Fordham Opens Its Gift: An Antiquities Museum
Chester V. Higgins Jr./The New York Times


By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: December 6, 2007
For some four decades, William D. Walsh browsed auction catalogs in
search of the ancient artifacts that would gratify his passion for
classical antiquity.

A bust of Emperor Augustus at the new Fordham Museum.
From Greek terra cotta vases to Roman marble heads to Etruscan urns,
he gradually assembled a private gallery of more than 200 pieces of
varying shapes, sizes and materials at his home in Menlo Park, Calif.

Today nearly all of those antiquities are to go on view at Fordham
University in the Bronx as a permanent gift from Mr. Walsh, a
financier and philanthropist.

Mr. Walsh said he decided a year ago that it was simply time to give
them away. "I'm 77, my wife is 78," he said in a telephone
interview. "Who knows how long you've got to go?"

To house the antiquities and make them accessible to its students and
the general public, the university has established the Fordham Museum
of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art, which opens today. The collection
amounts to the largest of its kind held by a university in the New
York area, said Jennifer Udell, Fordham's curator of university art.

The antiquities collections at Princeton, Yale and the University of
Pennsylvania come the closest to it, representing institutions "that
have been collecting for a very long time," Ms. Udell said.

Having studied Latin and Greek at Fordham, Mr. Walsh said he believed
that the university's curriculum could benefit from his antiquities
collection, whose value he estimated at $5 million to $6
million. "One of the things I felt was missing at Fordham was a
recognition of the actual usage of things in Roman and Greek times,"
he said.

It might not seem a propitious moment to open an antiquities
collection to public view, given recent claims by Italy and Greece
that some artifacts in American collections were looted from their
soil. (The Princeton University Art Museum agreed last month to turn
over eight objects to Italy, and several museums have brokered
similar transfers after long talks.)

Richard Hodges, the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology, said that Fordham's new museum was
problematic.

"It's a slightly imprudent act on the part of the university, because
a lot of it is not provenanced," he said. "The message that it sends
is there is nothing wrong with looting and buying illegal objects.
Fordham needs to be very careful about this."

But Mr. Walsh said he acquired every piece at public auctions — not
through a private dealer — and therefore hopes that the provenance of
his artifacts is clean and accounted for. "I've always focused on
keeping the auction house between myself and the seller," he said.

Told of Mr. Hodges's comments, Ms. Udell said she hoped that anyone
who had a claim to or concerns about any of the pieces would come
forward.

"We're not trying to hide anything and we're happy to work with
anyone who has a legitimate claim," she said.

While Fordham cares "deeply about provenance questions," she added,
it also wants to share Mr. Walsh's treasures with the public.

"They're not going to do anybody any good sitting in a private
collection," Ms. Udell said.

The new 4,000-square-foot gallery is located in the William D. Walsh
Family Library on the Rose Hill campus of Fordham. In 1997 Mr. Walsh
and his family donated more than $10 million toward the construction
of the $54 million library and established an endowment for its
upkeep.

Mr. Walsh, who graduated from Fordham in 1951, is the founding
chairman of Sequoia Associates, a private investment firm in Menlo
Park. He also holds a Harvard law degree and was an assistant United
States attorney in New York City in the 1950s, overseeing drug and
organized crime investigations.

Ms. Udell, who began her curatorial work on the museum in June, said
the breadth of Mr. Walsh's collection, dating from the 10th century
B.C. to the third century A.D., made it an ideal teaching tool. She
said she hoped that Fordham's art history and classics departments
would integrate the objects into their courses.

"It spans several periods," Ms. Udell said of the
collection, "Mycenaean, Villanovan, Classical Greece, Geometrical,
Archaic Roman, Imperial Roman, Republican, Etruscan, South Italian."
There are red-figure and red-and-black-figure ceramics, and the shiny
black Etruscan pottery known as Bucchero. There is an array of
sculpture and terra cotta heads.

While Ms. Udell said that some of the pieces had been published in
academic journals, none have ever been lent for an exhibition. This
is the first time people will be able to see the extensive collection
that Mr. Walsh has built over the years. "It's really becoming
public," she said.

Students will be able to visit the museum from 8:30 a.m. to midnight
seven days a week. For now, members of the general public must
schedule an appointment, but regular hours are expected in January.

Among Ms. Udell's favorite pieces are three Greek lebes gamikos, or
ceremonial wedding vessels, including a vase with a dish that fits
inside it, and an oinochoe, or wine jug, that sits on top. The black
glaze ware, from around 325 B.C., was made as a set. "It's one of
these types of things that gets lost among the splashy South Italian
vases," Ms. Udell said.

She also pointed out the neck fragment of a volute krater from around
340 B.C. that features a rosette motif and a painted woman's face
that is somewhat Botticellian. "In its excerpted state, you really
get to appreciate the draftsmanship of the painter," Ms. Udell said.

There is a series of Etruscan votive heads, used as offerings to the
gods by people hoping to alleviate their suffering or express
gratitude for their recovery. There is also a series of votive feet
in the collection.

A Hydria water jar, from about 510 B.C., depicts Heracles battling
the Nemea Lion at the top, and, on the bottom, reclining after his
heroic efforts in the company of Athena and Hermes.

The largest piece in the collection is a funerary statue of a man
dating from the late Republican period — late first century B.C. —
that stands about eight feet tall. "He was a man of some importance,
given the scale," Ms. Udell said, "and the fact that he's wearing a
Greek-style himation, as opposed to a Roman-style toga." (A himation
is an ancient Greek draped cloak.)

There is also a child-size sarcophagus from the second or third
century A.D., with a lid, which is rare. The inscription indicates
that the coffin belonged to a 2 1/2 -year-old boy named Publius
Livius Maximus whose father, of the same name, was a member of a
military police unit in ancient Rome. "The father used the child's
sarcophagus to tell about himself," Ms. Udell said.

The only pieces that Mr. Walsh held onto were those that could not be
easily removed, like a Roman mosaic from Pompeii embedded in the wall
of his home. While he has given a few of his artifacts to friends and
family members, he said he was happy that most were at last going to
an educational institution.

"This is just a natural evolution," he said. "You don't live forever."