago. It will be the first piece from the Met's collection to be repatriated since the museum installed a new executive, Lucian Simmons, last year to lead an expanded provenance research unit. The museum chose to devote more research efforts to determining the provenance of its expansive holdings after a series of seizures of looted artifacts and increased scrutiny over the protocols it had used to accept and purchase works and objects, particularly antiquities. As head of provenance research, a newly created role, Simmons, a former executive at Sotheby's, oversees a team of analysts that has been expanded to 11 from six. The ancient Greeks often decorated their bronze cauldrons, used to honor the gods, with the head of a griffin, whose visage is that of an eagle but whose body is that of a lion. On its website, the Met said the cauldrons set on tripods or conical stands were often used as votive gifts dedicated in Greek sanctuaries from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C. The head had been displayed at the entrance to the Met's Greek and Roman galleries since 1999. It was originally discovered in a riverbed in Olympia, in the Peloponnese region of Greece, in 1914 by the curator of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, but it went missing roughly two decades later, the Met said in a statement. It said research by Met and Greek authorities showed the antiquity had been stolen. The head came to the Met in a bequest from Walter C. Baker, a financier, art collector and Met trustee who had bought it in 1948 from a dealer in New York. 'The Met and the Greek Ministry agreed to the return of the Griffin after careful review of records and letters determining that it could not have legitimately left the Archaeological Museum of Olympia,' the Met said in the statement. 'This research revealed that the theft of the object occurred under the watch of the head of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, for which he was referred for criminal prosecution over 80 years ago.' The work will be lent back to the Met for an exhibition next year, the Met said. 'The Met is honored to collaborate with the Hellenic Republic on the return of this extraordinary object,' said Max Hollein, the museum's director and CEO. 'We are grateful for our long-standing partnership with the Greek government, and look forward to continued engagement and opportunities for cultural exchange.' Loan agreements have become a tool for museums looking to continue to display important items at a time when many countries are seeking the return of their cultural heritage. In 2022, the Met announced another arrangement with Greece to display one of the world's most significant privately assembled collections of Cycladic antiquities — mostly marble figures and vessels created thousands of years ago in the Cyclades, a group of islands off the coast of Greece in the Aegean Sea. The works were collected by businessperson and philanthropist Leonard N. Stern. Stern gave his collection to Greece, and in an agreement with the Met and the Greek government, most of the objects are to remain on view at the museum for 25 years, with an acknowledgment that the collection belongs to the Greek state, and with select works periodically returning to Greece. The agreement foresees that the loan can be extended. On Tuesday, Greek officials will take part in a panel discussion at the Met about the cooperation between the museum and Greece, titled 'The Cyclades at the Met: a New Model of Collaboration.' Greek officials are also scheduled Tuesday to attend a ceremony at the Manhattan district attorney's office where the officials are to receive 11 artifacts. The artifacts, which were described as looted, had been seized by the office's Antiquities Trafficking Unit from private collectors. —NYT
New York Times
24-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
Met Museum Returning Ancient Bronze Thought Stolen from Greek Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning to Greece the bronze head of a griffin, the mythological creature, after determining that the artifact from the 7th century B.C. was likely stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s. The museum said the head, which entered the collection as a gift from a former trustee in 1972, will be turned over to Greece's minister of culture at a ceremony Monday at the Met. Though discussions about the provenance of the piece have been underway since 2018, the museum said the decision to return it was finalized only a few months ago. It will be the first piece from the Met's collection to be repatriated since the museum installed a new executive, Lucian Simmons, last year to lead an expanded provenance research unit. The museum chose to devote more research efforts to determining the provenance of its expansive holdings after a series of seizures of looted artifacts and increased scrutiny over the protocols it had used to accept and purchase works and objects, particularly antiquities. As head of provenance research, a newly created role, Simmons, a former executive at Sotheby's, oversees a team of analysts that has been expanded from six to 11. The ancient Greeks often decorated their bronze cauldrons, used to honor the gods, with the head of a griffin, whose visage is that of an eagle but whose body is that of a lion. On its website, the Met said that the cauldrons set on tripods or conical stands were often used as votive gifts dedicated in Greek sanctuaries from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C. The head had been displayed at the entrance to The Met's Greek and Roman galleries since 1999. It was originally discovered in a river bed in Olympia, in the Peloponnese region of Greece, in 1914 by the curator of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, but it went missing roughly two decades later, the Met said in a statement. It said research by the Met and Greek authorities showed the antiquity had been stolen. The head came to the Met in a bequest from Walter C. Baker, a financier and art collector and Met trustee who had bought it in 1948 from a dealer in New York. 'The Met and the Greek Ministry agreed to the return of the Griffin after careful review of records and letters determining that it could not have legitimately left the Archaeological Museum of Olympia,' the Met said in the statement. 'This research revealed that the theft of the object occurred under the watch of the head of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, for which he was referred for criminal prosecution over 80 years ago.' The work will be lent back to The Met for an exhibition next year, the Met said. 'The Met is honored to collaborate with the Hellenic Republic on the return of this extraordinary object,' said Max Hollein, the museum's director and chief executive. 'We are grateful for our long-standing partnership with the Greek government, and look forward to continued engagement and opportunities for cultural exchange.' Loan agreements have become a tool for museums looking to continue to display important items at a time when many countries are seeking the return of their cultural heritage. In 2022, the Met announced another arrangement with Greece to display one of the world's most significant privately assembled collections of Cycladic antiquities — mostly marble figures and vessels created thousands of years ago in the Cyclades, a group of islands off the coast of Greece in the Aegean Sea. The works were collected by the businessman and philanthropist Leonard N. Stern. Stern gave his collection to Greece, and in an agreement with the Met and the Greek government, most of the objects are to remain on view at the museum for 25 years, with an acknowledgment that the collection belongs to the Greek state, and with select works periodically returning to Greece. The agreement foresees that the loan can be extended. On Tuesday, Greek officials will take part in a panel discussion at the Met about the cooperation between the museum and Greece, titled 'The Cyclades at the Met: a New Model of Collaboration.' Greek officials are also scheduled on Tuesday to attend a ceremony at the Manhattan district attorney's office where the officials are to receive 11 artifacts. The artifacts, which were described as looted, had been seized by the office's Antiquities Trafficking Unit from private collectors.
