Sotheby’s postpones sale of gems linked to the Buddha, after Indian pressure

Sotheby’s has postponed a sale of gems linked to the Buddha after the Indian government threatened legal action and called for their return, reports the BBC. The ‘Piprahwa gemstones’ were to be sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on 7 May. They have belonged to the Peppé family since the British official William Claxton Peppé excavated them from a 2,000-year-old burial ground in 1898. The site also contained ashes and bone fragments identified as belonging to the Buddha, which were separated from the stones and given to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. The proposed sale has been heavily criticised by the Buddhist community and experts in art from South East Asia: in Religion News, SOAS professor Ashley Thompson and curator Conan Cheng said it ‘[perpetuated] colonial violence’. On 5 May, India’s ministry of culture issued a legal notice to Sotheby’s and to Chris Peppé, demanding the auction’s cancellation and citing the ‘sacred significance’ of the relics for Buddhists around the world. After a meeting between Indian officials and Sotheby’s on 6 May, the auction has been  postponed indefinitely.

Julia Alexander, president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and former director and CEO of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, has died at the age of 57. Alexander began her career as assistant curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in 1996, where she worked for 12 years, rising to associate director, before becoming deputy director of curatorial affairs at the San Diego Museum of Art. In 2013, she became the first woman to run the Walters. Last September, she was appointed president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which supports the study and conservation of European art, architecture and archaeology through its grant programmes. In a statement issued on 5 May announcing Alexander’s death from a heart attack, Daniel H. Weiss, vice-chair of the foundation’s board, said that ‘even in the short time Julia served as president of Kress she made an impact, on our programs, on our work, and on our sense of the possible.’ Lisa W. Schermerhorn, vice president of the foundation, has been appointed interim president.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation have announced $800,000 in funding for 80 programmes whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were cancelled by the Trump administration in February. Artnet reports that the foundations will give $10,000 to each of the programmes affected when the federal agency axed the Challenge America grants, intended for underserved areas. Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, said, ‘We are committed to providing some semblance of stability and continuity during this time of unprecedented upheaval.’ In other NEA news, on Wednesday the Washington Post reported that the ten staff overseeing grants across the arts have resigned. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) announced on 6 May that it had received an email cancelling a $50,000 grant to fund a commission by the artist Jeffrey Gibson.

Defne Ayas will be the next director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, reports the Art Newspaper. Ayas is currently curator-at-large at Performa, a New York-based non-profit that hosts a performance art biennial in the city. Before that, she was director of the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam from 2012 to 2017 and co-curated exhibitions at major arts events such as the 11th Baltic Triennale in 2012. Ayas co-curated the exhibition ‘Double Infinity’ at the Van Abbemuseum in 2011. She takes over from Charles Esche, who is stepping down in September after two decades leading the museum. In other museum leadership news, the New York Times reports that James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, is on voluntary leave from the institution after allegedly becoming intoxicated and taking off his clothes on a flight from Chicago to Munich on 18 April. A spokesperson for the institution said that they are taking the incident ‘very seriously’, adding that Rondeau will remain away from his post while an independent investigation is completed.

A British art dealer who regularly featured as an expert advisor on the BBC antiques show Bargain Hunt has pleaded guilty to selling artworks to a suspected financier for Hezbollah, reports the New York Times. During a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Friday, prosecutor Lyndon Harris alleged that between October 2020 and December 2021, Oghenochuko Ojiri sold several artworks valued at a total of £140,000 to Nazem Ahmad. It is alleged that Ojiri was aware that Ahmad was sanctioned by both the United States and Britain for his ties to the Lebanese Shia militia group, which is designated a terrorist organisation in both countries. Ojiri is the first person to be charged under section 21A of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which made it illegal for those working in the art sector to fail to disclose terrorist fundraising in 2020. Ojiri has been released on bail ahead of his sentencing at the Central Criminal Court on 6 June. He faces a maximum sentence of five year’s imprisonment.