The Denver Art Museum (DAM) will repatriate 11 Southeast Asian antiquities from its collection that have been connected to the late British smuggler Douglas Latchford and his Colorado collaborator, the late Emma C. Bunker, a long-time trustee and partner of the institution. The pieces will be returned to Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, according to a statement by Lori Iliff, a senior provenance researcher at the DAM.
Bunker, an art historian who played a key role in Latchford’s decades-long trafficking scheme, donated all of the aforementioned objects to the museum. Five of the artefacts are known to have passed through Latchford’s hands at some point. After the Denver Post’s three-part investigatigative report on Bunker’s activities at the DAM in 2022, the museum removed Bunker’s name from its gallery wall and returned $185,000 that she and her family had donated. In March of 2023, DAM officially acknowledged that Bunker assisted Latchford in persuading the museum to acquire looted artworks.
The Denver Post further reported that Bunker used museum as a “way station” for looted artefacts provided by Latchford, the Bangkok-based dealer who spent his career selling plundered items and fragments from war-torn Khmer to wealthy institutions and collectors.
Bunker, who died in 2021, introduced Latchford, who died in 2020, to the DAM and persuaded him to sell and donate a variety of historically significant statues from the storied Khmer empire to the museum. Bunker was never officially charged with a crime, but her name appeared in five civil and criminal cases related to Latchford’s dealings.
The items designated for restitution this month include a pair of 12th-century iron palanquin hooks, a 13th-century bronze Buddha sculpture and a 12th-century figurine depicting Prajnaparamita, the Buddhist goddess of wisdom.
According to museum records, Latchford kept five of the relics in Bangkok before they came into Bunker’s possession. She loaned or donated them to the DAM between 2004 and 2016. Five of the artefacts also appeared in Bunker and Latchford’s 2004 book Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art, one of three books the pair co-authored.
Pressure from law enforcement and the press have prompted the museum to return additional items from its collection in recent years, including five Asian antiquities connected to disgraced New York City gallerists Doris and Nancy Wiener and 22 objects whose sales had been traced to convicted antiquities trafficker Subhash Kapoor. Officials at the museum also backed out of hosting a traveling exhibition of purportedly ancient, Greek artefacts from a Florida museum after finding out that many of the proposed objects lacked detailed provenances, The New York Times reported last year.
