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In recent years, a number of American museums have become entangled in disputes with foreign governments over the ownership of certain very old objects—antiquities—held by the museums but originally retrieved from territory now under the jurisdiction of the complaining nations. The most highly publicized case involved the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the government of Italy. It was resolved with the Getty’s agreeing to return to Italy 40 ancient Greek artifacts—including a statue of a female deity purchased by the museum for $18 million—that the Italians claimed had been looted from their own archeological sites. Other museums that have reportedly negotiated the return of holdings in their collections include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Princeton University Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The museums would seem to have little choice in such matters. Complaining governments can assert, correctly, that in demanding the return of certain objects, they are acting in accordance both with their own laws and with international conventions governing the trafficking in and recovery of a country’s “cultural property.” And of course American museums must rely on the cooperation of countries from which they wish to borrow works of art for their exhibitions. At the same time, museum officials themselves, apparently out of financial concerns and worries about their institutions’ reputations, have adopted more restrictive guidelines on the acquisition of so-called “unprovenanced” antiquities—that is, those lacking adequate proof of having been legally acquired. Although the guidelines leave final decisions on such purchases to the individual museum, they would seem to reinforce the notion that such antiquities should be returned to their “source” countries.

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