The Vince Lombardi Trophy isn't the only coveted work of art hanging in the balance when the Saints and the Colts meet for the Super Bowl this weekend. In a rare bout of art-institutional sports bravado, New Orleans Museum of Art director John Bullard and Indianapolis Museum of Art director Maxwell Anderson have made a high-stakes wager that whoever's home team loses will have to lend the other's museum a priceless work of art. In a back-and-forth that took place on blogger and sports addict Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes, the bet started out fairly modestly, with Anderson offering up an Ingrid Calame painting and bragging that his museum was "already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang." Trash talk ensued.
Dismissing the Calame as "insignificant," Bullard upped the ante by offering Renoir's 1908 Seamstress at Windowwhich Anderson laughed off as "sentimental blancmange by that 'China Painter,'" raising his bet to a jeweled cup by Jean-Valentine Morel. Rebuffing the "gaudy Chalice," Bullard said, "let's get serious. Each museum needs to offer an art work they would really miss for three months." The upshot? If the Saints win, Anderson will be sending NOMA J.M.W. Turner's enormous masterpiece The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800), and if the IMA wins it will receive Claude Lorrain's Ideal View of Tivoli (1644). In a gallant display of museological sportsmanship, Bullard said of Lorrain: "This great French artist is considered the father of landscape painting and was one of Turner's great inspirations. These two paintings would look splendid hanging together in New Orleans—or miracle of miracles, in Indianapolis."
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