THE director of the art-rich yet cash-poor National Academy Museum in New York expected a backlash when its board decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for around $15 million.
The director, Carmine Branagan, had already approached leaders of two groups to which the academy belonged about the prospect. She knew that both the American Association of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors had firm policies against museums’ selling off artworks because of financial hardship and were not going to make an exception.
Even so, she said, she was not prepared for the directors group’s “immediate and punitive” response to the sale. In an e-mail message on Dec. 5 to its 190 members, it denounced the academy, founded in 1825, for “breaching one of the most basic and important of A.A.M.D.’s principles” and called on members “to suspend any loans of works of art to and any collaborations on exhibitions with the National Academy.”
Ms. Branagan, who had by that time withdrawn her membership from both groups, said she “was shocked by the tone of the letter, like we had committed some egregious crime.”
She called the withdrawal of loans “a death knell” for the museum, adding, “What the A.A.M.D. have done is basically shoot us while we’re wounded.”
Beyond shaping the fate of any one museum, this exchange has sparked larger questions over a principle that has long seemed sacred. Why, several experts ask, is it so wrong for a museum to sell art from its collection to raise badly needed funds? And now that many institutions are facing financial hardship, should the ban on selling art to cover operating costs be eased?
Lending urgency to the discussion are the travails of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which has one of the world’s best collections of contemporary art but whose endowment is said to have shriveled to $6 million from more than $40 million over the last nine years. Wouldn’t it be preferable, some people asked this month, to sell a Mark Rothko painting or a couple of Robert Rauschenberg’s legendary “combines” — the museum owns 11 — than to risk closing its doors? (Ultimately the museum announced a $30 million bailout by the billionaire Eli Broad on Tuesday that would preclude the sales of any artworks.)
Yet defenders of the prohibition warn that such sales can irreparably damage a institution. “Selling an object is a knee-jerk act, and it undermines core principles of a museum,” said Michael Conforti, president of the directors’ association and director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. “There are always other options.”
The sale of artwork from a museum’s permanent collection, known as deaccessioning, is not illegal in the United States, provided that any terms accompanying the original donation of artwork are respected. In Europe, by contrast, many museums are state-financed and prevented by national law from deaccessioning.
But under the code of ethics of the American Association of Museums, the proceeds should be “used only for the acquisition, preservation, protection or care of collections.” The code of the Association of Art Museum Directors is even stricter, specifying that funds should not be used “for purposes other than acquisitions of works of art for the collection.”
Donn Zaretsky, a New York lawyer who specializes in art cases, has sympathized with the National Academy at theartlawblog.blogspot.com, asking why a museum can sell art to buy more art but not to cover overhead costs or a much-needed education center. “Why should we automatically assume that buying art always justifies a deaccessioning, but that no other use of proceeds — no matter how important to an institution’s mission — ever can?” he wrote.
Michael O’Hare, a cultural policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has also broached the issue on samefacts.com, said in a telephone interview, “I see no reason for strict rules about deaccessioning, other than telling the truth to the public and not selling to international trafficking mafias.
“The National Academy is absolutely within their right to say, ‘We’re going to go broke or we’re going to sell off two paintings, what do you think?’ ”
Even Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago known for her strong stance on protecting cultural patrimony, said her position had softened over the years. “If it’s really a life-or-death situation, if it’s a choice between selling a Rauschenberg and keeping the museum doors open, I think there’s some justification for selling the painting,” she said.
But several directors drew a much harder line, noting that museums get tax-deductible donations of art and cash to safeguard art collections for the public. Selling off any holdings for profit would thus betray that trust, they say, not to mention rob a community of art, so no exceptions for financial hardships should be allowed.
Dan Monroe, a board member of the directors’ group and the director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., said that almost any museum can claim financial hardship, especially now that endowments are suffering. “It’s wrong to look at the situation from the standpoint of a single institution,” he said. “You have to look at what would happen if every institution went this route.”
It’s a classic slippery slope, this thinking goes: Letting one museum sell off two paintings paves the way for dozens of museums to sell off thousands of artworks, perhaps routinely. “The fact is as soon as you breach this principle, everybody’s got a hardship case” Mr. Monroe said. “It would be impossible to control the outcome.”
