Museum Discovers a Gift Isn’t a Gift

In 1986, Crayola fortune heir Edward Binney willed to the San Diego Museum of Art what some experts say is the world’s most important collection of Indian paintings.

Since then, Binney’s generous bequest to the museum has become mired in complex probate proceedings, and in an unusual twist, the museum must now pay $500,000 in money it doesn’t have to Binney’s survivors to keep the collection.

“The $500,000 is a whole new factor coming into it,” museum director Steven Brezzo said this week. “That’s a half-million dollars we have to raise, plus $100,000 to $200,000 to maintain the collection. (That puts us) into the rarefied air of $750,000 the museum has to raise. We do not have those kinds of funds designated for art purchases, and we couldn’t get anything from the estate. And so where do you go from there?”

The museum is looking at the collection itself as a way to fund the bequest. Museum officials are considering raising the money by selling part of the collection. That plan so disturbed one local art dealer that he fired off a letter to Mayor Maureen O’Connor, hoping to start a process “to save the integrity of what will undoubtedly be San Diego’s finest art collection.”

A mayoral spokesman said he was unaware of the letter and it would have been referred to the mayor’s arts aide, who is out of the country.

The 1,200 pieces that Binney acquired span every school of Indian painting from the 11th Century through the 19th Century were recently appraised at $5 million and will certainly bring Indian scholars to San Diego, said Pratapaditya Pal., senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Pal is one of five Indian art scholars who make up the Binney estate’s board of directors.

“I can’t overemphasize how significant (the collection) is,” Pal said. “I do not know of a more major gift by any collector of Indian art besides John D. Rockefeller III’s collection given to the Asia House in New York or Avery Brundage’s gift to the (Asian Art) Museum of San Francisco. It’s of that compatible stature. It’s the most comprehensive collection of Indian paintings ever made by a private individual in 30 years at least.”

Another expert, Tom Lentz, the Los Angeles County Museum’s curator of Islamic Art, compared the collection to those in London’s India Office Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, adding that Binney’s collection is “far wider” in scope than even those public collections.

“He covers all the major schools and idiosyncratic areas that nobody else knew about,” Lentz said. “He avoided searching out the masterpiece in each style. He took a more encyclopedic approach. He wanted one of everything.”

Pal said that by any measure, it’s a prize collection.

“I think San Diego is extraordinarily fortunate,” Pal said. “In terms of their other collections, this would be the most important art collection from a given civilization in that museum.”

Though the San Diego Museum of Art has an Asian art department, the problem is that Asian art--so far at least--is not the museum’s forte.

“These are Indian drawings,” said the Museum of Art’s Brezzo. “They’re fragile, delicate and small, but that area is not a strength of the museum’s collection. It has high scholarly content. It’s very specialized material.”

Asked whether the collection would attract the public’s attention, Brezzo said it would have “limited popular appeal.”

“In terms of drawing thousands of people to San Diego, I don’t know about that,” he said. “We don’t take things into our collection because they would be a draw.”

Two years after Binney’s death, his estate remains unsettled in part because he underestimated its value in preparing his will, according to a source close to talks between lawyers representing Binney’s estate, his family and several art institutions that he designated in his will.

Because Binney’s widow is a strong supporter of the museum, “It’s not like a messy emotional divorce,” said Boston attorney Gerald O’Grady, who represents her. “A large percentage of the estate is in the collection. We want to try to work out what’s fair to Mrs. Binney.”

O’Grady said that according to Massachusetts law, his client is entitled to one third of the value of Binney’s estate.

Other institutions involved in the estate settlement include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and museums in Portland and Honolulu, all of which must pay Binney’s widow a percentage of the value of their collections.

Binney divided his extensive collection of Turkish paintings from the Ottoman period between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fogg. He bequeathed his entire collection of European ballet prints to Harvard.

But the largest and most significant of his collections is the Indian artworks, which amount to two-thirds of the entire estate.

Though the Indian collection was placed in storage at the San Diego museum, it has not been shown since Binney died in a Boston hospital in August, 1986. He was 61. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, Binney was the grandson of the founder of Binney and Smith, makers of children’s colored crayons. From 1960 until his death, he maintained a house in Point Loma. He also served on the San Diego museum’s board of trustees.

Binney, a history scholar fluent in Spanish, French and German, was a passionate collector and an acknowledged expert in his fields of interest. Selling the collection now will look like a panic sale, cautioned Pal, the Indian art expert.

“Everyone knows that something is in the offing,” he said. “It’s not a secret. You know the art market; everyone is waiting like vultures.

“If the museum put out 200 paintings now, technically worth $500,000, but not the best, people in the market would wait and let these go until some other pieces fall out. I’m not sure (the museum) understands that.”

Lawyers who have been working on the Binney estate for more than a year say they may close the books on it within two months.