Tales of Collectors & Collections from the Kelsey Museum
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Passionate Curiosities Passionate Curiosities Tales of Collectors & Collections from the Kelsey Museum Lauren E. Talalay & Margaret Cool Root Kelsey Museum Publication 13 Ann Arbor, Michigan 2015 To our husbands and partners in the passionate curiosities of life Steve Bank and Larry Root Published by: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology 434 South State Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1390 http://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey/research/publications © Kelsey Museum of Archaeology 2015 ISBN 978-0-9906623-3-4 Contents Acknowledgments vii Map of the Mediterranean and the Near East x chapter one Introduction 1 chapter two The Backdrop: An Overview of Early American Museums 9 chapter three Francis W. Kelsey: Scholar, Collector, Leader 17 A Brief Biography 17 Professor Kelsey’s Acquisitions 20 Birth of an Archaeology Museum in Ann Arbor 24 chapter four What Comes Home from the Field (1924–1963) 27 Excavations as Collection-Building Missions 27 Pre–World War II Excavations 28 Expeditions of a Different Order: Post–World War II 43 chapter five The Passionate and the Curious, Part I (1893–1927): Collections Acquired in the F. W. Kelsey Years 51 The De Criscio Collection 52 The Dennison Collection 54 The Marburg (ex-Gottschalk) Collection 56 The Todd Collection: The Djehutymose Coffin and Related Artifacts 58 The Askren Collection 63 The Petrie Gift 65 The Barosso Watercolors 67 chapter six The Passionate and the Curious, Part I (1928–2013): Collections Acquired by the Kelsey Museum 73 The Cesnola Collection 73 The Van Deman Collection 77 The Bay View Collection 80 vi CONTENTS The Gillman Collection 87 The Goudsmit Collection 93 The Waterman Collection 97 The Bonner Collection and Related Corpora 102 The Adams (ex-Herzfeld) Collection of Late Prehistoric Stamp Seals 105 Individual Acquisitions by Purchase, 1970s–1990s 109 chapter seven Select Categories of Artifacts 117 Textiles 117 Coins 129 Glass 135 Fine Art Photography and Prints 141 chapter eight Collectors, Dealers, Authenticity, and Ethical Quandaries 157 Collectors and Dealers 158 Questions of Authenticity 167 Ethical Quandaries 171 appendix Antiquities Legislation 177 Simplified Timelines for Kelsey Collections 181 Notes 182 Works Cited 188 Concordance of Museum Object Accession Numbers to Figure Numbers 197 General Index 199 About the Authors 206 Acknowledgments No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it. —Halford E. Luccock (1885–1961) assionate Curiosities began as a modest endeavor. Initially conceived many years ago, it was intended as a short, internal document selectively high- Plighting some of the more interesting collectors and collections that have contributed to making the Kelsey Museum corpus so unusual. Although a brief history of the Museum’s fieldwork had been printed in 2006 (In the Field: The Archaeological Expeditions of the Kelsey Museum) and a biography of the Museum’s epony- mous founder published in 2011 ( J. G. Pedley’s The Life and Work of Francis Willey Kelsey), the Museum lacked even a short document devoted to overviews of the collections his- tory and the array of intriguing figures who first began donating antiquities to the Uni- versity of Michigan in the late 1800s. As often happens with ideas that germinate for a while, our initial plan expanded in both concept and scope, mostly through the coordi- nated efforts of a small army of individuals. In the end, Passionate Curiosities evolved into a more complex project than first envisioned and became a collaborative undertaking incorporating work by several former and current students at the University, as well as numerous curators and staff members, past and present, at the Kelsey Museum. We warmly thank the entire administrative team of the Museum during the span of our project: Sharon Herbert and Chris Ratté (former and current directors, respec- tively); Dawn Johnson (associate director); and administrative staff members Carl Abrego, Sandra Malveaux, Alex Zwinak, and Lorene Sterner for their constant support. Thanks also to Lorene for her exceptional help with image files and maps. On research questions and advice, we are especially grateful to the following mem- bers of the Kelsey family: Professors Elaine Gazda, Janet Richards, and Terry Wilfong (fellow curators); John Griffiths Pedley (former director of the Museum and goldmine of information on Francis W. Kelsey and institutional history); Amy Rosenberg, Clau- dia Chemello, Suzanne Davis and Carrie Roberts (former and current conservators); Madeline Neiman (Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellow in Conservation, 2014–2015); Ann Taylor van Rosevelt (research associate); Kathryn Carras (textile consultant); Se- bastián Encina and Michelle Fontenot (database and