'Off the walls'

Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” (1849), oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches. The Hudson River School masterwork was deaccessioned by the New York Public Library for $35 million.

ART & ANTIQUES
August 2008

Off The Walls
by James Panero

By selling art from their collections, some museums are stirring up controversy and making donors nervous.

“You’re hitting me where it hurt,” says Tom Freudenheim, former assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution. The Buffalo, N.Y., native still smarts over what went down at his hometown museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In November 2006, the Albright- Knox, a small institution in a cash-strapped city with a noted modernist collection, issued an excited press release. It announced that the museum was about to “deaccession”—or sell off from its permanent collection—“antiquities and other historical works.”

The statement included extensive quotes from agents of Sotheby’s, who would be acting on the museum’s behalf by auctioning off more than 200 lots in public sales over the following year. One expert praised an Indian figure of the dancing god, Shiva, as “arguably the best example of its kind.” A set of Chinese ceramics was “certain to spark competitive bidding, particularly from Asian collectors and mainland Chinese institutions.” Then there was the bronze Roman statue “Artemis and the Stag,” the highest-profile lot of all. Richard Keresey, worldwide head of antiquities at Sotheby’s, called it “among the very finest large classical bronze sculptures in America and the most splendid to appear on the market in memory. It would be a star in any of the great collections of the world, whether in a museum or private hands.”

A star, that is, except at the Albright- Knox. Half a century after acquiring “Artemis and the Stag,” the museum had decided to sell the masterpiece, along with dozens of other exceptional works, in order to raise money for its acquisition fund for modern and contemporary art— “a tradition that has been in place since the museum’s inception in 1862,” according to the press release. “I went ballistic,” Freudenheim recalls, “so I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal.”

He took the Albright-Knox to task for “devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history—supposedly what museums are all about—is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for work in the present.” The article fired the first salvo in what turned out to be a losing battle to stop the Albright-Knox sales.

In the end, the criticism may have helped the auctions, which saw windfall profits. These days, Louis Grachos, the director of the Albright-Knox who oversaw the deaccessioning, chuckles when asked about the irony of the situation, though he declines to comment on it. The final take for the auctions came to $68 million, more than four times the $15 million estimate. The Artemis alone went for $28 million to an anonymous European collector, who has now temporarily loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I took my son to see it there last week,” Grachos says. His acquisition endowment has swelled to $91 million, drawing $4 million annually, up from $1.1 million annually. He says he has already used some of the money to purchase work by Fred Sandback and Olafur Eliasson. He has previously said that he would like to use the funds to acquire works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.

“I was surprised by the intensity of the response,” Grachos says of the vocal criticism from Freudenheim and others. “What was interesting is that so many people did not comprehend what the true mission of the gallery was. This was an institution to support and collect living artists.” As for the long-term effect of the public debate over the auctions, he says, “Our membership was in decline before the deaccessioning; now we’re on the way up.” However, he adds, such controversies “are not healthy for museums.”

Just how unhealthy they are is up for debate. Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator-in-charge at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco, maintains that the Albright-Knox “traded old lamps for new, but they have also caused a sense of distress amongst potential donors, who don’t even tell the museum, ‘We were going to give our paintings to you, and now we’re not.’ They don’t know what they lost, because nobody informed them.”

With the art economy booming, it is very tempting for institutions to sell off parts of their permanent collections to fund acquisitions or to cover expenses. In 2005, the New York Public Library sold “Kindred Spirits” (1849), a Hudson River School masterpiece by Asher B. Durand, for $35 million to Wal- Mart heiress Alice Walton, who acquired it for her forthcoming Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Ark. The revenue went to the library’s operating expenses.

Two years later, in order to fund a campus expansion, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced plans to sell one of the most recognizable paintings in the United States, Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic” (1875), for $68 million, again to Walton, unless a local institution could match the price within 45 days. (Like the New York Public Library, the college justified its decision on the grounds that it is not an art museum.) The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with help from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and a bank loan, came up with the funds, but only though deaccessioning an Eakins painting and two oil sketches from its own collection. A public explanation for the sales quoted the instructions of Susan Macdowell Eakins, the artist’s widow and the donor of the works in 1929, who gave the go-ahead for the museum to exchange certain works for others so long as it was “favorable to the memory and reputation of Thomas Eakins.”

