The Whitney Museum of Sotheby’s Art sale is a scandal

Lifestyle

By Georgina Adam

May 13, 2023 | 10:00am

The art world is up in arms, from collectors to curators – donors to docents.

They are all furious about a host of major museums selling works by some of America’s best-loved artists. 

And one of the most contentious of these sell-offs is happening this week at the venerable Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan.

No less than eight works have been sent by the Whitney to Sotheby’s, with the priciest piece up for auction at the house’s glamorous evening sale on Tuesday.

This is Edward Hopper’s major oil, “Cobb’s Barns, South Truro,” which was painted in 1931 and is expected to fetch between $8 million and $12 million.

Three other less valuable Hopper watercolors will also be auctioned, along with works by John Marin and Maurice Brazil Prendergast.

These, which carry lower estimates, are included in a day sale on Wednesday.

Worse still, say the critics: the Hoppers are part of a mammoth bequest of more than 3,000 works given to the Whitney by the artist’s widow Josephine in 1968. “Cobb’s Barn” is considered the jewel in the group, as it was chosen by Barack Obama during his presidency and loaned to the Oval Office.

It is one of the largest works Hopper painted and was recently featured in a major survey of the artist’s landscapes at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.

Deaccessioning – or the process of museums selling works from their collection – is nothing new.

Back in 1967, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold off works donated by the estate of Adelaide Milton de Groot.

Deaccessioning continued in the 1980s and 1990s; in 1989, for instance, the Museum of Modern Art garnered $13.6 million through the sale of works including a Pablo Picasso piece.

But by this century the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) had stepped in to tighten deaccessioning guidelines.

COVID, however, upended the conversation around deaccessioning.

With their doors shut and their finances cratering, in April 2020, the AAMD relaxed its previous rules around deaccessioning.

This shift allowed members to use the proceeds of sales to shore up their finances or care for their collections during the pandemic (the policy remains valid today).

Why does the AAMD matter?

It can impose sanctions for breaches of the guidelines, making it difficult for the member to organize exhibitions or obtain works on loan.

In the most serious cases, it can even expel museums, leading to the loss of tax-exempt status.

This is not the first time the Whitney has deaccessioned, or tried to deaccession some of its group of Hoppers.

In 2013 it sent two watercolors from the same bequest for sale but only succeeded in selling one. 

The Whitney argues that the museum’s mission is to display living American artists – certainly not the case for Hopper, Marin, and Prendergast – and that there are redundancies in its current holdings.

“It was determined that the works were duplicative within the collection,” said the Whitney to The Post in a statement about the forthcoming auction. 

As a result today, today it is rare for museums to sell works from their collections, although it may be tolerated if the money raised is to bolster holdings elsewhere in the museum.

Any museum displaying contemporary art has a similar dilemma.

To stay fresh and up to date, it has to constantly acquire new works – but what to do with duplicates?

Or older works?

Are they still as relevant as they were 20 years ago?

A museum has to deal with the costs of conserving and storing these works even if they are no longer on display.

Wouldn’t it be better to sell and buy something more in the spirit of our times?

“The museum field has long been divided between ‘deaccession absolutists’ (who will never accept sales of artworks) and ‘deaccession relativists’ (who are open to it in certain situations),” comments the cultural advisor András Szánto, author of a number of books on museums. “In the pandemic, the pendulum swung toward deaccession relativism. Where it will ultimately settle is an open question,” he says. 

In addition, many museum collections are still dominated by works from mostly white, male, and dead artists.

To attract a more diverse audience and to display a broader spectrum of artistic creation, museums have been boosting their holdings of works by people of color and women, and selling other works to fund the initiatives.

For example, in 2019 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) sold Mark Rothko’s maroon and gray canvas, “Untitled,” (1960) for $50.1 million and used the proceeds to buy works by “diverse” artists such as Alma Thomas, American surrealist Kay Sage, British abstract painter Frank Bowling and Mickalene Thomas.

There is still a long way to go.

