Angkorian Deified King

Angkorian Deified King

This standing male figure, cast in the eleventh century of gilt-copper alloy and inlaid with silver, is distinguished among metal statuary of the Angkorian or Khmer Empire by its large size (with a height of 105.4 cm), relative completeness, fine detail and craftsmanship. The identity of the figure is not clear because its iconography provides limited clues and the archaeological context has been destroyed by looting.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which possessed it from 1988 to 2024, tentatively referred to it as an image of the god Shiva. Given Angkorian statues of male figures can express the merging of a god with a monarch, this entry refers to it as a Deified King.

In 2022, villagers in the rural community of Ban Yang Pong Sadao, Lahan Sai district, Buriram province, in northeast Thailand, attested to a local man’s discovery of the statue in the mid 1970s. It was buried in the ground on the site of an ancient temple in their village. Although a plaza was later built over the temple site, still standing nearby is the stone plinth for a statue.

The village headman recalled visits during that era of Douglas Latchford, a Briton who also held Thai nationality and from his homes in London and Bangkok became a mass collector and international dealer of illicit artifacts. His activities came to the attention of authorities in various countries, culminating in his indictment by the US government for trafficking in stolen antiquities in 2019.

During his trips to Buriram, Latchford had rented the village headman’s father’s house as a base from which to buy antiquities illegally excavated around the area. Latchford purchased the Deified King from the villagers for one million baht (about US$27,300 as of June 2024) – a huge sum in rural Thailand in the mid 1970s.

There was no hint of the statue’s subsequent whereabouts until over a decade later, when Martin Lerner, the curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wolfgang Felten, a German collector, co-authored a volume on Thai and Cambodian sculptures, almost all from private collections. It was published by Klett in German language in Stuttgart in 1988 and by the auction house Sotheby’s in English in London the following year. In the section on bronze sculptures, Lerner wrote briefly of a “large gilded standing deified king (Jayavarman VI?), height 105.5cm,” noting that it had come from Buriram province in Thailand and was owned by a private collector in London whom he did not name. The book did not include an illustration of the piece.

In the same year that the German volume appeared, in 1988, Lerner announced that the Deified King had been gifted by its owners to the Met. The acquisition of the Deified King was a landmark addition to the museum’s galleries. In an essay for a Met magazine at the time, Lerner wrote, “The figure is of such superb quality and possesses such magnetic grandeur that it must be considered one of the most important examples of the arts of Asia and certainly the most important gift of a Southeast Asian sculpture ever made to our collection.”

The Deified King was a “partial gift” from the businessman, philanthropist and former diplomat Walter Annenberg, who had a “half interest” in the piece. The museum has never revealed who owned the other half. The only other provenance information it disclosed was that Annenberg had purchased the statue in 1988 from Spink & Son Ltd., a London dealer whose role in the illicit antiquities market would come to the attention of US law enforcement authorities in multiple cases years later.

In particular, in its 2019 indictment of Douglas Latchford for antiquities smuggling, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York noted that beginning in the early 1970s Latchford had “regularly supplied” Spink (called “Auction House-1” in the indictment) with pillaged Khmer artifacts. Spink became an important source of Asian antiquities for the Met, which acquired over thirty items from Southeast Asia (plus antiquities from elsewhere in Asia) that had passed through Spink’s gallery.

The Met also obtained pieces directly from Latchford, who donated or sold the museum over a dozen artifacts during Lerner’s tenure as curator, including four items Latchford gifted “in honor of Martin Lerner.” In 2003, after over thirty years as curator, Lerner retired from the museum. Interviewed by The New York Times in 2022, he admitted that he “could have done more” to investigate the origins of the antiquities but said that even as the Met had gradually placed more weight on provenance, it never deemed provenance research a priority.

In the 1988 volume published with Felten, Lerner had identified Thailand as the origin of the Deified King, but he labelled it as “Cambodian” in his 1988 Met essay and in the catalogue and subsequent publications of the Met. Lerner provided no public explanation for the change in designation.

