Art Seizures at the Met Caused Concern. His Job Is to Address It.

After surrendering scores of art works thought looted, the museum is looking to its new head of provenance research to police its acquisitions and review its collection.

From his office on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucian Simmons has a vantage point from which to survey the huge mission he has undertaken. Below him in gallery after gallery are the artworks and artifacts that the museum has collected across its 155 years in business.

Formerly, as head of the restitution department at Sotheby’s, Simmons confronted questions about the histories of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of works a year that the auction house sought to sell.

Now as the Met’s head of provenance research, a new position created last May, he is responsible for a collection of 1.5 million objects that span 5,000 years of human history. And he has assumed the role at a time when the museum faces questions about how it collected many of them.

Since 2017, the Manhattan district attorney’s office reports it has seized some 74 works of art, including 22 on loan, as well as 55 Etruscan amber carvings and an assortment of other ancient fragments and carvings, from the Met, asserting they had been looted. Those seizures, and others by federal authorities, have led some academics and others to question the collecting practices of the past and to wonder whether other objects in the museum have shaky provenance.

Into this maelstrom steps Simmons with a job to correct earlier errors, to prevent new questionable acquisitions and to ensure that the museum’s reputation for integrity and scholarship is not further damaged.

“My reception at the Met has been incredibly generous,” Simmons, 62, said in an interview at the museum. “People have been open to talking about provenance and turning over rocks because people realize it is part of being this museum.”