With yesterday’s announcement that David Franklin, CMA director for the past three years, is resigning for personal reasons (effective immediately), the museum will have seen the arrival and departure of four directors since 2000.
Franklin’s resignation, according to a prepared statement, was the result of some personal reflection in which Franklin concluded he needed more time for “research and writing.” The PD’s Steven Litt reported that Franklin will stay on in a consulting role as interim director Fred Bidwell (of Transformer Station fame) takes the reins.
But Litt’s story failed to address what most commenters (many of those comments have now been deleted from the Cleveland.com story, incidentally) and Cleveland art enthusiasts saw as the real story in Franklin’s resignation: the alleged affair he had with a CMA staffer (according to several sources close to the organization and the woman), her suicide five months ago, and the collusion of a wealthy board which swept that story under the rug. Scene talked to more than a couple people familiar with what museum employees and trustees knew, and heard from more throughout the day. Many were dismayed at the museum’s statements and the PD’s coverage.
“Lots of people know a lot – it’s been the best kept secret in Cleveland for 5 months,” one source tells Scene. “Anyone who has any association to CMA or [the young lady] has been waiting on this day for over 5 months.”
When the museum became aware is not clear, nor when any decision was made about Franklin’s future, which now includes a consulting gig with CMA to ensure a “proper transition.”
Franklin’s track record was suspect to begin with. The world-renowned historian of Italian Renaissance Art “mysteriously disappeared” from his post as deputy director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada. That departure occurred during preparations for two major exhibitions and left the museum in a state of turmoil.
Two years later, the CMA board tapped Franklin to take over the directorship in Cleveland. Here’s the PD editorial welcoming him on Sep. 6, 2010:
David Franklin, former deputy director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, is sounding all of the right notes of enthusiasm, commitment and scholarship as incoming director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
He relishes the internationally renowned art museum’s strengths — yet is rightly eager to have it do more to plan major exhibitions, tapping into its great collections. That’s encouraging.
And the respected, hockey-loving Montreal native and his family want to stay in Cleveland for a long, long time. The museum needs that kind of stability. Roll out the welcome mat.
Franklin, 49, an expert in Renaissance art, has quite a to-do list. Taking the helm during a $350 million expansion and renovation, he’ll have to work hard to raise $130 million to pay off the museum’s construction bonds and to manage a construction project that won’t end until 2013.
The museum will celebrate its centennial in 2016.
But if Franklin can communicate his excitement about the museum’s rich, diverse collection to patrons and visitors, he should enjoy a long and gratifying career in Cleveland. And Cleveland should enjoy having him.
Roll out the welcome mat indeed. Looks like the “long and gratifying career” will be cut short once again.
Not surprising that the PD would trumpet the sterling qualities while neglecting to mention the troubling resume of Franklin, a man whom the paper’s publisher Terry Egger, a CMA trustee, helped hire. Not surprising also that when Franklin announced his sudden resignation, the board members summarily communicated their shock and distress while failing to elaborate on the “personal reasons” Franklin offered for his departure.
There’s certainly more to the story based on what we’ve heard today.
Know more? Get in touch at sallard@clevescene.com.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2013.
While his sleazy behavior with a CMA employee is hardly cause for celebration, is he really responsible for the young woman’s suicide. And since she killed herself 5 months ago, why is he quitting now. Who pushed him out the door on Monday? The board managed with the eager assistance of the “reporters” at the PD, always complicit in covering up Cleveland’s nasty scandals from the riff raff, to keep this quiet. The last thing Mr. Franklin wants to do is “writing” and “research” when he had one of the best museum jobs in the country with a band of cheerleaders in the press. Thank you Mr. Allard for revealing the truth, as Scene magazine always does, within one day of the “announcement”
Yes…thank you for your article. My wife just asked me this morning if I had heard anything about Mr. Franklin’s departure. To find this story and email it to her…I am sure it will make her day.
I am a big backer of the CMA and I am sorry to see what politicing has emeshed the institution into. The Board moved from a somewhat a doughty mainly white-shoed group of people interested in art to aggresive venture, corporate, legal and financial people and the institution has done nothing but suffer for it. Big money both in the endowment and in the collection is the real turn on to too much of the Board and the CMA has suffered from their games. Bidwell is one of the good guys so to speak and I hope that he can effect a hosing out.
DF created similar problems in Ottawa and it actually ended up with the RMCP getting involved. Various allegations including a cover up involving deleted email records. I believe that some of the Board at the CMA knew about these prior problems going in and chose to ignore them. They covered up for him and still are. DF is likely a serial sexual predator. It is sad that someone with so much can’t keep it in his pants and keep them zipped. There have are also a number of very salacious stories circulating about him whether true or not I can’t attest.
