The Metropolitan Museum of Art is voluntarily returning 19 small artifacts to Egypt that had been in its collection for decades and that curators recently determined came from Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Among the more significant are a tiny bronze dog, less than three-quarters of an inch tall, and a small lapis lazuli  sphinx from a bracelet. The objects will be on display until January as part of the Tutankhamen exhibition in Times Square. After that, they are to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum for six months and then sent to Egypt to be shown at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza when it opens in 2012.

The New York Times

drhawass.com

Art Museum Journal has a very good article on this topic.

Around forty years ago, when King Tutankhamen’s first exhibition was held in the US, the artefacts were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite the fact that the museum made millions of dollars from donations and from the catalogues and souvenirs that were sold, Egypt made no financial profits from it.

This time, Dr. Zahi Hawass announced that “Egypt will no longer hand out freebies”, as a response by the Metropolitan Museum administration in New York that it would not pay Egypt for the exhibition of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, on the pretext that entry to the museum is usually free. Actually, no one is allowed to enter the Met unless a donation is made.

This is the reason why the blockbuster show will be displayed at a special hall in the Times Square area.

The revenues of this exhibition will all go to the construction of the new Grand Museum in Egypt, which will be the most important and the largest museum for antiquities in the world.

Dr. Hawass, however, recognizes the tourist and promotional gains for Egypt as a result of previous King Tut’s exhibitions in the US.

Source: asharq alawsat

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the special exhibition Tutankhamun’s Funeral from March 16 to September 6, 2010. The installation features 60 objects used in the mummification and religious rituals associated with the boy-king’s burial. Most of the artifacts are derived from the museum’s permanent collection.

The museum’s installation is greatly enhanced by the presence of a limestone Head of Tutankhamun (ca. 1336-1327 B.C.) and several facsimile paintings depicting ancient Egyptian funerary rites. Archival photographs taken by Harry Burton (1879-1940) during the excavation of the pharaoh’s modest and unfinished tomb round out the presentation.

Art Museum Journal

Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Nancy, said.

During his tenure, the museum opened new galleries dedicated to Islamic art, organized a major reinstallation of its Egyptian wing and set in motion an expansion program that eventually resulted in a much larger American wing, a glass-walled addition for the Temple of Dendur, a wing for the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas, and a new southwest wing, now dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

He outmaneuvered the Smithsonian Institution to get the crowd-pleasing Temple of Dendur and helped save an entire Prairie House by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose living room was meticulously reassembled in the American Wing.

But the story of probably his greatest acquisition coup — an exquisite 2,500-year-old Greek vase adorned by the master painter Euphronios, bought in 1972 for $1 million — did not end as happily.

Even before the vase, known as a krater, went on display, experts contended that it had been wrested illicitly from an Etruscan tomb near Rome. In 2006, after years of demands from the Italian government, the Met agreed to return the vessel to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other antiquities.

His negotiations with Egyptian authorities in 1975 were pivotal in bringing about the first American tour of the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun. During one of several visits to Egypt to cajole and twist arms, Mr. Hoving recalled, he and his assistants were left mostly alone with piles of Tut artifacts, and Mr. Hoving claimed to have wheeled around the pharaoh’s solid-gold inner coffin himself.

The exhibition arrived at the Met in December 1978 after attracting 5.6 million people at five other museums across the country, and drew almost 1.3 million during its four-month stay, generating more than $100 million in additional tourism money for the city.

Excerpted from an article by Randy Kennedy for The New York Times

The Supreme Council of Antiquities said that a piece of a red granite shrine, known as a “naos,” was purchased from an antiquities collector in New York last October so that it could be returned.

SCA head Zahi Hawass hailed the Met’s move as a “great deed,” singling it out as the first time a museum has bought an item for the sole purpose of repatriating it.

The fragment belongs to the naos honoring the 12th Dynasty King Amenemhat I, who ruled 4,000 years ago, which is now in the Ptah temple of Karnak in Luxor.

