What was the Fleischer Museum?
For twelve years, one of the country’s best collections of California Impressionist painting hung, free to anyone, in an office building in north Scottsdale. Mort and Donna Fleischer opened the Fleischer Museum in 1990 in the Perimeter Center headquarters of his company, Franchise Finance Corporation of America, which lent money to restaurant and convenience-store franchisees across the country.
It was, by Wikipedia’s account and its own, the first museum in the United States devoted to California Impressionism: the painters who worked outdoors along the Pacific coast and in the California hills in the early 1900s. Guy Rose, Franz Bischoff, Edgar Payne and William Wendt were the core of a collection the couple had begun in 1983 and grew past 300 works.
It closed in November 2002, the year after GE Capital agreed to buy FFCA. The Fleischers kept the paintings, and the building is offices again.
How it worked
The collection. In 1983 Mort Fleischer saw a Franz Bischoff at Petersen Galleries in Los Angeles and, as Fine Art Connoisseur tells it, was immediately hooked. His first purchases were that December. By 1986 there was a book, Masterworks of California Impressionism, on what was then the FFCA–Morton H. Fleischer Collection. The couple’s favorite was Guy Rose’s Mist over Point Lobos, from about 1918.
The museum. A nonprofit, with Donna Fleischer as director and no admission fee. Jean Stern, the California Impressionism scholar who had advised the Fleischers on buying, consulted on its founding and stayed on as an adviser. It ran a Cultural Arts Series of lectures on the third Sunday of each month from October to April and a Great Masters concert series. Its exhibitions included the Irvine Museum’s first traveling show in 1992, a catalog of Russian and Soviet Impressionism in 1994, Masterworks of American Sculpture with the National Sculpture Society in 1999, and Feminine Visions: Women of the California School, 1890–1930s in 2000 and 2001.
The end. GE Capital announced in April 2001 that it would buy FFCA. The museum closed in November 2002. A fan site of the time reported plans to reopen in downtown Scottsdale, which didn’t happen. The collection went to a climate-controlled gallery on the Fleischers’ ranch in Rio Verde, where Phoenix Home & Garden has photographed it hung floor to ceiling on navy walls. In 2019 the Irvine Museum published Stern’s book on it.
The sources, and what they leave open
Main sources: Fine Art Connoisseur’s 2020 profile of the collection; Phoenix Home & Garden on the Fleischers’ gallery; Wikipedia’s Jean Stern article; the Traditional Fine Arts Organization’s exhibition listings, which record the closing; catalogs in university libraries; Entrepreneur on the GE Capital deal; and a 1993 Arizona Republic listing for the address, read in a snippet.
What’s unsettled:
- How long it ran. 1990 to 2002 in most sources; Phoenix Home & Garden says “about a dozen years” in one piece and sixteen in another.
- The founding year. One business directory says 1989, likely the nonprofit’s incorporation.
- Why it closed. The timing points at the FFCA sale, but no source says so.
- “The first.” The claim is Wikipedia’s and the museum’s, uncited elsewhere. The Irvine Museum in California, the best-known museum of the school, came a few years later, in the early 1990s.
- The space. Whether the galleries were inside FFCA’s offices or in their own wing, and who designed them, isn’t recorded.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic and Scottsdale Tribune for the 1990 opening and the 2002 closing, and the museum’s own catalogs and newsletters.
Why it matters
Scottsdale’s museums mostly told the Western story. The Fleischer brought in a California school of painting that was being rediscovered just then, made it free, and put it in an office park near the Airpark. It’s also a reminder that some of the city’s cultural life has depended on a single family or company. When FFCA was sold, the museum ended, and the paintings went back to being a private collection.