CLEVELAND, Ohio - Michael Bennett, the curator who advocated and defended the Cleveland Museum of Art's controversial purchase of an ancient Greek bronze statue of Apollo during his tenure there, has taken a new job at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Bennett's last day at the Cleveland museum was Feb. 3, it said. The museum posted its opening for a new curator of ancient Greek and Roman art on its website Tuesday.
Florida news websites said Bennett would start work at the museum in St. Petersburg early in March as its senior curator of early Western art.
During his 20 years in Cleveland, Bennett organized important shows and expanded the museum's exploration of the ancient world, particularly in the central Mediterranean.
Major exhibitions on his watch included "Magna Graecia: Greek Art from South Italy and Sicily," 2002, and "Sicily: Art and Invention Between Greece and Rome," 2013, both of which he co-organized.
But Bennett stirred controversy among art historians and archaeologists over the museum's 2004 purchase of the "Apollo Sauroktonos," or "Apollo the Lizard Slayer," now known as "Apollo the Python-Slayer."
Bennett attributed the work to Praxiteles, one of the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece.
Opposing the purchase
Leading archaeologists and art historians opposed the purchase because the sculpture's provenance, or ownership history, could not be backed up with hard evidence.
Such evidence could have included proof of the time and place of the work's excavation prior to 1970, the cutoff set by the UNESCO convention of that same year aimed at halting the looting and trafficking of antiquities.
Although it lacked such proof, the museum said in 2004 that scientific analysis showed the sculpture had been out of the ground for at least a century and could not have been looted in violation of the UNESCO convention.
The museum bought the Apollo from Phoenix Ancient Art, whose principals, brothers Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, had had brushes with the law.
Ali Aboutaam was sentenced in absentia in Egypt in 2004 on charges of smuggling and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Ali Aboutaam's lawyer, Mario Roberty, said at the time that the charges were "absolutely ridiculous" and politically motivated.
Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty in New York in June 2004 to a misdemeanor federal charge that he had falsified a customs document to hide the origins of an ancient silver drinking vessel the Phoenix gallery later sold for $950,000.
Expert criticism
"Buying poorly documented objects from disreputable dealers is akin to looting an archaeological site and destroying the historical record," Jenifer Neils, professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, said in a 2012 New York Times story about the Cleveland museum's practices at the time.
Bennett responded to such criticisms in a 2013 book on the Apollo by saying that museums should collect, preserve and exhibit "orphaned" pieces such as the Apollo, because lack of documentation does not prove that an object was looted.
By 2010, Bennett said he considered the legitimacy of the museum's ownership of the Apollo a settled issue.
Also in 2010, Bennett collaborated with Italian scholars on the short-term loan of four antiquities that the country sent to Cleveland as a thank-you to the museum for having returned 13 looted antiquities in 2008.
The museum had originally purchased the 13 works in good faith between 1975 and 1996, before Italy uncovered and revealed proof that they had been looted.
Drusus returned
In a cooperative agreement in 2017, the Cleveland museum returned to Italy an important work purchased during Bennett's tenure, an ancient Roman portrait of Drusus Minor.
The museum purchased the work in 2012 from the Aboutaams, again raising complaints about its collecting practices.
Research published by Italian scholars in 2011, 2013 and 2014 offered photographic evidence that the Drusus had been excavated in Sessa Aurunca, an hour north of Naples, in 1926. The articles also said the work very likely had been stolen from a nearby museum in 1944 by occupying troops.
At the time it purchased the Drusus, the museum believed the sculpture had come from a collection in Algeria. A joint news release issued by the museum and Italian authorities in 2017 said they had confirmed that the work had been stolen from Italy in 1944.
Evolving policies
Bennett's time in Cleveland unfolded while policies regarding the collection of antiquities by American art museums were evolving.
The Association of Art Museum Directors revised its guidelines on collecting of antiquities in 2008 and 2013, urging greater due diligence and disclosure, while allowing for discretion by museums.
David Franklin, the Cleveland museum's director at the time it bought the Drusus, and who left after an unrelated ethical breach in 2013, took a firmly pro-collecting stance toward the Drusus based on the information the institution had at the time.
William Griswold, the Cleveland museum's director since 2014, has emphasized working cooperatively with archaeological source countries to return works clearly shown to have been looted.
For example, the museum returned a medieval Khmer sculpture of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman to Cambodia in 2015, after discovering through research that the head and body of the work, which it had bought in good faith in 1982, had been looted and later offered for sale in Thailand in 1968 and 1972, respectively.
The museum's voluntary action earned it a collaborative agreement with Cambodia that includes the important loan of a large-scale temple wall relief sculpture from Banteay Chhmar, now on view through March 25.
Bennett did not comment publicly about the Drusus when it was returned to Italy. The Cleveland museum said Thursday it had no contact information for him while he was between jobs.
The museum in St. Petersburg did not provide contact information for Bennett and declined to comment about the sculpture, referring questions to the Cleveland museum.
The Cleveland museum said in its online job posting for the antiquities job that it "seeks a highly motivated individual to oversee the display, interpretation, and growth of the museum's collection of ancient western art," a collection of over 1,100 works that includes art from the ancient Near East, ancient Egypt, Greece, Etruria and Rome.