By ALICE THORSON,The Kansas City Star

On an August visit to New Hampshire, Kansas City antique experts Philip and Elva Needles were dismayed to discover that some familiar objects were being sold at auction.

The couple recognized several pieces from the American period rooms at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. They included Hepplewhite chairs, wallpaper panels and 18th-century carved woodwork.


Also on the block at Portsmouth-based Northeast Auctions were three pieces of Southwestern antique furniture from the museum.

“It is our opinion that all of this is Kansas City’s loss,” the couple wrote in a recent letter to The Kansas City Star.

For seven years the two ran an antique shop in the Crestwood neighborhood, which they closed last November.

Catherine Futter, curator of decorative arts at the Nelson-Atkins since 2002, confirmed that the objects were — or will be — sold and was happy to explain why.

“One of my very first projects when I got here was to review the furniture collection,” she said. “We are an art museum with a mission to have the very best things on view. Many of the pieces in the American period rooms were not of that quality.

“We came to the conclusion that four of the five American period rooms were not of the level of the Nelson-Atkins collection. That wallpaper, for instance, although period, has had extensive restoration and quite a bit of addition, and the (carved woodwork) paneling in that same room was fair to middling quality and therefore was not deemed exhibit-able.”

Futter emphasized that “the decorative arts department never deaccessions for any reason other than quality.”

After carefully examining the upholstery, the tacks and the wood used in the Hepplewhite chairs, she concluded that they are not authentic early 19th-century examples of the neoclassical style, but revival pieces made in the late 19th-century.

The Southwestern furniture also underwent intense scrutiny.

Futter thinks the pieces were originally part of a diorama dating to the museum’s opening in 1933, which showed San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez in her studio.

Before deciding to sell them, she reviewed them with the museum’s woodwork conservator.

“We did it extremely slowly and carefully, and we did it twice,” she said. “We took every piece of furniture apart. We then brought in an outside independent consultant, and he came to the same conclusions that we did.”

The Needles couple were relieved to learn that the Nelson’s deaccessioning has been very selective.

“If they’re keeping the best and going ahead with the idea that American furniture is an art form, that’s all right,” Philip Needles said.

The couple noticed that period rooms are declining in museums across the country, a trend that Futter confirms.

“Many art museums are decreasing the number of period rooms because they were installed to create an atmosphere of history, of how life used to be,” she said. “In our day and age there are other ways to do this.

“I do value period rooms,” she added.

The Nelson has three European period rooms that allow visitors to see what life was like in the 18th century in Italy — “The Gabinetto,” or Red Lacquer Room — France and England.

When the new American galleries open in spring 2016 they will include one American period room — the hall from the Robert Hooper House in Danvers, Mass., dating to the mid-18th century.