Last March, Nesta Spink walked into the Alumni Center and there before her was a 90-year-old painting she had long had on her mind. "It had hung in the Pendleton Room at the Union when I first came here 30 years ago," she recalls. "It had a gold frame, I think, and at 4 feet by 6 feet it was an imposing portrait of a seated man. The painter was one of America’s greatest, William Merritt Chase, and the subject was one of the University’s great presidents, James Burrill Angell. At some point I realized I hadn’t seen it for a long time, so I started looking for it, off and on."

Spink, a Whistler scholar and a private dealer in prints and drawings, was the curator of collections at the University’s Museum of Art from 1967 to 1979. She is seriously concerned about the disciplines that keep artworks safe and well cared for. She still has the soul of a curator, which is closely akin to that of a detective. Here in front of her was the impressive figure of President Angell with no information posted nearby to identify either the subject or the painter. "I find that incredible," she says. "If you bend down you can make out a signature in the lower left hand corner." (In fairness, we must point out that the Center will give you a guide to its art on display, a security-conscious practice that the Bentley Library, among many other non-museums, uses.)

Along with her old colleague Marvin Eisenberg, professor emeritus of the history of art, Spink looked its surface over. They found a hole, dents, light scrapes, flaking paint and a pronounced wrinkle. A general murkiness, apart from the picture’s natural dark tones, dulled its impact on a viewer. All this their trained eyes took in without diagnostic tools like infrared light and microscopes.

The painting was in a high traffic area, behind a table holding refreshments for a reception in progress. A large coffee urn sent whiffs of steam up and over President Angell’s belly. Spink wondered how the portrait had got to the Center, which was opened in 1982. Where had it been before arriving there? How might it have fallen into its present condition?

Charles Sawyer, director of the U-M Museum of Art from 1957-72, speculates that Chase’s portrait of Angell had become "an orphan." What did he mean by that? "Throughout the University’s sprawl there are dozens and dozens of portraits and other artwork. Every school, many departments and special areas (rare book rooms, the Hopwood Room, the Vandenberg Room) have these things. Most of them are mainly of archival interest, but some are fine works of art.

"Here’s what I’ve seen happen," Sawyer continued. "An ambitious young man gets a major promotion in his school. He sits at his desk in front of a large portrait of his world-famous predecessor. He feels intimidated. One day he says, ‘Can we find storage for this picture? I need the wall space.’ The storage space may turn out to be a closet in the basement; the moment the painting enters it, the painting becomes an orphan. Other routes lead to the same end. ‘Temporary storage’ during major moves, building demolition or just renovations can easily become permanent, completely undocumented storage." Sawyer guesses this happens a lot.

Chase’s works bring high prices today. Spink asked the Office of Risk Management how much the painting was insured for. The answer was unclear. But surely it was insured? The answer was still unclear.

What did the Alumni Association recall about its arrival? William Stegath, former assistant executive director of the Alumni Association, remembers that when the new Alumni Center was finished in 1982, he asked Evan Maurer, director of the U-M Museum of Art at the time, if there were pictures in storage that the Association could borrow for the new building. Together they went to the Museum’s storage area and in the end selected the Angell portrait. It had no frame, but its records showed that it went out for light restoration in 1980 and had then returned straight into storage again.

Where had it been before all that? Spink did some more digging and found records indicating that the painting had been stored in the Museum for four years awaiting the O.K. for its restoration. Its location before that? The Michigan Union.

In 1976, a committee form the Intermuseum Conservation Laboratory at Oberlin College in Ohio had paid its regularly scheduled visit to the Museum to see if anything needed attention. Bret Waller, who was then the Museum’s director, asked them to look at Chase’s portrait of Angell across the street at the Union. They found the painting in the Pendleton Room behind a bulletin board. They rolled that aside and with some difficulty took the picture down and carried it across State Street to the art museum.

In the deadpan style of medical reports, the Oberlin experts made the following points in their official Report on Condition:

1. The 4’x 6’ painting was nailed to the wall. "Ten to twelve nails had been driven through the front edge of the canvas and stretcher." A wooden molding somehow held a thick piece of glass against the front surface of the painting.

2. Ultra-violet light revealed a strongly fluorescing surface coating. There was probable discoloration of the varnish.

3. There was evidence of moisture damage at the bottom center edge.

4. The "painting support [that is, canvas] is a coarse weave linen, very brittle and very slack. It is abraded at the tacking margins."

