Gloria Groom was in Paris on a shopping trip, not for the latest fashions but to purchase a landscape painting by John Constable for the Art Institute of Chicago. When she finally saw the work at the dealer’s one chilly February afternoon, she was less than impressed. But as she pondered her next move, her eyes lit on a large painting hanging behind the dealer’s desk.
“There was this incredibly luscious, riveting image of a hunky male in wet-look armor throwing his arm over an enchanting female holding an olive branch,” recalled Groom, a curator in the Art Institute’s department of European painting. Inscribed on the figure’s robe was the name “Pompeo Batoni,” one of the most celebrated artists in middle to late 18th Century Europe.
After some investigation, curators and administrators learned that the painting, an allegorical work finished in 1776 entitled “Peace and War,” was known to Batoni scholars only by a detailed description in a contemporaneous letter. The painting had spent the last several decades in Vatican City in the possession of the Cardinal de Furstenberg, finally ending up in the hands of his nephew, a Belgian count.
“We realized we had come upon something special,” Groom said. The Art Institute approved the purchase, and “Peace and War” now hangs in Gallery 220, its nearly life-size sculptural figures anticipating the neo-classical style sweeping through Europe in the late 1700s.
Groom’s fortuitous sighting of “Peace and War” and its subsequent acquisition illustrate just one of the ways museums may come to own works. The acquisitions process can be exhilarating, suspenseful, satisfying and frustrating.
Some acquisitions require years of relationship-building with prospective donors or involve long, intensive searches. Others come with a single, unexpected phone call, such as the one last September notifying University of Chicago administrators of a $5 million bequest by an alumnus to the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.
But one aspect holds true: Museums must count on the financial resources of board members, shrewd business dealings and, at times, the kindness of strangers to be able to purchase some works. Chicago museums have relied on gifts, both solicited and unsolicited, to start and round out collections.
In many cases, the process almost resembles a mystery story. The following are just a few examples of the intriguing ways museums have added to their collections:
One recent acquisition by the Museum of Contemporary Art seemed to fall from the sky. When a representative from Marshall Field’s invited the MCA last year to check out a sculpture in its Northbrook store, curators didn’t know what to expect. What they found floating over mannequins in the women’s apparel department was a mobile created by Alexander Calder in 1947 that consisted of six abstract brass shapes hanging in delicate balance.
Marshall Field’s had purchased “Brass in the Sky” in 1948, promptly renamed it “Flight in Motion” and displayed it prominently in its Cloud Room restaurant at Midway Airport (then called the Chicago Municipal Airport) until 1962, when the restaurant closed. The sculpture then traveled to Seattle, where it was on view at a department store that was a division of Marshall Field’s at the time. In the late 1970s the mobile returned to Chicago, where it rested in storage until 1996, when Field’s installed it in its new Northbrook store.
“I had shopped there a lot, but I never saw it. I was looking at the racks–I never looked up,” said Lela Hersh of the MCA, who went on the original inspection.
After initially loaning the work, which has an estimated value of $500,000, to the MCA, Marshall Field’s donated it to the museum. Today “Brass in the Sky” hangs from the ceiling of the museum’s ground floor.
The Field Museum received a surprise gift several years ago when a man from Washington offered a stone-offering table from an Egyptian tomb dating to 2300 B.C. The table had originally accompanied a “false door,” an upright stone Egyptians believed was the meeting place of the living and the dead, that had been in the museum’s collection since 1899.
“It was a happy circumstance,” said Frank Yurco, a Field research associate who specializes in Egyptology. “Usually museums have to make a cast when they discover companion pieces like this, but in this case the owner was willing to give it to us. For instance, we have the head of a nobleman from the 25th Dynasty. The Brooklyn Museum has the body, so we traded casts to make complete figures.”
