Celestial Dancer was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 2023.Courtesy of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Returns More Than 1,400 Antiquities Worth $10 M. to India

by · ARTnews

The Manhattan District Attorney‘s Office has announced the return of 1,440 artifacts, collectively valued at $10 million, to India.

The items were recovered as part of ongoing investigations into criminal trafficking networks, including ones linked to convicted art trafficker Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener. Notably, two of the items were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same year, 1993, and had been seized by the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU).

The return include a sandstone sculpture depicting a Celestial Dancer looted from a temple in the early 1980s, and a sculpture of the Tanesar Mother Goddess carved from a green-gray type of metamorphic rock that was looted from a village in northwestern India in the early 1960s.

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The Celestial Dancer had adorned a temple pillar before looted severed the carved statue off into two halves to better enable its illegal sale. According to a press release from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on November 13, the two halves of the sculpture were illegally transported from London to New York by February 1992 under the instruction of Kapoor. After professional reassembly, the Celestial Dancer was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a client of Kapoor. It was displayed at the institution until its seizure by the ATU in 2023.

The “Tanesar Mother Goddess” returned to India.

The Tanesar Mother Goddess came into the possession of Doris Wiener and her gallery in Manhattan by 1968, then two other collectors in New York before being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993. The sandstone sculpture was on display at the institution until it was seized by the ATU in 2022.

The District Attorney’s Office obtained an arrest warrant for Kapoor in 2012. He was convicted by a court in India for trafficking antiquities in 2022. Kapoor’s extradition is pending.

The 1,440 antiquities were recently returned to India in a ceremony with Manish Kulhary, the commercial representative from the Consulate General of India in New York, and Alexandra deArmas, Group Supervisor from the Homeland Security Investigation, New York Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities Group.

“Today’s repatriation marks another victory in what has been a multi-year, international investigation into antiquities trafficked by one of history’s most prolific offenders,” Homeland Security Investigations New York Special Agent in Charge William S. Walker said in a press statement.