Graham Beal, another member of the directors’ group, is the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which has had operating shortfalls of more than $10 million a year for several years now. He suggested another reason directors feel the stakes are so high: the pressure to raise money, he said, is intense.
Mr. Beal said he often fields questions from new trustees about selling artworks: “Since we have four van Goghs, people say why don’t we sell one of the van Goghs?”
“It makes perfect sense in the business world, where they’re looking for assets to sell the way Ford sold Jaguar,” he said.
Many museum trustees are themselves collectors and may have been tempted during the recent art-market boom to think of art as a commodity to be bought and sold at will. That attitude may explain why so many museum directors are using their trade group to build a strong firewall around the idea of a permanent collection. They are speaking not just to each other but to their own trustees.
“If it were suddenly legitimate to sell artworks and use the proceeds for anything other than acquisitions,” Mr. Beal contended, “there would be a wholesale cannibalization of many museums.”
Historically the most vulnerable collections have belonged to university museums, where the core values of the university can trump those of the museum. In 2005 the financially strapped Fisk University in Nashville moved to sell paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, until the courts found this would violate the terms of O’Keeffe’s gift of the two works to the institution. In 2006 Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia struck a deal to sell Thomas Eakins’s “Gross Clinic,” from 1875, for $68 million. Philadelphia museums matched the price to keep the work in town.
And last year the president of Randolph College in Virginia oversaw the removal of four paintings, including George Bellows’s 1912 “Men of the Docks,” from the campus art museum before dispatching them to Christie’s. The museum’s director, Karol Lawson, who compared the experience to a mugging, promptly resigned and is now researching a book on deaccessioning.
Ms. Lawson suggests that deaccessioning controversies reflect nothing less than two competing visions of art: commodity versus educational tool. At Randolph, she said, “the people who wanted to sell the art were saying it’s the same thing as a truck or computer or a chair.” (Make that a very nice truck — Randolph’s 1945 Rufino Tamayo painting, “Troubadour,” sold at Christie’s in April for $7.2 million. The Bellows is sitting in a Christie’s warehouse, pending a rebound in the art market.)
Stand-alone museums have more safeguards against this kind of decision — or more safekeepers, in curators invested in the idea of art’s intrinsic value. But deaccessioning has proven thorny for museums even when the money is directed into accepted channels like acquisitions.
Sometimes the controversy centers on the irreplaceable nature of the object for sale, as when Thomas Hoving, then the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began aggressively pruning its collection in the early 1970s, selling high-profile paintings like van Gogh’s “Olive Pickers” and Rousseau’s “Tropics.” The Metropolitan owned only one other painting by Rousseau, and the backlash was fierce.
At other times the outrage arises when curators seem to refocus the collection. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo became a magnet for this kind of dispute when it decided to sell more than 200 older artworks to bolster its strengths in modern and contemporary art. The sales netted $67 million last year, but local residents decried the loss of art in the area.
Yet critics of strict deaccessioning rules make a public-access argument as well. “Most big museums can’t show 90 percent of the objects they own — it’s all in storage,” said Mr. O’Hare at Berkeley. “What’s wrong with selling these objects to smaller museums or even private collectors, who are more likely to put them on display?”
At the National Academy Ms. Branagan said that the two paintings already sold (there are plans to sell two more) went to a foundation — she said she did not know which one; the sale was arranged privately — that has agreed to display them publicly. She said that some proceeds would be used to create permanent exhibition galleries to bring more of the academy’s 7,300-piece collection out of storage.
Yet she did call this kind of deaccessioning an act of last resort, one that she would not have considered without a “long-range financial and programmatic” plan. Ms. Branagan said she told her members as much before they voted for the sale — 181 to 2 in favor — in November:
“I remember saying: Unless you believe you can support sweeping change, then do not vote for deaccessioning. The tragedy isn’t that we’re going to sell these four pieces. That’s not a tragedy. The tragedy would be if in 10 or 15 years we were back here having the same conversation.”
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