The thousand-year-old Indian statue sat in the Denver Art Museum’s Asian art collection for six decades, a gift from prominent New York art dealer Robert Ellsworth.
Sculpted around the 10th century, the 38-inch sandstone piece depicts a celestial woman beneath a mango tree. It was once part of the Ghatesvara Temple in northern India, built as a shrine to the Hindu god Shiva.
Indian archaeologists, for years, said this priceless work was stolen. Four years ago, the museum quietly handed the statue to U.S. law enforcement to be repatriated to India.
Denver Art Museum officials did not issue a press release. The artifact has been scrubbed from the institution’s website as if it was never there. Aside from saved webpages on Internet archives, there’s no public-facing evidence that the statue was once a part of the museum’s collection.
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For years, the Denver museum has carefully curated which repatriations and deaccessions — pieces removed from its collection — it chooses to publicly announce, a practice that goes against industry recommendations. Unlike some other institutions, it’s impossible in Denver to see which pieces, and how many, the museum has returned after foreign governments or U.S. authorities provided evidence that they were stolen or illegally trafficked.
Other institutions, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the San Antonio Museum of Art, provide detailed information for all works they choose to remove from their collections — though that practice still represents the exception, not the rule.
Art experts say this should be the gold standard, an important tool for transparency and accountability as a public institution with an educational mission.
“Museums should be telling these stories not just for the sake of transparency but because they are intrinsically important stories that tell us really deep and meaningful things about how we understand other peoples’ cultural belongings,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor of art and director of Colgate University’s museum studies program. “That’s central to any universal museum.”
A Denver Art Museum spokesperson, Andy Sinclair, said the institution follows all field guidelines, practices and policies for collections and deaccessions. The museum is focused, she said in an email, on adding to its online collection database. Information on deaccessions will be made available “upon request,” she said.
A plundered past
Kirit Mankodi has been tracking the celestial goddess for nearly 20 years.
The retired archaeologist runs a website called Plundered Past that traces stolen Indian antiquities around the world.
In 2005, Mankodi wrote to the Archaeological Survey of India, the national agency in charge of protecting the country’s rich cultural heritage. He provided detailed evidence that the Denver piece had been stolen from the Ghatesvara Temple sometime in the 1960s.
The archaeologist included images from Indian authorities, showing the sculpture still in place in 1960. By the time Dr. Lakshmi Kant Tripath wrote “The Temples of Baroli” in 1975, the stone work had been looted.
Indian law protects artifacts in the country’s numerous ancient temples, forbidding their sale or transfer abroad.
In 1965, financier and art collector Christian Humann loaned the artwork to the Denver Art Museum as part of his Pan-Asian Collection. He chose the Mile High City for his impressive collection after cultivating a friendship with a Denver museum trustee and research consultant, Emma C. Bunker.
Bunker’s close relationship with dealers and collectors helped the Denver Art Museum build its 7,000-piece Asian art collection. But these close ties also led the museum to acquire a host of objects that had been looted from countries like Cambodia and Thailand, The Post found in a three-part investigation last year.
The Pan-Asian Collection has also come under scrutiny in recent years for its questionable origins. Many of Humann’s pieces, in auctions or in major American museums, have no provenance, or ownership history, going back earlier than the collector himself. This includes an 8th-century Thai bronze still in the Denver Art Museum’s collection that has no ownership details earlier than Humann.
At least five other Thai bronzes from the famed Prakhon Chai hoard can be traced to this collection — pieces the federal government is now investigating. The Post revealed last year that looters stole these pieces in the 1960s from a secret temple vault near the Cambodian border and sold them to disgraced dealer Douglas Latchford, with the help of Bunker’s scholarship. Many ended up, and remain, at prestigious museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Records show Ellsworth, who purchased much of Humann’s collection, gifted the Indian relic to the Denver museum in 1982 after the loan expired.
After alerting Indian authorities to the plundered Denver piece, Mankodi said he sent a letter in May 2010 to the museum’s Asian art curator, including the same photographic documentation.
The curator, Ronald Otsuka, responded promptly, Mankodi said. But when the archaeologist said this stolen artifact belonged back in India, the curator stopped replying, he said.
“He didn’t write to me again,” Mankodi said.
Otsuka did not respond to requests from The Post for comment.
Sinclair, the Denver Art Museum spokesperson, said 2015 marked the first repatriation request from the Indian government. The following year, museum officials hosted U.S. law enforcement officials, providing requested provenance information.
U.S. officials in 2018 provided the museum with “images, measurements and facts enabling the museum to confirm the object was illegally removed from the Baroli temple,” Sinclair said.
