The search began on a cold spring day in 1986. Just after Ferdinand E. Marcos was ousted from power after two decades, volunteers working with the newly formed Philippine government entered an abandoned mansion on East 66th Street in Manhattan.
It had been the residence where Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former president, often received guests, and the volunteers were looking for art—particularly art they believed the couple had purchased with ill-gotten public money.
But instead of paintings, they found only eight bronze nameplates identifying the art they thought once hung on the now empty walls. As the volunteers began compiling a list of the paintings that had disappeared, those plaques — featuring names like Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Edgar Degas — became their first clues.
It was just the beginning of what has become a decades-long hunt for Marcoses’ art collection. Some works have turned up at auctions and in the homes of former Marcoses employees, but only a small portion of the collection, valued at up to $500 million by the Philippine government, has been recovered.
As time has gone by, the government has tried several more innovative strategies to find the art. But the results slowly came in and the Marcos family is once again gaining political power.
“Even though it’s been 30 years, we still face challenges because of the Marcos family’s efforts to hide and repossess their ill-gotten wealth,” said Reynold S. Munsayac, the acting president of the presidential executive. Good Governance Commission, the government agency tasked with locating up to $10 billion in assets believed to have been stolen by Mr. Marcos, who died in 1989, and his associates.
“This is a non-stop effort,” said Mr Munsayac. “We want to make sure that every centavo that can be recovered benefits the state and the people.”
He spoke in a recent interview at the commission’s desk, a squat, nondescript building — ceded by one of Mr Marcos’s former associates — on a busy thoroughfare here. Inside the entrance, several posters remind the approximately 120 employees of their mission. One shows a photo of a dazzling diamond-and-white gold crown that once belonged to Ms. Marcos, along with the caption, “Can build 8 one-story classrooms in the Philippines.”
For much of the three decades since its inception, the commission has taken a traditional forensic approach to track down Marcoses’ art collection: interviewing sources, collaborating with international authorities, and sifting through mountains of paperwork.
Using this strategy, the Philippine government achieved some early successes. In 1987, a collection of old masters, including works by Raphael, Titian, and El Greco, was seized in France by Adnan M. Khashoggi, a wealthy Saudi arms dealer and associate of Marcos. The paintings were then sold at a Christie’s auction in New York for $15.4 million, with a portion of the proceeds going to the commission.
According to officials, those funds and others recovered by the commission have been spent on programs to help farmers and on reparations for victims of human rights abuses during Mr Marcos’s rule.
In 1998, with the help of the Art Loss Register, a private London-based company that tracks down looted art, the committee found a 1954 Picasso painting, “Head of a Woman,” after a California lawyer sent it to Christie’s on behalf of Christie’s. brought. from an anonymous client. The painting, which sold for $992,500 at Christie’s auction in 1999, is said to have been one of the works missing from the East 66th Street mansion.
According to the commission’s own count, it has recovered a total of 105 works of art, which have been sold on behalf of the government for more than $17 million.
But over the years, as the trails got colder, the committee began experimenting with new ways to find the art.
Earlier this year, it launched an interactive website to crowdsource information. Like any respectable social media campaign, the website has a clever Twitter hashtag: #ShowMeTheMonet.
In total, the site contains more than 160 missing works, including paintings by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. (Doubts arose shortly after the Marcoses were evicted about the authenticity of some of the works purchased by Ms. Marcos.)
The site does not contain paintings by important Filipino artists such as Vicente Manansala, which have also not been recovered.
Also listed are about 18 paintings that have been found but have not been recovered. Many are embroiled in lawsuits, including a multi-million dollar stock of Impressionist masterpieces seized from Ms. Marcos’ personal secretary, Vilma Bautista, who was convicted in New York in 2013 of conspiracy and tax fraud for selling or attempting to sell the paintings. .
The stock — which includes such works as Alfred Sisley’s “Langland Bay” (1897) and Monet’s “L’Eglise et La Seine à Vetheuil” (1881) — is now in a storage facility in New York, pending a court decision (there no date is known). kit). The paintings could go to the Philippine government through the commission; to a group action group of thousands of victims of human rights violations under Mr Marcos’ rule; or to Mrs. Bautista, who remains out on bail and claims that she has legally come into possession of some of the paintings.
“We need all the help we can get,” Mr Munsayac said of the new website. “These paintings can be anywhere. They can be in a museum or displayed in someone’s living room.”
But commission officials say the tips have been slow to come in since the site went live in January, with only a few users commenting and no concrete leads. Still, they’re hopeful it can educate younger Filipinos about what officials called the “excesses of the former regime.”
But even that can be an uphill battle. Five presidents have come and gone since Mr. Marcos fled with his family to Hawaii in 1986 after a peaceful popular uprising. The committee’s work has become even more challenging as members of the Marcos family – who returned from exile in the early 1990s – have made a political comeback. Imelda Marcos is now a member of the House of Representatives; her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was close to winning the vice presidency earlier this year; and her daughter, Imee, is the governor of the Northern Province considered a stronghold of Marcos.
The family’s increasing political capital has led some observers to cast doubt on the commission’s ability to operate effectively. In 2013, Andres Bautista, then its chairman, even advised scaling back the committee’s activities, telling Agence France-Presse that “at the moment it has become a law of diminishing returns.”
But many still support the committee’s efforts.
That became apparent last month when Rodrigo Duterte, the current president of the Philippines, awarded Mr. Marcos a hero’s funeral despite fierce protests. The issue fueled decades-old feelings of anger and a newfound passion to hold the Marcos family accountable.
“I had given up completely,” said Petty Benitez-Johannot, one of the original volunteers who worked for the commission in New York in 1986.
At the end of last month, Mrs. Benitez-Johannot, now an art history teacher at the University of the Philippines, joins thousands of other Filipinos on the streets of Manila, dressed all in black to protest the funeral.