Why Do So Many Museums Hold a Convicted Antiquity Dealer’s Treasures?
After The Met returned a Roman bust connected to Phoenix Ancient Art, the question of what will happen to other works sold by the gallery to dozens of US institutions remains open.
The Roman was gone.
When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few weeks ago in search of a marble portrait bust of an imperious-looking Roman man, both the sculpture and its pedestal had vanished. Only the label dating the piece to the 2nd century CE remained, marooned on the gallery wall.
The sculpture had been purchased from Phoenix Ancient Art, a gallery purporting to follow “the antiquities trade’s most vigorous and stringent procedures of due diligence.” The gallery touted the effort it put into finding evidence that its artifacts had left their countries of origin long before the enactment of export bans. Equipped with these good provenances, or ownership histories, Phoenix boasted that its antiquities could be “collected in full compliance with all legal and ethical rules.”
The Roman was supposed to be above suspicion. But he was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which gave me a list showing that they have taken a total of nine Phoenix artifacts from The Met, worth nearly $5 million, since 2021 alone. (Three of these were loans.)
A Met Museum spokesperson confirmed that the Roman was repatriated to the Republic of Türkiye this February. The question of what will happen to the other spectacular antiquities the gallery sold, all with equally convincing-seeming provenances and many still sitting in the galleries of a dozen other American museums, remains open.
Phoenix Ancient Art has not responded to a request for comment for this story.
Ali Aboutaam was the key figure in the rise of Phoenix Ancient Art. Born in 1965, Aboutaam began working in his father’s antiquities business in Beirut as a teenager. Business was good in a country whose soil still yielded artifacts from the villas built by Roman merchants who sent ships full of luxuries from the East to Europe. Centuries later, the same Lebanese ports were still the logical launching points for antiquities smuggled in from nearby Syria, Turkey, and Iraq.