5. Dead insects were trapped behind the glass, and there was an accumulation of soot on the upper surfaces of the sags and bulges of the canvas.

6. Flaking paint was seen and first aid was applied to stop the process while a proposal for restoration made the rounds.

A note at the end suggested that when the picture came back, a better place should be found to hang it than behind a bulletin board. Further, they emphasized that glass was a good protection in high traffic areas but never, ever should it be put flat against a painting’s surface. Again, however, there was no word about the frame.

The restoration of paintings is a high-priced specialty. Spink suspects that no unit stepped forward to claim ownership of the painting in 1976 because Waller had estimated that proper restoration would cost $1,000 or so.

And today, the Alumni Association says flat-out, "We don’t own it." The Museum of Art says, "We own no portraits by Chase. It belongs to the Union." The Union says, "No, not us. The University owns it."

At this point in Spink’s sleuthing William Stegath reappeared, having found the whole story of ownership in the Michigan Alumnus of 1907. The Student Union had decided to commission a major portrait of President Angell. Looking around for a painter, they decided, remarkably, on William Merritt Chase, the internationally celebrated American portrait painter. They raised the necessary $4,000 entirely by subscription. The money came in one-, five- and ten-dollar bills from thousands of students, faculty and alumni.

In the summer of 1906, Angell met Chase in the town of Good Ground on Long Island, New York. Angell, who served in office from 1871 to 1909, grumbled about his dreadful lodgings there in a letter to a friend. He went on to tell her (the letter is now in the Bentley Historical Library) that he was enjoying his talks with the painter during the sittings. They appear to have talked about well-known people they knew in quiet, competitive rounds of name-dropping.

When the portrait was finished, Chase declared it his best ever, and Angell said if he looked as good as the picture, he was pleased. After being exhibited in Providence, Rhode Island, Angell’s home, and in New York City, the picture came to Ann Arbor in the fall to be formally presented to the University of Michigan in University Hall on Dec. 6, 1906. A beautiful frame, shown in the accompanying photograph from the Michigan Alumnus, set it off handsomely.

A quick search of the minutes of the Board of Regents revealed no record of their having accepted the portrait, but clearly the Union was right all along—the University of Michigan owns the painting. Besides this vindication on the question of ownership, the Michigan Union can also take credit for putting up the money for the restoration. But the 1980 project was shrunk, procedure by procedure, well below Waller’s estimate of $1,000. The job was handed over to the Detroit Institute of Arts laboratory instead of Oberlin. Spink found that the final bill was $320 minus a 50 percent "institutional discount," which brought the Union’s bill down to $160. "For that amount, only Band-Aid treatment could be expected," she says.

The painting had been cleaned with benzene, and a patchwork of stop-gap measures had halted or slowed deterioration. The varnish had not been removed, the back had not been relined with new linen, and other fundamental measures were left to be taken next time.

A New York dealer with specialist’s knowledge of the Chase market has this to say: "A portrait of a man brings less than one of a woman. This man is of only institutional interest, which further discounts the painting’s value. Nevertheless, I would say the picture is worth not less than $125,000."

The question remains of what to do about the huge job of caring for the entire campuswide accumulation of artwork—an accumulation that undoubtedly includes several neglected or undiscovered masterpieces. The task may seem impossible. Yet, as late as the 1970s, the entire contents of the Kelsey Museum were uncatalogued, Prof. John G. Pedley discovered when he arrived to teach classical archaeology and Greek. "One woman wrote things down in notebooks, and she and she alone knew where everything was," he recalls. "But a modern cataloguer tackled the project and completed it in two years."

Spink knows a start has been made. Inventories at the School of Medicine and the Law School are in good shape, and they are under way elsewhere. But she advises that the University consider the following as a comprehensive approach to the problem:

• Have all University units that record their artworks use "standard museum form" (an example of which accompanies this article);

• Record the location of each piece of art and keep a curatorial history of each item;

• Create a curatorial position for the oversight of the whole institution.

Following her advice would be a big undertaking, she admits, but that’s what it takes to rescue artworks from orphanhood.

As for the whereabouts of that frame—heavy, expensive, dignified, rich-looking? Spink continues to look for it.

Annette Hodesh is an Ann Arbor writer.