College pays bills by selling its art
Under-the-radar sales highlight financial strain at many universities
When Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, Tenn., tried to sell two paintings several years ago from its storied Alfred Stieglitz art collection, a firestorm erupted. The proposed sale violated conditions of the gift of the collection from Stieglitz’s widow, Georgia O’Keeffe, according to her foundation.
A drawn-out legal challenge ended in a compromise in 2012 that allowed Fisk to share its collection with Crystal Bridges, the Arkansas museum founded by Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress, bringing the struggling university an infusion of $30 million.
But what was not revealed at the time, and has only recently come to light, is that before the agreement was completed — and with the debate over the future of Fisk itself swirling around her — Hazel O’Leary, then the university’s president and a former U.S. energy secretary, quietly sold off two other paintings owned by Fisk.
The institution was “under duress,” said Patrick Albano of Aaron Galleries, an art dealer from Illinois whom O’Leary asked to broker the sale.
One painting was Florine Stettheimer’s exuberantly detailed Asbury Park South.
Its sale represented the first time a major work by Stettheimer, the beloved New York modernist artist and salon hostess, had come on the market in 20 years.
According to Albano, Fisk decided to sell work by Stettheimer and the well-known illustrator Rockwell Kent, which had been donated to the university with “no strings attached.”
Another dealer ultimately bought the Stettheimer painting, offering it for sale at the Armory Show in New York in 2012.
When Michael Rosenfeld, a gallery owner, saw Asbury Park South, halfway out of a crate, “I literally got on my knees, and said to the person in the booth, ‘I have to have this painting,’ ” he recalled. “It was virtually impossible to own a major painting” by Stettheimer, he added. Rosenfeld scooped it up for an undisclosed amount.
Fisk’s under-the-radar sale of the Stettheimer highlights the minefield institutions must navigate when they use proceeds from art to pay operating expenses or, in recent years, to try to finance costly expansions. At the same time, the sale reveals what can happen when an artist — even one as critically revered as Stettheimer — fails to secure her legacy.
“Shame on them,” said Lyndel King, director of the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota and a chairwoman of the Task Force for the Protection of University Collections, referring to Fisk’s actions. “It’s very much against the ethics of our profession.”
Though the task force does not have legal authority over universities, its members, who represent several museum associations, can censure those who sell art to pay operating expenses, putting pressure on them not to treat art as an ATM. That practice “alienates donors and undermines the purpose of having a museum on campus,” King said.
Various museum associations say that de-accessioning art, if not in violation of the original gift, is justified if the proceeds are used to buy more art. It is the cherry-picking of a painting here and a painting there to bolster an endowment or support operating expenses that is frowned upon.
Universities, however, have argued in several settings that they must consider such sales when the fiscal alternatives — cutting programs or staff — are untenable.
“We’re managing everything at Fisk today in such a manner that we hope we are never confronted with having to make that kind of decision again,” said Frank Sims, the university’s interim president.
When King’s own institution made plans to expand its Frank Gehry-designed space, “a couple of our advisory board members said, ‘Why don’t you just sell your Georgia O’Keeffe? ’ ”
Called Oriental Poppies, it was the Weisman Museum’s most valuable work. “We convinced them there was another way,” King said, and the new wing was financed without selling art.
Born into a wealthy German Jewish family, Stettheimer had no need to sell her art during her lifetime, and the way her paintings were distributed after her death in 1944, at 72 — with most going to institutions — has meant that few of her important works have been offered for sale since.
Painted in 1920, Asbury Park South is set at a restricted beach in New Jersey. Most of the figures are African-American, but Stettheimer included herself and white friends like Marcel Duchamp and the writer and critic Carl Van Vechten in the crowded and lively scene.
A central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, with close ties to Fisk, Van Vechten suggested to Stettheimer’s sister Ettie that the painting be donated to the university, just as he encouraged O’Keeffe’s larger gift from her husband’s collection of modernist art. Both gifts were made in 1949.
Francis Naumann, one of the few art dealers who have handled Stettheimer’s work, said that when Rosenfeld showed him Asbury Park South after he bought it, “it took my breath away.” Naumann said he believed the painting could be worth as much as $3 million.
Rosenfeld said he and his fellow gallerist Halley K. Harrisburg, to whom he is married, plan to keep the painting. (They have lent it to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine for O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York, through Sept. 18.)
King said the sale of museum collections to fund operating expenses, which began with art museums, has extended to other institutions, like those with valuable paleontology collections.
The problem, according to King, is most acute at small private universities, where museum directors often are not strong enough to stand up for their collections.
But what happens when an entire school faces closing, when there isn’t enough money to pay basic expenses, let alone maintain a gallery or museum? That was Fisk’s predicament as it fought to sell an interest in the Stieglitz Collection, with O’Leary telling the court that her university would “bleed to death” if it did not sell art.
Stettheimer is having a moment — including at Fisk.
Jamaal Sheats, the new director of Fisk University’s galleries, has organized an exhibition, Origins of Influence, using 43 works from the Stieglitz Collection.
Its centerpiece? A Stettheimer portrait of Alfred Stieglitz.