Lucian Simmons will take on the role, which was established as part of the Museum’s cultural property initiatives
The Met also announced the hiring of additional provenance researchers and further updates in its ongoing efforts related to cultural heritage and collecting practices
(New York, March 22, 2024)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the appointment of a Head of Provenance Research, a new position within the Director’s Office created to coordinate such research efforts across the Museum. Lucian Simmons, who most recently served as Vice Chairman and Worldwide Head of the Restitution Department and Senior Specialist for the Impressionist and Modern Art Department at Sotheby’s, will begin in the role in May 2024. Simmons has worked on restitution and provenance matters since 1997, launching Sotheby’s worldwide team dedicated to these topics and creating a market standard for World War II provenance issues. He speaks widely on the art market and particularly the displacement of art during World War II, and gives regular seminars at universities and law schools across North America. At The Met, he will lead coordination of a team of researchers working across many of the Museum’s 19 collecting areas. The establishment of the new leadership role and additional research positions are key components of The Met’s commitment to increasing its dedication of resources to long-term work related to cultural property.
“As The Met engages more intensively and proactively in examining our collection, we are delighted to welcome Lucian Simmons to help lead this crucial and ongoing work,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “His vast experience with cultural property and restitution over the past several decades will be invaluable to the Museum. We are grateful to the curators, conservators, and existing provenance researchers who have been deeply engaged in studying the collection for many decades. Our hiring of additional experts will help further these efforts and play a vital role in coordinating the work amongst departments.”
As Head of Provenance Research, Simmons will be responsible for coordinating provenance research efforts throughout the Museum’s curatorial departments in close collaboration with the Deputy Director for Collections and Administration and in consultation with the Counsel’s Office. He will work with the curators within the appropriate departments to confirm that proper research is undertaken on all objects currently in the collection or entering through acquisition that can be considered cultural property or should be examined for their Nazi-era provenance.
Simmons said, “I am thrilled at this opportunity to bring my experience working on provenance and cultural property issues to The Met, which has been a leading voice on these topics in the global art community. I look forward to collaborating with the exceptional staff already focused on this important work and to furthering the Museum’s mission.”
The Museum also announced an expanded position for Maya Muratov, who is already engaged in provenance research in the Department of Greek and Roman Art. Additionally, The Met created new provenance research positions in the Department of Asian Art, the American Wing (with a focus on Native American art), and the Department of Egyptian Art that are being filled by Qamar Adamjee, Jennifer Day, and Maxence Garde, respectively. These new positions and promoted staff bring to 11 the number of Met employees engaged on provenance research alongside the curators, building on the Museum’s many decades of extensive provenance research and information sharing across numerous areas.
In spring 2023, The Met announced a suite of initiatives related to cultural property and collecting practices that include undertaking a focused review of works in the collection; hiring additional provenance researchers to join the many researchers and curators already doing this work at the Museum; further engaging staff and trustees; and using The Met’s platform to support and contribute to public discourse on this topic.
The Met has made significant progress in a number of these areas in recent months, building on earlier initiatives. In February 2024, The Met and the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India signed a Memorandum of Understanding outlining future cooperation on educational initiatives, exhibitions, and exchanges of scholarship and expertise, building on a decades-long partnership that has yielded many important collaborations. Other recent agreements include the transfer of ownership of two stone sculptures to the Republic of Yemen following provenance research conducted by Met scholars and an ongoing engagement with the Nepalese government that led to a decision to return a 13th-century wooden temple strut and stone stele of a Vishnu triad. In December 2023, The Met announced the repatriation of 14 sculptures to the Kingdom of Cambodia and two to the Kingdom of Thailand, including all Angkorian sculptures known by the Museum to be associated with the dealer Douglas Latchford.
The Met has launched object webpages for all restituted works of art—specifying that the object has been returned and to what country—as part of a commitment to transparency. The Museum has also embraced a New York State law passed in August 2022 that requires museums to publicly identify any artworks in their collection that changed hands in Europe during the Nazi era (1933–1945) due to involuntary means, with more than 50 updated object labels now installed.
Additionally, The Met began its “Cultural Heritage Now” convening series in spring 2023. The first panel highlighted provenance research underway at The Met, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The second program focused on international partnerships, featuring presentations on the Rubin Museum’s partnership in Nepal and The Met’s Indian Conservation Fellowship Program. Details on the next program will be announced in the coming weeks.
Further information on The Met’s collecting practices and activities is available online.
Lucian Simmons
Simmons has worked at Sotheby’s since 1995, most recently serving as Vice Chairman and Worldwide Head of the Restitution Department and Senior Specialist for the Impressionist and Modern Art Department. Prior to joining Sotheby’s, he was a partner in the London law firm of Barlow, Lyde and Gilbert. Having studied law at the London School of Economics, he was called to the Bar in 1984 and later requalified as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. He is a regular public speaker on art law, restitution, art history, and the fine and decorative arts.
Qamar Adamjee
Adamjee, an art historian of the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent, was previously a provenance researcher for the South Asian collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and before that, associate curator of South Asian and Islamic art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. She was also a former research assistant in The Met’s Department of Islamic Art. She received a PhD in Islamic Art and Architecture from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; an MA in Art History from Hunter College, City University of New York; and an MBA from the Institute of Business Administration, University of Karachi, Pakistan.
Jennifer Day
Day joined the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2005. As Head Registrar for the Indian Arts Research (IARC), she supervised the Collection Review program, which systematically reviews each object in a given community’s collections at IARC with cultural representatives chosen by the tribe. Additionally, she performed all collections cataloging and provenance research for the institution. She came to the organization with a background in museum registration and completed a graduate degree in museum studies at the University of Florida.
Maxence Garde
Garde will join The Met part-time in addition to his current role as Curator in charge of the Antiquities collection at the Museum Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal. Previously, he was Head of the Department for Collections for GRAHAL (Groupe de Recherche Art Histoire Architecture Littérature) in Paris and worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. He co-curated an exhibition at the Museo Egizio di Torino about the history of collecting antiquities during the 20th century. He studied at the École du Louvre, receiving an extensive specialization in Egyptology and History of Collections.
Maya Muratov
Muratov will take on the role of Associate Research Curator for Provenance in The Met’s Department of Greek and Roman Art, having worked part-time on the department’s Provenance Project since 2009. She is currently Associate Professor of the History of Art at Adelphi University. With a PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Muratov is a practicing field archaeologist and cultural historian with research interests in religious and social history of the ancient Greek and Roman world and the history of collecting antiquities in the 18th–early 20th centuries.
About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.
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March 22, 2024
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