Art Market Monitor

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Map of Deaccessioning

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Tyler Green published this extraordinary and valuable compendium of deaccessioned works. Among the museums that Green has covered (with the painstaking work of linking to the auction house posting on each work) are the Hirshhorn, St. Louis’s Kemper Museum and St. Louis Art Museum, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Delaware Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art and the Montclair Museum. Here’s a sample of the linking:

The Palm Springs Art Museum has been a busy deaccessioner in recent auctions. This season it’s selling a vaguely Duchampian 1957 Robert Irwin painting, a Kenneth Noland and an Alexander Liberman.

The Art Institute of Chicago has not been a prominent deaccessioner in recent seasons. It is offering a minor Julian Alden Weir portrait, Louis McClellan Potter (2), Anna Hyatt Huntington, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (2), Walter Ufer, Pauline Palmer, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, and five paintings by Arthur B. Davies: Summer and the Mother-Hearted, Evening Among the Ruins, Lake and Island, Sierra Nevada, Dirge in Spring, and Leda and the Dioscuri.

Early Fall Deaccessioning Roundup (Modern Art Notes)

Behind the Fisk-Crystal Bridges Deal

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Lindsay Pollock takes a trip to Fisk College to tell the story of the controversial Crystal Bridges deal. Though it would appear that Pollock is advocating for the deal as she writes a highly sympathetic tale of a college seeking to fulfill its mission by maximizing the value of its assets in a way that benefits both the college and the increasingly important Crystal Bridges Museum. Here’s Pollock’s description of Fisk, the Stieglitz collection that Georgia O’Keeefe donated and the compromise:

The approximately 650-square foot gallery, installed in an elegant 1889 brick building which once served as Fisk’s gymnasium, has been closed over the summer while a flurry of improvements were completed, including a fresh coat of white paint, a new sleek bamboo floor and more than twenty security cameras, protecting 101 artworks appraised at $75 million.Continue Reading

De-Accessioning Double Standard

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Forgive the late link on this item from the LA Times’s Culture Monster blog but the glaring double standard in Christopher Knight’s post is hard to let pass. One of the central arguments of the strict anti-de-accessionists is the public’s right to see the art that has been placed in trust for them by private individuals. Knight is one of the most vocal proponents of public over private stewardship of art.

So it is odd to see him reverse course and argue now that donor intent is paramount. Here’s his musing on the Rose Museum lawsuit in the context of the Barnes Foundation litigation:

Ever since news of the Brandeis scheme rocked the art world six months ago, the tragic fate of the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia has been rumbling around in my head.

In what has been called the “legal theft” of a multibillion-dollar art collection, a group of powerful Philadelphia philanthropies, politicians, businessmen and others finagled the planned relocation of the foundation’s unparalleled collection of Post-Impressionist, early Modern and other art from its unique Brad C. Bower AP Barnes Foundation suburban home to a downtown spot on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway — a grand total of less than eight miles, but light-years away from the non-commercial, domestic environment the donor envisioned, constructed and gave to Pennsylvania for safekeeping. Aside from the waste of at least $150 million in private and public money to make the move, the relocation plan represents a 180-degree departure from the charitable intentions of the late founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes.Continue Reading

Rose Rage

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The saga of the Rose Museum at Brandeis University continues with three of the museum’s overseers suing the university over the closure. The New York Times has a brief item on the suit:

In their suit the overseers — Jonathan O. Lee, Lois Foster and Meryl Rose, a member of the family whose donations created the museum in 1961 — contend that Brandeis’s plans to close the museum “contradict the charitable intentions” of the museum’s founders, “abrogate Brandeis’s promises that the Rose would be maintained in perpetuity” as a modern and contemporary art museum, and violate its commitments to those who donated art to the museum.Continue Reading

Deaccessioning Takes Hold in the UK

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The Telegraph‘s Rupert Christiansen catalogues recent attempts in the UK to raise cash through art sales:

As part of an effort to raise £15 million for a new museum devoted to the Titanic, Southampton City Council has decided to trawl through the 3,500 works of art owned by its outstandingly good Art Gallery and send a selection of them off to the open market.Continue Reading

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