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Art

A quandary every art collector faces

What happens to art when the owner is ready to pass it on? For CEO Tom James, creating a museum may be the answer.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 18, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG

His idea to establish a museum for his collection of western and wildlife art is tentative. But even in the exploratory phase, Tom James faces the issue of every collector: how best to protect treasured art.

If his were a smaller collection, it would probably be distributed among family members and an arts institution or two. But Tom and Mary James have amassed more than 2,000 paintings and sculptures. He is chairman and CEO of Raymond James Financial, and the Jameses have placed most of their art on display at corporate headquarters, available to the public in free tours. But there's so much of it, even those large offices can't accommodate it all at one time. Even if he founds a museum, there will still be plenty to inhabit the workplace.

As a financial planner, James is trained to anticipate the inevitable. He's a healthy, vigorous man but at 64 wants to look ahead to the future of his collection. So why not a museum, a cultural asset that would benefit the community?

Some have questioned its relevance. Focusing on art more popular in places such as Santa Fe than here, the collection was built on personal taste rather with an eye to scholarship. There is the valid concern, too, that it would compete with existing institutions for financial support.

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An obvious alternative would be to give the collection to an existing museum. That isn't as easy as it sounds.

Most museums gladly take a single work of art, or a few, if they will enhance an existing collection. They usually balk at a collection of this size because it changes the overall balance.

Reynolds and Eleanor Morse tried for years to interest several major museums in their trove of works by Salvador Dali but were rebuffed unless they agreed to allow the museum to cherry-pick the most valuable works and sell off many more, breaking up the collection. Their refusal to do so is the reason we have such a prestigious, single-artist museum in St. Petersburg.

James doesn't compare his collection to that of the Morses. In his estimation, only about one-third of it is museum-quality. He says he has never had the collection appraised except for insurance purposes so that's a difficult assessment to make.

Most of the work is by living artists whose importance can rise or fall over time. It should be given an opportunity for study and the room to mature and benefit from the scrutiny of a future generation.

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Another challenge in preserving such a collection is its specific niche. Western and wildlife art is a genre beloved by many but not highly regarded by a lot of art professionals. It hews closely to 19th century realism that presented its subjects in idealized surroundings, emphasizing their nobility. Think Albert Bierstadt's landscapes and Frederic Remington's sculptures. It's a grand kind of pictorial, narrative art, with a dose of nostalgia, that isn't intellectually fashionable today in a culture that has been steeped in the virtues of abstract, conceptual and pop art. And beyond the art critics, there are those who say it romanticizes a brutal part of U.S. history, particularly concerning American Indians.

There are a number of museums devoted to the heritage of the American West; the Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art in Phoenix and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City are important examples. The Heard was opened in 1929 by a couple of that name who had a collection of American Indian art and artifacts. Today, through community support, it has become a leading repository of that genre and has an international reputation.

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A new museum is good for a community provided it is an enhancement, not a civic burden.

If James establishes a well-run museum, like the Heard Museum, it could become far more than the collection that inspired it. James' is the kind of accessible, beautifully executed work that would attract people who do not regularly visit museums. Raymond James Financial's headquarters in the Carillon office park welcomes more than 6,000 people annually who come for the free tours. That's not great attendance by museum standards, but huge for out-of-the-way office space that doesn't advertise and requires advance reservations for its tours.

James the businessman and philanthropist is a regionalist, but he says he prefers a location in downtown St. Petersburg. The downtown already has two fine arts museums (the Dali and the Museum of Fine Arts), two historical museums (the St. Petersburg Museum of History and the Florida Holocaust Museum) and the Florida International Museum, which hosts general-interest special exhibitions. A western and wildlife art museum would add to the mix and benefit from tag-on visits by people here for other reasons.

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Finding the right place is a big deal but not the biggest in starting up a museum. Even the most highly trafficked institutions can't rely only on attendance revenue. A museum needs a significant endowment that guarantees cash flow through inevitable vicissitudes. It needs a strong director and a staff of arts professionals to curate and conserve the art and design educational programming. It needs a diverse board of volunteer trustees who are willing to raise money for special exhibitions and accessions and are flexible and far-sighted enough to help the museum's mission evolve.

James has never been interested in collecting artifacts, for example, or more avant-garde expressions in the genre. A museum could and should have a broader mission than a private collection, one that would accommodate growth in new areas and attract other donors willing to give works that would complement the core collection.

James, who has had high-level involvement in the arts for years, knows all this and understands that most of the money needed, at least initially, will have to come from him. The best thing the community can do is give him the space to think through the many variables of such an ambitious project, then welcome it and thank him if he decides to give it the green light.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 15, 2007, 10:08:32]