Lee Rosenbaum, a blogger and journalist who frequently writes for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, nevertheless questions the ethics of such a deal. “Trading up is not an appropriate collections management strategy,” she writes. “In my view, the ‘permanent collection’ is called that for a reason: Past acquisitions of museum-quality works should not be exploited as assets to bankroll high stakes plays by today’s curators who want a piece of the market action.”

Of course, museums have always quietly disposed of lesser pieces from their collections. By selling work otherwise halfforgotten down in storage rooms, they return art to the public and private domains. “This is a healthy process for the community at large,” says Marco Grassi, an Old Master restorer and dealer based in New York, who sees an upside to public work returning to private hands. “It keeps the juices flowing. Museums are far too acquisitive and retentive. I feel very strongly that works of art need to have a life outside of museums. When the stuff is in a vitrine it no longer has a life of its own.”

Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” in regard to museums was in 1972, when the New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.” Hoving was the first museum custodian to conceive of his permanent collection as a source of capital. In 1970, he purchased a Velazquez portrait for $5.5 million but lacked the funds to cover it. He began looking for works to sell, and the bequest of the late Adelaide de Groot was his principal target. Against the heiress’s wishes that her collection remains in a public institution, Hoving sold off masterpieces from her donation—most notably “The Tropics” by Henri Rousseau— through Marlborough Gallery. The sale was so controversial at the time that the Met’s curator of European painting refused to sign the deaccession form. Hoving signed it for him.

Today’s museum directors have followed in Hoving's footsteps. “They have Champagne taste and a beer budget,” says Johnson, “and one of the ways they bring up the difference is to cannibalize the collection they are responsible for. They sell works of art that do not seem valuable or fashionable at the time. In my mind that is the worst thing a trustee or curator could do.” But don’t expect a change anytime soon. There will be an outcry whenever a non-profit, tax-exempt institution sells off work. It will remain controversial when trustees and directors raid collections for funds rather than rely on patrons. But so long as the art market stays bullish, deaccessioning shows no sign of letting up.

Donors of art to museums, meanwhile, are quietly taking note. While major collectors recognize deaccession as an important topic, they are reluctant to discuss the particular practices of museums, in which they often have an interest. One donor, off the record, says she only gives work to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which never deaccessions. Johnson says that if he were a collector making a donation to a museum, he would stipulate that “you cannot go and sell my Chinese porcelain to buy a Jeff Koons.” But such stipulations are notoriously easy to overrule in the courts, especially after a donor has died. Freudenheim’s advice to his collector friends is, “If you really care about it, sell it while you are alive. If you think it will stay in the museum forever, then you are fooling yourself.”

'Brother, Who Art Thou?'

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 29, 2008

Brother, Who Art Thou?
By JAMES PANERO

A review of 'APPLES AND ORANGES: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found,' by Marie Brenner. (Illustrated. 268 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.)

If Marie Brenner and her brother, Carl, can learn to love each other, there might be hope for our divided America after all. She’s a hot-shot writer at large for Vanity Fair, an investigative journalist known for taking down corporations; her exposé of the tobacco industry became the 1999 movie “The Insider.” He is an apple farmer in Washington State with the N.R.A. sticker on his truck who complains about his sister’s “A.C.L.U. friends in New York.” Illness turns out to be this family’s cure. Carl is discovered to have cancer, and Marie flies to apple country to try to save him.

In less capable hands, a memoir of such reconciliation might become a tired on-the-road travelogue or, worse, a bedside tear-jerker. But in “Apples and Oranges,” Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate.

“Our relationship is like tangled fishing line. We are defined by each other and against each other, a red state and a blue state, yin and yang.” The history of sibling warfare between these Brenners goes back to childhood. When she was 3, Carl pushed Marie out a window, sending her to the hospital. In high school, Carl filled his room with “manuals of alleged Communists published by the John Birch Society” while Marie played Joan Baez records. One day Marie came home to find the records smashed. “She’s a subversive,” Carl told her. “I have it right here on my list.”

