The Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii

Overseas Khmer Art: The Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, located in the Pacific Ocean about 2,000 miles from the United States mainland, has a fairly large collection of Khmer art but does not advertise the fact. Most museums have their collections online, but Honolulu has almost nothing to see. Very puzzling. With a bit of digging you can find some artifacts but not a lot. So, it was intriguing to see a series of media reports in 2015 and 2016 that the museum had sued a collector, alleging that artworks he’d donated to the museum from 2003 onwards, did not possess sufficient provenance (ie; they were dodgy). Initially, Dr Joel Greene, a San Francisco art collector and historian, had donated an 11th-century Khmer sculpture and to sweeten further promised donations, the museum agreed to pay an annuity of USD80,000 for the rest of his life. In total, Greene donated five items (worth USD1.269 million) including this 13th-century bronze Buddhist Triad. A decade later the museum demanded written provenance relating to the objects and suspended annuity payments, hence the court case. Greene countersued and won the day in court, and the museum returned the artifacts to the collector, though it appeared in late 2016 that they were the subject of an ongoing Department of Homeland Security investigation, as Greene had acquired the artifacts from Subhash Kapoor, a convicted trafficker of looted antiquities. How that particular investigation turned out, I’m not aware, though Kapoor is in jail and many museums (and US authorities) are rightly returning artworks with Kapoor's fingerprints on them to their countries of origin. (Photo): Buddhist Triad - Adorned Buddha (center), Lokeshvara (4 arms), Prajnaparamita, 13thC. Bronze, gift of Dr Joel Greene 2004. © Honolulu Museum of Art and available under the Creative Commons CC0.