From his office on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucian Simmons has a vantage point from which to survey the huge mission he has undertaken. Below him in gallery after gallery are the artworks and artifacts that the museum has collected across its 155 years in business.
Formerly, as head of the restitution department at Sotheby’s, Simmons confronted questions about the histories of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of works a year that the auction house sought to sell.
Now as the Met’s head of provenance research, a new position created last May, he is responsible for a collection of 1.5 million objects that span 5,000 years of human history. And he has assumed the role at a time when the museum faces questions about how it collected many of them.
Since 2017, the Manhattan district attorney’s office reports it has seized some 74 works of art, including 22 on loan, as well as 55 Etruscan amber carvings and an assortment of other ancient fragments and carvings, from the Met, asserting they had been looted. Those seizures, and others by federal authorities, have led some academics and others to question the collecting practices of the past and to wonder whether other objects in the museum have shaky provenance.
Into this maelstrom steps Simmons with a job to correct earlier errors, to prevent new questionable acquisitions and to ensure that the museum’s reputation for integrity and scholarship is not further damaged.
“My reception at the Met has been incredibly generous,” Simmons, 62, said in an interview at the museum. “People have been open to talking about provenance and turning over rocks because people realize it is part of being this museum.”
To illustrate its new seriousness in this regard, the museum now posts two inventories on its website — one for antiquities it has restituted and the other, on a separate page, for artworks that are no longer part of the collection after it was determined they were likely looted during World War II.
In addition, the Met has expanded the team of analysts dedicated to provenance research from six to 11. One new initiative the researchers have undertaken is to focus on items in the collection with histories that include some contact with tainted dealers.
“We no longer want the answer” to a provenance or restitution inquiry “to be, ‘We lack the resources.’ It’s not a good answer,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive.
Last month, the Met made its first antiquities repatriation since Simmons’ arrival as it returned to Greece the ancient bronze head of a griffin, the mythological creature. It had determined that the artifact, which entered the Met in 1972, was likely stolen from an archaeological museum in Olympia in the 1930s.
Museum officials said Simmons has helped introduce a stricter culture in evaluating works for possible acquisition.
“I’m paranoid, and I’m paid to be paranoid,” Simmons said. He said he has told curators “‘You can do better,’ meaning, ‘Go back, go back. More questions. More research.’”
Since his arrival, museum officials said, it has blocked the acquisition of works with gaps or “red flags” in their provenance, including one antiquity and other items from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. But they declined to provide any further detail about the number or type of objects, because they said dealers and collectors who offer works to the museum do so under an agreement of confidentiality.
For the Met and other museums, the past few years have been a moment to account for collecting practices from an earlier era when they competed to secure remarkable objects without much scrutiny or restraint. Until recent decades, the art market seldom put many strictures on sales, countries did little to enforce their own patrimony laws, and many museums posted provenance research protocols they had adopted but often did not follow.
That has changed in recent years. Many countries have begun to enforce their laws, to demand the return of stolen cultural heritage and to point to the damage commercial looting causes to the world’s archaeological sites.
Now the Met has joined other museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which appointed a curator of provenance in 2010, in creating a position at the top executive rank that demonstrates a seriousness about the topic.
“They have really stepped up,” Leila A. Amineddoleh, an art and cultural heritage lawyer, said of the Met. “All institutions are stepping up. Collecting standards have changed.”
In Simmons, the Met picked an executive with a long history of leading research in this area, albeit in a corporate setting. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Simmons, who was born in Britain, studied and practiced law in London before joining Sotheby’s in 1995.
He said he had been interested in art since childhood — he traded in old master prints and drawings at school — and worked during his student days for the American collector Stanley J. Seeger, developing a passion for Modern art, especially Francis Bacon and late Picasso. “I joined Sotheby’s because I could combine my hard legal and research skills with an involvement in the arts,” he said.
At Sotheby’s, he was vice chairman and worldwide head of the restitution department, starting a team that, by the time he left, had five full-time staff members dedicated to guarding against dealing in looted art. He also served as a senior specialist for the Impressionist and Modern Art and Global Fine Art departments.
Some say it remains to be seen whether Simmons, who came from a world dominated by the commercial imperative, will be able to adjust to a museum provenance role.
Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor of art and director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, said the moral and ethical bar and the need for transparency is higher for a public institution than a private corporation.
