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In Key West, where life is laid back, an artist's work has been mislaid. His family wants an accounting of the works; a museum can't seem to provide it.
By ADAM C. SMITH
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 12, 2001
KEY WEST -- You probably never heard of F. Townsend Morgan, an obscure but prize-winning artist whose work resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the New York Public Library and in countless private collections.
Among art history buffs in Key West, though, he is a significant historical figure. After the Depression when the town was destitute, he led a team of government-paid artists who pumped out art to promote tourism.
These days, 36 years after his death, he is also a source of considerable consternation in America's southernmost town.
The problem? Morgan's work seems to keep disappearing. His descendants have spent more than a decade trying to get an accounting of the F. Townsend Morgan artwork left years ago at the Key West Art & Historical Society. But they say a string of museum leaders kept brushing them off. Only after prosecutors started asking questions last year did museum officials begin returning some of the artwork. By then, the museum couldn't find much of it.
Bill Everhart, who has idolized "Grandpop" Morgan since boyhood, has infuriated the town's cultural elite, poking around homes, galleries and museums searching for art that means a great deal to him.
In this famously laid-back community, reaction to Everhart's feverish quest for answers has been anything but easygoing.
"He's a terrorist," said Claudia Pennington, executive director of the Key West Art & Historical Society.
"A troublemaker," said Nance Frank, owner of the pricey Gallery on Greene. "And a jerk."
"If he tries to come around here, I'll tell you honestly, I'll probably give him a poke in the nose," said Benjamin "Dink" Bruce, an art collector and scion of a prominent family.
Welcome to a seldom-seen side of the museum business, where sloppy management can collide with lofty claims of art stewardship.
Decades ago, handshake deals often sufficed when museums acquired pieces for their collections. Museum treasures were frequently listed as on "permanent loan," whatever that meant. Now, most reputable cultural institutions require clear contracts before accepting additions to their collection, and they generally balk at accepting anything on loan, as Morgan's family insists his work was.
The non-profit, government-funded Key West Art & Historical Society is hardly the first museum to have its integrity challenged. But this particular controversy over missing art is especially fitting in a town that celebrates its history of pirates and wreckers siphoning off riches from sinking ships.
"The wrecker mentality is alive and well in Key West," Everhart groused recently in his Winter Haven home. "I can't see this happening in a lot of other places that weren't as isolated as Key West."
Everhart views the Key West Art & Historical Society as a black hole through which art has been disappearing for years.
"It's the Art Motel," he said. "Art checks in, but it doesn't check out."
The story begins after Key West hit rock bottom. In 1934, the Depression had so devastated the town that as many as 85 percent of its residents relied on government relief. Authorities actually considered abandoning the bankrupt city and moving its inhabitants to the Tampa Bay area.
Instead, the governor's office and federal New Deal administrators concluded that the best hope for Key West was to turn it into a tourist destination. Artists from across the country were sent in to paint murals, design monuments, stage theater shows and draw and paint appealing postcards and pictures to be sent nationwide to entice would-be vacationers.
One of those artists was F. Townsend Morgan of Pennsylvania, whom President Roosevelt appointed as the second director of the Key West artists group working under the Works Progress Administration.
Morgan was a family man, but also a free spirit with a salty vocabulary. He produced water colors, oil paintings and sculptures but specialized in etchings. He would etch intricate scenes onto metal plates and create black and white prints of varying sizes. In Key West, Morgan etched palm trees, houses, ships and storms, some of the etchings so precise they resembled photographs.
He stayed in Key West well after the WPA program ended, helping found the Key West Art Center, which sold and showed his and other artists' work. The Key West Art & Historical Society later branched off from the arts center, sending commissions to Morgan for artwork of his that they sold. Morgan moved to Annapolis, Md., around 1949, and records show he continued to send pieces to Key West for sale.
Leaders of the Art & Historical Society, which today operates three museums, can find no records of Morgan donating artwork. But Morgan's family insists none of the pieces ever belonged to the museum.
"He left work there to be sold (on consignment) or shown at exhibits. It was never donated to them," said Norma Clark, Morgan's daughter and Everhart's mother.
Backing that position are a number of handwritten notes and letters Morgan wrote to the Art & Historical Society in the early 1960s about artwork for sale there and alluding to checks they sent him for sold pieces.
In 1966, the year after Morgan died and willed all his art to his family, daughter Norma Clark sent 18 more etchings to Key West to be sold, her records show. She never received any more checks for sold artwork and had little contact with the Key West arts group for years afterward.
Over the years, Morgan's artwork slowly disappeared.
When family members went to Key West in 1984, museum officials showed them more than 50 pieces on display and in storage. Fiften years later, the museum had 30 on hand but wouldn't let Morgan's daughter take any with her, saying it first had to go to the board. The next year, museum officials could only find 13 pieces and returned several to family members. Three weeks later, it found four pieces, returning three to Morgan's family. Two more showed up a few weeks later and were mailed to the family.
Museum officials offered varying explanations for the ever-changing Morgan inventory, usually blaming past leaders for misplacing artwork.