collections management), whose collaborations on database issues, images, and archival searches have been invaluable; Don Burian and Penny Slough (registry volunteers working with coins); Kirsty Walker (registry intern); Randall McCombs (docent and registry volunteer in digital imaging); Cathy Person (educational programming), and Todd Gerring and Sarah Mullersman (former and current community outreach coordinators, respectively); Scott Meier and viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Emily Kirk (exhibition designer and assistant designer, respectively) as well as former designers David Slee and Dana Buck; and to all the Kelsey Museum docents for their consistently perceptive suggestions. We are deeply in your collective debt—and happy to be so. Among this great in-house cadre we single out Peg Lourie (editor) with profound gratitude. Her skills, collegiality, and intellectual sensitivity have been critical in trans- forming our text into a book. We are honored to be under your wing, Peg; and we enjoy every minute of it. We also thank Terry Wilfong for his supportive guidance as curato- rial head of publications. For support and superlative services we are grateful to Matt Biro (chair of the Department of the History of Art), to the Freer Committee, and to the Department’s administrative staff; to Cathy Pense Rayos and Sally Bjork (Visual Resources Col- lections); to Deirdre Spencer and her entire staff (Fine Arts Library); to the research personnel of the Bentley Historical Library; to Randal Stegmeyer (photographer, Uni- versity Library), and to the superb University library system, including everyone who makes ILL and GET work and all the good people at the Buhr facility. For research and networking within the University, we thank Mary Freiman (sec- retary to the director, Department of American Culture); Carole McNamara (curator, University of Michigan Museum of Art) as well as Beth Bahls, Pam Reister, and Ruth Slavin on the UMMA staff; Jeff Pearson (librarian, Askwith Media Library); Phil Hall- man (librarian, Department of Screen Arts and Cultures); and the following faculty: Celeste Brusati, Christiane Gruber, Patricia Simons, Rebecca Zurier, and Howard Lay (Department of the History of Art); Carla Sinopoli (Department of Anthropology, cu- rator in the Museum of Anthropology, and director of the Museum Studies Program); the late Bill Farrand and also Eric Essene (Department of Geological Sciences); and Carol Bardenstein (Department of Near Eastern Studies). Beyond the University, we are indebted to Bill Peck (former curator of Egyptian art, Detroit Institute of Arts); Christine Lilyquist and Diana Patch (former and current curators in the Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art); Deirdre Lawrence and Angie Park (principal librarian and archivist, respectively, in the Brooklyn Museum); Esther Goudsmit (for her graciousness in sharing memories of her father, Samuel A. Goudsmit); Manuele Wasserman (for her advice and for sharing family lore about her great grandfather, Maurice Nahman); Lucy Kaplan (for information on her father, Edward Gans); Susan Porter (National Button Society membership coordina- tor) for recovering material on Jane Ford Adams; Kenneth Milano (Presbyterian His- torical Society of Pittsburgh) for helping to elucidate the life of Miss Hattie Conner; and Sarah Humes and her volunteer Autumn Muir (Kalamazoo Valley Museum) for invaluable assistance on A. M. Todd; Kelly Beattie of the Ypsilanti Historical Society; the JD Candler Roofing Company of Livonia; Rebecca Roundtree (BA 2012) at Chris- tie’s New York; Lavinia Ciuffa at the American Academy in Rome; and Lisa Crane, Special Collections, the Honnold/Mudd Library at the Claremont Colleges. ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For investigative efforts cutting across the entire range of Passionate Curiosities, we extend deep gratitude to Mrs. Cathy Andrejak for her extraordinary volunteer services as a professional librarian in archival research. Many students have contributed substantially to specific subsets of material dis- cussed here. We would like in particular to thank the following undergraduates whose projects reach two decades back: Jessie Tropman (BA 1992), Nathan Estep (BA 1994), Will Pestle (BA 1999), Jesse Ortega (BA 2004), Laura Kubit (BA 2005), Meryl Schwartz and Natalie Newton (BA 2008), Jessie Roy (BA 2010), Claire Malley (BA 2012), Helen Argiroff-Flood (BA 2014), and Lisa Padilla (BA 2015). Their special studies of artifact groups and/or archives have found fresh life here. Similarly, numerous graduate stu- dents past and current deserve special thanks for research on the Museum’s collections and archival records crucial to our investigations: Henry Colburn, James Cook, Emily Holt, Jenny Kreiger, Kate Larson, Leah Long, Hima Mallampati, Lynley McAlpine, Diana Ng, Adrian Ossi, Emma Sachs, Troy Samuels, and Adela