Art: The Impermanent Collection

When he died in 1946, Alfred Stieglitz, the great photographer and tireless promoter of modern art, left his estate to his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. His work as a photographer she shrewdly distributed to the large American museums that could be counted on to secure his reputation. But a sizable part of his art collection O’Keeffe deposited in a less predictable place. At the urging of a friend, the Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten, she gave 97 works to Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville. And she threw in a few of her own. One of those was Radiator Building– Night, New York, 1927, a painting we now recognize as a key moment in her career.

Years passed, during which Fisk’s endowment dwindled while the art market went into warp drive. In 2005 the school’s president, Hazel O’Leary, came up with an idea that could not only pay to renovate the frayed campus gallery where the Stieglitz Collection has languished but also pump millions of dollars into Fisk’s general budget. Why not sell off just a bit of that famous art? But when the school moved to bring Radiator Building to market, it triggered what became a lawsuit by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which moved to block the sale on the grounds that it violated the terms of the painter’s bequest. In February the museum offered Fisk a deal. It could sell Radiator Building, but only to the museum, and for $7 million, a price much below what it would go for in the current art market. If Fisk said yes, the museum promised not to block the sale of another painting from the collection, a Marsden Hartley, on the open market. Fisk said yes.

That was where things stood until April 5, when Tennessee attorney general Robert Cooper, whose office has the power to approve or disapprove charitable arrangements, rejected the arranged sale because of the difference between $7 million and what Fisk could get on the open market. Now lawyers for both sides plan to sit down in a judge’s chambers to see if a new deal can be worked out. Eventually, Fisk fully expects to be taking something to market.

Money has always been an obsession in the art world, but lately it’s at the heart of constant disputes over “deaccessioning”–what museums and other institutions do when they liquidate part of their collections. Though as a practice deaccessioning is nothing new, the outlandishly overheated art market of recent years has made it newly irresistible. At a time when a Jackson Pollock or a Gustav Klimt can go for about $140 million, it’s no surprise that one institution after another has begun to see its “permanent collection” as just so much movable merchandise. But art is no ordinary inventory. Briskly disposing of it doesn’t always sit well with people who like to visit the art, to say nothing of the people who donate it and who like to suppose that their gifts won’t be swept out the door a few years down the road.

So the sales are controversial, but they go on. In recent weeks Sotheby’s has been bringing down the hammer on scores of works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. The museum is shedding older pieces, like a Shang Dynasty bronze vessel that went for $8.1 million, to fatten its endowment for the purchase of contemporary art. In recent years its fund for that purpose has hovered at about $1 million annually–chump change in the current market. For Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox, the sale simply allows the museum to focus on its chief purpose. “Our core mission is to collect and to preserve contemporary art,” he says. And he insists that in Buffalo, a Rust Belt city of dwindling wealth, there are not enough big-money donors to enlarge the acquisition budget by other means.

All the same, while the Albright-Knox is mainly a contemporary collection, it’s also the only significant art museum in Buffalo. The local Museum of Science also has examples of Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts, but for anyone in that city hoping to see a range of art, the Albright-Knox is pretty much the only game in town. So its deaccession plan led to an angry public meeting in March at which Grachos was confronted by residents insisting he could have done more to find other sources of money.

There was another kind of uproar in Philadelphia in November when Thomas Jefferson University announced it was going to sell–for $68 million–one of the touchstones of 19th century American painting, The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, who spent nearly all of his turbulent career in Philadelphia. It didn’t help that one of the buyers was Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who wanted it for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which she’s bankrolling in Bentonville, Ark. This would be the same Alice Walton who paid the New York Public Library about $35 million two years ago for Asher B. Durand’s 19th century landscape Kindred Spirits, a local icon that nobody seemed to remember was a local icon until the trucks arrived to take it away. Walton proposed to buy the Eakins jointly with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, then have the two museums shuttle it back and forth. (So that’s what they mean by bankrolling.)

At the prospect of having their cultural patrimony carted off to Arkansas, the good people of Philadelphia reared up like Italians hearing that plundered Roman marbles were being earmarked for Malibu. By the end of January they had cobbled together enough real or potential financing to keep the Eakins at home in a joint purchase by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the much smaller Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), with the same kind of back-and-forth lending between the two institutions. Then came the next shock. To defray its part of the purchase, PAFA announced it was selling a lesser but still important Eakins, The Cello Player. One Eakins saved, one lost.

In its defense, Jefferson University can offer that it’s a university, not an art gallery. Its first responsibility is to the needs of its medical college. Fisk president O’Leary argues something similar. “The major collection we’re investing in,” she says, “is our students.” Still, channeling any money from art deaccessioning into a school’s general revenue is a violation of the guidelines of the American Association of Museums. Those hold that such money should always be plowed back into the art collection. But the association has no real enforcement powers.

No doubt, the temptation offered by the hypertrophic art market can also promote institutional laziness. Why come up with other ways to raise money when whatever paintings you have in hand are a potential and easily accessed gold mine? Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, says Fisk could have explored other ways to keep or share the entire collection and still make some money from it. “Why not look into co-ownership with Mrs. Walton?” he asks. “Or they could offer the collection under some kind of partnership arrangement to another historically black university.”

But in today’s market, it will always be tempting to cash out. In March, just as Philadelphia was congratulating itself for managing to keep The Gross Clinic at home, Jefferson University dropped the other shoe. It abruptly announced it would also be selling its two remaining Eakinses, both of them portraits of 19th century physicians who were once on the school’s faculty. The weary and tapped-out locals have made no significant move to save those.

Meanwhile, the Albright-Knox auctions will continue over the next several weeks. At least some of what’s sold in them will go back up on public display, though not in Buffalo. The buyer of a circa 10th century granite statue of the Hindu god Shiva that went for just over $4 million was the Cleveland Museum of Art, which, unlike the Albright-Knox, already has a substantial Asian collection. But much of the rest will disappear into the possession of dealers and private collectors. In the way of such things, in due time some of it may well make its way back into the public domain. It’s the fate of art to circulate. But make no mistake, due time could be quite a while.