AP

Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented: “The Metropolitan Museum is delighted to be able to assist in returning this granite fragment to its original home. Though the fragment is small, its return is a larger symbol of the Museum’s deep respect for the importance of protecting Egypt’s cultural heritage and the long history of warm relations the Museum enjoys with Egypt and the Supreme Council of Antiquities.”

metmuseum.org

Refining a technique that allows the study of microscopic bits of pigment, Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was able to analyze the color of a fragment of leather from an ancient Egyptian quiver. The discovery that the color was madder is the earliest evidence for the complex chemical knowledge needed to extract the dye from a plant and turn it into a pigment.

The find is some 700 years earlier than any previously known use of madder, which became highly popular in the Middle Ages and provides many of the red shades and glazes in the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

msnbc

Artful Science: Peering into Ancient Pigments

Ninety-six staff members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY accepted an offer of voluntary retirement, part of a wider staff reduction that also will cut employees by layoff and attrition and bring the payroll down by 357 positions, to 2,200.

Many had served the museum for decades, and all had been there for at least 15 years and were older than 55. The list includes: Everett Fahy, chairman of the department of European paintings, with 22 years of service; Colta Ives, curator, drawings and prints, 43 years; Christine Lilyquist, curator in Egyptology, 38 years; Susan Allen, associate research curator, Egyptian art, 16 years; Kevin Avery, associate curator, American painting and sculpture, 20 years; Lucy Belloli, conservator of paintings, 27 years; Takemitsu Oba, conservator of Asian Art, 31 years; Sondra Castile, conservator of Asian art, 31 years.

ARTINFO

The only child of a dentist and his wife, Ms. Lucille Virginia Burton was born in St. Louis but moved to Richmond as a child.

After graduating from Barnard College, she worked in public relations for the Metropolitan Museum and eventually landed a position in the Egyptology department of the Brooklyn Museum.

She returned to the Metropolitan Museum as a curatorial assistant in 1960 and rose to associate curator, the post she held in 1977, when she retired to Urbanna. A woman who had stayed in the cliffs of Petra and taught herself to read hieroglyphics, Ms. Burton said the pièce de résistance of her career was overseeing the transfer of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt.

The temple was given to the United States by Egypt in 1965 and allotted to the museum in 1967. Installation was completed in 1978 in the Sackler Wing, which was built around the temple as it was being reassembled.

Richmond Times Dispatch

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Sharon Waxman, author of “Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World”, is calling upon Thomas Campbell, new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to move the museum away from its murky past of treasure plundering to a new era of transparency where this noble institution can set an example for all museums and build new bridges of respect and cooperation.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has already readied a path for Mr. Campbell. This past summer, the association finally issued new guidelines, which recognize that buying unprovenanced antiquities encourages their illicit trade and recommend that its members purchase only antiquities that can be proven to have been legally exported after 1970, or else removed from their country of origin before that date. (It was in 1970 that Unesco adopted an international convention barring the illegal export and transfer of cultural property.)

The British Museum has adopted this cutoff date, as has the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Met quietly followed suit, but has barely made that fact known.

By publicly embracing the 1970 protocol, Mr. Campbell would be breaking with the policies of his predecessor, Mr. Philippe de Montebello, who believes that orphaned antiquities should be rescued by museums, not ignored by them.

The New York Times

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has assembled another spectacular examination of Middle Eastern history, this one filled with some 350 objects made of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and other precious materials, including a haul of 3,400-year-old luxury goods found in the wreck of the oldest seagoing vessel ever discovered on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The museum has even recreated the vessel’s hull around the gallery holding the find. Museum design rarely goes farther to set the scene.

“Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.” is more than just a treasure show, and the boat is more a symbol than a stage set. The theme of this show is the long historical record of internationalism in the region.

Among its 17 tons of cargo were ten tons of copper ingots, and one of tin (tin and copper melted together give you bronze, and this was, after all, the middle Bronze Age), both represented here by examples. There were also glass ingots for industrial use, and ivory and ostrich eggs from Egypt, ebony from Nubia, and Canaanite jars filled with resin for cosmetics. Altogether there were products from 12 separate cultures stretching from Sicily to the Baltic to Central Asia, not to mention the polyglot passengers, who included (judging from their weapons and jewelry) Canaanite merchants, two noble Mycenean envoys on their way back to Greece and an elite mercenary to oversee the cargo.

Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through March 15.

nj.com