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A stone sculpture representing a Hindu deity is making its way back to Nepal nearly 40 years after it disappeared from a temple shrine and ended up in the Dallas Museum of Art.
For more than eight centuries, the sacred stele of Lakshmi-Narayana, a manifestation of the Hindu deities Vishnu and Lakshmi, watched over devotees in the Nepalese city of Patan until it suddenly disappeared, stolen by looters in 1984. Six years later, the eight-armed figure reappeared at auction at Sotheby’s, selling to a collector, who then lent it to the Dallas museum.
A spokesman for Sotheby’s said it did not have records from the 1990 sale on hand to clarify what provenance had been presented to it at the time the antiquity was put up for auction, but it said it was researching the matter.
But it wasn’t until late 2019, when an expert raised concerns about the Kathmandu Valley icon, that curators re-examined its provenance. That’s when the F.B.I. got involved, collaborating on a transfer of the sacred statue, with permission from its lender, from the museum to Nepal’s embassy in Washington that is taking place this week.
“As soon as we became aware of additional information on the stele, we began working with the lender and with the Embassy of Nepal to determine an ethical and appropriate course of action,” Agustín Arteaga, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are pleased to ensure the safe transfer of this invaluable object to its home.”
The sculpture’s return also signals the Nepalese government’s renewed focus on cultural restitution. When the country began opening its borders in the 1950s, looters ransacked the Kathmandu Valley’s temples to feed the black market’s growing interest in the region, which surged again in the 1980s. A push by Nepalese officials to locate and retrieve stolen objects was sidetracked by a devastating earthquake in 2015, said researchers in the United States and Nepal who have worked on repatriation.
Alisha Sijapati, a correspondent for The Nepali Times who has reported on looted objects, said in an interview that some Nepalis did not understand at first why these objects were being looted. “But they understood it when these sculptures started showing up at auction houses where they were selling for thousands of dollars,” she said.
Experts hope the figure’s repatriation will send a message to other museums that might have Nepalese objects in their collections.
“American museums and collectors have a moral obligation to look at their collections and really think if those objects are worth retaining,” said Erin Thompson, an art-crime professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who questioned the provenance for the stele in a January 2020 article for the arts blog Hyperallergic.
Some Nepalis still remember when the Lakshmi-Narayana disappeared. Joy Lynn Davis, an artist whose decade of research into looted Nepalese objects helped inform the F.B.I.’s case, interviewed many of those devotees in 2012 while living a few minutes from the temple housing the deity.
“This is not an archaeological artifact; it’s part of a living, continuous culture,” she said, adding that the sculpture “will be welcomed back with a party and consecration ceremony.”
Davis estimates that thousands of other Nepalese objects have been smuggled out. Recently, she and others have focused on another sculpture, this one in the Denver Art Museum’s collection. The researchers have suggested it is from the 10th century and was taken from Nepal in the 1960s.
“The origin of cultural property is a significant and serious topic,” Jena Pruett, a museum spokeswoman, said in an interview this week. “The Denver Art Museum has contacted Nepalese government officials to gather any additional facts about the artwork and its provenance.”
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