NEW YORK, NY.- The exhibition was a major one, featuring nearly 200 ancient artifacts from around the world, including Neolithic marbles and imposing Roman bronzes, and its title, “Glories of the Past,” was appropriately grand.

“These are not the holdings of a large museum,” Philippe de Montebello, then the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in his introduction to the 1990 show, “but, in fact, a panoply of treasures assembled with relentless perseverance, according to a very personal vision.”

Indeed, they had all come from a single private collection owned by Shelby White and her husband Leon Levy, who would soon play even larger roles in the life of the museum.

White became a Met trustee that year and later joined the committee that advises the museum on what pieces to acquire. Most notably, she and her husband gave the Met $20 million, and in 2007, four years after Levy’s death, the museum opened a monumental new gallery for Greek and Roman art: the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court.

But recently the couple’s conduct as collectors has drawn heightened scrutiny. Investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office have carted away 71 looted artifacts from White’s home in the past two years, although they have not suggested that she or her husband knowingly bought stolen antiquities.

In fact, investigators would later thank White, 84, for her cooperation, as artifacts were returned to multiple countries, including Yemen, Turkey and Italy. But in June 2021 they showed up, unannounced, with a search warrant at her spacious Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan at 6 a.m. The rooms inside were filled with antiquities, some of which had been purchased from dealers who would later be accused of trafficking in illicit artifacts. Many were displayed in their own nooks or cabinets, and set off by lighting that enhanced their appeal.

“It is literally a museum,” said Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which visited the apartment several times.

From the Met itself, investigators seized another 17 antiquities on loan from White, asserting that they, too, had been stolen. One, a Chinese funerary artifact, had been in storage at the museum for more than 20 years but had never been displayed. When investigators opened its crate, the artifact was still caked with dirt, a clear indication, Bogdanos said, that it had been looted.

The seizures were a significant blow to White, not only because the items were valued at nearly $69 million. She is one of the most celebrated philanthropists of her generation, someone with a demonstrated zeal for preserving the treasures of the past and advancing a broader understanding of the ancient world. But critics said, given her background, they found the couple’s collecting practices to have been naive or careless.

“There is no way,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, “that someone at her level of the market and her depth of collecting and her prominence at the Met, there is no way someone at that level did not know they should be asking for things like export licenses.”

White’s many friends and admirers dismiss the criticism, and her lawyer characterized it as unfair. But it has become an awkward moment for the museum, which has had its own collection riddled by seizures. In recent weeks, even as the Met announced a major review to ensure that its ancient holdings did not include other looted artifacts, White continued to play a significant role at the museum.

She sits on its acquisitions, buildings and finance committees — where, as an emeritus trustee, she no longer votes but advises the panels. The museum’s collection is still filled with dozens of antiquities that she either donated or lent. And just weeks ago, when the Met announced its new, stricter initiative on antiquities, White was appointed to a 12-member task force of trustees that will offer “their experience and counsel” to help shape the museum’s collecting practices and other policies with regard to cultural property issues.

“Shelby White is a profoundly generous supporter of the Met,” Max Hollein, its director, said in response to a question last month, “and she has had an enormous impact at this museum and many other institutions."

American museums survive in large part because of the financial support of trustees, but some cultural heritage experts view the museum’s loyalty to White as problematic.

“If you pick a trustee whose financial generosity is the most important factor, then fine,” said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues and a professor at DePaul University College of Law. “But should a trustee be a model of conduct when it pertains to the purpose of the museum itself? Her collecting practices do not fit the model of how a museum should be pursuing knowledge and preserving the historical record.”

White declined to be interviewed in recent weeks, as her lawyer, Peter A. Chavkin, fielded questions on her behalf. He said in a statement that White and Levy had acquired objects “in good faith, at public auction and from dealers they believed to be reputable.”

“If an item in her collection was shown to have been wrongfully taken by others,” Chavkin said, “Ms. White has expeditiously and voluntarily returned it to its rightful place of origin.”

But critics say that White appears to have done little to review the hundreds of artifacts she owned in the years since once-trusted dealers she and her husband had done business with were accused of handling illicit items.

“Instead, she held on to them,” said Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist and head of illicit antiquities research at the Ionian University in Greece who helped the Manhattan investigators identify some of the White objects recently seized.

The museum, similarly, does not seem to have done much to review items it had or would get from White after a host of her artifacts were returned in 2008 to Italy and Greece.

The Met says it is now paying closer attention.

“The Met has been very public in acknowledging that new information brought to light by law enforcement and others has precipitated our decision to devote additional resources to provenance research,” Ken Weine, a Met spokesperson, said in a statement. The measures introduced include requiring new loans of antiquities to have provenance going back to 1970.

Many Kudos, and Critics

It is difficult to overstate White’s contributions to the arts and to the study of ancient civilizations. Although not an archaeologist by trade, she developed a passion for the study of antiquity. A writer who has focused on financial matters for publications like Forbes and The New York Times, she has also occasionally written about her collecting and philanthropy. Her 1992 book, “What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband’s Money,” is a financial survival guide geared to female readers.

Beyond their collecting, White and her husband, a hedge fund pioneer, financed excavations at an important site in Israel. White went on digs herself and the couple established a program at Harvard to support the publication of archaeological work.

After her husband’s death, White created a foundation in his name that has made sizable gifts to, among others, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Botanical Garden and Lincoln Center. In 2006, she gave $200 million to New York University to help create the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, which operates in a town house her foundation bought near the Met.

