Museum’s Benin Bronzes Are Reclaimed by Wealthy Collector

When it began displaying a group of finely crafted treasures from the Kingdom of Benin in 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acknowledged that British soldiers had plundered thousands of such sculptures and other items from that land in 1897.

The collection of some 30 objects — including what the museum described as a “particularly excellent” sculpture of a warrior on horseback — had been lent by a wealthy scion and collector with the promise that over time they would be donated to the museum. To exhibit the works, known as Benin Bronzes, the museum created a gallery that included information about the looting and invited the kingdom’s royal leader, the oba, to the opening.

But several years later a new oba got in touch with the museum, seeking ownership of the items, museum officials said. For several years, they had conversations with the oba’s representatives and the collector, Robert Owen Lehman Jr., about how to handle that request.

Those discussions ended this week with an announcement by the museum that almost all of the items would be going back to Lehman.

“We strive to be a leader in ethical stewardship and reaching judicious restitution decisions,” Matthew Teitelbaum, who took over as the museum’s director in 2015, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we were not able to make progress on a mutually agreeable resolution for our gallery of Benin Bronzes.”

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Between 2012 and 2020, the museum said, Lehman donated five of the Benin Kingdom objects to the institution; those are now part of its permanent collection. The museum said it would continue to seek “a resolution regarding the ownership and display” of those items: two relief plaques, two commemorative heads and an 18th- or 19th-century pendant showing an oba and two dignitaries.

Lehman declined to comment.

In addition to the warrior that the Museum of Fine Arts had termed “excellent” — a 16th-century copper alloy sculpture of a figure holding a spear — the items from Lehman that he is taking back include a 19th-century staff topped with the figure of a bird and a 17th-century double gong.

The fact that so many artifacts were removed by British forces from Benin, in present-day southern Nigeria, has led museums including the Smithsonian to return some of those items to Africa. The repatriation is part of a broader reckoning within the art world about how to handle vast amounts of cultural patrimony that were removed from global sites and then placed on display in Western cities.

Many museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, have adopted guidelines related to items dating from the colonial era, which require them to look into restituting artworks that were removed by imperial powers.

While announcing that its Benin Kingdom Gallery would close this month, the museum wrote that many of the items in the Lehman collection, which was formed in the 1970s and 1980s through purchase at public auction and from dealers, can be traced to the 1897 British attack on Benin.

“The heat is really on Western museums” to return those items, said Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, curator of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and an expert on the bronzes who grew up in the Kingdom of Benin.

Lehman is a great-grandson of Emanuel Lehman, one of three immigrant brothers who founded the Lehman Brothers financial firm in 1850. His father, Robert Owen Lehman Sr., led the firm and was a prominent art collector who donated works by artists like Goya, Matisse and Rodin to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they are housed in a wing named after him.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, the junior Lehman has been involved in previous disagreements over artworks.

Last year, after a three-way court battle over ownership of a drawing by Egon Schiele that Lehman was given in the 1960s by his father, a judge in Rochester, N.Y., awarded possession of the work to heirs of a textile merchant named Karl Mayländer who had been killed by the Nazis.

Reflecting on efforts by the three parties — the Kingdom of Benin, the Museum of Fine Arts and Lehman — to find a mutual resolution regarding the bronzes, Teitelbaum said in an interview, “We were constantly trying to align the various interests to achieve an outcome that honored history as well as the museum’s ability to display the works.”

“This was not the outcome anyone wanted,” he said.