One of the Field Museum’s most unusual acquisitions involved the skins of the Tsavo lions, two beasts who killed 135 Uganda Railway workers in 1898 at a bridge-construction site at the Tsavo River. British army Lt. Col. John Patterson, a railroad engineer, stalked the lions for nine months before killing them. He gave his hair-raising account of the “man-eaters of Tsavo” in a lecture at the Field in 1924, and two days after wrote a letter proposing their sale to museum director D.C. Davies. One month and $5,000 later, the museum received the lion skins, a little worse for wear but essentially intact.
Some acquisitions arrive in museums after a lengthy courtship of collectors. Ramon Price, chief curator at the DuSable Museum of African American Culture, has spent countless hours building relationships with collectors and artists, an important task because 90 percent of the museum’s collection consists of gifts. “Much of our sleuthing comes about from extending our expertise to people and in return we are successful in getting something we want,” Price explained.
Almost every August since 1985, Price has traveled to Brazil to witness a ceremony performed by the Irmadade da Boa Morte (Sisters of the Good Death), a group of about 30 women known for their rituals surrounding the three-day feast of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. The women are descendants of African slaves who integrated Catholicism into their Yoruba beliefs. Price finally asked the reclusive women last year for permission to commission a red-lined stole used in the ceremony, and they agreed.
“I had gained their confidence by participating in their ceremony so they knew me by face and by name,” Price said. “We were anxious to have one of those outfits so we could explain how they are residuals of African survivals in the New World.”
Other large acquisitions require inventive business dealings. For example, in 1989 the Art Institute made the trustees of the British Rail Pension Fund an offer they couldn’t refuse. At that time there was a diminishing supply of noteworthy Old Master drawings and an increase in the number of interested buyers. The museum proposed a joint purchase of a group of drawings. In the final deal, the Art Institute bought 20 Old Master drawings by French, Italian, Dutch and Flemish artists.
“We gave them a nice return on their investment and enhanced our collection in significant ways,” said Suzanne Folds McCullagh, curator of earlier prints and drawings.
Only one of the selected drawings, an early Renaissance work by Gian Francesco de’ Maineri, posed a problem. The British government held it back for six months while it searched for a British collector to buy it. “Luckily they didn’t find anyone,” McCullagh said. “I got a call after Christmas saying, `You can come get your drawing.’ I got on a plane and picked it up within 24 hours, before they could change their minds.”
Eleven of the drawings bought in the British Rail arrangement are on display in “Maineri to Morot: The Regenstein Collection since 1975,” which runs through July 16. The Regenstein collection is in itself an interesting example of Chicago-style acquisitions. While most of the major art museums on the East Coast built up their holdings by acquiring large, private collections, curators at the Art Institute have a history of developing close relationships with individuals who are willing to buy artworks directly for the museum. For instance, curator Carl Schniewind started the museum’s master drawing collection in the 1940s by reaching out to the city’s leading society ladies.
“Schniewind enchanted the grande dames of Chicago and encouraged them to buy great drawings for the city,” McCullagh explained. His patrons included Pauline Kohlsaat Palmer and Margaret Day Blake.
In 1958 Helen Regenstein began her contribution to the master drawing collection with the purchase of a work by Antoine Watteau. Over the years she focused on French drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries and 18th Century Italian drawings. By 1974 the Art Institute had acquired 82 works with her help, and her children have continued her philanthropy after her death in 1982 to bring the present total of works to 128.
A few years ago the Chicago Historical Society found the easiest route to acquisition: Just ask. When organizing the 1999 exhibition “What George Wore and Sally Didn’t,” curators found a mannequin based on the face and figure of a Playboy Bunny named Suzy Leigh, who was purported to be the ideal Bunny. “But we had nothing related to Hugh Hefner,” said Russell Lewis, director for collections and research. “So I wrote a letter to the Playboy Foundation and asked for his pajamas and pipe. They said they’d be delighted to give them to us. When I talked to Hugh, he said, `I don’t think anyone had ever asked me.”‘
That’s how Hefner’s red silk pajamas and pipe ended up in the society’s permanent costume collection. “Sometimes it’s simply knowing who to ask and asking at the right time,” Lewis said.Museums
