The Met May Have Millions in Stolen Art. It’s Not Waiting to Be Asked to Return It.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late February, an increasingly familiar scene played out: A museum was restituting a work of art, giving back something from its collection to the place where it originated—in this case, Greece. The announcement, however, was more celebratory than sheepish. It was being done with the fanfare more often associated with acquiring a great object rather than returning one. That’s because, in this case, the Met itself launched the inquiry into the sculpture’s origin.

The work in question was a small bronze sculpture of the head of a griffin, a mythological creature, made in the 7th century B.C. It had been on display at the Met since 1972. Max Hollein, the Met’s director and CEO, spoke to the assembled crowd. The piece, he said, “could not have legitimately left” Greece.

Over the last few years, museums have had to respond to inquiries—sometimes as part of legal claims that can come from countries or former owners, or are initiated by U.S. law enforcement—about works that were stolen, illegally excavated, exported or traded improperly.

But with the griffin head, the Met didn’t wait to be asked. Greek authorities weren’t attempting to reclaim it. Instead, in a turn that shows how the process of repatriation and restitution has changed, the Met took the initiative to investigate how the griffin head got into its collection. The museum found it had disappeared from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s.

Last year the Met appointed Lucian Simmons, a lawyer and former Sotheby’s executive, to be its first-ever head of provenance. He leads a team of 10 full-time researchers, which the Met says is the biggest staff dedicated to this task at any museum.

Simmons acts as “air-traffic control,” he said, providing support, supervision and coordination to the provenance research specialists, who are embedded within the museum’s departments.

Simmons’s broader philosophy is that more sunlight is better when it comes to determining pieces’ back stories. “We need to know the truth,” he said. “Sometimes it’s uncomfortable.”

With these claims, the stakes are often high: In 2022, local and federal authorities seized 27 objects worth a reported $13 million from the Met and returned them to Italy and Egypt, their countries of origin.

Provenance research, or finding a comprehensive record of an art object’s previous ownership and history, is “core museum work” these days, said Hollein, certainly when it comes to vetting new acquisitions. But now, more museums are examining the back story of objects they’ve had for decades and then taking action based on what they find.

“Museums used to take a wait-and-see approach,” said William M. Griswold, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the chair of the cultural property task force of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “Now, they are much more proactive about investigating and finding ways to resolve issues that pertain to provenance.”

Hollein noted how much the landscape of looking into a work’s provenance had changed. “Forty, fifty years ago, nobody cared about documents. It’s not because everything was illegal. That’s just not how it worked.”

The Met has more than 1.5 million objects in its collection, six million visitors a year and an endowment of $4.5 billion.

With the griffin head, Met staffers flagged in 2018 that there were issues, and Hollein then reached out to the Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage of Greece. The mystery was never solved definitively, and hence the museum could not be sure the piece met its standards.

But it’s not gone for good. The bronze is coming back to the Met as a loan next year.

When the billionaire Leonard N. Stern, a real-estate developer and heir of the pet-product company Hartz Mountain, wanted to give the Met a collection of Bronze Age sculptures from the Cycladic Islands, which are now part of Greece, the Met couldn’t determine the art’s origin.

“Ninety percent of Cycladic art comes from unknown contexts, and a lot of it probably comes out of tombs,” said Seán Hemingway, the Met’s chief curator of Greek and Roman art.

Instead of turning down the gift, the Met worked with the Greek government and the Museum of Cycladic Art to establish a long-term partnership. The works will be owned by Greece, but most will be on display at the Met for the next 25 years, and the country will loan other Cycladic art to the museum. Separately, Stern is supporting extensive joint research and conservation projects.

Hollein said the reaction to such an offer had changed completely. “Maybe like 40 years ago, it would have been, ‘We’ll take it,’” he said. “Then maybe 10 years ago, it would have been, ‘It’s impossible for us to get right.’

Sometimes, the outcomes of provenance research don’t result in a piece being returned, as with Jean-Louis Lemoyne’s “La Crainte des Traits de l’Amour” (1739-40), a Rococo marble sculpture in the Met’s Petrie Court depicting a woman startled by a tiny Cupid.

Last year, an associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department flagged a gap in its ownership records. Upon further investigation, the museum confirmed that the sculpture, once owned by a branch of the Rothschild banking family, had been seized during World War II, a fact previously unknown to the museum. After being taken from the family, “it was put on a truck by Nazis in Paris,” Simmons said. “It was taken to the Jeu de Paume and then shipped to Berlin.”

Somehow, the work found its way back to the Rothschilds, who later sold it, and the Met bought it from a dealer, so it didn’t clearly call for restitution. Instead, new information explaining this history will be added to the placard describing the work, part of a new New York state legal requirement that requires New York museums to publicize when an artwork was stolen by the German Army.

Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.

Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.

On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.

The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.

The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.

APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.

For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.

Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.

What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.

Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.

The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.

But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.

In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.

Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.

APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (

The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)

APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.

The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.

One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.

The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.

In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.

Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.

These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.

But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.

Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.

Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.

The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.

The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.

APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.

Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.

The Met May Have Millions in Stolen Art. It’s Not Waiting to Be Asked to Return It.

The museum is taking the lead on re-evaluating its art and artifacts to determine where these works came from in the first place.

At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.