Shelby White & Leon Levy
Shelby White and her husband, Leon Levy, are incredibly prominent collectors of antiquities and ancient art. They are also massive donors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but where did all their pieces come from?
A Little Background
As I said, White and Levy are insanely wealthy art and antiquities collectors and have always been willing to donate their money and possessions to museums, galleries, and other causes they care about. One of White’s most longstanding relationships is with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she sits on their Board of Trustees.
In terms of their collection, in 1990, over 200 items from White and Levy’s personal collection were loaned to the MET for an exhibition called Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection. In 1995, the couple donated $20 million to the MET for the expansion of their Greek and Roman galleries. The gallery opened in 2007 with the name The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court.
In 2006, White gave a staggering donation of $200 million to New York University to help establish the Institute of the Study of the Ancient World. File this away; we’ll come back to it.
Additionally, in 2000, White was appointed to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, a government organization formed in 1983 to help combat the illegal international trade of antiquities.
So What’s The Problem?
I’m sure this all sounds just great, two philanthropists willing to give both their money and pieces from their collection to be seen by the public and bolster public understanding and appreciation for antiquities and art. But, as always, it comes back to provenance.
In the 1990s, White and Levy agreed to send 16 artifects from their collection to the British Museum upon their deaths after being shown evidence that the pieces were looted from Roman ruins in Icklingham, England.
In 2000 scholars published an article about the material consequences of contemporary classical collecting, what White and Levy did, and in the article they mention that 93% of the objects in the Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection exhibition were of unknown provenance, suggesting illegal digs or looting.
In 2006, remember that big donation they gave to NYU? There was huge backlash against that with one anthropology professor resigning in protest. He said: “I simply no longer wanted my name to be affiliated with an organization that would accept such a gift without expressing severe reservations or even protest. This is a major issue—the flow of antiquities through the art market. This is not a small issue cropping up by a few malcontents. This is something we fight daily to try to preserve the archaeological record” (Dafoe, 2022).
In 2008, White (and, I guess, also Levy but he died in 2003) were compelled to repatriate items to Turkey, Greece, and Italy. At the time, “Shelby White remarked that her collection “was purchased at public auction and from dealers we believed to be reputable.” White’s attorney also claimed that White purchased “in good faith”” (Wang, 2023). We’ll come back to this.
More Investigations
However, these were just the beginning. More recently, beginning in 2021 the Manhattan District Attorney launched an investigation into looted and, for lack of a better term, sketchy art and antiquities in both museums and personal collections in New York.
In June of 2021, the DA’s office issued a warrant to search White’s New York home, where they seized five pieces. Another search in April of 2022 resulted in another 18 items being taken. Among the pieces was a bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Lucius Verus from the late 2nd or early 3rd century CE, as well as four sections of a sarcophagus from the ancient city of Perge which date to between 170 and 180 CE. The statue is estimated to be worth around $15 million, while the sarcophagus fragments are worth around $1 million all together. From the MET itself, investigators seized another 17 pieces which they asserted had also been stolen. One example is a Chinese funerary artifact that had been in storage at the museum for over 20 years, never displayed, and when they opened the crate containing it, it was still covered with dirt. This is an indication of looting as a reputable dealer or seller would have a clean item.
So it was around here that I started really thinking about White’s comment about everything being purchased in good faith and I just don’t know if I can buy that. Probably in some instances, yes, they may have purchased items without knowing they’re stolen or looted or smuggled but it’s just hard for me to believe that collectors of White and Levy’s calibre weren’t in the know about how to get provenance and import/export documentation. And I wasn’t alone in that thinking; “There is no way,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, the director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, “that someone at her level of the market and her depth of collecting and her prominence at the Met, there is no way someone at that level did not know they should be asking for things like export licenses” (Bowley and Mashberg, 2023).
So this entire investigation and seizure of White and Levy’s items wasn’t just a financial blow to White, the estimated total value of everything taken by the DA is around $69 million, it’s also reputational. Given her extensive background, many criticize her collecting process as careless or naive.
White’s lawyer recently said, “If an item in her collection was shown to have been wrongfully taken by others, Ms. White has expeditiously and voluntarily returned it to its rightful place of origin” (Bowley and Mashberg, 2023). However, again, critics are quick to note that while, yes, she did return items when her hand was forced by authorities, she has taken no initiative to review her extensive collection of hundreds of artifacts she has owned in the years since obtaining them from dealers who were later exposed to be trading in stolen and looted goods. Instead, she has held onto them in her apartment (which apparently looks like a museum) and continues to loan them to the MET and other museums.
So clearly there are still institutions that can look past this shady part of her past and are happy to accept her donations of objects and money. However, there are some that are staunchly against it. “Officials at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and at the University of Cincinnati discouraged their scholars from accepting money from an archaeology fund White and Levy had established” (Bowley and Mashberg, 2023). In the face of this backlash and criticism White said that it was unfair to apply these new standards to items that she had collected with her husband in the 1970s when laws and standards were vastly different. I personally feel like you shouldn’t need a law to tell you that looting and stealing is bad but maybe that’s just me.
This quote from an extensive New York Times article about White sums it up really well so I’ll end on this: “It is clear from White’s essays and interviews that she views the collector who brings antiquities into public view as a kind of champion of expanded understanding. It’s not clear, these scholars said, that she acknowledges how much voracious collecting can at the same time incentivize looting at ancient sites. “I don’t think,” said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues and a professor at DePaul University College of Law, “the good works, the support of archaeological work, outweigh the harm that she caused”” (Bowley and Mashberg, 2023). I tend to agree that likely her good works and support are vastly overshadowed and undermined by how she acquired these items in the first place.
Works Cited
Bowley, Graham and Tom Mashberg. “At The MET She Holds Court, At Home She Held 71 Looted Antiquities”. The New York Times. 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/arts/design/shelby-white-the-met-antiquities-investigation.html
Dafoe, Taylor. “Authorities Have Confiscated Almost Two Dozen Antiquities From The Collection Of MET Trustee Shelby White”. ArtNet. 2022. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/met-trustee-shelby-white-have-been-confiscated-by-the-das-office-2223188
Roxana Wang. “The Krater In Her Cupboard: Shelby White and The Grey Side of Private Antiquities Collections”. Center for Art Law. 2023. https://itsartlaw.org/art-law/the-krater-in-her-cupboard-shelby-white-and-the-grey-side-of-private-antiquities-collections/#post-61078-footnote-0