Delaware Art Museum Selling More Art

The NY Times reports the Delaware Art Museum plans on selling two more paintings as it continues to raise fund to pay off debt, and increase the endowment of the museum. The museum plans on selling a Winslow Homer and an Alexander Calder this fall at Sotehby's unless it can find private buyers beforehand. Perhaps they are selling because the Howard Pyle previously offered by the museum failed to raise the expected funds when selling a William Holman Hunt’s painting through Christie's where it was estimated at $8.4 million to $13.4 million, yet sold for a disappointing $4.25 million. The museum was sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) for selling the Hunt.

The NY Times reports on the upcoming sales

If the Delaware Art Museum has a signature painting, surely it is Howard Pyle’s “Marooned.” A native of this city, Pyle is justly remembered as the father of American illustration. His “Marooned” (1909) is an image of genuine drama and distress. It shows a pirate near death, curled up on a sand bar, a tiny figure enveloped by a burning yellow sky.

The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.

The spanking came one day after the museum sold a painting from its collection, William Holman Hunt’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil.” Trustees say that the sale was the only way to help settle a $19.8 million expansion debt and plump the museum’s endowment. Now, in a move that has not previously been reported, they are in the process of selling two more works. The first, Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time” (1875), is a masterpiece of American genre painting, a quietly intense farm scene in which a mother and son turn away and gaze over a wooden fence that seems to say something about held-back emotion. The Homer will be offered in a Sotheby’s auction this fall, unless a buyer turns up first. “That is our plan of attack,” Gerret Copeland, the chairman of the Delaware Museum board, explained. “If we find a private buyer, it will go sooner.”

The second work slated for sale is Alexander Calder’s “The Black Crescent,” a mobile which arched gracefully above the museum’s double-height East Court.

“They’re just cherry-picking the best things in the hopes they get to where they need to be,” said Timothy Rub, the president of the museum directors group, as well as the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “If, as with the Holman Hunt, they fall flat on their face, it’s going to be a double tragedy.”

Auctions are risky. Christie’s, entrusted with the Holman Hunt, confidently estimated its value at $8.4 million to $13.4 million. But the painting sold for $4.25 million — half the low estimate.

In some ways, the situation in Delaware can be seen as a cautionary tale about the perils of overexpansion. In 2005, the museum completed a construction project that doubled its space. Glass wings rose up on either side of the original building, a trim, red-brick, Georgian-style structure that brought to mind a suburban bank.

But renovating and enlarging art museums, which has become so popular you might think size was the goal of art, is no guarantee of larger audiences. Revealingly, the Delaware Museum’s membership is down to 1,600 households, from a peak of about 3,000 in 2001, said Jessica Jenkins, a museum spokeswoman.

Selling artwork to fund operations (as opposed to acquisitions) is widely viewed as self-defeating, like burning down your house to heat the kitchen. Museums are supposed to safeguard art for future generations, not cash in or out. And as the sale of the Holman Hunt proved, it doesn’t always go as hoped.

“We’re disappointed that it didn’t go for more, and so is Christie’s and everybody else,” said Michael Miller, who became chief executive and director of the museum a year ago, after serving as its chief financial officer. “Is it a fair price? Who knows? I don’t know.” The painting was purchased by a telephone bidder who some say is John H. Schaeffer, an Australian businessman and art collector, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Miller, 64, is not likely to be called a connoisseur. As he himself put it on the afternoon we met in the museum’s offices, “I know nothing about art.” He joined the museum staff seven years ago, after retiring from DuPont Merck, a pharmaceutical company that he helped found. Asked to name a work at the museum that he likes, he replied: “Jeez. I never thought about that. Well, I actually like Picasso, but we don’t have any Picassos.”

To some degree, the situation in Wilmington might seem analogous to one at the Detroit Institute of Arts, which has been batting away pleas that it liquidate its masterpiece-stocked collection. In truth, there is no such thing anymore as a priceless painting. Every Rembrandt or van Gogh can be appraised, and works that once seemed safely ensconced in museum galleries are being viewed as cash machines in gold-leaf frames.

True, Wilmington is much smaller than Detroit, and already doused in cash. Known as a tax haven, it remains a magnet for credit-card companies, perhaps because a state law eliminated the cap on the interest rates banks can charge customers. The city is home to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the DuPont chemical company, one of whose heirs is Mr. Copeland, the museum chairman.

Asked how he chose the Holman Hunt for selling, as opposed to any of the 12,500-odd other works in the museum’s collection, Mr. Miller said the process was relatively straightforward. You might assume that he met with the museum’s curators, asking them to weed out works that struck them as inferior, or too similar to other works to merit space. But the curators were never consulted. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with this,” Mr. Miller said. “And we didn’t want to bring them into this.” Instead, he deferred to the marketplace. He contacted art appraisers from Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams, and had them valuate “a very short list” of works the museum had purchased over the years. Gifts or bequests were excluded, to minimize the potential of lawsuits from donors or their heirs.

