Displaying items by tag: ministry of culture

The Netherlands and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum intend to buy two rare works by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, repatriating the 1634 masterpieces after more than a century of ownership by France’s Rothschild family.

Each buyer plans to pay 80 million euros ($90 million), according to the Ministry of Culture. About 50 million euros of the Dutch state’s portion is going to come from dividends paid out from the state’s ownership of companies including ABN Amro Group NV.

Morocco is due to get its first major national museum since gaining independence from France more than 50 years ago. The Mohammed VI Musée National d’Art Moderne et Contemporaine will open officially on 25 September. Located in the heart of the capital city Rabat, the three-level 22,350 sq. m building will consist of 4,921 sq. m for a permanent collection and 2,558 sq. m for temporary exhibits, conservation laboratories, an auditorium, education center, a multimedia library and a café. The ministry of culture and the Fonds Hassan II for Economic and Social Development funded the 73m Dh ($9m) building and Abdelazzi Idrissi, an archaeologist and conservator, has been appointed its director. The museum was scheduled to open at the end of May, although many thought the date somewhat optimistic.

Conceived in 1999 and under construction since 2004, the museum has been controversial.

Two 10^th century statues that were looted from jungle temples have been returned to Cambodia by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met announced in May 2013 that they would send the Khmer sculptures known as Kneeling Attendants back to Cambodia after being displayed in the museum’s Asian Wing for 10 years.

Hab Touch, director general at the Ministry of Culture, said, “The return of the statues is a historic event for us.” Seven Buddhist monks blessed the life-size statues during a religious ceremony attended by officials from the government and the Met at the airport. Upon their return to Cambodia, the sculptures will be put on display at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh and later kept at either the National Museum in the capital or at a museum in the northwestern city of Siem Reap.

The two statues were looted from the Koh Ker temple site in the early 1970s. At the time, Cambodia was being ravaged by a brutal civil war and looting was rampant. The works were donated piece by piece to the Met in the late 1980s and 1990s. Recent documentary research revealed that the statues were in fact looted from Cambodia.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles will return a terracotta head depicting the Greek god Hades to Sicily. The museum has been working with Italian officials for two years to decide whether or not the artifact should be returned. The Getty purchased the terracotta head from New York collector Maurice Tempelsman for $530,000 in 1985. Tempelsman had originally acquired the piece from the disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes.

Officials determined that the terracotta head was originally located in Sicily at a sanctuary site for the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The piece’s provenance was discovered by comparing the head to four terracotta fragments found near the famous and highly looted archaeological site Morgantina in Sicily. It soon came to light that the head was illegally excavated from Morgantina in the early 1970s.

The Getty entered into an agreement with Italy’s Ministry of Culture in 2007 after a long legal battle regarding looted works and the museum’s former curator, Marion True. The Getty now has connections in various parts of Italy to facilitate cultural exchange and has been working closely with Sicilian officials since 2010.

The head of Hades will be on view at the Getty Villa as part of the exhibition The Sanctuaries of Demeter and Persephone at Morgantina through January 21, 2013. The work will then join the Getty-organized traveling exhibition Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome before being placed in Sicily’s Museo Archeologico.