The National Gallery of Australia has removed from display all works acquired from the disgraced art dealer behind the looted Dancing Shiva, but decisions on whether to return them to India won't be made until at least the end of the year.
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In the past month 13 sculptures among $11 million worth of works acquired through Subhash Kapoor's Art of the Past dealership in New York were quietly removed from display including two large stone door guardians.
An independent review into the provenance of all 5000 pieces in the gallery's Asian art collection, under way by former High Court judge Sue Crennan since last December, is due to deliver a report in time for the gallery's November board meeting.
The 21 works acquired from Kapoor which remain in the gallery's collection are the review's main priority, following the return of the Dancing Shiva last year.
Director Gerard Vaughan said that after the report was handed down the gallery would work with Indian authorities to decide what to do with the "problematic" pieces.
"We want to do the right thing and we want to be open and transparent," he said.
"It's important to have good relations with India and interestingly the Indian authorities are very pleased with how we are doing things here and feel they can be something of a model for the rest of the world."
As the significance of pieces in the Asian collection varies from large sculptures to fragments of fabric and photographs, Dr Vaughan expects the review to uncover "orphan objects" without any documentation where the provenance will never be established for certain.
"We're going to get it dealt with as quickly as we can, but not too quickly," he said.
"The stakes are high if we rush it too much we might miss something, we want to give our researchers enough time to give it their best shot.
"Every fragment of information in the world they'll try to find. You can't do that overnight."
The NGA was unable to provide a definitive list of the most recent works removed from display in time for publication.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott handed back the looted Shiva sculpture to the Indian government last September.
In March the gallery received a refund from another New York dealer for a seated Buddha sculpture with uncertain provenance.
Since the scandal surrounding the stolen Asian antiquities the gallery had developed "new methodologies" to deal with pieces of questionable provenance, Dr Vaughan said.
"It's no different to other museums and galleries around the world who were buying from him [Kapoor]… we've all got the same problem," he said.
"It seems pretty clear there was a process of fraud… but we're not alone."
Dr Vaughan said the gallery's history of concentrating on art from India and south-east Asia had been a way to differ from offerings in Sydney and Melbourne when it was established.
He flagged further loans from other institutions as another way of displaying pieces from other cultures.
"At the end of the day the Indian authorities like the idea that an institution in Australia like the NGA wants to collect Indian material, that we want to have galleries where we show the visual culture of India to all the millions of people who over the years visit the NGA," he said.
"We've got to get that balance of the Indians wanting us to have Indian material here but making sure anything that came out illegally goes back."