Everhart went to the state attorney's office.
He complained about stolen artwork worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He alluded to a black market of Morgan's art among Key West society. Among reams of documentation, he provided names of prominent and wealthy conchs with Morgan pieces in their homes, including "Dink" Bruce, who happened to be the landlord of Claudia Pennington, head of the Art & Historical Society.
(Everhart's efforts late one evening to get Pennington to let him inspect the artwork in Bruce's house while Bruce was out of town are why Bruce might be inclined to punch him in the nose.)
Everhart got the attention of the state attorney in Monroe County, but nothing came of it.
"Obviously there's a problem there, but I don't see anything that we can file criminally," said Kirby Owen, chief investigator for the state attorney in Key West. "He's probably got grounds for a civil suit."
Even if they could make a criminal case, State Attorney Mark Kohl said, they would run into statute of limitations problems. Besides, he said, "It's not like these people came to his house, took his property and sold it. Nobody knows for sure what kind of agreement was executed for this artwork, except for the artist and the people he made that deal with, and they're not around."
Claudia Pennington, a veteran museum professional who came to Key West last year, sat in her office overlooking the waterfront recently wearing a sun dress and a smile. Everhart's complaints, she suggested, were merely ravings from a pesky conspiracy theorist. She was determined not to waste any more time on him.
The art is not missing, she said. "I would say we probably have 25 pieces by F. Townsend Morgan," she said. Some of it is still in the process of being moved from storage in one museum to another, but many of the pieces are well accounted for, she said.
Asked to show them, she said security concerns prevented that. When pressed, she reluctantly escorted a reporter to the top floor of the Custom House Museum, where she spent 15 minutes searching through drawers and a climate-controlled room filled with cardboard boxes.
Nothing.
She said she knew of some stored elsewhere, but again said she wasn't comfortable showing a reporter. She eventually agreed and went to another room to dig out Morgan pieces. After five more minutes searching, she found one unsigned etching that she said was probably one of Morgan's.
"Well, I don't know what to tell you," Pennington said after her second unsuccessful search.
Missing artwork is nothing new to the Key West Art & Historical Society. Henry La Cagnina, one of the last surviving Key West WPA artists, donated a couple of paintings to the society in the 1960s only to find years later that they had disappeared.
"Key West is pretty loose. Who knows what happened to it?" said La Cagnina's son, David. "My father doesn't hold it against them. He gave it to them for historical reasons, and they should have taken care of it. Since they didn't, he's not going to give them anything else, but that's the way it goes."
In 1989, the niece of one longtime former director of the society was helping her incapacitated aunt move into a nursing home. In the process, she discovered art and artifacts "stacked floor to ceiling" in her aunt's home, according to an official history of the society. Some of the pieces were sold off, and some were returned to the museum collection. Everhart believes Morgan pieces were among the work discovered in the director's house.
Susan Olsen, the first trained museum professional hired by the Art & Historical Society in 1986, suspects much of the Morgan artwork was sold off before she arrived. In late 1984 or early 1985, she said, museum leaders sold off a lot of artwork to raise money to upgrade the collection.
"That's when I think a lot of the F. Townsend Morgan pieces left. The terrible mistake they made was selling without having clear title.... Trust is everything in a museum," said Olsen. She lamented that the Art & Historical Society sometimes operated under a loose, "everybody knows each other, we're all friends," standard.
Elisa Phelps, a museum collections expert active with the American Association of Museums, was unfamiliar with the Key West group but said most museums with relatively small collections have little difficulty finding pieces in their collection. Likewise, professional museums for decades have been careful about how they sell their work.
"One shouldn't dispose of anything in any way when you can't document that you have a clear title," Phelps said.
Everhart doubts he could afford a civil suit against the arts group, but any lawsuit would require untangling murky ownership questions about Morgan's art. Unable to find any records of donated artwork, Pennington last year wrote Everhart that all Morgan artwork at the Art & Historical Society would be credited as "on loan" from the Morgan estate and his family.
But the museum now sees it differently.
"We've been in possession of it and maintaining it for all these years," she said. "The board's position is that it's ours."
Nearly four decades after Townsend Morgan died, there is no great demand for his black and white etchings. Everhart told the state attorney's office that the missing pieces are worth $250,000 to $1-million. This appears to be a big leap, colored by a grandson's adoration.
In fact, there is no clear value, because Morgan pieces are rarely sold. A 1994 exhibition of WPA art in Key West valued Morgan pieces at $2,000 apiece. A California auction house reported selling a Morgan oil painting last year for $4,000. On eBay last month, three different signed Morgan etchings were offered, attracting top bids between $5.50 and $50.
"They don't know what they have," Everhart said. Everhart himself has dozens of Morgan pieces, a collection he considers priceless. Several of his pieces are on display at a Winter Haven frame shop and gallery, Art Effects, and he hopes to exhibit his grandfather's work across the state.
For now, though, Key West looks like an unlikely site.
-- A number of F. Townsend Morgan pieces are on display at Art Effects, a gallery and frame shop at 605 Overlook Drive, Winter Haven; (863) 324-5811.