Fred Stewart and his cousin Todd Minor walked on the winter-browned turf of a cemetery in Heber Springs, Ark., graced by a few gloomy cedars and leafless oaks, searching for the grave of Mike Disfarmer.
A photographer who opened a portrait studio in this small town in the Ozark foothills around 1915, Disfarmer was a solitary bachelor who was said to like ice cream, his fiddle, the occasional beer — and little else. After by most accounts renouncing his relatives, he died here in obscurity in 1959, only to be acclaimed in the 1970s as a great artist.
It took Stewart less than half an hour to locate the simply carved granite stone he and Minor were looking for. “Todd!” he shouted to his cousin across the way. “I found Uncle Mike!”
It was another step to reclaiming their ancestral heritage. In late January, Stewart, Minor and 91 other distant relatives of Disfarmer had celebrated the settlement of a six-year legal dispute that pitted them against the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation to determine who controls the archive and copyright, and ultimately the legacy, of the artist, who died without a will.
Although the specific terms are confidential, the agreement between the family and museum left the heirs in apparent possession of the copyright and of about 3,000 of Disfarmer’s glass-plate negatives and hundreds of posthumous prints made from them.
On Feb. 25, the first family-authorized exhibition of the artist’s work, “Disfarmer: The Homecoming,” with nine prints, opened in the rotunda of the Arkansas State Capitol, where it will be on view through late May.
Art scholars and experts on intellectual property law say the litigation over the Disfarmer archive poses consequential ethical and legal questions, among them: Who should manage the estate of an artist who dies without a will? Heirs who hardly knew him — or outsiders, including museums, who built and conserved the estates that are now worth fighting over?
The Disfarmer litigation raises some of the same issues — and indeed, involves some of the same players — as the lawsuits initiated by families of two other reclusive American artists who died without wills: Vivian Maier and Henry Darger, who both lived in Chicago. All three were unrecognized during their lifetimes and out of touch with their relatives. When their estates belatedly became valuable, distant cousins stepped up to demand their rights. The law would dictate the outcome. But some question whether the law always serves an artist’s best interests.
“Heirs are a mixed bag,” said Christopher Jon Sprigman, professor of law at New York University and an expert on intellectual property and copyright law. “Sometimes heirs are really concerned with artistic legacy and are well advised, and work to expand public recognition of the person they’ve inherited from. Sometimes they’re just not.”
Hailed as a Virtuoso
Beginning around 1914, Disfarmer began to photograph members of his community, who bought his portraits for as little as 25 cents. For the most part, his customers were struggling farm families, evidenced by their homemade clothing and weathered, stoic faces. Along with a mastery of lighting and composition, Disfarmer possessed that rare and mysterious talent of a great portrait photographer: the ability to coax his subjects to drop their masks and reveal themselves genuinely to the camera.
Ever since Disfarmer’s photographs were discovered by the art world in the mid-1970s, his achievement has been shrouded — or packaged — in tales of his eccentricities.
“There was such a mystery around Disfarmer, which the world of photography loves,” says David Campany, creative director of the International Center of Photography. “I remember seeing the first book of Disfarmer’s work and being struck that it was on a line between something austere and clinical and something empathetic. It seemed to be on a really interesting knife edge.”
Born Mike Meyer in Indiana in 1884 to German American parents, the photographer repudiated his family tie and changed his name to “Disfarmer” in 1939, explaining in a petition that he wanted to spare the family any anxiety that “he might attempt to inherit and share a portion of their wealth.” (He chose the name Disfarmer believing that “Meyer” meant “farmer” in German; more precisely, it refers to a farm overseer).
Disfarmer died at 75, leaving behind thousands of negatives, and a bank account of $18,148.80 (worth about $200,000 today) that was divided six ways among his siblings or their heirs. The estate’s administrator sold his lot of negatives for $5 to a former mayor of Heber Springs, who later sold them for $1 to Peter Miller, a newspaper editor and lawyer in town.
Some of the emulsions on the glass plates, which register the images, had been eaten by bacteria. Miller restored the salvageable plates and sent a selection of prints to Julia Scully, the editor of Modern Photography, in New York. In 1976 the pair published a book of 66 portraits to rapturous reviews. In The New York Times, the critic Gene Thornton wrote that the photographs “can stand comparison with the works of August Sander, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn.” Richard Avedon said the book was “indispensable.”
Suddenly, Disfarmer was no longer a forgotten small-town practitioner. He was a great artist.
On June 9, 1977, an industrious commune in Arkansas called The Group, which had received the bulk of Disfarmer’s negative plates from Miller, donated them to the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation, which became the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation, the subject of the recent lawsuit.
The photography market generally awards much greater value to prints overseen by the artist than to those produced posthumously. In 2004 and 2005, dealers from New York hired local canvassers to buy up photographs that Disfarmer had sold in his lifetime that were now hanging on residents’ walls or glued in scrapbooks. While prints made later from his negatives sold for around $1,500 or less, his vintage prints could fetch 10 times that amount or more. Vintage prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty Center and the Whitney Museum.
Hunting for the Heirs
Scattered throughout Arkansas and as far away as California, Disfarmer’s descendants knew nothing of his posthumous celebrity until Ron Slattery, a Chicago buyer and seller of the sort of vernacular photographs that are found in flea markets, texted Minor on Aug. 27, 2019, and asked to meet with him.
