113 works by famed KC artist go up for auction. Friend questions who really owns them

It would seem on the face of it that the 113 Thomas Hart Benton sketches and other small works now up for bid by a Kansas City auction house would not turn a 91-year-old man apoplectic.

But Fred W. McCraw of Merriam isn’t just any art lover.

He is a Benton collector. Two originals — one oil, one water color — sit in his vault, brought out recently for a visitor.

He is a Benton champion. Dozens of books on the Missouri regionalist — famed for museum pieces like the sexy “Persephone” at the Nelson-Atkins and sweeping Depression-era murals like ”America Today” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — sit stacked in his home, a warren of art and piles of papers.

More than that, for several years when McCraw was young — beginning in 1968 until January 1975 when Benton died in Kansas City at age 85 — the two were friends. They went on float trips together. McCraw celebrated his birthday with Tom and Rita Benton over dinner. McCraw said he visited with Rita — immortalized in canvas by her husband when the couple were young and fit in their bathing suits — in the days and weeks after Benton died. Rita died less than three months later at age 73.

In early November, McCraw saw that Circle Auction in the West Bottoms was auctioning off 113 pieces from what it advertised as The Campanella Collection — so-named because the pieces were acquired decades ago by the late artist Vincent Campanella, also a Benton friend. The auction is set to end Saturday. McCraw couldn’t stay silent. He contacted The Star with a story to tell.

His allegation was clear.

In the world of fine art, the provenance — the ownership and chain of custody of pieces — is vital for sales. To McCraw’s way of thinking, The Campanella Collection never fully belonged to Vincent Campanella at all and, at best, belonged to both him and Benton’s heirs.

What documented proof does he have? Frankly, McCraw conceded, none.

“I can’t prove it,” he said, a matter that has frustrated him for decades. Important: He never met Vincent Campanella. Nor did he actually see him take any artwork. But he swears to his own experience.

“When Tom died,” McCraw said, “Campanella came over to help the widow with whatever he could help with. So did I. I stopped by the house one day. I saw something that nobody else may have ever seen and there’s no way to verify it. But I want to tell you exactly what happened that day.

“I was visiting her in the downstairs area. And I heard noise upstairs and I asked her what that was. And she said, ‘That’s Campanella. He’s gathering up pieces that need to be restored. When he restores them, he’s going to bring them back and then I’ll sell them and we’ll split the proceeds.’

“Now, she was a little more specific. And most of what he was going to restore was up in the attic and it was largely works that were simple sketches, unfinished studies for different paintings and so forth. She said he was taking 100 of them. And that was the story. That’s all I knew.”

Three months later, Rita Benton died. A noted Kansas City attorney and Benton’s friend, Lyman Field, who died in 1999, was involved in handling the Benton estate.

“I started discussing things with Lyman. I asked him what he was going to do about the Campanella artworks. He said, ‘We can’t do anything about them because he (Campanella) says that she gave them to him.’

“Now, that’s true. That’s not a lie. But she gave them to him with the understanding that he would clean the ones that needed cleaning and so forth, and would return them for her to sell.

“Lyman said, ‘We can’t do anything about it, because I can’t prove that she didn’t give it to him.’ And I can’t either, except that she told me what that plan was. And that’s the way it was left.”

As he talked more, McCraw grew even more adamant about Campanella.

“He never would have gotten his hands on them had Benton been alive,” he said. “And Rita wouldn’t have given them to him on her dying bed. She would have wanted them to go to her children and grandchildren.”

Were these artworks a gift?

Proof of what’s true is wanting all around.

Anthony Benton Gude, Benton’s grandson who is also an artist, chose not to respond to The Star’s questions regarding the matter.

Tura Campanella Cook, daughter to Vincent Campanella, now living in Texas, responded by phone to the allegation with gracious equanimity, and a counter story of her own.

“I’m not surprised that there are rumors,” Campanella Cook said of the collection. “Tom was a folk hero. Lots of people have stories and loved him.”

Her father, whose work has been displayed at venues including New York’s Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, died in 2001. Her mother, who had been long-separated from her father, died in 2013.

She conceded she knew of no receipts, letters or other documents that legally proved that Rita Benton gave her father the artworks. Vincent Campanella, according to his obituary, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1949 to 1952 and later started the art department at what is now Park University, where he was a professor and professor emeritus for 49 years.

But she had little doubt about the provenance of the Benton works.

“They belonged to my dad,” she said.

Her story:

“At the time of Benton’s death, I was in college,” she said. Her parents would soon separate. “My younger brother was in college. We knew about the death and we knew how it impacted my father. Their friendship had been up and down for years. They were both outspoken.

“In 1973, Rita or Benton, or both, had approached my father and said, ‘Benton wants you to do a portrait of him.’ And, of course, my father was flattered. They spent a number of weeks during that process when Tom was posing, and my father was either sketching or painting, and they grew closer together. … So there was this, you know, emotional tie.

“And when Benton suddenly died, Rita called upon my father, first of all to finish a mural that Tom had been working on for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. There were little details that had to be finished. But if it wasn’t finished, you know, the museum wouldn’t pay Rita.”

The mural, “The Sources of Country Music,” was Benton’s last.

“I don’t know why my father was asked, but he was asked to — the way I heard it described — to clear out Tom’s studio. And so things that were in there — and I don’t know whether the sketches were there, or somewhere else in the house — but Rita said to him, ‘I want this out. They’re yours.’ And so she gave him the things that he possessed.”

