When museums bite

Susan Helen Adler paced the corridors of the Baltimore Museum of Art, searching for objects that once belonged to her great-great-aunt, the late Saidie Adler May.

In one room, she encountered about a dozen pieces, next to plaques that read “Gift of Saidie A. May.” But Adler, hungry to see more May donations on display, quickly grew upset with how much she thought should be there.

She was already frustrated that one of her great-great-aunt’s paintings, a small Renoir, had turned up in a box of junk at a West Virginia flea market. The painting, she eventually learned, had been stolen from the museum in 1951 and then largely forgotten. How could that have happened?

Read the article by Ian Shapira in the WaPo here.