It Was the Biggest Job of His Life. Was He On Target, or Off by Half?

Whenever a worthy cause needs help in Rockland, Maine, this town of 7,000 overlooking Penobscot Bay, people reach out to Bruce Gamage Jr., an auctioneer who runs an antiques shop downtown.

Regularly, he drops what he’s doing to drum up bidding at charity auctions organized for, say, the historical society or an injured child, displaying the professional expertise he’s honed for years while selling off silver sets and scrimshaw from dusty attics and the estates of the recently deceased.

French Gothic cabinets? Amethyst rings? Walking sticks? An oil portrait or gouache?

Gamage is as established an expert on such items as you’ll find around Rockland, a working-class town once known for its quarries and fish canneries. Many in town say he is just as self-sacrificing a spirit.

“It’s almost all we need to do is send him the date, he is just so generous with his time,” said Amie Hutchison, executive director of Trekkers, a local nonprofit that mentors young people.

Gamage’s expertise was tested, though, in 2018 when he was given what he called “the most important job I’ve ever had.”

Robert Indiana, the master Pop artist, had just died, at 89, on the nearby island of Vinalhaven, and Gamage’s good friend, James Brannan, a lawyer, was the executor of the estate. Brannan hired Gamage to appraise the sizeable collection of artwork that Indiana had left behind.

“Jimmy had a mess on his hands,” Gamage said in an interview from his shop on Main Street. Brannan, he said, knew the job would be best handled by someone he could trust.

“If you have a friend, you ask them,” he said.

There were thousands of works to assess, most of which had been created by Indiana, whose sculpture of the word LOVE — its letters stacked, its O tilted like a jaunty cap — is a fixture in public plazas around the country.

For all his experience with antiques, Gamage, a former prison guard who spent a decade working inside the walls of Maine State Prison, had only limited exposure to the market for modern art. And he was not a credentialed appraiser. He said his valuation was complicated by the time it took to clean up Indiana’s mess of a house and to unpack and inventory the art before it was shipped to the mainland.

The work stretched out to nearly a year, and he charged $284,616 — a sum that, like the nearly $2 million in legal fees that Brannan charged, looked reasonable in the light of the bountiful value of Indiana’s art.

Gamage’s estimate: $85.5 million.

More recently, though, the charity that Indiana named in his will as the sole beneficiary of his estate hired its own expert to assess the collection it had inherited. Megan Fox Kelly, a prominent New York art adviser and a member of the Appraisers Association of America for the past 19 years, said she concluded that actually the art was worth less than half of what Gamage reported.

Her fee: $40,000. Her estimation: “It was perhaps surprising that the estate didn’t select an appraiser who was a member of the appraisers’ associations.”

The prospect of a diminished portfolio has now proved to be a problem for the charity, which is known as the Star of Hope Foundation. The foundation, established by Indiana, is named after the rickety old Victorian lodge on Vinalhaven that he used as both a house and a studio and ultimately bequeathed to Star of Hope.

His will directs that his assets be used to convert the lodge, which dates from the 1880s, into a museum that showcases his collection and his legacy. But the foundation has said in recent days that such a museum is not feasible. It cited the recalibration of the value of the art as one factor in its decision.

“What we do know, after careful analysis by art experts, is that the financial value of the collection is less than what those handling the settlement of the estate estimated,” the foundation said in a statement.

Gamage insists, though, that his calculations are not off and he is fully willing to explain how he came to them. “I don’t like tooting my horn,” he said, but he continued: “You don’t have to be that big to know what you are doing.”

Endless Estate Disputes

The yawning discrepancy in the appraisals is only the latest twist in the strange saga of Indiana’s last years on Vinalhaven, where he lived alone but was tended to by a retinue of helpers. Some of the aides were accused in a civil suit of taking advantage of him, including by creating artwork of their own design and selling it under Indiana’s name and reaping profits from those sales.

In one instance, a Wisconsin sausage maker commissioned a huge outdoor sculpture designed along the lines of Indiana’s “LOVE,” but this one said BRAT. Aides insisted the aging Indiana had created it, but acknowledged that a picture sent to the sausage company showing Indiana at a drafting table with the design in front of him might have been photoshopped.

Immediately after the artist’s death, legal fights erupted in New York between several parties over royalties and rights to produce versions of several of Indiana’s better-known images. As the representative of the estate, Brannan, whom Indiana had named executor after getting to know him on a real estate transaction, became involved in the disputes and hired outside counsel.

As the legal fees climbed toward $10 million, Brannan said he was forced to sell off important artworks to address those costs and to pay for the upkeep of the Star of Hope lodge.

Ultimately the Maine Attorney General’s office intervened, asserting that the money Brannan was paying himself and several other law firms was draining the estate’s resources and threatening Indiana’s plan for preserving his legacy. Brannan defended the fees, asserting that the legal firms were clawing back assets that might eventually double the size of the estate.

But in 2022, in a settlement with the attorney general, Brannan and the other firms paid back more than $2 million. That money, like the art, went to the foundation, which by Gamage’s reckoning was still holding a collection worth a pretty penny. He said an important part of its value was the fact that the artworks were those Indiana thought important enough to keep for himself.

“Collectors love to have a little extra,” he said. “If I say, ‘That was Indiana’s,’ I think it was worth a lot more.”

Gamage, 76, credits his interest in antiques to his superior officer at Maine State Prison, the gloomy brick-and-granite hulk that was the inspiration for the prison in Stephen King’s novella that became the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” In their spare time years ago, he said, he and the boss toured towns, knocking on doors offering to buy antiques. Although he wasn’t forceful enough to be a good “door knocker,” Gamage said he was hooked. He sent himself to Reppert Auction School in Indiana, and in the early 1980s set himself up in business in Rockland, his hometown. Today, his shop, Gamage Antiques, sits on an artsy stretch of Main Street, just around the corner from his friend Brannan’s office on Limerock Street.

