Culture Clash

Though Rauschenberg's lawyers maintain their client was never properly served, Kren's lawyers claim they attempted to serve process on the defendant with no results. The judge granted permission to simply serve process via first class mail. After Rauschenberg missed the deadline to respond in August, the plaintiffs amended their petition. This time, they alleged slander, libel, interference with business relationships (Pottorf's letters had been cc'd to several of Rauschenberg's associates) and asked for punitive damages.

"I'm not greedy," Kren says. "When something is wrong, we want to make it right."

Kren, 46, points out his wall of books to make the point that he's a scholar. As he ends his interview, he makes a last-ditch effort to prove that he is the aggrieved party, a loyal advocate who has been wrung out and discarded. "People keep calling and asking, 'How could this be?,' " he says. "I've been asking the same thing for a year and a half, 'How could this be?' "

Almost a week after the 15 Rauschenbergs had been seized, they were back on the walls of the Menil Collection by order of the court. Meanwhile, Rauschenberg has posted a $1,000,000 bond to postpone the sale of the work until the end of March, and has agreed to mediation of the dispute.

Kren said, "I am pleased that Mr. Rauschenberg has finally begun to appreciate the importance of this matter."

As for the city's museum directors, the seizure has made them jittery. Loans to museums are already in jeopardy: Last month a New York judge refused to allow the Museum of Modern Art to return two paintings by Egon Schiele to the Viennese museum that had lent them, because descendants of two Jewish families claimed the works had been taken from them by Nazis. The Menil Collection's good name has often helped persuade reluctant owners to lend works, and the museum claims its reputation has been devastated by the seizures.

As Menil attorney Bob Singleton said, rather histrionically, in the Houston Chronicle: "[The message is] Houston and Texas is not someplace to loan your art, because somebody is going to take it."

To which Constable Evans, for his part, offered a simple bit of wisdom: Perhaps it's the lenders who should be questioned, not the borrowers. "[Museums] normally keep a pretty straight business," he says, nonplused as ever. "They just happened to be doing business with somebody who wasn't keeping a straight business.