In March 2024, the Gallery repatriated eight Native American cultural belongings to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation (MCN), under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Comprised of beads and bronze jewelry associated with burial sites in Elmore County and Macon County, in Alabama, the object group was given to the Gallery in 1935 by Peter A. Brannon (1882–1967), a curator and amateur archaeologist. In April 2023, the Gallery completed a consultation with representatives of the MCN, who determined the objects’ cultural affiliation and qualification under NAGPRA as unassociated funerary objects.

Notice of Intent to Repatriate

In May 2022, the Gallery transferred Buddhist Goddess Tara to the government of Nepal (Department of Archaeology, Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation). Research conducted at the Gallery in 2021 showed that the sculpture had been stolen from the Bir Bhadreshwor Mahadev Temple, Golmadhi Tol, Bhaktapur, Nepal, where it had been worshipped as the Hindu goddess, Parvati. The consul general of Nepal in New York received the object on behalf of the government of Nepal, and in June 2022, the sculpture was transferred to Kathmandu.

Read the press release

In February 2022, the New York District Attorney’s Office provided evidence that 13 South and Southeast Asian objects in the Gallery’s collection constituted stolen property. Yale had already been conducting research into the provenance of these objects and voluntarily delivered the works in March 2022 to the New York District Attorney for repatriation to their countries of origin.

Read the media statement

In May 2022, the Gallery transferred Jan Griffier the Elder’s Rheinish Landscape to the Republic of Austria. Research completed at the Gallery between 2020 and 2021 showed that the painting had been presumed destroyed while on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna, to the office of the chancellor of Germany, in Berlin, during World War II. While the fate of the painting between 1945—when it disappeared from an air-raid shelter in the basement of the building—and 1991—when it appeared on the art market in London—remained unknown, museum officials in Vienna confirmed that the painting had never been recovered and that they were seeking its return.

In March 2009, Yale filed a declaratory judgment action in federal court to establish quiet title to the Vincent van Gogh painting The Night Café, bequeathed to the Gallery in 1961. The defendant, Pierre Konowaloff, asserted that the Russian government had unlawfully expropriated the painting from his ancestor following the 1917 Russian Revolution and that Yale’s title was therefore invalid. In September 2014, the court ruled that Yale was entitled to retain ownership of the painting, and the decision was subsequently upheld on appeal.

Statement by Yale University on Its Ownership of The Night Cafe, March 23, 2009

In October 2001, the Gallery announced its receipt by gift of Gustave Courbet’s landscape The Great Bridge. The painting had been on loan to Yale since 1981 from the collection of Monika and Dr. Herbert Schaefer. In 2000 the work was the subject of an ownership claim from Mr. Eric Weinmann, whose family had fled Nazi persecution in 1938. The University and Weinmann commissioned extensive research, and a resolution was reached wherein the painting was placed on loan to Weinmann for a period of 10 years and jointly gifted to Yale by him and the Schaefers.

Learn more