What happened to Barton Kestle? Art mystery.

I made a trip to the MIA this weekend, and they have ‘period rooms’ the most intriguing was the one of the first Modern Art curator:

On March 27, 1954, Barton Kestle, first curator of modern art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, boarded a train for Washington, D.C., and was never seen again.

A shy specialist in the Soviet Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism, Kestle had usually worked late into the night at the museum’s grand McKim, Mead, & White building, his office placed near the front entrance so he wouldn’t trip up alarms. This explains how staff came to accidentally seal and paint over his door during a rushed construction job some time in the ’50s.

Two years ago, employees found his door and stepped into Kestle’s world.

Can you FREAKING IMAGINE finding this? If I had the money, I would love to do a private investigation as to what happened to Barton (my guess is he was labeled as a communist spy, and found a ‘special fate’) But his office? What a trip.

I also enjoyed this take of Kestle;

Mark Dion’s “Curator’s Office” (2013), a small room installation, is ostensibly the workplace of one Barton Kestle, a mythical curator of modern art at the MIA. The work is diverting, but carries a hint of tragedy and a sly dose of, to use some artspeak, “institutional critique.” The quiet and unassuming Kestle, a wall label tells us, boarded a train bound for Washington, D.C., and was never heard from again. His office—containing such tools of his time as an Underwood typewriter, metal card-file drawers and a dial telephone—was supposedly walled off when the museum did some renovating. It was “rediscovered” only when interior reconstruction began for “More Real?” Kestle’s fate is a little dig at the MIA, implying that supporting modern art in early-1950s Minnesota might have made a man want to disappear.