Barbara Fleischman, the New York art collector who with her husband donated and sold more than 300 prized antiquities to the Getty Museum in 1996 and then quietly made a personal loan to the curator who arranged the deal, resigned from the Getty board Wednesday.
Her move comes nine weeks after Getty Trust officials revealed the loan, which was to then-antiquities curator Marion True, and called it an obvious conflict of interest, sparking calls for Fleischman's resignation.
Instead, she hung on as the trust prepared to unveil the lavishly renovated Getty Villa, an antiquities museum that showcases the donations and largesse of the Fleischmans.
But Wednesday, just three days before the grand opening, she relented and left the board.
Neither she nor Getty officials gave a reason for the departure.
"Her behavior is certainly questionable, and it could stain the reputation of the institution," said Warren Bennis, a USC business professor and management expert.
"I have been expecting it," said Selma Holo, director of USC's International Museum Institute. "From an optimistic perspective, I believe this could be interpreted as a signal that the Getty leadership, from the top down, will now be beyond any possible reproach."
Long before revelation of the loan, the gift and sale to the Getty by Fleischman and her husband, Lawrence, who died in 1997, had sent ripples through the art world. Landing their collection, widely considered one of the best in the world, was a coup for the Getty.
But the acquisition also sparked a debate over the hand-in-glove relationship between museums on the one hand and, on the other, dealers with access to items that lacked documented ownership histories and probably had been looted from archeological sites and illegally exported.
The Fleischmans sold more than 30 Greek and Roman artifacts to the Getty for $20 million and donated about 300 more with an estimated value of $40 million. The couple had acquired many of their items through dealers Giacomo Medici, who was convicted last year of trafficking in looted art, and Robert E. Hecht Jr., who is now on trial in Italy with former Getty curator True on similar charges.
"We were absolute innocents," Fleischman told The Times last year. "We thought we were buying it from legitimate dealers. Looking back at it, maybe it was naive."
