Burdick Collection

[sgbernard]

Steve, thanks for these wonderful photos.

Guys, remember that these cards are prints, photographs, chromolithographs, etc. They are paper, and it is (good) conservation policy not to display paper objects in galleries with natural sunlight, and also to rotate them on and off display regularly to protect their condition and vibrancy. The Met has the best print, drawing and photo collection in the US, and you won't see the famous Albrecht Durer prints, Leonardo drawings, Ansel Adams photos, etc. regularly on display either, and that's done for conservation reasons. Even the museum's main print and photo gallery is essentially a hallway between two painting galleries without windows, where paper objects are unlikely to be damaged by natural light. By contrast, the American Art gallery (where Burdick's cards could well belong) is very well lit with natural light. So, putting them where they are, and rotating them on and off display is not necessarily done as a slight to the cards; it's done to protect them.

As for uninformed people in galleries not knowing a thing about the cards, the Met's staff of curators is not regularly wandering the galleries. If you're finding someone to ask about the cards, you're likely finding one of the wonderful employees who works as a gallery guard, or a volunteer leading a tour. Neither has any reason to be trained about baseball cards, or frankly the history of any object chosen at random, so it's a bit unfair to blame them for that fact.

A world class museum like the Met is not going to have a huge tourist bump for Burdick's cards. That's just the truth. Even if 100 of us suddenly decided to drop everything and head to Fifth Ave. for an afternoon to see Burdick's Wagner, it wouldn't be a noticeable bump in a museum that gets more than 5 million people a year. Wouldn't it be cool to see a baseball show at the Met, but it's an art museum.

I think it's worth remembering that Burdick was not just a baseball card collector, but he was a card collector, and he did remarkable things in terms of cataloguing such cards and advancing appreciation of them beyond those of us who look to him as a foundational bball card collector. It is a great thing that his collection, all of it, is kept safe in one of the world's premiere art museums. It means that each one of your cards is also "art." I think it brings great prestige to our own collections that they are displayed among the sort of objects in that museum. I also think that we all (mostly, except for the very rarest cards) collect multiples, and if you're dying to see one of the 50+ T206 Wagners in person, chances are very good that an auction house at a major show will have one on display in the next two years. (That's how I've seen them.) I think some of the complaints about a travesty or mishandling of the collection are unjustified. I once worked at the Met, so I'm partial, but that's my two (ten?) cents anyway.