Caravaggio, “Sleeping Cupid,” Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Clowes Fund Collection
In what is by far the most flavorful recounting of yesterday’s courtroom scrum in the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries meltdown, the NY Times‘ Anemona Hartocollis today reports how the request by the Indianapolis Museum’s lawyer for the immediate return of a loaned Caravaggio, “Sleeping Cupid” (above), now locked, by court order, in the beleaguered New York gallery, “drew a chuckle from the judge, and loud guffaws from some of the other lawyers.”
I doubt that Deborah Mayer, lawyer for the museum, was laughing.
This brings up an issue that has always bothered me: the willingness of museums to lend their works to the more “scholarly” shows of commercial galleries. The Metropolitan Museum, for example, has previously lent to Berry-Hill Galleries, which later had legal troubles of its own. Both Wildenstein and Knoedler in New York are also among those that have hung prestigious museum loans on their walls.
At best, this is problematic because it lends a prestigious museum imprimatur to these commercial enterprises. The worst-case scenario is what we saw in court yesterday—a museum that got drawn into a tawdry tale of a gallery gone wrong, where one of its masterpieces is now locked in (temporary, one trusts) legal limbo.
Other accounts of yesterday’s State Supreme Court shenanigans, from Bloomberg and the Associated Press, are here and here.