The same week, she said, the museum initiated the process of deaccessioning the relic for its eventual repatriation to India.
The item remains in possession of the U.S. government, a spokesperson with Homeland Security Investigations confirmed this week. There’s no date set for its return.
Disappearing objects
When the celestial goddess remained part of the Denver Art Museum’s collection, anyone could find its photo, description and provenance information on the institution’s website.
But at least as far back as September 2019, museum officials scrubbed the antiquity from the site. The link to its entry now says “the requested page could not be found.” An archived version of the webpage can still be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine.
The same is true for other artworks the museum has deaccessioned in recent years. A host of Southeast Asian relics donated to the museum by Bunker in 2016 also have vanished from the website amid the federal investigation.
Further ommissions include dozens of pieces donated or sold to the museum by indicted or convicted art dealers, such as Latchford and former New York gallery owners Nancy Wiener and Subhash Kapoor.
Latchford sold, loaned and gifted at least 14 works to the Denver Art Museum between 1999 and 2011. But his name no longer appears in any provenance section on the museum’s searchable collection database.
Museum leadership sometimes puts out press releases when it gives up artworks to U.S. authorities for repatriation to source countries. Those announcements include multiple objects returned to Cambodia since 2016, a collection of Indian works given back last year and older repatriations to Guatemala and a Native American tribe.
But pieces such as the celestial goddess garnered no public announcement. And the press releases for these repatriated pieces do not include accession numbers, provenance information or object descriptions — all key for academics, law enforcement and members of the public interested in researching a museum’s collection.
The Association of Art Museum Directors, an organization of museum leaders from the United States, Canada and Mexico, in 2010 issued a recommendation that member museums “publish on its website within a reasonable period of time works that have been deaccessioned and disposed of.”
The guidance is simply a recommendation, though, not a requirement.
Still, after the association published the policy, a growing body of museums have adopted the practice of maintaining a database with deaccessioned works.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston allows the public to see information about all 2,289 objects the institution has removed from its collection.
The museum includes extensive information about the items and their ownership histories. The institution deaccessioned a 7th-century Italian vessel, for instance, after New York authorities supplied evidence it had been looted.
The object page outlines how the piece was illicitly excavated and sold to a New York collector before making its way into the museum’s collection in the 1990s. Museum officials note that the vessel was one of nine that came from a site that had been heavily looted and was later trafficked by a known illicit antiquities dealer.
“We feel transparency is important,” said Victoria Reed, the Boston museum’s curator for provenance. “We have a particular responsibility to our audience. We’re a public institution. If we decide to deaccession something, to remove it from public view, then we are accountable to our audience. We have a responsibility to share our thinking and information that led us to conclude what we did.”
The San Antonio Art Museum also faced this question in 2021 while repatriating objects to Italy. The simplest solution, museum leadership decided, was to keep the items on the institution’s website with updated details.
Researchers who want to study them will still be able to get information this way, since the museum can’t provide access to items no longer in its collection, said Lynley J. McAlpine, the San Antonio museum’s associate curator of provenance research.
“We hope that doing so will make information easy for people to find,” she said.
The Dallas Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art also provide details of deaccessioned works on their websites. The Met in New York this month pledged to soon do the same for restituted objects.
“A way to admit mistakes”
Former museum directors and other industry experts say the Denver Art Museum should adopt these best practices as it continues to probe its collection for problematic works.
In recent years, the museum’s past questionable dealings with suspected or convicted illicit antiquity dealers have put a spotlight on the Mile High City’s preeminent art institution. In response, the museum last year hired a full-time senior provenance researcher, calling the work an “essential component of our commitment to ethical collecting practices.”
But the public, industry watchers say, continues to be left in the dark.
“It’s embarrassing,” said David Gill, a professor of archaeological heritage at the University of Kent in England. “It shows your curators have been recommending dodgy things for the museum. It shows the trustees haven’t really engaged in due diligence. It shows museums are actors closing a blind eye to the problem.”
The selective press releases, Gill said, seem to serve more as controlling the publicity.
“It’s all about, ‘We’ve done the right thing,'” he said, “rather than saying, ‘How did you get into this position in the first place?'”
While repatriations can be seen as bad press for a museum, they’re not antithetical to an institution’s mission, said Marlowe, the Colgate University professor.
“The Denver Art Museum could have a really powerful, honest display in which they say, ‘When we accepted these objects 30 years ago, we understood them differently,'” she said. “Telling that story of that broad shift in cultural values is a way to admit mistakes, show they’ve learned and bring audiences into the story.”
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