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Kimmelmann writes today:
In the early 1970's the Metropolitan Museum privately sold off works by van Gogh and Henri Rousseau, among others. It caused a scandal. The New York attorney general stepped in. Twenty years later, the Guggenheim, which had been selling off Kandinskys by the dozens, caused a ruckus when it disposed of a Chagall, a Modigliani and a Kandinsky at an auction that finally caught the public's attention.
Lately, without nearly enough public accountability, the Museum of Modern Art has become a regular Kwik-E-Mart of art sales. It has turned over, among much else, an early Francis Bacon to a London dealer and a Cubist view by Picasso of the Spanish town of Horta de Ebro, a rare picture that originally belonged to Gertrude Stein. The newly expanded Modern said it no longer needed it because it was getting another, better view of Horta de Ebro from David Rockefeller.
It sold the work to another dealer. So much for public custody.
The last straw is my own new hobbyhorse, the New York Public Library's sale of Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," one of the great Hudson River School landscapes, a civic treasure. The work was bought last week for $35 million by Alice Walton, a Wal-Mart heir, in a closed auction at Sotheby's.
It's time for transparency. Increasingly, we demand it from government, the media and Wall Street, in response to dwindling public faith. The same should apply to libraries and museums, which also regularly test our trust. They have many excuses for selling art (to raise money for better works, to prune overcrowded storage) and most of what's sold shouldn't raise eyebrows. But it's the exceptions that count.
And the Durand auction - a hasty and secretive process that virtually ensured that the work, integral to the city's heritage, would not end up in a New York museum - suggests that the people in charge of the sale knew perfectly well that this was one was different.
Sotheby's strategy gained a nest egg for the library but squandered the public's good will, a priceless commodity. Who knows how much the sale may cost the library in terms of prospective donors who will be deterred by the prospect that their own gifts could someday end up in some secretive auction.
So in the future, I suggest new rules: besides giving local museums a reasonable period of time to match the price of any art sold by any public- which is to say any nonprofit - institution, there should be more open procedures and time for public scrutiny. Total transparency. The closed bid Sotheby's swiftly organized favored a private buyer who was free to dispense piles of her own cash. It also raised red flags. Sotheby's has been an occasional adviser to Ms. Walton. So is John Wilmerding, an art historian whom she is reported to have enlisted to help put together her collection for her prospective museum in Arkansas, where the Durand is said to be going.
Tags:
asher durand, henri rousseau, kimmelmann, kindred spirits, public library
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Posted on 5/18/2005
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