Just like conscientious homeowners, staffers at the Art Institute of Chicago periodically descend into the basement, roll up their sleeves and cull through their old bric-a-brac to see what they can dispose of to make room for new bric-a-brac.
Art Institute curators, however, rarely set their discards out on the curb for the garbage man to haul away. Even though they may not want the stuff any more, the bric-a-brac they deal in is worth thousands and sometimes millions of dollars.
So it is that their discards can end up as very valuable acquisitions for someone else.
Early this year, for example, the museum’s decorative arts department took a long look at 29 Swedish peasant wall hangings, pieces of primitive 18th and 19th Century folk art that have been in the Art Institute’s permanent collection since 1931.
More Top Picks Bissell Powerfresh Deluxe
While the Art Institute averages about 1.6 million visitors a year, not one visitor had seen the Swedish pieces in many years; the wall hangings had been kept in storage for decades. So the museum donated the art to a sister institution that will keep it on display all the time–the Swedish American Museum, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year, at 5211 N. Clark St.
“Every several years, we look at our collection to see if it is bloated with objects not exhibited in many years,” said Ian Wardropper, the museum’s curator of European decorative arts, sculpture and classical art.
“The Swedish wall paintings were more in the category of folk art. At the time they were donated to us (1931), my department occasionally displayed folk art, but we haven’t displayed that sort of thing now in 40 or 50 years.
“It made sense to look for an institution that could use them. There was a viable museum right here in Chicago that expressed a great love for these pieces and wants to display them on a regular basis. It just made sense.”
The wall hangings, dating from 1782 to 1854, called “bonader” (BOON-ah-dar) in Sweden, were created by untrained peasant artists using paints they made from natural dyes found on their farms.
None of the 29 wall hangings, variously painted on paper or linen, would be worth more than $5,000, Wardropper said. Yet they are priceless as artifacts of Swedish folk history.
Often brightened with brilliant blues, yellows, reds and greens, many of the pictures depict famous biblical stories. But all the biblical characters are dressed in the garb of 18th- and 19th-Century Swedes, and the biblical villages they populate in the paintings look very much like Swedish ones, studded with fancy, Stockholm-like townhouses.
“We are so delighted and so grateful to have this collection,” said Charlotta Koppanyi, the Swedish museum’s curator. “It is the eighth-largest collection of bonader in the world. It is very important for us.”
The Swedish museum has all 29 of the wall hangings on display in its first-floor gallery, along with five pieces of painted wooden peasant furniture also donated by the Art Institute. The exhibit will run through April 2, Koppanyi said. Thereafter, some portions of the collection will be on display constantly on a rotating basis.
“These are important pieces,” Koppanyi said. “They come from rural peasant homes just before and during the beginning stages of the Industrial Revolution. It is a primitive, naive form of art that disappeared quickly as people moved to towns and cities, drawn by promise of work in new factories.”
In 1930, Florence Dibell Bartlett, a wealthy Chicagoan interested in folk art, bought the collection in Sweden, donating it to the Art Institute in 1931.
Bartlett and her brother and sister, each having inherited a large fortune from their Chicago industrialist father, Augustus, became prominent art patrons both locally and nationally.
Indeed, the Art Institute’s most prized work of art, pointillist Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884,” was a gift from her brother, Frederick Clay Bartlett, who donated many great 19th Century European paintings to the museum. Her sister and brother-in-law, Marie and Dwight Heard, founded the Heard Museum in Phoenix, based on their own collection of Native American art and artifacts.
Florence Dibell Bartlett’s artistic passion lay with folk art. Seeing that modern life had erased traditional folk art in most industrial societies, she traveled the world looking for objects, gathering sizable collections from 39 countries.
Much of that material became the core of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., which she founded in 1953. Most of her Swedish material, however, stayed at the Art Institute.
In May 1954, despondent over her own ill health and the death of her brother a year earlier, Bartlett, 72, plunged to her death from her 17th-story penthouse on East Cedar Street. She left the major portion of her estate to the Santa Fe museum as an operating trust fund, which still figures largely in that institution’s budget.
The process of removing art from a museum collection is known as “de-accessioning.” Because the folk art was donated to the Art Institute, museum officials took care to track down and inform surviving members of Bartlett’s family, chiefly widely scattered nieces and nephews. None objected to the Art Institute’s plan to donate the objects to the Swedish American Museum, Wardropper said.
“De-accessioning is a meticulous, lengthy process,” said Eileen Harakal, an Art Institute spokeswoman. “The reasons for de-accessioning have to do with the quality of the object and its context within the collections.
“Our standard of quality is constantly evolving as we acquire new works, which leads to an ongoing review of the collections. If we have a better and comparable example of a piece, for instance, or if it no longer fits our collection, or if a new work of similar but higher quality is acquired–these could be reasons for de-accessioning.”
It is never done without lengthy discussion by a curatorial advisory committee and approval from the museum board of trustees, she said.
Donation of de-accessioned pieces, like the Bartlett collection, is fairly unusual. Most objects the museum decides to part with are sold at auction. The proceeds must be used to buy other works of art, which are then designated on identification cards as “a gift of” the donors of the de-accessioned pieces.
Even though the museum is de-accessioning them, the rejected pieces are not without value. Sales of such items can bring in millions of dollars.
“Within my department,” Wardropper said, “four years ago we de-accessioned a group of silver objects from various time periods and various countries. We decided on a case-by-case basis which ones were not of the quality we felt we aspired to as a collection and placed them in auction, assuring we would get what the market would bear for them.
More Top Picks Acer Nitro 16s Ai Review
“We realized in excess of $1 million from them.
“With the Swedish folk art, we decided that, considering their relative value, we should keep them intact as a collection and give them away. It was much more important to keep them in Chicago than to raise money to buy something else.”