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Super Bowl Cities' Museums Bet Paintings on Big Game

Matt Ledger |

You think you lost big betting on the Super Bowl? Imagine how Max Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, feels. The week before the big game, Anderson proposed a gentleman’s wager with the director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, E. John Bullard. Anderson was so sure his Colts would win that he was willing to offer up a three-month loan of IMA’s Ingrid Calame painting From #258 Drawing. This, though, wasn’t good enough for Bullard, and he quickly upped the ante by offering Renoir’s Seamstress at Window. A chain of awesome art-related Twitter trash talk later, the bet finally shook out to Anderson offering up Joseph Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt, and Bullard meeting the challenge by putting Claude Lorrain’s Ideal View of Tivoli on the line. Anderson, of course, lost, but with the swath of publicity the bet brought he’s probably not taking it that hard.