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The Denver Artwork Museum (DAM) has discovered itself on the centre of a far-reaching worldwide artwork looting scandal. On 10 March, representatives for the museum issued a press release saying their determination to take away the identify “Bunker” from the Arts of Asia gallery after returning donations price $185,000 from the late scholar, museum trustee and volunteer Emma C. Bunker. The transfer that comes within the wake of mounting revelations concerning falsified provenance and antiquities trafficking. The “Bunker” signage had been contractually decreed in 2018 to remain on the DAM’s partitions till 2071.
A yearlong investigation by the Denver Put up has revealed that Bunker, who died at age 90 in 2021, aided and abetted her buddy and collaborator Douglas Latchford, a infamous British antiquities supplier and smuggler, by fudging the provenance of looted Cambodian artefacts and utilizing her six-decade relationship with the DAM to legitimise his dealings. Bunker helped dealer the sale of 14 Latchford antiquities to the DAM, in addition to donating over 200 items to the museum herself—40 of these objects are technically thought-about “antiquities”; the museum’s aforementioned official assertion maintains that the DAM is “cooperating with US authorities” whereas conducting “analysis into the possession histories of those objects”.
Latchford died in 2020 whereas beneath indictment by the US authorities for fraud and smuggling, amongst different crimes (his off-shore accounts have been additionally revealed within the Pandora Papers leak in 2021). By the tip of his life, he had grow to be well-known for paying impoverished residents of rural Cambodia—a area that suffered from widespread looting amid civil conflicts spanning from the Nineteen Sixties to the 90s—to detach segments of in-situ sculptures for him to promote overseas. Bunker helped present cowl for this illicit enterprise by writing three books with Latchford wherein she supplied faux provenances for the pressured fragments. Bunker was even thanked publicly by officers in Phnom Penh for her work selling Cambodian tradition within the US.
The restitution of Cambodian cultural heritage objects has been a topic of engagement for US officers because the early 2010s, and the method has accelerated since Latchford’s demise. In August of 2022, the US returned 30 looted antiquities, a lot of them Latchford gross sales, to Cambodia. Representatives for the DAM reached out to US authorities after getting wind of Latchford’s indictment in 2019, however the museum has nonetheless not opened its information to the lawyer representing Cambodia, Bradley Gordon, who has recommended that there are as many as 4,000 Khmer sculptures nonetheless housed in museums and personal collections all around the world.
In an nameless 2013 assembly with US officers as regards to the Duryodhana, a looted statue bought by Sotheby’s by Latchford, Bunker—who wrote a listing entry and gave an accompanying lecture for the public sale home—described Latchford as “the brother she by no means had”.
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