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On Wednesday last week, New York's Museum of Modern Art unveiled its most recent gift, and one of the most significant in its history: Robert Rauschenberg's "Canyon" (1959). Rauschenberg was among the leading American artists of the post-World War II era, and "Canyon" is a "combine," a kind of large-scale, three-dimensional collage that includes photographs, pieces of wood, a mirror, a pillow and a stuffed bald eagle.
The arrival of "Canyon" at MoMA is the culmination of a five-year absurdist farce—one tinged more by Kafka than Feydeau—that involved the IRS, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the heirs of art dealer Ileana Sonnabend. It might have been laughable, except that the stakes were so high.
Sonnabend, a dealer and collector, died in 2007, leaving a collection of art by Rauschenberg as well as such contemporaries as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. It was valued at about $1 billion. Her heirs, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem, paid about $471 million in taxes on the value of the collection, selling some $600 million worth of art from it to do so.
But "Canyon" was another story. The presence of the stuffed eagle meant it couldn't be sold without violating the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Since the artwork couldn't be sold, logic dictated that it be listed as having zero value, which is what the Sonnabend family's three appraisers, one of them Christie's auction house, did.
But don't look for "logic" in any government dictionary. In the summer of 2011, the IRS sent the family an unsigned report appraising "Canyon" at $15 million. When they rejected the valuation, the government upped the ante: The appraisal was increased to $65 million, which yielded a $29.2 million tax bill. And the IRS levied a special "undervaluation penalty" of 40%, applied in cases where a party has made what the IRS deems a "gross understatement" of a property's value. That added $11.2 million to the tab. Plus interest.
Only in the fantasy bazaar of the U.S. government's imagination can an item that is worthless carry a multimillion-dollar price tag.
Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem had another option: donate "Canyon" to a museum. But since they were declaring that it had no value, they would have to forfeit the charitable deductions that normally accrue to individuals in such cases. In the end, this is what they chose to do. "Canyon," which had been on extended loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now joins five other Rauschenberg combines at MoMA. In exchange, the government has dropped its $40 million-plus claim against Sonnabend's estate.
"Canyon" had, in fact, been in the feds' sights long before this particular debacle. According to a New York Times story last summer, in the early 1980s the combine had caught the attention of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which tried to seize it from Sonnabend.
A deal was struck allowing her to keep possession as long as the work remained on public display. The issue resurfaced a few years later. In 1988, Rauschenberg himself had to submit a notarized letter stating that the eagle had been killed and stuffed by one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders long before the 1940 law went into effect.
Someone inherits a piece of art, pays the estate taxes on it, then gets pursued by the IRS again which says it can't be sold rendering it worthless, then bills them $29 million in taxes plus an undervaluing fee plus interest. Seriously? 
