Two Art Museums Directors Bet on Super Bowl

Though the arts and sports are not typically known to collide, New Orleans Museum of Art Director John Bullard and Indianapolis Museum of Art Director Maxwell Anderson made a friendly wager on the Super Bowl: The loser must lend the other’s museum a priceless piece of artwork. The bet began when Anderson offered up an Ingrid Calame painting and bragged that his museum was “already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang” via Tyler Greene’s Modern Art Notes blog. Trash talker Bullard dismissed the “insignificant” Calame and raised the stakes by offering Renoir’s 1908 Seamstress at Window. The battle continued until the two settled via Twitter on offering a work “they would really miss for three months,” which was Claude Lorrain’s “Ideal View of Tivoli” (1644) from NOMA and IMA’s “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” (1800) by J.M.W. Turner. “These two paintings would look splendid hanging together in New Orleans—or miracle of miracles, in Indianapolis,” Bullard boasted.