MFA Boston agrees to return collection of Benin Bronzes to donor

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) will return a promised gift of Benin Bronzes and close its Benin Kingdom gallery on 28 April, it announced this week. The bronzes are from the collection of Robert Owen Lehman Jr. – son of the collector and former Lehman Brothers CEO Robert Owen Lehman Sr. – who pledged in 2012 to give them to the museum ‘over time’. Many of the works can be traced back to the British raid on the historic kingdom of Benin in 1897, in which British soldiers looted thousands of artefacts. Lehman Jr. requested their return after the MFA began exploring avenues for returning the objects to their place of origin, reports the Boston Globe. Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the MFA, said that the museum strives to be ‘a leader in ethical stewardship’ and that the MFA and Lehman Jr. have ‘not [been] able to make progress on a mutually agreeable resolution for our gallery of Benin bronzes’. Five bronzes from Lehman Jr.’s collection have passed into the MFA’s ownership; several of these will go on display in the MFA’s Art of Africa gallery in late June while the museum ‘continues to seek a resolution’. The Benin Kingdom gallery will become a space for the MFA’s collection of Nubian art. All works on loan to the MFA from Lehman will eventually be returned to him.

A judge has ordered the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) to surrender a drawing by Egon Schiele to investigators who plan to return it to the heirs of a Jewish man killed in the Holocaust, the New York Times reports. The drawing, Russian War Prisoner (1916), has been the subject of dispute between the AIC and New York courts since last year, when the Manhattan district attorney’s office accused the museum of ignoring evidence that the work had been looted by Nazis from its original owner, the Austrian entertainer Fritz Grünbaum. The museum, which has held the drawing since 1966, has long defended its right to the work. However, Judge Althea Drysdale agreed with the investigators’ assessment, saying in her 79-page ruling that the drawing had been ‘stolen property for the last 86 years’. The AIC is claiming ownership of the drawing in a separate civil case in a federal court in New York.

Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten, the art collector and businessman who co-founded the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, has died at the age of 90, reports the Art Newspaper. Ullens, who was born in San Francisco into a Belgian aristocratic family, began collecting contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s. After his retirement from the investment firm Artal Group in 2000, Ullens and his wife Myriam founded the UCCA as a private museum – one of the first in China – to house more than 1,500 works by artists such as Ai Weiwei. Its first exhibition, ‘’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art’, brought global attention to artists working in the country. In 2017, the museum was sold to Chinese owners and renamed the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Myriam was shot and killed in 2023 by Nicolas Ullens, Guy’s son from a previous marriage, who is currently awaiting trial for her murder.

Tate Britain has announced the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize. The nominees are the sculptor Nnena Kalu, the photographer Rene Matić, the painter Mohammed Sami and the multimedia artist Zadie Xa. Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the selection jury, said in a statement that the shortlist ‘reflects the breadth of artistic practice today, from painting and sculpture to photography and installation’. An exhibition of the four artists’ work will open on 27 September at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford – the 2025 UK City of Culture – and a winner will be announced on 9 December.