Met Names Inaugural Head of Provenance Research

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has announced Lucian Simmons as its first provenance research chief. Simmons is set to step into the newly created role in May. He arrives to the museum from Sotheby’s, where he is vice chairman and worldwide head of the restitution department as well as the senior specialist for the Impressionist and Modern art department. The Met additionally announced an enhanced position for Maya Muratov, a provenance researcher in its department of Greek and Roman art, and named Qamar Adamjee, Jennifer Day, and Maxence Garde to newly established provenance research roles in, respectively, the Asian art department, the American Wing, and the Egyptian art department.

“[Simmons] has a vast amount of experience understanding the level of research you need to apply and what timelines you need to set to get to a result,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein told theNew York Times. “He probably had to deal with more issues at Sotheby’s than have many other institutions. You have to vet and scrutinize a huge number of objects. He’s someone who understands the theory but who also has a very practical attitude.”

Simmons’s appointment and the expansion of the provenance team reflect the institution’s commitment to performing due diligence regarding the ownership histories of the roughly 1.5 million objects in its collection. The move came on the heels of a ProPublica report suggesting that many items in the museum’s collection of Native American art lack complete provenance information and may be either stolen or fake. Another contributing factor was the 2022 seizure and repatriation by the Manhattan DA’s office of twenty-seven artifacts held by the Met that were found to have been looted from Egypt, Greece, and Italy. The museum late last year repatriated sixteen Khmer-era antiquities to Cambodia and Thailand.