Brannan did not return requests for comment. But Gamage spoke of their relationship. The two men grew up together. Both are veterans, occasional golf partners, and Brannan spoke at the funeral of Gamage’s father. Over the years, their business interests have intersected, and Gamage said he had conducted many appraisals of estates administered by Brannan.

Gamage said that, although he had never joined the big appraisal societies or appraised the collection of a major artist, he was not without credentials. He is a member of the New England Appraisers Association, a licensed auctioneer and is qualified to carry out I.R.S. appraisals. His clients, he said, have included the estates of Sister Parish, the interior decorator who designed the Kennedy White House, and Ann Wyeth McCoy, an artist and daughter of N.C. Wyeth, the illustrator.

And he emphasized in the interview, surrounded by the framed prints and antique furniture that fill his shop, that he knew well the market for works made by Indiana, whom he said he had met several times. He had followed it for decades and needed to, he said, because Indiana sometimes paid his studio assistants in art and they came straight to him from the Vinalhaven ferry to sell their pictures.

Gamage said few appraisers would have been equipped to handle the sort of conditions encountered at the Star of Hope. He and his crew traveled to it each day by ferry. Cluttered and leaking, filled with the muck of cats, pigeons and Indiana’s pet Chihuahua, the house where Indiana had lived since the 1970s needed to be cleaned as part of the appraisal process.

“Those fancy New York appraisers,” he said, “they want it set out in a room.”

One Collection, Two Estimates

Gamage said he put his antiques business largely on hold while he, his wife Becky and two daughters inspected some 13,000 items of art by hand, including posters, prints, sculptures and paintings. He said he devised his values using the standard practice of researching comparable sales and that he sought the advice of other experts.

He said he thought one point of discrepancy may have been the value he put on some Indiana paintings.

“Those oils, I put them down at $750,000,” he said. They were located, Gamage added, “in his study. He looked at them.”

Gamage also saw value in the plethora of smaller items, among them hundreds of posters Indiana created for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 1970. He imagined, sometime in the future, a Robert Indiana museum shop selling them off, a couple of hundred dollars each.

The foundation said its decision to hire a second appraiser was not a judgment on Gamage, just a solid business practice.

Larry Sterrs, a veteran nonprofit manager who chairs the board of the foundation, said: “For me it would not matter whether it was Mr. Gamage or Leonardo da Vinci, we were going to have it reappraised anyway.”

“It was never our intention to make anyone look bad, or look good,” he said. “We just wanted to know what it was.”

In hiring Kelly, the foundation selected someone who has appraised the estates of many major artists, such as that of Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist famed for her psychologically charged abstract sculptures. She died in 2010.

Kelly was serving as president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors when, in the fall of 2020, she drove with a colleague to assess the art at two Maine storage facilities. Unlike Gamage, she was allowed by the estate to examine only a representative sample, she said. So she inspected about 10 percent to 15 percent of the objects, focusing on the higher value paintings and sculptures and relying on Gamage’s inventory and photographs to estimate the rest.

She said since so much of Indiana’s work was produced in editions, it was enough to give her an accurate picture. “Relative to other artists’ estates, it was fairly straightforward because of the amount of editioned work,” she said.

It took her three months to turn in the final appraisal.

She applied the same rigorous procedures that she would in any appraisal, she said, basing her estimates on research of his market and, among other things, past auction results and prices at private sales.

Her calculation of the collection’s value: $39,786,980.

In its recent statement, the foundation said it recognizes it will need to sell off some of Indiana’s art to pay for the upkeep of the rest of the collection and to continue financing the maintenance of the Star of Hope, even if it is not to be an Indiana museum.

“It’s sort of like having a half-million-dollar lobster boat sitting in your backyard,” the foundation said of its collection. “Yes, it’s worth a lot of money, but if it’s not in the water and working, it’s not paying the bills.”

And, if truth be told, it’s not as if the foundation would still be considering a museum even if it had embraced Gamage’s rosier appraisal. The obstacles are not only money, but a continuing resistance to Indiana on the small island where he lived for 40 years after fleeing New York.

The artist, enigmatic and sometimes irascible, kept to himself on Vinalhaven, where he was viewed by some as an odd recluse who made time only for people from off the island, or those “from away,” as locals say.

After Indiana’s death, clashing attitudes about him were evident at public meetings and in a survey taken by the foundation in 2019 to gauge islanders’ views on what to do with the Star of Hope. Some were not happy with the idea of creating an attraction that would draw crowds to the island, and a third said they did not think it important that Indiana’s artwork remain there. The top reason among those who held that opinion about his work: “Dislike Robert Indiana.”

“The consensus at the meetings was for a community center,” said Lisa Lewis, who works in a wine shop a few stores down from Indiana’s former home.

So the foundation is moving in that direction now. On a recent visit, the Star of Hope stood tall in the sun, just yards from the ocean and the harbor with its masts and lobster traps, dressed up in a new coat of yellow paint and looking better than it has in decades.

The plan is to turn it into an arts-related community center, open to the public and supporting arts education and working artists in Maine. It won’t be a permanent Indiana museum, but some of his art will be displayed there periodically, according to the foundation, which said it was in talks with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., about taking his archives.

Gamage said it was not his place to say whether the Star of Hope should be a museum, as Indiana had wished. But, he said, though his appraisal is being second-guessed, he has no regrets about devoting nearly a year of his life to fully immerse himself in the career of a man he views as both a founding father of Pop Art and a former neighbor.

“I had a long history with Bob,” he said. “I have been following his art for 40 to 50 years. I did a job. I was paid for the job.”

Murray Carpenter contributed reporting from Maine.