What happened to $150,000 worth of invaluable Montici mosaics?
That’s the mystery.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Near the end of his life, in 1976, Richard Blow donated 25 beautiful Montici mosaics to Oregon State University. You can view them by clicking on the “Academic Biography” link on the Home page. The 72-year-old artist had closed his Montici workshop three years earlier, and had partially relocated back to New York. His Florentine art career was over. He was thinking of posterity.
Why to Oregon State University? I don’t know. I’ve never come across documents linking Richard’s life to that university. In any event, hos son David assembled a group of Richard’s friends, including Muriel King and my mother, to help him prepare the collection and ship it off to Oregon. He also recruited several Blow family members, including Richard’s sister, and Richard’s nephew, George Blow III.
The OSU collection was special for three reasons.
· It included a truly representative range of classic Montici themes – abstract geometrics, surreal works, marine life, mermaids, snakes, celestial bodies, a mythological yellow griffin, a Biblical tower of Babel,, castles, jeweled hands, butterflies, pop art question marks, trains and a brace of pistols.
· All 25 pieces covered a specific period of his art – 1966 to 1973, offering a glimpse of the artist in his final creative years (judging by the works, he created at a very high-level right to the end).
· Richard personally selected them to represent his quarter-century career and artistic legacy.
Our story could have ended there. University gets collection; visitors can view them today.
But it didn’t.
In 2019, my brother John approached OSU to alert them to our proposed Montici Society, and to see if they had high-resolution jpegs of the Blow mosaics in their collection.
The mosaics were gone.
Sometime after receiving the collection, for some reason OSU decided to divest themselves of their Montici collection.
Who ended up with them?
According to OSU, David Blow bought them back.
I turned my attention to finding David.. I hadn’t been in touch with him for 40 years. I spent a month trying to track him down. Rootless and unmarried, David seemed unable to settle anywhere. Using various public records, I traced his wanderings across the United States, from Bethel, CT; to three different San Francisco addresses; to Boca Raton, FL; to Chevy Chase, MD; where the trail finally went dry. I tried email addresses and phone numbers linked to each stop, but all were dead ends. I finally turned to an obituary search. He was born in 1938; he would be 81. Could he be dead?
Sadly, he was.
In the Social Security Death Index (1935-2014), I finally found it. “David Jeremy Blow, Died 23 July, 2006, Last Residence: 40484 Stanford, Lincoln, Kentucky.” He had been dead for 13 years. I’m puzzled by David ending up in Kentucky. Did he have relatives there? Maybe a girlfriend? Or did death simply catch up with him there? I did a Google search to find an obituary, but found nothing. That bothers me to this day. No friend of David, no family member, wrote one up? In my first blog on this site, I tried to rectify that, putting down my own memories. RIP David. You’re in our family’s prayers.
Back to the mystery.
So if David was the buyer, where did his collection of Montici art end up? Was it given to his family? Friends? Lovers? Did it stay together, or was it broken up and distributed piecemeal?
Whatever happened, not a single OSU collection piece has shown up on the market to date.
Zip. Nada.
Where are they? And how much would the collection be worth today?
I’m guessing at least $150,000.
Here’s my reasoning:
· In my opinion, the overall quality of the OSU works matches those in the historical Edelsberg Collection. If so, some back-of-an-envelope math gives us this: 87 Edelsberg mosiacs fetched around $450,000, or about $5,000 a mosaic. 25 OSU mosaics times $5,000 = $125,000.
· Tack on a premium. If intact, it’s a unique collection, for the reasons explained above. The collection is worth more than the sum of its individual works. So let’s add another 20%, which brings us to $150,000.
One final note: In Muriel King’s papers willed to our family, we found a typewritten sheet of paper dated April 7, 1974, and entitled “Inventory of Intarsia/University of Oregon State.” It lists 11 of the Montici artworks that eventually ended up being donated to Oregon State. Each one had a listed valuation (in 1974 dollars). I’m guessing it was done for tax purposes, or it was required by the OSU Foundation.
The total estimated value of the 11 pieces was $4,870.
Our estimate if sold today? $55,000.
Let the treasure hunt begin.
Michael Schmicker