The Mendelsohn Case: Implications for Future Restitution

By Kira Hernandez and Rebecca Amen

In August 2024, California-based collector Aaron Mendelsohn filed suit in the Central District of California against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, seeking a declaratory judgment that he was the rightful owner of a headless Roman bronze statue he had purchased in 2007 from New York's Royal-Athena Galleries for $1.33 million.^[1] The bronze sculpture is one of a number of works believed to have been illegally imported from Bubon, an ancient city in modern-day Turkey, and the D.A.'s office had been working to restitute said artifacts to Turkey, having already secured the return of objects from twelve institutions.^[2] By December 2025, the statue had been repatriated to Turkey. The case it generated along the way raises unresolved questions about the appropriate use of criminal process in antiquities repatriation — questions that will matter long after the Bubon bronzes are home.

The Object and Its History

In the 1960s, individuals from a village near the ancient site of Bubon began plundering a Sebasteion — an ancient shrine with monumental bronze statues of Roman emperors — and selling looted antiquities to smugglers.^[3] Working with Switzerland-based trafficker George Zakos and New York-and-Paris-based trafficker Robert Hecht, they unlawfully removed the antiquities from Turkey, transporting them to Switzerland or the United Kingdom before onward shipment to the United States or other European destinations. Once in the United States, New York-based dealers such as Jerome Eisenberg's Royal-Athena Galleries funneled the stolen Bubon bronzes into museum exhibitions and academic publications, laundering the pieces with newly crafted provenance.^[4] Mendelsohn purchased his bronze from Royal-Athena in 2007 with a guarantee of legal importation, an Art Loss Register clearance, and an invoice noting the piece was said to be from Bubon but was acquired in Basel, Switzerland in 1967, placing it before the 1970 UNESCO Convention cutoff.^[5] He believed his purchase was legally sound.