Art Museum Will Pay for Rare Collection

The board of trustees of the San Diego Museum of Art voted unanimously Tuesday to pay $500,000 to keep a comprehensive art collection that spans nine centuries of the art of India.

Appraised at $5 million to $15 million, the world-class collection was bequeathed to the museum in 1986 by Edwin Binney III, a former museum trustee and heir to the Crayola fortune.

Pratapaditya Pal, one of five Indian art scholars who Binney appointed to oversee his estate, said the news was “fantastic.”

“Overnight, the San Diego museum becomes one of the greatest repositories of Indian paintings in the world,” said Pal, who is senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “I cannot think of a more comprehensive collection of Indian paintings in America other than ours. In numbers, numerically our collection is smaller, and we have one of the largest collections in the country.”

As recently as last week, San Diego Museum of Art officials said they were baffled by a quirk in Massachusetts law that entitles Binney’s widow to one-third of the value of the estate. That figured out to $500,000 that the museum did not have, and museum officials seriously considered selling off part of the collection to raise the $500,000. Then, at Tuesday’s 3 p.m. board meeting, the trustees voted to fund the collection with existing funds and raise the money over “the next few years.”

“I think the trustees felt they had to do this,” said Joseph Hibben, president of the museum’s board of trustees. “It’s such a marvelous collection, unlike anything else in the world. It has a representation of every school of Indian art.”

Binney, who died in 1986 at the age of 61 in a Boston hospital, was a scholar and enthusiastic art collector with wide-ranging interests. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, he was the grandson of the founder of Binney & Smith, makers of children’s colored crayons.

When the museum trustees met Tuesday, about 25 artworks from the 1,200-piece collection, including intricate colored drawings, some laced with pure gold, were on display in the board room.

Museum director Steven Brezzo said a major exhibit of the collection is planned for the spring of 1990. The exhibit will then be circulated to museums around the world, while the trustees raise the money to pay back the $500,000 they have allocated from general funds.