In August 2018, I received an email from Tobias Mörike, a curator of Islamic Art, introducing himself and the marble. “They all might go back to the same source.” Mörike had read my stories on smugglers and corruption in Afghanistan. Silke Reuther, the museum’s provenance researcher, led me on a tour of the collection. Like many professions pushed by a new generation of activists and scholars, the museum world is coming to grips with thorny issues of power and inequality. At the MKG, Reuther and I stopped in front of a glass case full of silverware that had been confiscated by the Nazis, the first exhibit in the “Looted Art?” series.

Source: International New York Times March 04, 2021 10:01 UTC