The Art of Baseball Cards with Jim Lessersohn

In 1947, a retired Syracuse electrician named Jefferson Burdick donated his collection of more than 30,000 baseball cards to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He then spent the remaining 16 years of his life at the museum cataloguing his collection, giving every pre-World War II set the number that is still used to sort and identify cards. Today, a niche of exhibition panels in the Met's American Wing shows a rotating selection of the cards in a permanent installation. Collectors of these mass produced pieces of commercial art rarely talk about the artistic merits of the cards. Values are driven primarily by the prominence of the players (Hall of Famers preferred) and the scarcity of the sets. So why does the Metropolitan Museum believe that these small pieces of 19th and 20th Century printed cardboard deserve to be exhibited in the same galleries as Raphael, Rembrandt, Monet and Picasso? We will make the case that the Met knows what it is doing, with examples spanning the decades from the 1880's to the 1960's. Oradell - South Reading Room