Stele of Lakshmi-Narayana

Stele of Lakshmi-Narayana

In 2021, the Dallas Museum of Art agreed to return an 800 year old stele of Lakshmi-Narayana that had been stolen from a Nepalese temple in 1984.

It was first identified as stolen in the pages of Lain Singh Bangdel’s 1989 book, "Stolen Images of Nepal." It also appeared in Krishna Deva’s "Images of Nepal," attesting to it being known missing and culturally valued. Nepal had banned the export of historic statues of deities in 1956.

As Nepali activists and supporters began to track down missing icons in the 2020s, the Nepali writer and activist Kanak Mani Dixit highlighted the sculpture as especially important. Artist Joy Lynn Davis, who met Dixit while an artist in residence at the Kathmandu Contemporary Art Center, performed a Google reverse image search of the Lakshmi-Narayana and discovered it was in the Dallas Museum of Art.

The statue had been purchased at Sotheby’s in a 1990 auction by David T. Owsley, a prominent collector of antiquities and long-time patron of the Dallas Museum of Art. The sculpture was included in an exhibition of Owsley’s collections called "East Meets West: Sculpture from the David T. Owsley Collection," held at the museum in 1993 and 1994. It wasn't published as part of the museum's collection until the 2013 catalog "The Arts of India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas at the Dallas Museum of Art."

In 2003, Owsley donated his collection to the DMA, filling two dedicated galleries. But this specific Lakshmi-Narayana statue and a few other items were promised in 2007 with instructions to go to the museum "after Owsley's death." This was to bypass new Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) guidelines released in 2008 that prevented member museums from accepting donations without verifiable proof of export pre-1970.

Prof. Erin L. Thompson first alerted the museum that this statue was stolen in a tweet. The sculpture remained on long-term loan to the museum until its removal in 2019, when the FBI Art Squad, the Dallas FBI, Nepal and the museum reached an agreement for its voluntary return.

"To this day, a shrine in the Narayan Temple in Patko Tol from which the work was stolen has held a small replica of the sculpture so its community could continue to worship Vishnu, one of the principal Hindu deities," wrote Valentina De Liscia in Hyperallergic in 2021. "The original statue’s reinstatement represents for many worshippers the long-awaited return of a symbol of a living god."

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Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Thakuri Dynasty

Sotheby's

David T. Owsly

Dallas Museum of Art

DSC05076

Nepal

Damien Huffer

Jason Felch