By DANIEL GRANT
California has a strong tradition of open-air painting in an Impressionist style, dating back over a century and continuing to this day. Perhaps that explains the barrage of criticism that has greeted the Orange County Museum of Art's recent unpublicized sale of 18 of its 20 California Impressionist paintings to an undisclosed Laguna Beach collector for a reported $963,000. That, and the secrecy of the sale and its relatively small proceeds.
This isn't another story about a museum making a debatable choice about what to pare from its collection. The museum's director, Dennis Szakacs, has made it clear that the 18 paintings no longer serve the institution's mission -- which is now focused on postwar art -- and he plans to use the money to buy works created since 1950. This story is about how a museum should sell the objects it is deaccessioning.
Perhaps Mr. Szakacs could have earned more by taking the paintings to auction. But he argued that by selling the works to a single buyer, he was able to make sure that the collection remained together and in California. By contrast, the Wilmington Library in Delaware recently announced its intention to sell at Christie's auction house its portfolio of 14 N.C. Wyeth paintings that illustrated the Daniel Dafoe novel "Robinson Crusoe." Maybe one collector will buy all 14 paintings, but that's not likely. The library had made overtures to the nearby Brandywine River Museum, which is devoted to illustration art in general and the Wyeth family in particular, but museum officials "didn't feel they were in a position to expend this amount of money at this time," according to the library's director, Larry Manuel.
In most cases, museums prefer going to auction. Whatever criticism these institutions receive for selling objects only increases if they don't do it that way. Take, for example, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., a museum devoted to contemporary art that sold 207 of its older artworks at Sotheby's, raising $67.2 million. There was some discussion at the board level of selling pieces directly to other museums or through art dealers, said Louis Grachos, the Albright-Knox's director, "but in the end, it just seemed like going the auction route was the safest and wisest choice."
Certainly wise in this case, but why safest? "We were under a microscope, and people were looking for any reason whatsoever to attack us," he said. "Going to public auction made all our actions transparent. No one could claim that we were pursuing back-room deals."
James Snipes, legal counsel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston described it as an "optics issue, rather than an economic one. Going to auction may not provide the best return, but it is the most transparent" way of selling an object. Museums not only "have a fiduciary duty to maximize value when they deaccession objects, but they have to be seen fulfilling that duty."
There is no rule that museums have to sell deaccessioned objects at auction. The Association of Art Museum Directors' guidebook for members offers the options of "sale through publicly advertised auction, sale to or exchange with another public institution, and sale or exchange to a reputable, established dealer." But "the prevailing preference is to go to auction," said Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and chairman of the art issues committee of the association. "It invites problems if you don't go to auction." That view was seconded by William Eiland, director of the University of Georgia's Art Museum and chairman of AAMD's professional issues committee. "At auction, there is no gerrymandering the price, no hocus pocus," he said.
When did the art trade become an invitation to problems and hocus pocus? Many museums regularly purchase objects from dealers, so what makes selling so different? Ralph Lerner, a New York lawyer and co-author of "Art Law" (Practicing Law Institute), noted the possibility of favoritism in selecting a gallery through which to sell a work of art. On a museum's board, he said, "everyone knows somebody," and these contacts raise "questions of a conflict of interest and sweetheart deals."
Such conflicts do arise. In 2000, S.I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Advance Publications, was forced to resign from the board of New York's Museum of Modern Art after he purchased a 1913 Picasso painting, "Man With a Guitar," for $10 million from the dealer through whom the museum was selling the work. No legal action was taken against the museum, because no written agreements were violated and the museum received what was seen as a fair price.
If art dealers are hocus-pocus, are auctions so safe? Auctions are one-shot events, affected by everything from electrical storms that knock out cellphone reception (most of the big sales these days are to phone bidders) to a sudden drop in the stock market. "I had someone phone-bidding on a lot who told me, 'I have to go now. My house is on fire,'" Nicholas Lowry, president of New York's Swann Galleries, said. Even in the best of times, it is customary for 20% to 30% of the lots in a given sale to not find buyers, which makes them less apt to be sold in the near future for a good price. If, on the other hand, the artwork had been consigned to a gallery, the object could be shown to prospective buyers over a longer period -- and if someone balked at the price, that information wouldn't be so publicly available and damaging.
The method of disposing of deaccessioned objects needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and museum directors fearful of public criticism might want to broaden their outlook. The Albright-Knox was probably right to take its disparate objects to auction, picking the right time and the best way to maximize earnings, while artworks that ought to stay together, such as the Wilmington Library's N.C. Wyeths, call for a perhaps less lucrative "friendly" sale to another institution.
It made sense that when Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University sought to raise money by selling its painting "The Gross Clinic" by Thomas Eakins, it gave first dibs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art if it could raise $68 million in 2008. The subject of the painting, Dr. Samuel Gross, was a renowned Philadelphia physician, and Eakins himself spent most of his life in that city. Raising money and doing well by the art aren't mutually exclusive goals.
And what of the Orange County Museum of Art's recent sale? The ruckus it raised has had less to do with the deaccessioning itself than with the secrecy surrounding it. Much like students writing a high-school term paper, museum directors need to say "this is what I am going to do, this is what I am doing, and this is what I did."
Mr. Grant is the author of "The Business of Being an Artist" (Allworth).
