NEW YORK—The Hispanic Society of America has recalled 38,000 coins on loan to the American Numismatic Sociey (ANS), possibly in order to sell them, the Art Newspaper reports.

The coin collection — which consists of coins minted in Spain, its dependencies, and the powers that controlled Spain from the 5th century B.C. until the 20th century — is estimated by Ute Wartenberg Kagan, the executive director of ANS, to be worth $30–40 million. It has been on loan from the Hispanic Society since the mid 1940s, originally given to the ANS by Archer Huntington, the founder of the Hispanic Society and ANS's former president.

According to a spokesman for the Hispanic Society, trustees "have decided to explore a deaccession, [but] no decision has been made going forward." The Art Newspaper writes, however, that it saw a copy of a letter from the director of the society to Kagan dated January 25, 2008, in which he says that "the board of trustees adopted a resolution to deaccession the loan collection" with the help of Sotheby's.

Questions about the ownership of the coins arose in early 2007, when the Hispanic Society drew up a "modern" loan agreement. The ANS apparently signed the agreement in April 2007 but received a letter in July canceling it, saying the society wanted their coins back. Kagan calls the document a "set-up" meant to prove ownership of the collection.

In February 2008, two weeks after the loan expired, the Hispanic Society filed a suit with the Supreme Court of New York County to get the coins back. In April, the judge ruled that the coins were the sole property of the Hispanic Society and that ANS must return them. The judge also forced the ANS to make available the original photographic record for the coins and the computer database created later.

"We were told to hand over the entire record and that we had no copyright on this material. We basically gave them a sales catalogue as well as the coins," said Kagan.

She continued that ANS plans to submit a letter to the New York attorney general that objects to the sale. It is a violation of Huntington's wishes, she maintains, and the coins are too fundamentally related to the Hispanic Society's mission to be acceptable for deaccession.

She also expressed concern, echoed among other scholars, that the collection will be broken up. "We want to preserve what can be preserved," she said, "but I am pessimistic."