The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profiles a local man who is an acknowledged leading collector of memorabilia from the television show “The Munsters” as well as a collector of cartoon drawings. But what’s got everyone in a dither is Tony Greco’s claims that he’s holding on to much more:
From the world of fine art and illustration, he also advertises pieces by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington, George Seurat, Jean Cocteau, Erte, Al Hirschfeld, John Lennon, Maurice Sendak and Keith Haring. Mr. Greco says he was friends with Mr. Haring in the mid-1970s, when the latter studied at the now-closed Ivy School of Art in Pittsburgh and Mr. Greco attended Pittsburgh Beauty Academy.
Many pieces in the second group, he says, are not museum-quality canvases with a verifiable provenance but rather lesser works or small sketches on paper that were never cataloged. Most he simply keeps in folders without intent to sell — on occasion a cat will lie on one on his desk — but some are on the market.
His source, he says, is primarily inheritance — from family members who brought them from Europe, but mostly from what he describes as a large cache of unsold inventory, left to him by a relative, from the fine art department of Kaufmann’s Department Store. An exhaustive search of records and interviews with knowledgeable sources, however, could not verify the existence of such a department.
