Retiring Museum of Art's legal counsel looks back

Larry Berger started college thinking he might combine his interest in art with industrial design.

He ended up going to law school, instead, a fortunate turn that led him to a long first career as a business lawyer with Morgan Lewis LLP and a second professional act as general counsel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Berger, 68, plans to retire from that position by the end of the year - and, when he does, he will have many stories to tell the lawyer who takes his place.

Laws governing art collections have changed in recent years, and lawyers such as Berger - only a few other U.S. museums have in-house counsel - have had to scramble to keep up.

Exhibitions and the legal issues surrounding them have become far more complex. Works of art are borrowed from institutions and individuals, often from around the world, as was the case, for example, with the recent exhibition of Impressionist works collected by 19th-century art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. That show began in Paris, traveled to London, and ended at the Museum of Art. Each work had to be meticulously wrapped not only in protective packaging, but also in airtight lending agreements, insurance coverage, and transportation arrangements.

"Museums in the U.S. on the whole have become much more ambitious and they are often pushing in new directions to engage the public," Berger said.

One example was the acquisition by the Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of Thomas Eakins' renowned Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) in 2006. Berger handled much of the legal work for that transaction, which followed a mad, 45-day fund-raising dash by local philanthropists, museum leaders and everyday people to match a $68 million offer for the Eakins painting by the National Gallery of Art and Alice Walton, heir to Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

Had Walton and the National Gallery prevailed, the painting would have left Philadelphia and shuttled back and forth between Washington and Bentonville, Ark., where the Walton-supported Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is located.

That such a significant work never before had been jointly owned by two museums created added legal complexity, Berger said.

Museum leaders "needed help in drafting an agreement for the purchase," Berger said. "We needed to draft an agreement with [the Academy of the Fine Arts] for joint ownership of the work of art, you had to worry about insuring it and transporting it and how the two museums would take turns for it to be displayed."

Before Berger came on board in 2006, the year of The Gross Clinic acquisition, the Museum of Art had no in-house counsel, like many other major museums in the United States.

It turned out that Berger, who played attack on the lacrosse teams at Haverford High School and later at Michigan State University, was able to make a running start. He'd started his career here at Morgan Lewis, then a regional law firm but now one of the world's largest, in 1972 after getting his law degree from the University of Virginia.

He spent much of his career at Morgan Lewis working on business matters. Later, he also began to handle legal matters for nonprofits, including the art museum, and became so steeped in the subject that he helped draft the American Bar Association's model statute governing those institutions.

It was a short leap from Morgan Lewis to the Museum of Art.

"I thought it would be interesting to change things up and do something different, still practicing law but inside for a client," Berger said.

He quickly learned that the tasks of in-house counsel are much like those of a partner at a big firm. Like his job at Morgan Lewis, it was necessary to handle multiple matters simultaneously. The difference being that he had only one client.

And that he did not have a huge stable of lawyers specializing in the arcanery of whatever issue he was working on at the moment, whether it was pension or tax law, or a trust matter.

The issue of stolen art has been a recurring theme for American museums that have found works in their collections that were looted by the Nazis from Jewish owners in the years leading up to and during World War II.

The Museum of Art has had a few such disputes. In 2011, the museum learned that a 17th-century Italian tapestry designed by Antonio Gherardi was part of a collection that had been taken by the Nazis from Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, a Jewish couple that owned one of Berlin's most prominent art galleries.

Berger negotiated with the Oppenheimers' heirs over compensation, and the tapestry stayed in the museum collection.

"It's not all glamour, but there is a warm glow that comes over me when I go through a gallery and see a work of art that I was able to work on and help the museum acquire," he said.

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