Museum’s Benin Bronzes Are Reclaimed by Wealthy Collector

When he exhibited a group of finely elaborate treasures from the kingdom of Benin in 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acknowledged that British soldiers had looted thousands of those sculptures and other articles of that land in 1897.

The collection of about 30 objects, including what the museum described as a “particularly excellent” sculpture of a warrior on horseback, had been provided by a rich rich and collector with the promise that approximately time would be donated to the museum. To exhibit the works, known as Benin Bronzes, the museum created a gallery that included information about looting and invited the real leader of the kingdom, the Oba, to the opening.

But several years later, a new Oba contacted the museum, looking for the property of the articles, said museum officials. For several years, they had conversations with the representatives of Oba and the collector, Robert Owen Lehman Jr., on how to handle that request.

Those discussions ended this week with an announcement from the museum that almost all articles would return to Lehman.

“We strive to be a leader in ethical administration and achieve judicious restitution decisions,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, who promoted as a museum director in 2015, in a statement. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t advance in a pleasant mutual resolution for our Benin gallery or bronzes.”

Between 2012 and 2020, said the Museum, Lehman donated five of Benin’s objects to the institution; Those are now part of their permanent collection. The museum said it would continue to seek “a resolution regarding the property and exhibition” of these articles: two relief plates, two commemorative bosses and a 18th century pendant showing an oba and two dignitaries.

Lehman declined to comment.

In addition to the warrior that the Museum of Fine Arts, called “Excellent”, a copper alloy sculpture of the 16th century of a figure that holds a spear, Lehman’s articles that are recovering include a nineteenth -century staff with Gong Gongy.

The fact that so many artifacts were eliminated by British forces of Benin, in southern Nigeria in southern Nigeria, has led to Museums, including Smithsonian, to return some of those articles to Africa. Repatriation is part of a broader calculation within the art world on how the fixed amounts of cultural heritage that were eliminated from global sites and then exhibited in Western cities.

Many museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, have adopted guidelines related to articles dating from the colonial era, which require that they consider restoring works of art that were eliminated by imperial powers.

By announcing that its Benin Kingdom gallery would close this month, the museum hid that many of the items in the Lehman collection, which was formed in the seventies and eighties through the purchase in the public auction and the Fromtack dealers, can be traced until 1897

“The heat is really in the Western museums” to return those articles, said Nubuisi C. Ezeluomba, African art curator in the Museum of Fine Arts of Virginia and an expert in the bronzes that grew in the kingdom of Benin.

Lehman is a great -grandson of Emanuel Lehman, one of the three immigrant brothers founded by Lehman Brothers’s financial firm in 1850. His father, Robert Owen Lehman Sr., directed the firm and was an outstanding art collector who donated by artist by artist by artist by artist by artist by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they are at a time of a cima.

An award -winning documentary, Junior Lehman has been involved in previous disagreements about works of art.

Last year, after a three -way judicial battle on the property or a raffle of Egon Schiele, which Lehman was given in the 1960s by his father, a judge in Rochester, New York, awarded possession of the work to the injuries of a merchant merchant with a merchant name with a merchant name with a merchant name with a merchant name with a merchant name with a merchant name.

Reflecting on the efforts of the three games, the kingdom of Benin, the Museum of Fine Arts and Lehman, to find a mutual resolution with respect to the bronzes, Teitelbaum said in an interview: “We were constantly trying to align the interests of the Dong Axes axes

“This was not the result that someone wanted,” he said.