However, while these agreements are certainly very beneficial in regulating the trade of art all items imported after Nov. 17, 1970, it leaves a lot of controversial art unaccounted for. In the case of the Tang Dynasty murals as well as multiple other pieces of cultural property removed in the 20th century and before, the UNESCO protocols do not necessarily have an effect.

Fit To Travel

Even with policies like the UNESCO agreement in place, there are still other issues that museums must consider when dealing with the accession or the repatriation of pieces. Primary among these is protecting the piece from harm. “Any antiquity that is, say, buried in the ground and gets dug up is removed from a stable environment into an unstable environment,” says Joseph A. Greene, deputy director and curator at the Semitic Museum.

Moving pieces once they are in a museum is also risky, as is the case with the murals from the Mogao Caves. “They are very fragile, and it was a very experimental process that [Warner] tried to remove those things,” Moy says. The chemicals Warner used, along with the nature of the murals, have made even considering the return or even the loan of them impossible.

However, Moy says that she does want to collaborate with Dunhuang scholars, noting that in 2009-10, the Harvard Yenching Institute sponsored a researcher from the Dunhuang Research Academy, who studied the Tang Dynasty frescoes. “They recognize that we have them here,” Moy says. “And there is a certain acknowledgement that this is not something that anyone here would ever do today, but it was a different world back then.”

Another concern often raised when discussing repatriation is the fitness of the source country's institutions. Some scholars view increased international collaboration as a solution to the issue. Theresa E. Sims, a Ph.D. student in art history at Harvard, brings up the example of the Benin Bronzes, a collection of hundreds of ornately figured metal plaques taken from Nigeria in a 1897 punitive expedition by the British. Though the British Museum has sold some of these works back to Nigeria, they have kept the bulk of their collection despite calls for repatriation.

“[One] argument that [has] been made about the Benin Bronzes and other pieces of artwork that are in Western institutions is that Nigeria doesn't have the resources to take care of them properly as they should, and the British Museum sees itself as this custodian of world culture,” Sims says.

But the British Museum is not the only institution to possess these bronzes—a 2012 donation of Western African art made to the Museum of Fine Arts included a number of works stripped from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin during the 1897 invasion. The Peabody holds some of these bronze plaques in its collection as well.

Moving forward, Sims would like there to be a greater effort to improve foreign art facilities. “I would be interested in seeing more of an interest on the part of Western museums in ways that they can collaborate with institutions of the continent [of Africa] so that it's not just like a black-and-white, ‘Well, we have the resources, so we're just going to keep the art because these African institutions just can't handle it.’”

Behind The Masks

Whether a museum holds a bill of sale or believes itself to be serving as protectors, there might still be some moral implications to consider in the display of some pieces. The displaying of African masks, for example, presents a much deeper ethical issue than a legal question of who technically owns the piece. “There's a lot of scholarly debate about the problem associated with taking something like a mask out of its original context and putting it into a museum. Especially because masquerades generally do have a more spiritual significance,” Sims says.

The displaying of masks in museums as merely pieces of art or culture poses potential problems within the source societies at large, even if one member of the society was willing to sell or donate the mask. At Harvard, the Peabody Museum has a collection of such masks, many of which were purchased by George Harley. “Their sale to him was something that was very fraught,” Sims says. “He had to buy them from people in secret because it was a real taboo within the community to sell these things.”

These masks are not currently on display at the Peabody Museum for space reasons; however, Sims asserts that museums should take this latter reason into consideration more. “With particular types of masks that are customarily not meant to be seen outside of a ritual context or that or that have those kinds of attributes attached to them, I would be more wary about displaying that in a museum.”

Giving Back

In 1990, the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, disallowing the display of certain Native American cultural items and requiring all institutions receiving government funding to return items that were classified as human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or cultural patrimony.