Another day, another object from a museum’s permanent collection leaving that collection to return to from whence it was taken. In a recent case, that object is a carved wood column, part of the side of a doorframe that dates to the 12th Century and was illegally removed from the Phanom Rung shrine to the Hindu god Shiva in northeast Thailand. Returning the pilaster fragment is the Art Institute of Chicago, where it had been on long-term loan since 1996 and officially entered the museum’s permanent collection in 2017. The process of returning the object to Thailand began on June 18th. The museum has some familiarity with the Phanom Rung shrine, having previously returned another looted object—the Vishnu lintel—to the same temple in 1988. That lintel was restored to the structure, and presumably the pilaster will be as well.
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Righting a historical wrong is a good thing, although the process of repatriating cultural property that’s been wrongly removed from a nation in the developing world, whether by looting or illegal excavation or accidental (or intentional) misidentification on import and export documents, can take months or even years and is accomplished one object at a time. One issue is that the history of what happened to and with these objects is so often obscured—with details including their original location and owners or stewards being sometimes near impossible to determine. How an artifact ended up in an institution’s permanent collection can be equally tough to figure out. It is almost always the case that such items have passed through various hands, including dealers, auctioneers, private buyers and other museums. It is often only when an object is written about or shown, perhaps in an auction catalogue or museum periodical, that someone from its country of origin will make a claim.
It is unknown when the 36.5×12×7.25-inch pilaster was pried off the door and somehow came into the possession of some Asian antiquities dealer. What we do know is that a private U.S. dealer sold it in 1966 to a private collector who made a long-term loan of it to the Art Institute in 1996—eventually donating it twenty-one years later. Up until last year, curators at the museum assumed that it was Cambodian. The Art Institute’s Asian Art Department oversees art and artifacts from many different regions, but specific to Southeast Asia, there are approximately 350 objects in the permanent collection. According to Sarah Guernsey, deputy director and senior vice president for curatorial affairs at the institution, the Art Institute of Chicago hired a specialist in art from the Khmer region, an area that covers what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, in 2023. That specialist, Nicolas Revire, Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts of Asia and Curatorial Documentation and Research, researched the object and “was able to identify the iconography and style as more likely Thai than Cambodian, and ultimately identified it as originating at the Phanom Rung Temple in Thailand.”
She told Observer that the research on the pilaster took between six and eight months and included a trip by Revire to Thailand to visit the temple to confirm his findings. After that, museum officials contacted the Thai government “to make them aware of this object and return the pilaster to its place of origin.”
Finding out where the objects in museums’ permanent collections actually came from, known as Provenance research, which involves figuring out how the objects in........