Tang Chhin Sothy/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Monks were among those who welcomed two statues being returned to Cambodia.Two Cambodian statues that stood for a millennium in a remote Khmer Empire temple before spending two decades at the Metropolitan Museum of Art arrived back in their homeland Tuesday to the plaudits of Cambodian officials, who plan to display them in Phnom Phen starting Saturday.
“We are happy and thrilled and so grateful to the Met museum for this historic decision,†said Chan Tani, Cambodia’s secretary of state, after a ceremony at the airport in Phnom Penh attended by government officials and by Maxwell Hearn, chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Met.
Mak Remissa/European Pressphoto Agency The statues had been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1994.The Met agreed last month to return the twin sandstone sculptures, known as the Kneeling Attendants, after Cambodia argued that they had been looted during the tumult of the country’s civil war. The statues had arrived at the museum in four pieces between 1987 and 1992 as a series of gifts from donors. The 200-pound statues had flanked a main doorway into the Met’s South and Southeast Asian art galleries since 1994.
Thomas P. Campbell, the Met director, said last month that the museum had been swayed by “facts that were not known at the time of the acquisition,†evidence that Mr. Tani described as “proof that the statues were brutally stolen after 1970.â€
The statues came from a remote temple complex called Koh Ker, about 200 miles north of the capital. The temple is also the original site of a large statue of a Hindu warrior that is the subject of a federal lawsuit against Sotheby’s, which is seeking to sell the antiquity. American and Cambodian officials say the warrior statue and its twin, now at the Norton Simon Museum in California, were looted around at the same time as the Kneeling Attendants, allegations that Sotheby’s disputes.
