August 8, 2002 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The art world is all abuzz with the news that a vacationing Scottish museum director, searching through boxes of drawings at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in New York, came upon what everyone now seems to agree is undeniably a work by Michelangelo. The drawing represents one of only a handful of works by the Italian master in this country and is probably worth more than $10-million.
To the delight of the Cooper-Hewitt, Michelangelo’s drawing of a massive candelabrum, replete with ornate architectural details, was bought in 1942 along with a group of other decorative drawings from a London dealer for the bargain price of $60. The drawing in question was wrongly attributed to a little-known 16th-century painter and thus sat in the storage box unnoticed until a set of well-trained and patient eyes came upon it. Those amusing facts have widely been shared by the museum, while giddy art lovers and connoisseurs around the world have marveled at the artistic and financial windfall achieved by the museum.
With a bit of distance, however, one hopes that some of the glow of the story may begin to fade. After all, several generations of museum goers and art historians have been unable to view this masterpiece, as it sat ignored and unrecognized in storage. More significantly, the discovery calls into question the capacity of the museum to manage its collection and properly attribute the many objects it has been entrusted to preserve. What else, one has to wonder, is hidden away in the storage bins of the museum because it has been wrongly attributed, unrecognized, or mislabeled?
To be fair, museums are faced with the difficult task of caring for and exhibiting thousands or, in the case of larger museums, millions of items, ranging in size, age, and value. In the case of the Cooper-Hewitt, budget constraints — including the laying off of the curator in charge of drawings not long before the discovery — surely made it hard to keep track of everything within the institution’s walls. Add to this the difficulty in making artistic attributions in many cases, and it is soon clear that practicing good stewardship over artistic assets is not an easy task.
Still, the idea that a drawing by Michelangelo could sit in a storage box at a major American museum for 60 years is troubling. Imagine, for example, if a cash-strapped nonprofit community health clinic discovered it had a “forgotten endowment” that it had neglected to draw upon for decades. Or consider the reaction researchers might have to the revelation that a university library erred by failing to enter into its card catalog thousands of books in its collection and hence never made those items accessible to students and faculty members. It is unlikely that such discoveries would be viewed as miraculous events. Questions would be asked, and heads might even roll.
Because resources are scarce in most nonprofit organizations, effective stewardship is one of the most important jobs of charity leaders. Good stewardship requires using the resources available in a way that does the most good, for the most people, over the long term. Preserving assets and staying true to a mission are not glamorous tasks, but they remain essential.
Sadly, stewardship is not a hot topic in the nonprofit world anymore. Fund-raising prowess, not sound stewardship, is what defines successful and high-profile nonprofit leadership. As competition within the broader nonprofit world has increased in recent years, the relative importance of stewardship has diminished, at least when compared with other leadership responsibilities. In its place, many nonprofit groups focus first and foremost on the ability of their leaders to attract new resources to their organizations.
If nothing else, the story of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s surprise find should remind us that it is not enough just to buy a Michelangelo at a bargain price and to store it away for decades. It is — or at least it should be — just as important to be able to demonstrate that a major cultural organization has the capacity to oversee the asset responsibly and intelligently.
Peter Frumkin is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the author of the recently released book
On Being Nonprofit (Harvard University Press).
