Law enforcement officers have seized 13 artifacts from the Yale University Art Gallery that they say have been looted. Many are part of an ongoing investigation into Subhash Kapoor, a former Madison Avenue art dealer accused of being one of the world’s most prolific antiquities smugglers, according to authorities.
Yale acknowledged the seizure Thursday with a notice on the museum’s website that it delivered the items Wednesday to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which is conducting the investigation with US Homeland Security Investigations.
“Yale was pleased to partner with the DA’s Office on this important matter,” the university statement said.
Kapoor, who once ran a respected Manhattan gallery known as Art of the Past, has been imprisoned in India since 2011 on charges of theft, smuggling and trafficking of more than 2,500 South Asian artifacts. He faces similar charges in New York, where officials have accused him of running a multinational gang that traded illegal objects worth more than $145 million for more than 30 years. His extradition to the United States will be requested after the criminal case is resolved in India.
Officials from Homeland Security Investigations and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said they were unable to discuss the full parameters of the investigation. But Homeland Security released a statement that most of Yale’s artifacts as being “associated with Subhash Kapoor or his foreign suppliers.”
The agency valued the 13 properties at $1.29 million.
Matthew Bogdanos, head of the District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, released a statement saying the office had identified nine of 13 antiquities at Yale as being illegally traded by Kapoor.
“With the help of our partners in India, we also identified two antiquities at Yale that had been stolen from temples,” he said.
Of the artifacts, nine were donated to Yale by the Rubin-Ladd Foundation, which has donated works to multiple museums and provided grants to cultural and educational organizations.
Founded in 1832 and recognized as the oldest university art museum in America, the Yale Museum has nearly 300,000 items in its collection, according to its website. Other museums that have returned items with links to Kapoor include the National Gallery of Australia, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Vijay Kumar, the founder of an India-based organization that tracks stolen artifacts and has collaborated with investigators, said that although Yale had received gifts before Kapoor’s arrest, the university should have done more to investigate their provenance after the art world became aware. of the magnitude of the looting of Indian artifacts. Investigators said some of the items Yale received as gifts had provenances that included Kapoor’s gallery.
“How can you buy or keep Indian art for so long without a full provenance and when you know Kapoor and the history of theft from India,” says Kumar, whose group is called the India Pride Project.
When asked about the scope of the provenance investigation, Yale declined to comment. But the university had listed some of the items on a section of its website that mentions works in the collection with gaps in provenance.
Thursday’s statement read: “After receiving information from Yale University that artworks in its collections had been stolen from their countries of origin, it delivered the works to the New York District Attorney’s Office on March 30, 2022, which is responsible for the repatriation of objects later this year.”
Among the artifacts seized by researchers was a 10th-century sandstone statue of Kubera, a god of wealth, which was valued by researchers at $550,000. Yale acquired it in 2011 as a gift from the Rubin-Ladd Foundation.
A second item handed in was a marble arch, known as a Parikara, from the 12th or 13th century, valued at $85,000. It was donated in 2007, also by the foundation.
Representatives of the foundation were not immediately available for comment. The foundation listed assets of nearly $6.8 million on its most recent publicly available tax return, which it filed last year. The Smithsonian and the New York Public Library were registered as two of the 23 organizations that received a total of $126,500 in grants, according to the filing.
Twelve of the artifacts are originally from India and one is from Burma, researchers said.