Probably none of this would have occurred if Danielle Rice were still the director of the Delaware Art Museum. She resigned last summer to oversee a museum studies program at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Trustees always talk about selling things, but I was very clear on the fact that it was not a viable course of action,” she noted in an email. “Unfortunately, it does look like I was the only thing standing in the way of their taking action.”

Despite its small size, the Delaware Museum is a singular institution with patches of blazing strength. It has always mingled high art and popular illustration to a degree that is almost unheard-of at American museums. Founded in 1912, a year after Pyle’s death, it set out specifically to preserve his legacy as the leading magazine and book illustrator of the late 19th century. At last count, the museum owned 1,412 of his works, accomplished images of pirates, intrepid soldiers and medieval knights in clanking armor.

The Pyles, in a way, set the tone for the whole museum, alerting visitors to the love of storytelling that runs through so much of American art. Many artists in the collection, including Homer and Edward Hopper, began their careers as commercial illustrators and never abandoned the seductions of narrative. Hopper’s “Summertime” (1943), a museum standout, is a city scene in which a shapely redhead in a floppy hat lingers outside of an apartment building, waiting for someone who might never arrive.

The museum also has the largest collection of British Pre-Raphaelite painting in America, thanks to a bequest from a long-gone local collector. Pre-Raphaelite painting is probably an acquired taste, and not everyone will thrill to the galleries where pale women with flowing orange-red hair and pouty lips swoon and wilt as if they had taken one too many sleeping pills. “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” the Holman Hunt that flopped at auction, was a linchpin of the museum’s Pre-Raphaelite holdings. The painting is admittedly bizarre, portraying a dark-haired heroine from a John Keats poem hiding the head of her dead lover in a leafy houseplant.

You don’t have to be a cultural alarmist to wonder what other works could be plucked from the museum’s collection and pitched like so many wares. Asked whether the museum might jettison its Pyles, Mr. Miller shook his head, and said, “They don’t have a lot of value.” He was referring to financial value, of course, and it seemed altogether sad that the works that bore the highest price tags were also the most vulnerable to being disowned.

In the meantime, the Delaware Art Museum remains sanctioned by the museum association, which represents 242 art museum directors who tend to agree about the need for professional standards. Mr. Miller, who said he resigned from the organization the day before selling the Holman Hunt, speaks of it indifferently. “It’s a club that I don’t need to belong to,” he said. “The good news is that people who support us don’t really care about what they say.”

He added, on a more conciliatory note, “I reached out to the A.A.M.D., and I told them, ‘We would like to talk to you and see if there’s any way we could work something out.’ They were appreciative of the contact, and we had a lot of discussions.”

Christine Anagnos, the executive director of the group, recalls a different sequence of events. Last November, she said, she received a phone call from an unidentified woman who tipped her off to a proposed sale. Ms. Anagnos and Mr. Rub contacted Mr. Miller and arranged to visit Wilmington to try to convince him that there were better ways to raise money than liquidating a museum’s collection.

Their first and last meeting was held on Jan. 7, and Mr. Rub made specific suggestions. He advised Mr. Miller and Mr. Copeland to mount a major fund-raising drive. He recommended that they enlist the help of state legislators who perhaps could talk to Wells Fargo, which was demanding immediate repayment of the bond, and ask the bank to be more flexible.

“Gerret Copeland said something during our meeting that absolutely astonished me,” Mr. Rub recalled, referring to the proposed sale. “He said: ‘We need to do this. We simply haven’t been able to persuade donors to support us. There will be cheering in the streets when we do this.’ I wanted to use the old John McEnroe line with him, ‘You cannot be serious.’ ”

For now, there is no loud cheering to be heard outside or inside the museum, although, by a nice coincidence, there is a show of contemporary art that comes with a good deal of sound. “Performance Now,” a traveling exhibition curated by the veteran art historian Roselee Goldberg, will remain at Delaware through Sept. 21. It brings together the work of Marina Abramovic, Laurie Simmons and Allora & Calzadilla, among others, whose devotion to the improvised gesture — the kind of art that melts into air — is captured in documentary photos and accompanying props, including hula hoops strewn on the floor.

Compared with the quick fix of selling artwork, an exhibition of new art such as “Performance Now” cultivates long-term rewards. It reaches out to local people and is likely to pull in new viewers, especially younger ones. That is the goal, to engage viewers in their teens and 20s as well as a broader audience of the sort that understands this: If you go see art, if you take the trouble to visit museums on the chance that something wondrous might happen, you will never suffer the isolation of Pyle’s marooned pirate.

Source: The NY Times