Lord Shiva statue...

The Cleveland Museum of Art has revealed it was the secret buyer of a rare, 1,000-year-old Indian sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva, sold by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in a highly controversial auction on March 23.

Bidding at Sotheby's in New York through the London art dealer John Eskenazi, the Cleveland museum paid $4.072 million for the work, a record price for an Indian sculpture.

"I'm elated," Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland museum, said Monday by phone from New York, calling the sculpture a new centerpiece of Cleveland's highly regarded collection of Asian art.

"This is the crowning of my career," said Stanislaw Czuma, who retired in 2005 after 33 years as the museum's curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, and who urged the museum to buy the work. "From every level you approach it, this is a fantastic acquisition."

In a written statement, Martin Lerner, a retired curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, called the Shiva "one of the most important Indian sculptures to have come on the market in recent memory."

Carved and polished in dark gray granite, the life-size sculpture depicts the Hindu deity Shiva, known as "the Destroyer," as he shares identity with the deity Brahma, known as "the Creator."

Czuma called the work a superb example of best artistic period of the Chola Dynasty, which dominated southern India from the 10th to the 13th centuries.

The Albright-Knox set off a bitter civic controversy in Buffalo last year when it decided to sell the Shiva and dozens of other important pre-modern works to raise money for its relatively modest endowment of $58 million.

"We sort of went through a war here," said Louis Grachos, director of the Buffalo museum.

In March, a N.Y. State Supreme Court judge dismissed a last-minute lawsuit filed by an ad hoc group called the Buffalo Art Keepers, which tried to stop the auctions.

The Albright-Knox has raised $22 million so far by selling works of ancient and Asian art, with the Shiva fetching one of the highest individual prices. The museum will use the money to boost the portion of the endowment restricted to art purchases and will focus on buying works of Modern and contemporary art, its principal focus.

Grachos said there was "absolutely" no other way to raise millions of dollars for the endowment than by selling artworks that no longer fit the museum's core mission.

He said he was delighted that the Shiva will go to Cleveland, rather than in a private collection or a museum overseas. Knowing that the work is a short drive away from Buffalo takes some of the sting out of the sale, he said.

"Although it's left home, it's not gone far away," he said.

Rub said he hoped to exhibit the sculpture later this year alongside other important works from the museum's collection of Indian art. The museum is mostly closed for a $258 million expansion and renovation, although it is open for special exhibitions and classes.

The Albright-Knox acquired the Shiva in 1927 as a gift from a donor who bought it from the respected dealer, C.T. Loo. The work's "provenance," or ownership history, places it beyond the reach of contemporary laws aimed at preventing the looting of ancient artworks.

Czuma said the sculpture probably adorned an outdoor niche on the north side of a major temple in southern India, but it is not known when the work was removed. He said it was the finest of a group of five major stone statues of Shiva as Brahma acquired by American museums before World War II.

The sculpture combines the attributes of Shiva as the destroyer and Brahma as the creator to encapsulate the Hindu belief in death, reincarnation and progress toward perfection, Czuma said.

In the sculpture, Shiva is sitting on a double lotus blossom. He has a third eye and four heads, each looking in one of the cardinal directions, Czuma said. The deity's four arms indicate his special powers. Two of his hands hold a lotus and a rosary. The other two hands are positioned in gestures of blessing and teaching.

"The carving is fantastic," Czuma said. "You almost feel the flesh of the image. It was a really great master that created it."