Flea-market Renoir reignites tensions between museum and art donor’s descendants

Susan Helen Adler paced the corridors of the Baltimore Museum of Art, searching for objects that once belonged to her great-great-aunt, the late Saidie Adler May.

In one room, she encountered about a dozen pieces, next to plaques that read “Gift of Saidie A. May.” But Adler, hungry to see more May donations on display, quickly grew upset with how much she thought should be there.

(The Potomack Company/AFP/Getty Images) - A painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir titled “Paysage Bords de Seine.”

She was already frustrated that one of her great-great-aunt’s paintings, a small Renoir, had turned up in a box of junk at a West Virginia flea market. The painting, she eventually learned, had been stolen from the museum in 1951 and then largely forgotten. How could that have happened?

“Saidie spent her life dedicated to art and educating the public, but other people have made the decision about her legacy. The museum has hundreds of her items in storage. I don’t even know what they have,” said Adler, as she stood inside the museum last month. She wore a white T-shirt with a picture of the stolen Renoir and the words: “How Did I End Up At A Flea Market?”

Behind every museum’s art collection, behind every terse “Gift of” plaque on a museum wall, are the little-known, often fraught histories between museums and their donor families. On one hand, museums feel obligated to keep donor families happy so that other wealthy collectors might give but, on the other hand, feel entitled to exercise their curatorial judgment.

The headlines about the stolen Renoir — which is in the FBI’s custody — shined a light on an otherwise low-profile Maryland family and its long-standing disappointments with the BMA.

Tensions have simmered for decades between the museum and May’s chief descendants: Adler, 55, a Maryland elementary school behavior specialist and author of May’s biography; and May’s grandniece Amalie Adler Ascher, 85, a former Baltimore Sun gardening columnist.

The relatives said they believe that the museum has not always safeguarded their family’s donations. Until late October, the descendants didn’t know that art donated by May’s sister, Blanche Adler, a prominent BMA donor, also had been stolen from the museum. They also complained that the museum does not display enough of May’s art.

Museum officials said the thefts happened a long time ago, and security has been beefed up considerably since. They noted that the museum can show off only so much from one family’s collection, and that May’s mix of classical and Egyptian works, Renaissance textiles, 20th-century European paintings, and even a Jackson Pollock, was given with no strings attached.

Besides, the BMA said, it plans to bring out even more of May’s pieces — including the Pollock work — and display them starting Sunday in its contemporary wing and northwest galleries.

One May artwork that BMA officials hope to display soon: the stolen Renoir, a landscape piece that dates to 1879, titled “On the Shore of the Seine.”

A painting vanishes

At some point between Nov. 16 and 17, 1951, “On the Shore of the Seine” vanished from the BMA. The city police wrote up a report. And the BMA documented the theft’s scant details on a peach-colored registration card that it filed away in its private loan records.