At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late February, an increasingly familiar scene played out: A museum was restituting a work of art, giving back something from its collection to the place where ...

By Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg From his office on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucian Simmons has a vantage point from which to survey the huge mission he has undertaken.

Signs of desecration were everywhere; eyes had been gouged out, heads lopped off, the cobra-like symbol of royalty hacked from foreheads. Winlock, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ...