This past February, Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s auction house in New York, called the Evansville Museum to inquire about a layered glass mosaic by Picasso, entitled Seated Woman with Red Hat, whose provenance he had traced to the museum. Though museum officials at first thought Ettinger was mistaken, in fact the artwork had been stashed in a shipping crate in the museum for over forty years, mislabeled and all but forgotten.

The industrial designer Raymond Loewy had gifted the work to the museum in 1963, when it had been appraised for tax purposes for $20,000. Some experts today have opined that the piece—consisting of multicolored pieces of glass layered and fused with liquid enamel as part of a technique called “gemmaux”—may fetch as much as $30 million to $40 million.  For a museum whose entire art collection is valued at only $10 million, the discovery is a game changer.  No wonder museum officials have decided to sell, rather than display the work.

But the potential windfall has raised a number of questions for museums.  What is the museum’s responsibility, if any, to Loewy’s estate?  And what is an institution’s responsibility to keep donated works and exhibit them to the public?  Certainly these issues have touched a nerve with some Evansville residents, who, once the painting is sold, will be deprived of even a glimpse of the masterpiece that has been right under their noses for the last forty years.