“Is anything in life an accident?” Marie asks. They both came from the same secular Jewish household, heirs to a chain of Texas discount stores called Solo Serve. So how could she become a liberal journalist in New York while her brother turned out to be a Bush-loving, Wagner-listening, evangelical “right-wing nut” growing apples on the other coast?

Marie Brenner brings the same journalistic arsenal to this question that she would normally reserve for an investigation of Big Tobacco. When her brother gets sick, research becomes her coping mechanism. “I am treating my brother as if he is a source,” she writes, “someone I have been assigned to interview.”

Brenner looks for answers in the relatively new science of sibling psychology. Questionable terrain, perhaps. “I want to investigate if sibling problems are passed down in families like blue eyes and brown hair,” she writes. She uncovers letters that reveal a rift between her father, Milton, and his sister Anita. “Did my father’s rage at his sister impact my relationship with Carl?” Anita went to Mexico to become an associate of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco; she posed for Edward Weston and knew Trotsky. Milton stayed in San Antonio to build up the company founded by their father, Isidor.

When Isidor left their mother for a much younger woman, Anita backed her father. Milton did not. “Don’t you see that you are laying the fuse for a tremendous bomb,” Anita asked Milton in 1932, “the results of which no one can foresee, and which will involve all of us?”

Marie hopes that understanding her father’s family can help her make sense of her own. “The term ‘coherent story’ keeps popping into my mind,” she writes. “Family therapists call this the genogram, the laying on of family theory.”

How do we end up the way we do? Marie is the compulsive rationalist looking for the missing piece in her brother’s story, the key to the mystery. Her faith, like Anita’s, is in enlightened salvation. “I was stitching facts out of what I learned, trying to come up with a grid to lock together all of the following events,” she writes. “Where was the pattern? How did it link?”

Like his father, Carl is ever the skeptic. “It doesn’t connect,” Carl responds. As soon as Marie develops a leitmotif, Carl undermines it. We are led to believe that Carl was in the Marines, where “officers are trained to run through smoke and fires.” Ah, we say, maybe that caused Carl’s adenocarcinoma. But this cannot be the case. “After all that tough-guy posturing in college,” Brenner writes, Carl “never got to the Marines.”

In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. “Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,” she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb “through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’” Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.

'Art's Willing Executioner'

THE NEW YORK SUN
June 4, 2008

'Art's Willing Executioner'
by James Panero

A review of 'Let's See' by Peter Schjeldahl

Art critics are like thoroughbred horses: They risk breaking down after a short period on the track. It came as a surprise, then, when the New Yorker appointed Peter Schjeldahl as its critic in residence 10 years ago: By 1998, Mr. Schjeldahl had already been around the course more than once. Born in Fargo, N.D., in 1942, he had been writing for the Village Voice since 1980, and before that for ARTnews, Seven Days, and the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. Back in the late 1960s, the New Yorker's hiring of the Abstract Expressionist critic Harold Rosenberg came as a temporary reprieve from the slaughterhouse. For Mr. Schjeldahl, one wondered if the job would be a similarly green pasture in which to natter on into oblivion.

But Mr. Schjeldahl found his second wind at the New Yorker. He has regularly filed tuneful columns of readable stories with tight structure and interesting twists of phrase informed by his years as both a journalist and a poet. (By the 1960s, Mr. Schjeldahl was already a published poet in the New York School; he abandoned poetry around 1980 to pursue criticism.) Mr. Schjeldahl's latest volume of selected writing, 75 essays from a decade at the New Yorker running through 2007, has now been published as "Let's See" (Thames & Hudson, 256 pages, $29.95).

Those 10 years make for an interesting case study of art, one framed by the unprecedented rise in the market value of postwar and contemporary work — now a global infatuation — and an art-world giddiness that seems untouched, or is perhaps even encouraged, by crises in the economy and the war on terror. The art critic of today must function as a gossip columnist, a stock analyst, and a lifestyle guru. Mr. Schjeldahl plays these roles with brio: At the New Yorker, he has kept up with the art of his times all too well.

At its best, Mr. Schjeldahl's craft produces one-liners that are pleasing and illustrative: "[Gauguin] had the kind of petty run-ins with local authorities that dog arrogant misfits in resort towns everywhere." "One doesn't so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine." Lucian Freud "is less a painter than 'the Painter,' performing the rites of his medium in the sacristy of his studio." "All Picasso's pictures are dirty." Such zingers are ready for Bartlett's.

