The Atlanta Journal/Constitution
By Catherine Fox Staff Writer

Museums know the next best thing to a Monet is a mummy.      So the folks at Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum are understandably excited about the prospect of acquiring 80 pieces of Egyptian art, the stars of the group being 10 painted coffins and 10 mummies*.    The quality of these artifacts, perhaps the finest collection of Egyptian art still in private hands - and the fact that a little more than half of the $2 million price tag must be raised in the next few days - explain why museum director Tony Hirschel has abandoned the secrecy usually surrounding such acquisitions. He's gone public to appeal for funding.

     "The quality [of the collection] is such that it would put the Carlos on par with the great collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the area of Egyptian funerary arts - not in quantity, of course, but in quality," Hirschel said Wednesday.

     "While this would make great study material at the university, our interest in the collection is about fulfilling our civic mission", he said. "We feel that this is something that the broader public would respond to. Egyptian art is rivaled only by impressionism in popularity among museumgoers."

     Other national Egyptian art experts agree.

     "As a group, they will rival any key collection of coffin ensembles [coffins of diminishing size placed within another] in North America", said Boston Egyptologist Joyce Haynes. "Several of the coffins are of very high quality. Just in terms of quantity, 10 is a huge number".

     Carter Lupton, curator of ancient history at the Milwaukee Public Museum, said, "To have this many mummies and coffins available on the market at one time is virtually an unheard-of occurrence. You don't get them out of Egypt anymore, and they're not on the market. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

     "I tried to convince our director here to try for them," Lupton said, but the Milwaukee museum had other priorities and the price was too high.

     The collection includes bronzes, clay figurines and canopic jars - which hold the entrails of the mummies. It has been in the hands of only two families since it was formed in the mid-19th century. Though now owned by an anonymous dealer, it has occupied since the 1950s the second floor of a museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

     Peter Lacovara, the Carlos' new Egyptian art curator, got wind of its availability through a curator friend and went to see it in November.

     "I'd heard rumours about this collection for years, but no one had ever gone to see it because it's such a weird, out-of-the-way museum", he said. "It was full of odd stuff, much like the old Emory Museum. It was dark and dank, but it was amazing to see how many artifacts there were, and how beautiful they were."

     Because Lacovara saw it first, the Carlos has been given the first shot at acquisition. After this week, however, there will be open competition for the collection.

     "Unlike special exhibitions, we have the potential now to secure, at a similar cost, a collection that would remain here permanently, a source of pride for the people of this region and envy by those from elsewhere", Hirschel said.

 

     Staff writer Kathy Janich contributed to this article
* (Please note that there were actually 9 complete mummies, 9 coffins and one mummified head in the collection - an error was made by the writer).