Because the Angkorian or Khmer Empire, which lasted from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, had extended beyond the borders of present-day Cambodia, Khmer antiquities have been found not only within Cambodia but in what are now Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Empire was centered at Angkor in today’s northern Cambodia and was led by ethnic Khmer people who used the Khmer language. The Angkorian material culture, whether from Cambodia or neighboring countries, is therefore generally referred to as 'Khmer.'

Artifacts that were looted and smuggled, such as the Deified King, typically were delivered to the art market with no data or falsified information on their origins, as criminals and their associates aimed to mask their activity while museums and private collectors failed to probe the origins of their acquisitions. Thus, the origins of Khmer antiquities such as the Deified King now located abroad are often unclear.

Douglas Latchford and his close colleague Emma Bunker, a consultant to the Denver Art Museum, began in the early 1970s to attempt to legitimize antiquities that Latchford owned or sold by publishing them in books and articles. In multiple publications, some published at Latchford’s own expense, Bunker and Latchford stated that Thailand was the findspot of the Deified King. In 2008, Bunker and Latchford brought forth a coffee-table volume on Khmer gold artifacts that included a footnote that stated that the Deified King “was actually found at the village of Ban Yang, Lahan district, where its stone base is still visible, and not in Cambodia.”
In an article on ancient Khmer gilding also published in 2008, Bunker referred to the statue as having been found in northeast Thailand. In their 2011 book on Khmer bronzes, Bunker and Latchford wrote that the statue had been discovered in Buriram Province in Thailand. They dubbed it “Golden Boy,” a nickname that to some reflects the pair’s colonialist, commoditizing treatment of Khmer antiquities.

In 2022, independent scholars Tanongsak Hanwong and Lalita Hanwong visited Ban Yang Pong Sadao in Lahan Sai district, Buriram Province, accompanied by film crews first from Channel News Asia and subsequently from Thai PBS. They found villagers who had been directly involved in or recalled the discovery and sale of the Deified King about 50 years previously. The testimonies spurred officials and scholars in Thailand as well as Cambodia to further research the statue’s origins and history. The Thai Ministry of Culture had not yet approached the Met about the Deified King when, in late 2023, the Met contacted it about returning the statue.

By this time, Cambodia’s antiquities restitution team, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and US Homeland Security Investigations had for several years been engaged in investigating the Met’s Khmer collection and holding discussions with museum officials. Questions about the Met’s collecting history had also been raised publicly in the news media, particularly in the years of reporting by The New York Times, as well as by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media outlets. The issues may have reached an even broader audience when the well-known journalist Anderson Cooper reported on the looting of Khmer antiquities and exposed concerning aspects of the Met’s practices in a segment for the US television program 60 Minutes on 17 December 2023.

On 15 December, two days before the 60 Minutes episode was due to air, the Met announced that it was repatriating to Thailand the Deified King and a bronze Kneeling Female Figure, as well as returning to Cambodia fourteen antiquities – a total of sixteen out of the dozens of Khmer artifacts in its collection. The Met stated that the sixteen were “all Angkorian sculptures known by the Museum to be associated with the dealer Douglas Latchford.”

The Met disclosed no evidence nor any further reasoning behind the returns. Its online catalogue entries provide only scant provenance and general information on each sculpture. The Met declared that it was continuing to review its Khmer collections and was committed to collaborating with Cambodia and Thailand.

Both countries are persisting in their efforts to secure from the Met the return of further antiquities - and to enjoin the museum to share its internal files on provenance, technical studies, conservation records and other information that could enhance the understanding of the artifacts. The continuing public interest in the issues was indicated in an update that 60 Minutes aired on 23 June 2024 that queried why the Met had taken so long to examine its Khmer holdings and raised questions about the museum’s ongoing possession of problematic Khmer artifacts.

1

Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Angkorian or Khmer Empire

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1988.355a–c

Thailand

Martin Lerner, “Bronze Sculptures,” in Wolfgang Felten and Martin Lerner, Thai and Cambodian Sculpture (London: Philip Wilson Publishers for Sotheby’s Publications, 1989), pp. 217-243 (p. 226) (First published in the German language by Ernst Klett Verlage, Stuttgart, 1988)

Angela S. Chiu

Jason Felch