Art, damn it, art! watch (#34 in a series)

Once upon a time, a man named Colonel Michael Friedsam, president of the B. Altman retail store chain, died.

The late Col. Friedsam left his extensive art collection to the Brooklyn Museum. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a catch. Actually, several catches.

Catch one: Col. Friedsam died in 1931. Over the years, the Brooklyn Museum has discovered…well…

… A quarter of the 926 works have turned out to be fakes, misattributions or of poor quality, and the museum potentially faces a hefty bill to store the 229 pieces it no longer wants.

This leads us directly to catch number two: the museum is paying to store stuff it doesn’t particularly want.

The problem of what to do with the unwanted items has arisen as the Brooklyn Museum tries to reclaim gallery space that has long been devoted to storage. When the museum accepted the Friedsam collection in the early 1930s, its sprawling Beaux-Arts building on the edge of Prospect Park had vast spaces to fill. As officials explain in their court filing, the opposite problem now plagues the museum, which at one point had as many as 1.5 million objects, some of them inauthentic, trivial or no longer in keeping with the museum’s mission — like a three battle-axes that came from Mr. Friedsam.

Of course, there are rules and standards on how museums are supposed to store art, so they can’t just shove stuff “willy-nilly into a closet”, as the NYT describes it.

So why don’t they just get rid of the stuff they don’t want? Surely, they can find a buyer, even for the fakes? I’d give them $5 for that Louis XI portrait.

Ah, but that’s catch number three: Col. Friedsam’s will requires that the museum get permission from the executors of his estate before they “deaccession” items. And the last executor died in 1962. The museum is working with the courts on this problem, but:

Noting that the will specified that the art should go to the colonel’s brother-in-law and two friends if the collection were not kept together, Judge Nora Anderson told the museum in December 2011 that it must search for these three men’s descendants before she would rule.

Left unclear in the article: why it took 80 years for the museum to figure out it was stuck with a bunch of crap. Or, alternatively, why there’s a crap crisis now.

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