An old New England trade group claims it owns a landmark American statue in the collection of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk.
NORFOLK — A visitor flipping through the records of an old New England social group in 1999 made a startling claim.
How did it wind up in Norfolk? Answering that question took years of detective work and left a mystery at its core. Each institution interprets that mystery differently, and so the two are at loggerheads — both claiming ownership of one of the Chrysler’s signature works of art. “We just reached the point where we said, this is crazy. We want the damn thing back,” said Chuck Sulkala, president of the MCMA board. “It’s that simple.”Its sculptor, Stephenson, was a little-known Boston artist
But Stephenson struggled to find a market for his creation after it returned to Boston. He developed a reputation for carving portrait busts of the city’s elite, but never surpassed “The Wounded Indian” and died in 1861, at the age of 37, in a mental facility. Today’s members, with headquarters in a small building in Quincy, Mass., are generally involved in businesses such as metal fabrication and auto repair.
He hired a graduate student one summer for help with research and leaned on a friend who worked in the library at the Boston Globe. After a few years, the board retained a law firm, Cultural Heritage Partners, which specializes in art ownership cases. Slowly the story began to emerge.
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