Slattery and Fawn Slattery, who was then his wife, had a passionate interest in the question of who inherits the estate of an artist dying without a will. In several phone interviews with The Times shortly before his death this year, Slattery said that the couple had been driving around the country that summer when Fawn, a photography collector, saw that a friend had posted a Disfarmer photograph on the internet. When she called up other images, she was perplexed to find that Disfarmer’s photos were all credited to Peter Miller or The Group. They had owned the negatives, but why did they control the reproduction rights? Under copyright law, the owner of photographs and negatives can display or sell them, but the authority to make prints or reproduce the images rests with the photographer or the heirs.
“I said to Ron, ‘This is not right,’” Fawn recalled in a phone interview. “I went on the genealogy site for Disfarmer and within 20 minutes I found his family tree and family members.’” Minor met them the next day at a diner near his home in eastern Arkansas.
Minor’s paternal great-grandmother was Disfarmer’s sister. From his father, Jimmy Minor, a country music singer-songwriter, Todd Minor had learned he had a great-uncle Mike who was a photographer. “I never thought anything about it,” he said, adding that after his father died in 2009, he found some of his uncle’s photographs in his papers. “I’ve been researching him ever since,” he said.
Minor said that contrary to prevailing belief, Disfarmer had been close to his sisters and nieces until an acrimonious probate dispute led him to change his name. “Our perception of him is a little off from what people think,” he said. “He was eccentric, yes, but not so extreme.”
The Slatterys rode around Arkansas with Minor, visiting members of Disfarmer’s extended clan. None knew of his eminent reputation, and many suspected a scam. At one meeting, a burly cousin threw a Polaroid of a dead rattlesnake on the table and said to Ron, “This is what we do to snakes in Arkansas.” But over time, most relatives were persuaded to enroll in Disfarmer Family LLC. They succeeded in reopening the estate in 2021, a year after they retained a lawyer. Three years later, having failed to reach agreement with the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts on ownership of the negatives, they initiated a lawsuit.
A Peculiar Chicago Genius
While researching Disfarmer, the Slatterys read an article by Elyssa Westby, a law student, that questioned the management of the estate of Henry Darger, an outsider artist who was known as a social misfit. In his two-room apartment in a Chicago boardinghouse, Darger, who earned a living as a hospital janitor, created a gargantuan opus, illustrating with watercolors, drawings and collages an epic tale of conflict between a legion of little girls, many of them portrayed naked with penises, and a brutal horde of adult marauders. After Darger became too infirm to stay in his apartment, his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, moved him to a nursing home and took possession of a trove of his paintings and writings.
Once again, the Slatterys conducted genealogical research and identified Darger’s relatives. Learning they were cousins of the artist, and that paintings by Darger had sold at auction for prices as high as $745,000, the Darger descendants banded together. One of them, Christen Sadowski, was appointed as supervised administrator of the estate in June 2022. The heirs sued Kiyoko Lerner, the widow of Nathan, to acquire possession and copyright of the art. The lawsuit is ongoing.
The Slatterys said they have not benefited materially from either dispute. Fawn, a retired psychiatric nurse, said, “Both artists — and this is what made me angry — they said they were crazy. I thought, that’s not right. It stuck in my craw.”
Ron’s devotion to the subject dated to 2007, when he purchased unclaimed boxes auctioned in Chicago. They were found to contain the prints and negatives of Vivian Maier, a street photographer who made her living as a nanny in Metropolitan Chicago.
Maier, like Disfarmer and Darger, drew little notice during her lifetime but attained posthumous fame thanks to her chief promoter, John Maloof, a young real estate broker who acquired most of her negatives and unprocessed film at auction, and by purchase from Slattery and others.
Although Maloof said he had acquired the copyright from a distant cousin of Maier who lived in France, that man was not a legally declared heir. In 2014, David Deal, an enterprising Virginia attorney, located another removed, but closer, Maier cousin and filed a petition on his behalf. That led Cook County, Ill., five years after Maier’s death, to probate the Maier estate and assign it a public administrator until the question of heirship is resolved. The next hearing is scheduled for later this month.
Asking, Who Benefits?
Slattery argued that the rights to work by an artist who dies without a will should go to the closest surviving relatives. “It’s about legacy,” he said. “How dare you take the legacy from them?”
Others make the case that while outside parties like Miller and Scully, in the case of Disfarmer, or the Lerners and Maloof may have profited from their investment in these artists, they also worked diligently and successfully to advance the artists’ reputations, bringing to public attention the estates that are now worth fighting over.
Chelsea Spengemann, an independent curator who organized a Disfarmer show at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2014-15, said copyright laws can be harmful when they automatically reward heirs with the rights without asking, “what is beneficial to the culture at large or detrimental to cultural preservation?”
In the case of the Disfarmer estate, she said, “What’s at stake is the work not being accessible and not being preserved.” She added, “I’m surprised after this much time that the family would be rewarded with these rights.”
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts argued in a court filing in 2021 that it had spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore and preserve the negatives,” many of which, when received, “were in various stages of decay and decomposition.”
In an emailed statement after the settlement, Victoria Ramirez, executive director of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, said that since 1977, the museum had “housed and cared for the glass-plate negatives” and “ensured that the materials and archives were preserved and maintained intact as a cohesive body of work for historical purposes.”
Disfarmer’s heirs have ambitious plans to promote his legacy, Stewart said. A larger exhibition of prints in the State Capitol is scheduled for fall. Stewart is also considering creating a studio like Disfarmer’s, where visitors could have their pictures taken in vintage clothing.
“Heber Springs really wants to do it, but there would be more tourists in Little Rock,” he said. He seems elated to have claimed the illustrious photographer as a family member. How Disfarmer would feel about rejoining the Meyers is, of course, something no one will ever know.
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