“It’s that moral landscape that’s completely different at a museum than at a private auction company,” she said. “It’s hard to know whether someone coming from the auction world has what it takes for that particular mission. It requires a willingness not to let sleeping dogs lie but to wake the dogs up.”
But Carla Shapreau, an expert on looted musical instruments, said she had been impressed by Simmons’ transparency when she approached him in her research.
“He was generous with his time and knowledge, and when we got into complex issues of provenance he would address those openly,” said Shapreau, who is a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “He seemed very straightforward and genuinely concerned with these questions of past ownership and with trying to reconstruct these objects’ histories.”
In his new role, as a researcher who helps determine whether the Met has rightful possession of various objects, Simmons will undoubtedly have some contact with Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The prosecutor was diplomatic in responding in a statement to a request for his impression of Simmons’ appointment.
“We appreciate the professionalism of the Met’s staff and their respect for a criminal-justice process that is always based on our long-term, thorough and complex criminal investigations that enable this office to repatriate looted antiquities,” he said.
But in court papers last year, Bogdanos was critical of Simmons’ role in a disputed transaction that took place at Sotheby’s in 2005. The dispute involved the sale of a work by Egon Schiele that Sotheby’s had allowed to go forward despite questions as to whether it had been looted by the Nazis. Bogdanos criticized Sotheby’s for having relied on sources who it said attested that the work had been legitimately sold to a Swiss dealer.
In fact, Bogdanos said, the Swiss dealer had been accused of trafficking with the Nazis, and the auction house’s sources were only repeating information they had gleaned from the dealer himself.
“That Sotheby’s London called such parroting an independent source speaks volumes about Sotheby’s London’s due diligence at the time,” he wrote.
A spokeswoman for the museum said Simmons declined to comment on the assertion in the court papers.
In his work at Sotheby’s, Simmons was typically more involved with issues of Nazi restitution than antiquity repatriation, and objects possibly lost or stolen during the Holocaust will continue to be a focus of his role at the Met.
For the Met, he is spending time researching in the Rosenberg & Stiebel gallery archive in the Frick Art Reference Library and the Rothschild family archives in Britain, focusing on art looted during World War II that eventually entered the Met’s collection, including pieces that have already been restituted and were later acquired by the museum. His work is leading to the updating of hundreds of provenance records, he said.
Simmons said, for example, that he recently changed the labels on an 18th-century British tea casket and a 14th-century terra-cotta sculpture to fully represent in their provenances that they had once been confiscated by the Nazis and restituted before entering the Met’s collection.
Part of the Met’s job is not only to perform this kind of vetting but also to show the world that it is. To that end, the museum has held panels to discuss issues of provenance research, one of them only the other day involving its loaned collection of ancient Cycladic art.
Simmons has also gone on the conference circuit — speaking in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere — advertising and explaining the Met’s new push deeper into provenance research.
As well as Nazi looted art, Simmons is pursuing looted antiquities, investigating the provenance of all ancient objects acquired since the 1970 UNESCO convention, in an era when the museum admits standards were laxer. (The convention, signed by 147 nations including the United States, seeks to halt trafficking in stolen cultural property and encourage its restitution to countries of origin.)
The Met’s priority is the examination of antiquities acquired from commercial dealers who have since been associated with looted art, such as Robert Hecht, a longtime international art dealer who died in 2012. The Met said its collection has 56 works associated with Hecht, his galleries or family members.
In some cases, the Met has arranged to retain items that authorities identified as looted, such as the Etruscan carvings, after negotiating a loan agreement with the country to which they were repatriated.
Marlowe said it will be important going forward to see whether outside researchers will be able to communicate with the provenance team if there are objects they are concerned about.
“Everyone acknowledges it’s an enormous job,” Marlowe said. “But if they want us to put their faith in them, they should be open with their priorities and what burden of proof they are using.”
One issue currently on the table is a request from Cambodian officials for the return of additional items they say were looted during the years of civil war and upheaval that ravaged the country from the 1970s to the late 1990s. In 2023, with the help of federal officials, the Cambodian government was able to secure the return of 14 Khmer-era artifacts they viewed as looted. But Cambodian officials say there are dozens more that belong to Cambodia.
“We are researching another group of Cambodian works,” Hollein said.
Simmons defends a gradual, thorough approach because the museum has a fiduciary responsibility “to get it right,” he said.
His boss is clear that the new head of provenance research is the person to do it. “We have an extremely strong filter now,” Hollein said.