But the anthology left me wondering how Mr. Schjeldahl's achievements, many but minor, stack up against his shortcomings as a responsible critic. It is not so much that Mr. Schjeldahl has bad taste. As a libertarian sensualist, he is rather preconditioned not to have taste at all, or at least to have sublimated his taste for the purposes of having his readers "engage with art of every kind," no matter how terrible or reprehensible the art might be. In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl belittles taste here as only a "sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's." It is interesting to note, however, that in disregarding taste, he heads right for the tasteless — leading me to suspect that Mr. Schjeldahl knows what good taste is all along but chooses to ignore it.

At times, this tastelessness can be unnerving but relatively harmless. Mr. Schjeldahl's ceaseless promotion of the histrionic contemporary artist John Currin, for instance, would put a publicist to shame. He calls Mr. Currin "as important an emerging painter as today's art world provides," whose "virtuosity has overshadowed that of everybody else in the field." He also manages to name-drop Mr. Currin into essays where you would least expect it, including a review of El Greco, and one of Victorian fairy paintings.

Over the past decade, about the last thing the overheated art market needed was more praise for artists like Mr. Currin. But Mr. Schjeldahl sent his coals to Newcastle — or rather, to the Gagosian Gallery — at the expense of endlessly more deserving and underappreciated artists.

Too often in the decade covered here, Mr. Schjeldahl followed the money rather than good conscience. Faced with market forces, he bids "goodbye to critics functioning as scouts, umpires, scorers, clubhouse cronies, and occasional coaches." Rather than regret the loss of critical authority, he welcomes collectors to the driver's seat. "Preposterous amounts of money seem to concentrate the mind," he says. Yet considering the overvaluing of artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and yes, John Currin, the facts just don't bear this out. I doubt Mr. Schjeldahl even believes it.

Far more damning than Mr. Schjeldahl's abdication of critical judgment, however, is his embrace of art used for violent ends. Mr. Schjeldahl came out of the Generation of 1968 with a weakness for violence, which often translates into an affection for fascist and Nazi imagery. He rightly bristles at politicized art, but I find his willingness to aestheticize politics just as disturbing. (There is a difference between the two: Walter Benjamin famously wrote that communism pursued the former strategy, while fascism adored the latter.)

"Art love does not accord with good politics, good morals," Mr. Schjeldahl said in a 2004 interview. "Hitler had rather good taste, certainly in architecture and design. I think the Nazi flag was one of the greatest design coups in history."

Such enthusiasm, a targeted irresponsibility, gets repeated more than once in the current collection. Mr. Schjeldahl describes "October 18, 1977" by Gerhard Richter, another son of the'60s, as "a suite of fifteen somber paintings [belonging] to a tiny category: great political art." Yet Richter's hagiographic icons (not all that well painted, by the way) simply mythologized murderous German thugs.

In fact, Mr. Schjeldahl reserves his highest praise for Der Führer himself, whom he describes as "masterly once he found his métier." Hitler, Mr. Schjeldahl informs us in a review of Nazi art, "embraced cleanly abstracted and geometric styles, which later informed his own design work (notably the stunning Nazi flag) and his shrewd patronage of the gifted youngsters Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer." I have deliberated over what is the most odious part of this remark, and I have settled on the use of the word "youngsters" to describe Riefenstahl and Speer. For Mr. Schjeldahl, it's as if Nazi propaganda was little more than after-school high jinks committed by the Little Rascals.

Mr. Schjeldahl's disagreement with the curator Deborah Rothschild in this same review is telling. He begins with a quote from Ms. Rothschild: "The union of malevolence and beauty can occur; we must remain vigilant against its seductive power." That sounds pretty reasonable, but Mr. Schjeldahl offers a quick retort: "I disagree. We must remain vigilant against malevolence, and we should resign ourselves to the truth that beauty is fundamentally amoral."

Why a critic should feel obligated to accept and even champion beauty in the service of wickedness is incomprehensible to me. Mr. Schjeldahl embodies the critic as an accomplice. At his best, he is gleefully sly. At his worst, he is art's willing executioner.