Toledo Museum of Art sells Duplicate Artifacts

Toledoans may soon have a rare chance to buy a piece of Roman or Egyptian history first brought to Toledo more than a century ago (Roberta Gedert, "Toledo Museum of Art selling off over 140 pieces", The Blade April 5 2017).

During a public sale last fall of more than 60 pieces of ancient artifacts from the Toledo Museum of Art’s collection, 145 additional pieces were offered by the museum that never made it to the auction block. The second lot, which includes 18 early pieces acquired in 1906 by museum founder Edward Drummond Libbey during a trip to Egypt, was determined by Christie’s Auction House to not be of high enough value to be sold through public auction. Subsequently, the museum will offer the antiquities for sale first to other museums before the public will have an opportunity, said TMA director Brian Kennedy. 

Of course, "the October sale was met with objections from the Egyptian and Cyprus governments, who said cultural artifacts should remain accessible to the public. “We have taken this position … let’s offer them first to museums and see if they want them; then if they don’t, put them on the market,”

The museum has contracted with private antiquities dealer Harlan J. Berk LTD., of Chicago, which is currently offering the pieces, including statues, vases, lamps, pitchers, and bowls from Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, to the 244 members that make up the Association of Art Museum Directors.[...]   More than 40 of the pieces have sold since the directors’ group was notified, said Aaron Berk, director of antiquities for Harlan Berk. He said working with the museum on the venture is an unusual process for the company that his father, Harlan Berk, founded in 1964. A timetable to release the remaining items for sale to the members of the American Alliance of Museums and then to private individuals has not been set. “As soon as we feel like the museums have been exhausted, we will open it up to the public,” Mr. Berk said. [...] If all items sold at listed prices, total sales would peak at more than $283,500. That price tag compares to the almost $970,000 generated from the 66 higher-priced pieces during the online and live auctions at Christie’s in October. Money from both sales goes into the museum’s new acquisitions fund. Deaccessioning is the act of permanently removing pieces from a museum through sales so that new pieces can be acquired. The 213 pieces were chosen from the museum’s collection of more than 1,500 antiquities under a two-year process of review of its antiquities collection by an art committee, which determined that the pieces selected had not appeared in museum literature or been studied by scholars, were not up to collection standards, or were duplicates of other pieces in the collection. 

This seems like an ideal solution to the masses of material lying unwanted in museum stores all over the world. Even the governments of the countries producing the antiquities agree:

Leonidas Pantelides, ambassador for Cyprus, [...] drafted a letter [...] on Tuesday, recommending that the museum consider similar deaccessioning in the future. “In return, both the embassy and the Hellenic American Community will laud the Toledo Museum of Art as a responsible ethical museum for engaging in rules-based deaccessioning and paving the way for responsible museum practice that can be hailed as truly pioneering,” Mr. Pantelides wrote.