Canadian Collector Murray Frum Dies at 81

Canada’s Globe and Mail reports on the death of noted collector and Art Gallery of Ontario patron, Murray Frum who began collecting shortly after his marriage to television personality Barbara Frum:

The couple bought their first piece of African art on their honeymoon in a museum gift shop, and later amassed an internationally recognized collection, which has been donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario. […] As a collector, Dr. Frum loved the chase, the sleuthing, the knowledge that came from finding a treasure and the pleasure of displaying a piece in harmony with seemingly disparate works. He had a keen eye for business deals, people and objets. […] “He was very engaged with us as a trustee, and was very knowledgeable and strategic as a member of the building committee of the new gallery,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the AGO.

“There are very few people in my experience who had a finer sense of taste,” Mr. Teitelbaum said, describing Dr. Frum “as a very generous collector, who had a real interest in and fidelity to the hand-made in art.”

His son, David Frum, tells how he kept collecting until the very end:

At the beginning of April, he had been in Florence on one of his famous art-sleuthing expeditions. Seven years before, my father had scored one of the great coups of his art-collecting career. He had bought a Baroque bronze of a crucified Jesus. The bronze, heavily overpainted in black, was dismissed by art historians as a product of the “Italian School,” meaning a sculptor too insignificant to merit a name. My father’s friend, the art historian Andrew Butterfield, conclusively proved that the piece was the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great builder of papal Rome—indeed that it was Bernini’s own personal devotional icon. The piece now overhangs a central gallery of the Art Gallery of Ontario, my father’s gift to his beloved native city of Toronto.

Now my father had a new project in hand. He’d bought a wooden bas-relief of mother and child. The piece was generally thought to be a later copy of a Donatello original. But he had an intuition that the piece was older than previously thought and … he and Butterfield were on the case …

Murray Frum, developer and art collector, dies at 81 (Globe & Mail)

Murray Bernard Frum, 1931–2013 (The Daily Beast)