In 2017, in something of a crowning recognition, White was awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. The citation noted that “the multifaceted breadth of her giving is ever evolving.”

But even as she and her husband built a reputation for generosity, their collecting drew criticism.

White and Levy had begun amassing their extensive collection of more than 700 antiquities in the 1970s. At that time, to curb looting, countries were beginning to adopt guidelines that discouraged the trade in items that lacked ownership histories dating back to at least 1970. But a good bit of time would pass before museums, dealers and private collectors fully embraced the new practice, and White and Levy, like many others, took in objects with limited provenance.

Beginning in 1993, the couple agreed to relinquish 16 items after claims they had been looted from an ancient Roman site in England. In 2008, White surrendered 10 objects to Italy and two to Greece. Italian investigators had traced several of them to Giacomo Medici, an Italian accused in 2004 of trafficking in illegal antiquities, and White and her husband had bought some of these same ones from Robin Symes, a prominent British antiquities dealer who later became embroiled in a series of investigations into looted art.

One of the returned items was a much-celebrated antiquity, a vessel with scenes of Zeus and Herakles, attributed to the fifth-century B.C. painter Eucharides. It had been part of the “Glories of the Past” exhibition at the Met in 1990.

“It’s astonishing that so many pieces from that exhibition have now gone back to Italy, Greece, Turkey, and so on,” said David Gill, an archaeologist and a fellow with the Center for Heritage at the University of Kent in England.

For all the understanding of the ancient world that White had fostered, her ambitious collecting upset some archaeologists who thought it helped create a market that encouraged looting. When objects were wrenched from their original context, they complained, it undermined the very understanding of antiquity that she was trying to develop.

In 2006, a professor at NYU resigned from the university’s Center for Ancient Studies to protest the founding of the new ancient studies graduate institute financed by White.

“This is not a small issue cropping up by a few malcontents,” the professor, Randall White, said at the time. “This is something we fight daily to try to preserve the archaeological record.”

Officials at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and at the University of Cincinnati discouraged their scholars from accepting money from an archaeology fund White and Levy had established.

“We didn’t want to validate their philanthropy when it grew out of so much plundering,” said James C. Wright, professor emeritus and former chair of the department of classical and Near Eastern archaeology at Bryn Mawr.

Shelby White did not wither from the criticism. Instead, she defended her approach, noting in published essays and interviews the extent to which she had exhibited her collection, a transparency that she said not only expanded public understanding of antiquity but also exposed her artifacts to scrutiny.

“I’m not hiding things,” she told the Times in 2005. “If it turns out there is something I shouldn’t have bought, I will act appropriately.”

Although she had no interest in collecting stolen objects, White said it was unfair to apply new standards to objects bought decades ago when even museums didn’t require full provenances.

“In the ’90s, there was talk about provenance, but that meant different things” to different people, White told The New York Sun in a 2007 interview. “Even today, what is considered an acceptable provenance is unclear and changing.”

A New Era

White is hardly alone in having items from her collection seized as looted by authorities. Other wealthy collectors — including financier Michael Steinhardt, who shared a similar interest in both the ancient world and cultural philanthropy — have been forced to return dozens of items.

But few have had such a central role at an American museum at a time when such institutions are facing what some experts would call an evolved understanding on collecting best practices. Others would call it a reckoning.

“She is emblematic of the whole changed landscape over the last three to four decades,” said Marlowe, the Colgate professor. “The cozy way of thinking about collecting antiquities has changed radically.”

Some experts, however, say it is too harsh to judge White today by a changed set of collecting mores, especially given all of the work she has done to expand an understanding of ancient civilizations.

“Shelby White is a scholar,” said Montebello, the Met's former director, “who bought antiquities in good faith out of a real love and knowledge of the art and, most importantly, she did not put them away for her sole enjoyment but shared them with a wide public, lending generously to exhibitions worldwide and displaying the core of her collection in a solo show at the Met.”

He noted how open White had been to returning items when evidence of their questionable origins arose.

Other experts, however, point to a long fight Turkey waged for the return of the top half of a marble statue called the “Weary Herakles,” after spotting it in the “Glories of the Past” exhibit at the Met. Independent experts viewed Turkey’s evidence as strong — but White, Levy and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, who jointly owned the statue, balked at the return. The couple argued that they had bought it in good faith. White turned over full ownership to the museum in 2004, and it was finally returned to Turkey in 2011.

In the case of the most recent seizures, investigators said their interest in White’s collection grew when her and Levy’s names kept showing up in the books of antiquities dealers who had come under investigation.

After the most recent seizures from the Met, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced that its investigation into her collection had concluded. Bogdanos, the assistant district attorney, said that his team could still go back to examine other items she holds, but that at this point there is no reason to believe they are problematic.

“If tomorrow somebody comes forward, or if we find someone and they give us evidence, then we go right back,” Bogdanos said.

For some scholars, White’s passion for preserving treasures of the past and what they view as her collecting miscues are a confounding mix born of a perhaps noble, but misguided set of impulses. It is clear from White’s essays and interviews that she views the collector who brings antiquities into public view as a kind of champion of expanded understanding. It’s not clear, these scholars said, that she acknowledges how much voracious collecting can at the same time incentivize looting at ancient sites.

“I don’t think,” Gerstenblith said, “the good works, the support of archaeological work, outweigh the harm that she caused.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.