Original of Khmer Art🇰🇭
Cambodia (Khmer) Kingdom of Wonder
Beautiful of Women Khmer-style skirts.
Khmer Art Overseas:
Each of these statues of female deities is missing their head, arms and feet. They were almost certainly stolen from ancient temples in Cambodia from the 1960s onwards, with their heads and extremities lopped off to make their transportation easier across national and international borders. Most likely the heads would’ve been sold separately while their feet and pedestal bases would’ve been left at the looted temple site. The number of feet and bases to be found across Cambodia is mind-boggling. Without their heads, it’s impossible to tell which deity is represented by these torsos. They could be Uma, Lakshmi, Durga, Devi or Prajnaparamita, one of the important female goddesses of the Khmer Empire between the 6th and 13th centuries. It’s also clear from the description issued by Christie’s, the auction house that sold each of these sculptures, that they too, despite their so-called due diligence, had no idea which female goddess they portrayed. Frankly, their listed provenance is minimal at best and completely absent at worst. The systematic looting of Cambodia’s ancient temples and their free-standing statues and decorative carvings, saw most of the plunder whisked over the border into Thailand to dealers such as Douglas Latchford before being scattered across the globe into the top auction houses or into art galleries, private collections or museums. Cambodia has not authorized the sale of its cultural heritage in the form of sculptures since 1950, so it’s very likely that the majority of the artifacts being sold by the top auction houses were illegally looted from Cambodian soil.
