The Disputed Umā-Maheśvara in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: A Case Study in Reattribution and Reinterpretation

The genesis of this study is a March 2007 Los Angeles Times article on an Indian stone sculpture of UmāMaheśvara (Figs. 1, 1A) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that had been offered for sale after formal deaccession approval by the museum’s Board of Trustees. An e-mail by LACMA’s former Senior Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art (1970–1995), Pratapaditya Pal, protesting the deaccession, had engendered the newspaper article. The e-mail, which objected to the deaccession on the basis of the sculpture’s art-historical importance, was sent to the museum’s Administration and to the Los Angeles Times on 12 March. Subsequently, the proposed deaccession of the sculpture was cancelled to undertake an extensive scholarly investigation of its art-historical complexities. The following discussion presents this investigation’s analysis and findings. The appropriateness of the proposed deaccession of