The Brooklyn Museum, aided by the New York State attorney general’s office, has been working to get around this roadblock. But one final hurdle has been set by a Manhattan Surrogate Court judge. Noting that the will specified that the art should go to the colonel’s brother-in-law and two friends if the collection was not kept together, Judge Nora Anderson told the museum in December 2011 that it must search for these three men’s descendants before she would rule. The museum has yet to begin looking as it confers with the attorney general’s office on how to proceed.

James Fanelli reported the museum’s conundrum last week in DNAinfo.com, a New York news site.

The problem of what to do with the unwanted items has arisen as the Brooklyn Museum tries to reclaim gallery space that has long been devoted to storage. When the museum accepted the Friedsam collection in the early 1930s, its sprawling Beaux-Arts building on the edge of Prospect Park had vast spaces to fill.

As officials explain in their court filing, the opposite problem now plagues the museum, which at one point had as many as 1.5 million objects, some of them inauthentic, trivial or no longer in keeping with its mission — like three battle-axes from Mr. Friedsam. The Brooklyn Museum, like many other institutions, regularly reviews its collection, taking new information, techniques and inventory into account.

If it is unable to reduce the number of works kept behind the scenes, the museum may have to rent additional storage space, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ms. Lisk said.