St Louis Art Museum Case Study

1. 2. The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) Case

In the past years, there was another similar instance for the repatriation issues relating to the Egyptian collection in one of the U.S. museums. The issue was concerned with one of the ancient Egyptian artifact in Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri, the Ka-Nefer-Nefer funerary mummy mask (New Kingdom, Dynasty 19, 1295-1186 B.C.). This case was very controversial issue between Saint Louis Art Museum and the Egyptian Government for many following years. The saint Louis Art Museum purchased the mummy mask (inventory No. 19:1998) in 1998. Eight years later, in 2006, the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt requested the mask’s return on the grounds that it had been stolen from Egyptian Museum

One year later in 1953, the Egyptian Antiquities Service (Later Supreme Council of Antiquities) registered the funerary mask as Egyptian property in the official ledger book and deposited the object at the government storage, at Saqqara. The mask remained at Saqqara warehouse until 1959, when it had shipped along with other artifacts from Gonium’s excavation from storage at Saqqara to The Egyptian Museum in Cairo to be prepared for the planned travelling exhibtion to Tokyo in Japan that never fulfilled. In 1962, the Egyptian Museum shipped the mask back to Saqqara in box number fifty-four. Four years later, in 1966, the mask was sent again from Saqqara to the conservation Lab attached to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for restoration. In 1973, during a routine inventory, the Cairo Egyptian museum discovered that the mask no longer existed among the objects came from Saqqara. Since then, the funerary mask was considered missing by this

The museum alleged that the mask was in the possession of unknown Belgium dealer in 1952, the same year the Egyptian Government alleged that the mask was officially recorded. The museum was based on a handwritten letter (dated in February 11, 1997) of a swiss man named Charly Mathez who avowed in his letter that he had seen the mask in a gallery in Brussels, Belgium in 1952. Moreover, Mathez could not remember the gallery name, in his response letter (dated October 5, 1999) to the Saint Louis Art Museum team when they wrote to him seeking more information to uphold the provenance. The next appearance for the mask was almost ten years later in early 1960s. The mask became a part of Kaloterna private collection without any reference or details about how the ownership was changed or transferred. Then, the mask quickly resold again in the same time to a Swiss collector who asked anonymity according to the provenance. In 1997, the anonymous Swiss collector sold the mask to Phoenix Ancient Art. One year later, in 1998, the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased the mask from Phoenix for approximately $499,000.

In January 2011, the parties met in response to a request of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri seeking agreement regarding the mask. The meeting did not come up with any solutions to