Sam Maslon grew up on the north side of Minneapolis in the early 1900s, when the neighborhood was a Jewish enclave. His family was poor, but he managed to go to Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He rented a room in the home of law professor Felix Frankfurter, a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1923 he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Everything seemed to be lining up.
And then he returned to Minneapolis. The city was a capital of anti-Semitism in the 1920s, and would be through the 1950s. No law firm would hire him.
So he started his own. After a couple decades on his own, Maslon was joined by other Jewish attorneys as accomplished as he was—as late as the 1950s, their firm was reportedly one of only three in the Twin Cities that would hire Jewish lawyers. Many of their early clients were Jewish, too. Eventually they prospered.
Featured in the same newspaper story: Bruce Dayton with his first wife, Gwendolen Brandt, and Kirchner’s “View of Zurich” in their Wayzata home.
By the time this photo was taken, in 1958, Maslon and his wife, Luella, were living in Deephaven, on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, and were among the top art collectors in Minnesota. The image ran in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune as part of a feature on local collectors. True to the times, the wives went unnamed: Mr. and Mrs. Samuel H. Maslon, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Dayton, Mrs. John S. Pillsbury.
The thrust of the story was that art collecting was becoming a more popular pastime, broadening from the super-rich to the merely wealthy. “Back in the 19th century,” the article noted, “the state’s ‘big’ collectors could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, while today their number could be multiplied ten times. … Gambling on an artist’s fame and his possible increment of skill and value is part of the fun for the middle-incomed collector.”
It was, if nothing else, an excuse to show fancy people in their fancy homes with beautiful modern art.
Most if not all of the featured collectors were being coached by Richard Davis, then the director of Mia and a zealous advocate of modern art. He advised them on artists and galleries and purchases with the hope if not the promise of the art eventually coming to the museum. The Maslons were among his best pupils, and here they’re posing with Amedeo Modigliani’s Little Servant Girl, painted in Paris in 1916. It had made its way to Los Angeles in 1948, where it was briefly owned by the actress Fanny Brice; when she died, in 1951, the Maslons bought it.
A year after the newspaper story came out, the couple did gift Modigliani’s beguiling portrait to Mia, where it has become a visitor favorite. And Richard Davis, who had been selling off antiquities and other older art to fund modern acquisitions, resigned his post.
The Maslons’ home in Palm Springs.
The Maslons went on collecting modern and contemporary artworks, from Matisse to Motherwell—when their collection was auctioned in 2002, a year after Luella’s death, it was estimated to be worth $25 to $33 million. They had displayed many of the works in the glassy winter home they commissioned in 1962 from modernist icon Richard Neutra in Palm Springs, situated between two fairways on a country club golf course. It was a long way from North Minneapolis.