AUSTRALIA, November 16, 2013 (The Australian): HPI Note: This article follows on the one yesterday about the sale of a stolen Siva Nataraj to an Australian museum. Only now is the scale of the smuggling of stolen treasures from India becoming apparent.
A little more than two years ago, in August 2011, a small, delicate Madonna and child ivory carving originally from the former Portuguese territory of Timor arrived at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA). Canberra’s temple of high art had paid $US35,000 for the 250-year-old Catholic icon with the expectation it would round out its collection of religious antiquities. Within weeks of the piece emerging from its packing crate, however, the man who sold it to the gallery was intercepted at Frankfurt airport and arrested on an Interpol warrant.
It was an abrupt and ignominious end to the jet-setting adventures of Indian-born US resident Subhash Kapoor, who for almost four decades had wooed the world’s art elite from his shop Art of the Past, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and from numerous other New York addresses. For the next nine months, Kapoor was held in Germany, until mid-July last year when he was extradited to Chennai, India, where investigators allege he is the mastermind of a vast international antiquities looting empire.
Within days of Kapoor’s arrival in India, US Homeland Security raided Art of the Past and other premises controlled by him and family members. Initially they valued the cache of ancient Asian treasures found there at $US20 million but subsequently came to describe Kapoor as “one of the most prolific commodities smugglers in the world today” presiding over a $US100m empire.
Former NGA director Brian Kennedy, now director of Toledo Museum of Art, went further. Busting Kapoor, he said, was merely the start of revelations about antiquity theft and trafficking from nations such as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia. “It’s a wave that’s surely sweeping through this region.”
NGA management issued a statement admitting having acquired 21 objects but stressing it was merely one of “at least 18 major international art institutions” to have done so. The NGA statement said: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago have acquired works of art through gifts or [purchases] from Mr Kapoor.”
Much more information at ‘source.’