The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, was riding high as “From Chaos to Order,” an exhibition of ancient Greek art, became its first major traveling show in years. But the provenances…
The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, was riding high as “From Chaos to Order,” an exhibition of ancient Greek art, became its first major traveling show in years, making stops at museums in Florida and South Carolina before preparing to head west.
The show never made it to Denver. Two months later, Bennett, the curator in St. Petersburg, was put on leave. A month after that he was fired. Some experts suggested that it had been reckless for Bennett and the museum to mount the exhibition without having done more to investigate the origins of some of the objects.
“It is our responsibility, as a museum, to safeguard and preserve works of art — objects that represent the highest aspirations of humankind — in perpetuity,” the statement said. “Yet we do so amid the reality of a dynamic and constantly evolving world.” Several major U.S. museums with antiquities collections hold items that they, or a donor, acquired from Hecht, who had been one of the world’s leading dealers in ancient artifacts.In recent decades museums have agreed to best-practice guidelines not to acquire an object without clear, documented evidence that it had either left its country of origin before 1970, or had been legally exported after 1970.
A Greek bronze statue of Apollo, which the museum still holds, had a patchy provenance and an ancient Roman portrait of Drusus Minor had to be returned to Italy. Bennett said he had only agreed to buy the Greek statue after scientific tests showed that it had been excavated more than a century ago. He also contributed to the research that led to the return of the Roman artifact.
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