Yeah, But What Is It Worth?
Inside the Rose Art Museum.
Is it art or is it collateral?
Earlier this year, when Brandeis University voted to close its celebrated Rose Art Museum and put its works up for sale, art connoisseurs were apoplectic. Established in 1961, the Rose Art Museum is one of the great prizes of the Waltham, Mass., university and hawking its collection to the highest bidder seemed not only impetuous, but indecent. Where was the reverence, to say nothing of the gratitude for a collection begun with a $1 million gift from magnanimous donors?
Gratitude, to say nothing of decency, collapsed along with the stock market. Brandeis, like everybody else, has seen its endowment crumple under the weight of the economic downturn. Its endowment, like those of individuals and foundations, has dipped 30 percent in the past year. It faces a budget gap of nearly $79 million and has been madly trying to staunch its financial hemorrhaging by raising tuition and fees, paring expenses and not filling positions. But that hasn’t been enough. Like destitute Americans losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills, Brandeis is looking to pawn the family jewels to keep the house afloat.
Nobody who has watched the contemporary art market over the last 10 years can be astonished that anybody with a collection of paintings by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Wharhol would try to hawk them to pay the bills. The same folks clutching their chests in incredulous revulsion helped the art market spin crazily out of control, making masterpieces by the world’s greatest artists unaffordable to the world’s greatest museums.
Throughout history, monarchs who have been up against it have dipped into the state treasury and hocked their jewel-encrusted baubles for a flash of solvency. It’s hard to reproach Brandeis for its rashness. And after all, somebody’s going to get those Willem de Koonings and Helen Frankenthaler. One man’s loss is another man’s fortune.
But the size and scale of the Rose sell-off is unprecedented. And precedent is what’s at issue here. If one school can cannibalize its museum to sustain its student center, what’s to keep other, more august universities – like Princeton, Harvard or Yale – from doing the same? Moreover, if a university makes a habit of auctioning off its art works, why in heaven’s name would anyone ever donate a piece of work to such an institution again?
The predicament at Brandeis may seem arcane to those who have never been in an art museum, or those who have little use for the contemporary American works in which the Rose specializes. But the Rose predicament encapsulates the pickle in which most of us find ourselves in these recessionary days. Something has got to give – the massage or the meat. We have been forced into a frugality whose dynamics reveal our values. What really matters to us? “Our deeds determine us,” George Elliot wrote, “even as we define our deeds.”
Marsden Hartley.
Americans, always a practical lot, have never given art the kind of inviolability Europeans have. In Europe, for example, where most museums are state-owned, directors cannot sell off (or “deaccession”) paintings. It’s not prohibited in this country, but it is sneered upon. Ethically, museums are supposed to sell art only to buy, repair or preserve art. But as anybody frantically trying to make a mortgage knows, ethics too often take a back seat to expedience.
When the National Academy Museum in New York decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for $15 million, art lovers went berserk. Recently, the New York State Legislature introduced a bill to prohibit museums from selling art to fuel their operation expenses. Many in New York have still not recovered from the indelicacy of the New York Public Library selling Asher B. Durand’s iconic “Kindred Spirit” to that brazen upstart, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, for $35 million in 2005. One museum curator I talked to could barely contain a sob at the mention of the sale.
Those of us who benefit from university museums such as those at Yale or the University of Connecticut, will obviously be wounded by Brandeis’reckless and ultimately counterproductive decision. But the real losers are universities, where so much of the painstaking, penetrating and innovative research in art incubates. These researchers discover and help define how we look at art, as much as what art we look at. Take a walk through the engrossing exhibit on Darwin and the visual arts at the Yale Center for British Art, or the Picasso and Visual Language at Yale University Art Gallery. These exhibits are of the sort, as Holland Carter has noted, that are too small and specific to be housed at larger museums.
One of the most freakishly engrossing exhibits I’ve seen was one on Adolph Hilter’s years as a painter in Vienna. The exhibit was at Williams College Art Museum and it was chillingly perceptive. It was also preposterous to imagine seeing the exhibit at a larger institution.
The family of the Rose Art Museum’s benefactors has already objected to the “plundering” of its collection. The Massachusetts Attorney General is looking into whether the sale would violate the family’s will. Perhaps the art work will be saved – or perhaps we will be looking at the first in what may be a sustained attack on the body of art that is testament to our greatest possibilities.
Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com