She said that, even after the Bentons’ deaths, her father through letters also maintained a friendly relationship with the Bentons’ daughter, Jessie Benton, who died earlier this year at age 83 on Martha’s Vineyard.

In a follow-up email to The Star, Campanella Cook wrote that among her papers, “I found a letter from my mother, Leah Campanella, written to document the Benton-Campanella relationship. …

“In her letter she says Rita instructed Vincent to clean out the studio and office in preparation for the Benton home becoming a national landmark. At that time Rita gifted Vincent a number of items, including paintings ‘in addition to some that had been given to him earlier.’”

The Thomas Benton Home and Studio, in Kansas City’s Roanoke neighborhood, did not become a state historic site until 1977, two years after Benton’s death, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Campanella Cook said she was not even aware that her father possessed the Benton artworks until after his death.

“In 2001,” she said, “I came back to Kansas City and had a big job of cleaning out my father’s house. And I did not know about these drawings and discovered them.

“We had this big house on Karnes Boulevard, which is less than a half a mile from the Benton Home. He was living there, on his own at that point. He had paintings from his career. So the place was a treasure trove. … I thought I was just finding my father’s paintings.”

Amid her dad’s works, were found more than 100 Benton pieces — both canvases and sketches. She hired Kansas City art appraiser Burton L. Dunbar to catalog the material.

“I wanted everything handled with care and stored, etcetera, because now they were part of my father’s estate,” she said, “and it was, you know, a big complicated deal. And they found the Bentons. And it was Burton’s suggestion that, you know, we try to find a buyer because there were taxes involved with settling the estate.”

Dunbar declined The Star’s request to talk about the Campanella Collection. The collection, Campanella Cook said, was sold a year or more after her father’s 2001 death.

Avid Benton collectors

Campanella Cook emailed the Art Work Sales Agreement listing the collection then. It is far beyond what McCraw ever thought:

“Twenty-five (25) paintings in oil, tempera, casein, gouache, watercolor, and acrylic all by Thomas Hart Benton. One hundred and thirty-three drawings (133) in pencil, ink and other media all by Thomas Hart Benton.”

The listed buyers: Wes and Jeff Nedblake of Kansas City.

“I’ve owned, you know, probably 20 Bentons and I have three or four more I’ll probably acquire,” said Greydon Wesley Nedblake from his home in Florida. “I’ve sold at the $2 million mark all the way down to, you know, $75,000 or $80,000.”

Currently, he said, he owns about a half dozen. To his understanding, he said, he believed that Campanella was given Benton’s works as payment, in lieu of money, for doing background work on other Benton canvasses and that the collection was amassed over a number of years.

“I have two, maybe three paintings from that collection here in my condo,” Nedblake said. He said his son also has two.

He balked at any suggestion that Campanella might have possessed the Bentons improperly. “Campanella didn’t steal the paintings at all. Campanella was not a thief. He was definitely a straight-up guy. He earned the paintings.”

James Fry, who runs Circle Auction with his brother, Michael, would not reveal the current seller. But Nedblake said it’s not him.

“This is my ex-wife’s stuff,” Nedblake said. “If I had it, I wouldn’t sell it, but she won it in the divorce. … And I honestly don’t mind telling you, I kept two or three of the good paintings. … I got the best ones.”

Reached by text, the seller, Rene’e Park, said she’s begun a new life focusing on different pursuits now.

“With my current life,” Park said, “I no longer had a way to store, display or house these amazing pieces of art. It is time for them to be shared with the world.”

Most of the works at auction, Fry said, come from sketch pads. They range from a simple line drawing of a nose and eye (starting bid, $75) to a swirling woodland stream (starting bid, $1,200) to an oil on canvas, a study of an old woman and a highlight of the auction, with a starting bid of $18,000.

Fry also questions the accuracy of McCraw’s recollection from 48 years ago.

“One of the things that feels a little bit curious,” he said, “is the source saying that Vincent (Campanella) was going to restore them and sell them. Most of this collection is sketches. A large majority came out of two sketch books. It’s not really the kind of thing that you restore.”

He acknowledged that the complete Campanella Collection originally contained paintings not in the current lot of 113 pieces. As for the rest, “most of these, certainly at the time, would have been considered quite minor and largely insignificant. … I mean, I think, at the time, these wouldn’t have been viewed as something very commercial.”

But they are now.

Park defended the provenance of the works, telling a story similar to her former husband’s. Both spoke of Henry Adams, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and a recognized scholar and author on Benton.

“Dr. Henry Adams reviewed and researched the collection on our behalf,” Park said, “and interviewed Leah (Campanella) in the process.”

Adams did not respond to The Star’s request for comment regarding McCraw’s allegation.

He did pen an essay on tne Campanella Collection that appears on the website for the online auction. “No other body of Benton’s work, in a single place, provides such a varied record of his changes of subject matter and style,” Adams wrote. “In addition, it provides an interesting record of a most unusual friendship.”

As to the precise provenance of the collection, Adams is vague.

“Campanella must have acquired most of his Benton paintings during the 1970s,” he wrote. “According to Leah Campanella, ‘At some point during this period Tom gave Vincent some painting and sketches that were not a part of the family collection.’ Perhaps some of these paintings were given to him after Benton’s death by Rita Benton, in return for his work completing Benton’s ‘Sources of Country Music.’”

To McCraw, “perhaps” isn’t certain enough.

“I just want the truth to come out,” he said.