Two enterprising journalists, Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, analyzed US museum acquisitions and found that between 2008 and 2022 only 11% were of work by female artists and just  2.2% were by African Americans.

“There are some great examples of museums making smart choices to deaccession works of art and using the proceeds . . . [to] build more interesting collections,” says Burns. Adds Halperin: “Museums are gifted a huge volume of art — and it makes no sense to pay to conserve and store art that no one will see when there are holes in their collections.”

So in theory, deaccessioning is a good thing: it clears out insignificant works and allows the acquisition of art more relevant to our time.

But not everyone agrees.

According to Christopher Knight, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles-based critic and violent opponent of museum sell-offs, the excuse of the COVID pandemic has led, he wrote in 2020, to a “colossal art museum scandal . . . [that] threatens to take other museums with it” in regards to deaccessioning.

Museum advocates argue that what may be out of fashion today may be prized tomorrow – they cite the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s lamentable decision to sell works by Vincent van Gogh, Douanier Rousseau, and Jean August Dominique Ingres back in the 1970s, and at prices today’s curators can only dream of.

The Rousseau, from that de Groot bequest, sold privately, for only a $700,000-$1 million valuation, a fraction of its worth today.

From Indianapolis to Ohio to Brooklyn, museums put up works for sale after the AAMD relaxed its rules during the pandemic.

In 2020, the Brooklyn Museum of Art sold 10 Old Masters including a fetching nude by the 16th-century painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, raising $6.6 million for “collection maintenance.”

Not all proposed deaccessions go through.

Such was the outcry when the Baltimore Museum of Art tried to raise $65 million by selling off three prized paintings in 2020 – by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol – that the sale was called off at the last minute.

And just last month, Richard Brauer, founding director of Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art, filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse its plan to sell a Georgia O’Keeffe, a Frederic E. Church, and a Childe Hassam.

For the moment the plan to sell is on hold.

In the US this is a highly contentious topic, but is this happening elsewhere in the world?

The picture is completely different in Europe, and in some countries (such as France and Italy) selling works is simply forbidden by law.

Once a work of art is acquired by a publicly funded museum, it cannot be resold or disposed of in any way.

But there are problems with this approach.

Firstly, what to do with all that art in museums, since none can be sold, and secondly: what if some of it was found to be looted by the Nazis during World War II – but the law forbids returning it to its rightful owners?

The French have come up with one solution: satellite museums, such as the Louvre-Lens. Established in a former coal mining area in the country’s north, the space, designed by Japanese architects Sanaa, has revived the fortunes of the declining town and serves to exhibit some of the overflows of the Louvre.

Paris’ Centre Pompidou has established satellite spaces in Metz in northeastern France and even Shanghai, and there are plans for a partnership with Jersey City.  

As for restitution, museums in Europe often hold works of art that turn out to have been looted. 

The most famous case involved six works by Gustav Klimt held in the state Belvedere Museum in Austria. Maria Altmann, a descendant of the original owner, fought all the way to the US Supreme Court to successfully recover the works, including the iconic “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I”; her battle was the subject of the 2015 film “Woman in Gold.”

Meanwhile in France, this year it took a court order to obtain the return of four works of art held in the Musée d’Orsay to heirs of the famed dealer Ambroise Vollard.

The works – by Renoir, Cézanne and Gauguin – will be auctioned in the same sale as the Hopper, at Sotheby’s on Tuesday in Manhattan. 

One important final aspect of the whole deaccessioning debate – or debacle, depending on your position – f is whether the great museum sell-off will have a chilling effect on donations.

US museums are highly dependent on private patronage, but potential donors increasingly fear that down the line, their generous gift will end up on the auction block.

Boston-based lawyer Nicholas O’Donnell, partner with Sullivan and Worcester LLP and author of the Art Law Report, says the answer is already apparent: “There is no question that the deaccessioning topic has shifted the approach of some donors. I represent collectors who insist on provisions in their gifts to ensure that what they donate will not be liquidated.” 

Josephine Hopper might well be spinning in her grave at this very moment.