Met Museum Brokers Return of Three Artworks to Nigeria
Collector Ceil Pulitzer provided detailed provenance of the works, but the museum preferred another route.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has brokered the return of three sculptures to Nigeria through a long-term loan agreement for their display in New York. The works will be on view in the Rockefeller Wing's Arts of Africa galleries later this month and made available for further scholarship.
Collector Ceil Pulitzer sought to gift one copper figure and two terracotta busts from her collection to The Met last year. A painter from Arkansas, she married into the family behind the Pulitzer Prizes and Pulitzer Publishing Company in 1970, and soon began collecting African art. Per museum director and CEO Max Hollein's interview with the New York Times, Pulitzer provided detailed provenance for the three pieces she acquired between 2015 and 2018, but it still fell short of the museum's prerequisites for accepting the gift.
Spanning the 12th through 18th centuries, the three pieces supplement The Met's display of Nigerian art as pinnacle examples of Ife and Benin artistic traditions. Dated around the 18th century, the Edo copper figure representing an iyọ́bà (queen mother) from the Kingdom of Benin embodies what the museum describes as a rare, standalone depiction of a woman in the kingdom's courtly tradition.
“Most queen mother castings featured as the focal point of larger ensembles within an ùrhọ̀tọ̀ (altar tableau),” the museum explained in a press release concerning the gift. “The unique nature of this figure may indicate that it commemorated an especially prominent iyọ́bà who held the title sometime between the late 17th and 18th centuries.”
