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The Sun Shines on Shelby
There’s a lengthy, even-handed, comprehensive and quite intelligent article on the simultaneously revered and reviled antiquities collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee and benefactor Shelby White in today’s New York Sun. The most revealing passage is this quote from fellow collector Michael Steinhardt, not coincidentally a co-owner of the Sun: “I would say, Shelby has stood alone, and was not as strongly defended as she should have been by those very institutions to whom she had been a too-generous donor.” No wonder the normally silent White gave the Sun a rare interview.
May 26th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
[…] Talks between Italy and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee and benefactor Shelby White, whose antiquities collection, created with her late husband, the financier Leon Levy, have bogged down, says the New York Times, over White’s demand for a lifetime laissez-passe in exchange for nine objects Italy contends were illegally looted from its soil. A 1999 study by two British archaeologists found that 93% of the objects in a show of the Levy-White collection lacked provenance. An unidentified Italian official characterized White’s demand as, in effect, a license to pillage. White has refused my request for an interview, has never explained what she thought she and her husband were buying but in a brief, recent interview did allow that the standard for “acceptable provenance is unclear and changing.” […]