A Collector’s Art, on Loan to the Met, Will Be Owned by Nigeria

Last year the Metropolitan Museum of Art began talking with a longtime philanthropist and art collector about her three African masterworks, each hundreds of years old.

The provenance of the works, which the collector bought between 2015 and 2018, was detailed. Multiple owners were listed for each item. Two had entered the art market decades earlier. There was no evidence that any had been stolen and no suggestion that they had come into the United States illegally.

Despite what Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, described in an interview Friday as strong documentation, it was not quite strong enough for the museum to add the works to its collection.

So, with the collector, Ceil Pulitzer, and with officials of the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), curators and administrators at the Met developed a plan to return the items to what is now Nigeria while ensuring that they will be accessible to audiences and scholars in New York.

The transfer and the Met’s part in arranging it reflect changing views at leading museums on how to evaluate potential acquisitions and re-examine collections. Those changes come as institutions around the world have faced calls to repatriate items deemed to have been looted, that were obtained through colonialism or from impoverished societies or that changed hands during wartime or periods of political instability.

Leaders at the Met, which has relinquished works in response to requests from overseas governments or actions by law enforcement agencies, see the arrangement with Ms. Pulitzer and the NCMM as providing a model they and administrators at other museums can use in the future while navigating an environment in which opinions on best practices have sometimes changed significantly within short periods.

The agreement with Ms. Pulitzer and the Nigerian commission resembles a novel arrangement made in 2022 that allowed for the long-term exhibition at the Met of one of the world’s most significant privately assembled collections of Cycladic antiquities, 161 objects assembled by the businessman and philanthropist Leonard N. Stern. The agreement, which was approved by the Greek government, transferred possession of the works to a nonprofit organization, with the understanding that they are owned by the Greek state.

The specifics of the recent arrangement are being made public on Monday, with the Met announcing that Ms. Pulitzer had donated the three works –– a terra-cotta representation of a horse’s head dating back to the 12th to 15 centuries, a terra-cotta human head from about the 16th century and a brass figure from about the 18th century –– to the Friends of Nigeria’s Cultural Heritage, established by the NCMM.

As part of that arrangement, the works will be on loan for 25 years in the Met’s recently redesigned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

“Our main mission is to bring outstanding objects to the public,” Mr. Hollein said in the interview on Friday, adding that the parties in this agreement had found a way to “make sure these objects do not go back into the art market or a private collection” but instead will be “shared in perpetuity with the public.”

Olugbile Holloway, the director-general of the NCMM, said in a statement: “This initiative is very important to us because it enables Nigerian antiquities in private collections to be displayed at The Met and seen by a wide and diverse audience.”

In a statement forwarded by the Met, Ms. Pulitzer, who has long supported the institution, said: “It’s thrilling to explore new ways of at once strengthening Nigeria’s museums and sharing works that have given me great personal joy.”

Ms. Pulitzer, an artist, has long been a collector and philanthropist. She grew up in Arkansas, moved to New York to study painting at the Art Students League and in 1970 married Michael E. Pulitzer, whose family created the Pulitzer Prizes and who went on to help lead the Pulitzer Publishing Company.

A former Christie’s executive, Susan Kloman, wrote about Ms. Pulitzer’s role as a collector in a book titled “Beauty Unusual: Masterworks From the Ceil Pulitzer Collection of African Art.” A web page created by the book’s publisher said that Ms. Pulitzer “understood that African art shaped the trajectory of 20th-century art” and that in Paris, she met Charles Ratton, an influential and pioneering dealer in African art, who told her she had “a good eye.”

Many museums have agreed for decades not to acquire artifacts without clear evidence that they had left a country of origin before 1970, or had been legally exported after that year. Over the last several years, standards at some institutions have become more rigorous.

“The attitude used to be, don’t acquire something you know to be stolen,” Maxwell Anderson, an art historian who had served as the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, told the Times in 2023, adding: “The attitude today is, don’t acquire something unless you know it’s not stolen.”

That year, Mr. Hollein told Met employees in an internal letter that the museum planned to hire a provenance research team. The museum also formed a committee to consider policies on collecting.

The letter cited a panel conversation on an agreement the museum had previously made with the NCMM that accompanied the return from the Met’s collection of two 16th-century brass plaques created at the Court of Benin that had been removed from the Royal Palace in 1897 during a British military occupation. The Met also facilitated the return of a brass head produced around the 14th century that had been offered to the museum.

Since then, the Met said, the museum and officials in Nigeria have formed a close working relationship. That collaboration has included an initiative to digitally document the NCMM’s collections and a residency at The Met for curatorial staff from the National Museum in Lagos.

Alisa LaGamma, the curator in charge of the Rockefeller Wing, said the works Ms. Pulitzer had donated would enrich the galleries there.

The 18th century brass figure is a rare full body depiction of a queen mother, a role that included acting as an adviser to a reigning king. That work, which shows a teardrop-formed crown and a coral beaded collar, was removed from Benin City in 1897 by a British military officer, Captain Harvey.

A second work, which was created in the Benin Kingdom around the 16th century, remained in Benin City until the 1950s, Ms. LaGamma said. A representation of a human head made of fired clay, it was created by a member of the guild of artists who worked at the royal court.

Perhaps the most striking of the three works is what Ms. LaGamma described as a “beautifully refined” representation of a horse’s head made by a Yoruba artist between the 12th and 15th centuries.

Many similar works were unearthed in the second part of the 20th century by figures like Peter Garlake, an archaeologist who excavated items that are in the national collections of Nigeria.

Digging in the ancient city of Ife, the source of some of the most celebrated works in the African art canon, have brought numerous items into the market. But the Met has not wanted to contribute to unauthorized excavations in Nigeria.

“We as an institution never acquired works from this tradition, even though we are in awe of the beauty and the excellence and their historical importance,” Ms. LaGamma said, adding: “This is the first time in our permanent galleries that we’re showing a work of ancient Ife art.”