$23-Million Windfall for LACMA? : Museum: The settlement of a legal dispute still must be approved by the court. Museum officials say the funds would bolster its operating endowment.

Despite an announcement earlier this week that the beleaguered Los Angeles County Museum of Art may receive upward of $23 million from a longstanding legal dispute, nobody is opening champagne bottles yet.

According to a settlement announced Tuesday, the Christian Science Church, LACMA and Stanford University have agreed to divide the contested bequests of approximately $100 million from the families of Bliss Knapp, a Christian Science teacher and author, and his wife, Eloise Mabury Knapp.

The court must still approve the settlement, and a hearing has been set in Los Angeles Superior Court for Dec. 14. Challenges to the settlement may also occur prior to that time.

At financially pressed LACMA, which has trimmed staff and closed its doors an additional day each week, the potential settlement could more than double its relatively low, $20-million endowment. Should the museum indeed receive the settlement, Ronald Bratton, the museum’s chief deputy director, expects it would be used to “replace critical staffing cuts, education programming and outreach.”

“There is no certainty that this matter is resolved, or that it will be resolved,” Bratton said on Friday, “but trustees have discussed among themselves that if the museum should be fortunate enough to participate in the distribution of these funds, the greatest need the museum has now is in its operating endowment.”

“This is a complex lawsuit involving many parties and issues,” said Chip Rawlings, the attorney representing Museum Associates, the non-profit private sector organization that originally built and today manages LACMA. “Until the settlement is approved by the court, the museum is not counting on or spending the money prematurely.”

The potential windfall could also bolster LACMA’s potential appeal to candidates in its search for a director. Michael E. Shapiro, the museum’s former director, announced his resignation Aug. 29 after less than a year in that position and after considerable internal dissension and public controversy.

The settlement also comes at a time of increased disagreement between Museum Associates and Los Angeles County regarding county funding, which has been cut by $4.7 million over the past two fiscal years. Under terms of a 1958 agreement prior to the museum’s move in 1965 to Wilshire Boulevard, the county generally agreed to fund the museum’s operating expenses while Museum Associates provided acquisition and other monies.

Rawlings said the potential settlement “should have no effect on the ongoing responsibilities of the county. The fact of the filing, with respect to the settlement, has no immediate impact on the museum’s financing or its plans for the utilization of its current funds.”

But Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Ed Edelman sees the settlement as a potential factor in future county funding. “The fact that they got some additional help may mean there may be less of a need to call upon the county. The amount of money that might be asked for by the museum might be reduced to some degree. But we don’t know yet. All this is conjecture.

“There is a long-range problem of how we look at agreements we have made,” said Edelman, who earlier this month introduced a motion that LACMA and county officials meet to discuss their differences. “But that is an ongoing thing that talks about the long-term relationship with the county and how do we define the terms and maintain an obligation that will be sustainable.”

This week’s settlement ends a long saga in and out of court involving Knapp’s book about the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, titled “The Destiny of the Mother Church.” It was originally rejected for publication in 1948 by church directors because it deified Eddy, then was published in 1991 by the church as part of its “Twentieth-Century Biographers Series.”

Knapp died in 1958, and his wife and sister-in-law later agreed to leave the bulk of their sizable estates to the church if, among other things, the book was published as “authorized” Christian Science material and was “prominently displayed in substantially all” of the church’s worldwide reading rooms. If the church did not do that within a designated period of time, their bequests were to have been divided equally between LACMA and Stanford.

The church’s deadline was 1993, and documents were filed in late 1991 claiming that the church had complied with terms of the bequests. However, Stanford and LACMA filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court last year, Rawlings said.