The New York Times turned the screw a little tighter on The Metropolitan

The New York Times turned the screw a little tighter on The Metropolitan Museum of Art, located in New York, with another headline-grabbing article today on the museum’s ownership of a significant number of Cambodian works of art, linked to none other than Douglas Latchford, who presided over a large part of the market in Khmer art for decades as a dealer and collector. It’s a story I’ve highlighted before, but it’s well worth telling again, as the Times’ article underscored in detail the longtime curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the museum, Martin Lerner, as a Latchford confidant before and after Lerner left the Met in 2003. Cambodian officials have now taken their genuine concerns to federal authorities in the United States, alongside the credible testimony offered up by the leader of the temple looting gangs in Cambodia, Toek Tik, before his death late last year. The former Khmer Rouge soldier identified 33 artifacts in the Met collection that he personally plundered, sold and transported into Thailand. The Met’s own records, though scant, list Latchford as a donor or seller of exhibits to the museum, two of which, the Kneeling Attendants, were returned to Cambodia in 2013. There are too many Khmer artifacts with a dark and murky past still held by the Met, especially those with Latchford or his accomplices’ fingerprints all over them, as Cambodia’s lawyer Brad Gordon remarks: “The burden of proof should be on the Met to prove the Met has the right to legally own Cambodia’s national treasures.” They are certainly taking their time. Article: https://www.nytimes.com/.../met-artifacts-cambodia.html... *These 9 artifacts are among dozens that Cambodia officials assert were looted by Toek Tik and his gang of looters and are now in The Met collection in New York. Source: Andy Brouwer