[MSN] Missing art may be hanging on museum wall

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Missing art may be hanging on museum wall
MISSING ART: Gary man says city is rightful owner of Dudley painting now owned by state museum
BY JOE CARLSON
jcarlson at nwitimes.com
219.662.5339

Eighty years ago, noted dunes artist Frank V. Dudley set brush to canvas to capture an idyllic image of perch fishermen hauling a boat ashore over a sunny beach on the Gary lakeshore.

The painting, "Landing the Fish Boat," was donated to the city of Gary in 1957 shortly after Dudley's death, according to a newspaper photograph published that year. But the city no longer has the painting, and it appears to have surfaced at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis with no one seeming to know how or why it changed hands.

The Indiana State Museum exhibited a Dudley at a Valparaiso University gallery last year that appears to be the same work of art, prompting questions about how the painting was transferred through the years.

"It's definitely the same painting," Indiana State Museum Fine Arts Curator Rachel Perry said Monday, adding that her opinion was based on her own observation, not formal analysis.

Gary resident Jim Nowacki insists the Dudley painting is one of scores of art pieces once owned by Gary and its public school system that have since disappeared.

Nowacki said a 1948 inventory of art owned by the Gary schools lists works by painters that even casual art lovers would recognize, such as Cezanne, Monet and Rembrandt. None of them are owned by the schools today.

Nowacki would love to see Gary reassert ownership to some of the lost paintings, though the many hours of work he said he has put into the project have yet to return any art to the city.

He's hoping that "Landing the Fish Boat" will become his first success, which he can use to build public interest for pursuing other paintings that could be put on display in the city and used as a teaching aid in city art classes.

A May 15, 1957, photo in a local newspaper shows three city dignitaries, including the wife of former schools Superintendent William A. Wirt, admiring the Dudley painting that had just been donated for exhibition in a city historical museum.

Sometime during the next 15 years, the painting apparently came into the ownership of a Hammond man, who then donated it to his son in Gary around 1975, according to appraisal paperwork maintained by the Indiana State Museum. Perry declined to identify the former owners by name.

"I've always wanted the painting to be in a museum so that more people can appreciate the early days of Gary and the dunes," a letter from the donor to the museum states.

Perry could not say how the Dudley left the school's possession, although she noted that it would not have been uncommon for public school officials to store paintings at home during summer break or to take the art in their offices upon retirement.

"The paintings would just kind of walk off," Perry said.

http://www.thetimesonline.com