[MSN] Baton Rouge. Art League looking for missing owl.

[MSN]

Art League looking for missing owl
By ED CULLEN
Advocate staff writer
Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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WHOOOse got the owl?

Over the years, the Baton Rouge Art League, which turns 75 next year, has
had pieces in its collection "walk away."

That's how ladies of the league refer to suspected thefts and loaned pieces
that weren't returned.

One of those pieces, a small owl by sculptor John Walker, disappeared on
Wanda Foote's watch in 1965. Foote was president of the league that year.

Foote, 85, sounds like this: On meeting her future husband, John, at Sears
and Roebuck: "I took one look at him, and I was a gone gosling."

At a meeting of the Art League, Foote was talking about the missing owl as
though it had "walked away" yesterday.

"Well, why don't you give it back?" cracked one of the ladies.

"Everybody laughed, but it got me to thinking," Foote said. "Don't you know
I'd collapse with joy if I could put it back."

The league's 70-odd piece collection includes Works Progress Administration
art and the work of other Louisiana artists. The collection is kept at the
Louisiana State Archives, 3851 Essen Lane,  where no art from the league's
collection has gone strolling. To see pieces in the Art League collection,
go to http://www.sos.louisiana. gov, click on archives, then collections.

Other pieces believed stolen from the collection or borrowed but not
returned are John Ankeney's "Mexican Farmer," "Houseboat" by France Folse
and two paintings by Mary Lou Stockwell - "Banana Trees" and "Baton Rouge
Levee."

"'The Owl' was on display at the Old State Capitol," Foote said. "I didn't
know it was missing for several weeks until someone said, 'You know, they
got the owl.'"

The flown owl, Foote said, is like having a missing tooth.

"I just feel like the time is right for someone to return it," she said.

Foote thinks the sculptor, John Walker, might have been on the faculty at
Southern University, but Evelyn Brown, a league member for 54 years, thinks
Walker might have lived in Lafayette.

If the Walker owl was, indeed, stolen, the theft may have been the work of
someone with an owl fixation.

"They left a painting of an owl that was part of the exhibit in a restroom
at the Old State Capitol," Brown said. "They must have put the owl under
their coat."

The Art League held its annual show last Saturday at the Rural Life Museum,
down Essen Lane from the State Archives building. The show is by invitation
only but it's easy to just walk in. The trick is knowing that there's a
show.

Begun by a handful of women in 1934, the Art League is still very Old Baton
Rouge. If the league had done nothing but rescue the WPA paintings from the
basement of the Old State Capitol in 1977 the league would have done a lot.
But the league continues to

acquire paintings, promote art education and award scholarships.

Clarence Millet, John McCrady, Charles Reineke, Ellsworth Woodward and
Caroline Durieux are among the artists whose work the league has collected.

"I wouldn't want the police involved," said Foote who was sitting at a
sign-in table just inside the front door of the Rural Life Museum. "That
would discourage whoever took the owl,  wouldn't it?" she said.

Just return it to the archives, no questions asked, said Art League member
Mary-Miles Walker, 87, who studied art in the French Quarter as a young
woman.

"I'm one of the original hippies," she said.

By the time Saturday's show was over, about 500  visitors had sipped punch
or wine, downed many little sandwiches and wandered back into a stunning
spring afternoon.

An oil painting of an ibis in flight by Murrell Butler, one of the paintings
in the show, was purchased for the league's collection.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/

toncremers at museum-security.org
http://www.museum-security.org
http://www.museumbeveiliging.com
http://www.handboekveiligheidszorgmusea.nl