The looting of the Radya Pustaka Museum in Indonesia has to be one of the more audacious art thefts of recent years. The crimes, very much an ‘inside job’, were revealed when a guide at the museum noticed that artefacts had gone missing. She was fired after raising the issue, but on a later visit to the museum, she saw that some of the exhibits had changed size and colour!
Lambang Barbur Purnomo, An Indonesian archaeologist, started to investigate and found that several of the collection’s stone and bronze statues were in fact copies that had replaced the originals. Last month Lambang was found murdered. He had started to expose a scandal that involved the Indonesian royal family, political and business elites and international auction houses and collectors.
The breathtaking story is reported in Australian newspaper The Age.
The case raises interesting questions about what happens when state custodians and members of the ruling class want to flog off a nation’s heritage. It also highlights yet again the complicity of international auction houses, in this case Christie’s, in the looting and theft of antiquities. Hugo Kreijer, southeast Asian art advisor to Christie’s, accompanied the museum’s head and an antiquities broker, as they photographed objects that were earmarked for reproduction and transportation. He insists that the king gave permission and protests that “the idea was to preseve the statues so everybody could enjoy them, to bring them to a modern museum.”
Tags: antiquities market, art theft, illicit antiquities, Indonesia, Lambang Barbur Purnomo, Radya Pustaka Museum