Keep looking there is far more to this than even what you unearthed.
Interesting and largely unsubstantiated. I am sure there is another side to the story (there always is).
The PD has many flaws, but its apparent superficial coverage of the story was, most likely, cause for editorial consternation. Newspapers have always been biased, and the PD has always been a cheerleader for Cleveland. The CMA is certainly a gem in Cleveland’s crown, and reporting this story in a positive light is their prerogative.
I see the Scene article as, at worst, rumor mongering. Or, at best, it is guilty of reporting circumstantial evidence. I am sure there is a story there. A responsible reporter would uncover it.
It is tragic what passes for journalism these days.
More than just “circumstantial” evidence will be brought forward soon.
mabeldog…people routinely commit suicide due to personal life events. who knows what happened? dont discount the possibilities (this coming from a medical student). perhaps he was forced out somehow by an unknown person blackmailing him….
in regards to Anonymous’s comments:
i think you are missing something very serious here – the obvious under-reporting of this story by the PD and Mr. Litt.
forwhatever reason, the PD is the leading newspaper in NE Ohio. yet its own self-censorship of this story is alarming. the CMA is a gem in Cleveland and for reason alone, we the readers of the PD need to know the facts about Mr. Franklin’s abrupt resignation. the CMA also received tax dollars and its Board needs to be truthful, factual and transparent. None of which seems to be the case in announcing Mr. Franklin’s resignation.
I am confused why Anonymous would not encourage the PD to at least report some of the facts known about Franklin’s resignation – he had an affair with a young female CMA staffer; she committed suicide 5 months ago; there is a police report detailing the circumstances. Why is this not considered in Franklin’s resignation reporting by the PD? these are facts, and they are not unsubstantiated. by the PD refusal to really do some investigative reporting here, the citizens of NE Ohio are being censored by the powers that be at the PD, and by their willingness to let the CMA Board control the PR/Marketing message. There is a reason the PD continues to decline in readership/circulation. This is a perfect example.
my sympathy to the woman’s family… how sad..
I can not believe David Franklin is allowed to remain at CMA in any capacity!
i believe dee perry will be interviewing Mr. Litt on PBS APPLAUSE show on Thurs. Oct. 24. Please email Ms. Perry today and ask her to ask Mr. Litt the truth finding journalism questions we all want to be asked and answered regarding this sad situation at the CMA leadership level. The CMA Board and Mr. Bitwell may believe and enforce censorship within its institution but it has no right to expect that from the rest of us. And doesn’t the CMA receive federal and state and city monies – our tax dollars to operate? DEMAND TRANSPARENCY FROM THIS INSTITUTION!
Cleveland deserves better. Cleveland deserves a CMA Board that will hire someone responsible for the job. This guy actually disappeared from his last job for a time – yet the Board still hired him! If he had been a woman, with the same qualifications, you know he never would’ve been hired for the CMA job – you know it! But, because he’s an over-confident little man-child he can get away with it and get hired by one of the top ten art museums in the country! I am so sick and tired of powerful men getting away with this stuff and the havoc they create as a result. Any member of the Board who who was on the Board that hired this scumbag should resign – immediately.
What seems to be a sort of collusion between the board of CMA and the PD is all too common, especially in one paper towns and smallish news markets. Doesn’t this situation remind anyone of the Donald Rosenberg affair with the Cleveland Orchestra? And in Minneapolis, the board governing the Minnesota Orchestra includes a top executive from the paper in that town and there is a similar lack of substantive reporting about that board’s poor stewardship and seeming intention to break the musicians union while dismantling the orchestra in the process.
But I don’t think it makes sense to expect CMA to offer up the ugly facts in this story to explain Franklin’s departure. Let’s remember, in Ottawa he sued to get his job back and created a situation that must have been a huge distraction for that institution. You can be sure CMA wants Franklin to go away quietly. The notion that he “resigned” is nonsense, of course; he was removed. It is likely that his “consulting” position is another fig leaf of respectability that will end very quickly. It is not really to help the museum make a transition to interim leadership, it is to “help” push him out without acrimony or litigation, THAT is the “transition.”
Thank goodness SCENE has the will and ability to cover this. One commenter called their article “rumor mongering.” No, I think it’s a bit of JOURNALISM. And the PD article they quote in full on Franklin’s appointment, entirely ignoring the Ottawa museum crisis he created is a telling example of the PD’s collusion masquerading as civic boosterism.
Perhaps she didn’t commit suicide after all. Things are not always what they appear to be. Why has David Franklin retained the services of a criminal lawyer?