Valparaiso University is a school in Indiana that’s been around since 1859. Right now, has about 2,900 students but for the past few years has been confronting a problem that some other universities are increasingly facing: namely, that of declining enrollment. In hopes of attracting and retaining more students, the university wants to remodel some of its freshman residence halls that date to the 1950s. How to pay for this is causing controversy.
The administration wants to sell three particular paintings from the University’s highly regarded art museum and use the proceeds to fund construction. But doing that violates standard museum practices regarding the maintenance of collections. Deaccessioning—that is, when a museum sells off part of its collection—is acceptable but only if the money is used to buy more art, or sometimes for the preservation of existing works. Art museums, including ones affiliated with higher education, are not something like a stock portfolio that can be drawn down or cashed out to support other programs.
The university president assures us that the decision was not made lightly but the school has to reallocate “resources that are not core or critical to our educational mission and strategic plan.”
The paintings the administration wants to ship off to the auction house are all by notable American artists. There’s Frederic Church’s Mountain Landscape that dates from about 1849. Church—whose giant show-stopper canvas The Icebergs is one of the most popular paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art—was a key member of a group of American artists known collectively as the Hudson River School. Another of the paintings is by an impressionist named Childe Hassam who’s lesser known to the general public. But he was a central figure in the emergence of a twentieth century American art seriously informed by European Modernism. It’s called The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, and shows fog covering the hillside on the northern shore of San Francisco Bay.
But the painting at the center of this dustup is a rich voluptuous landscape that you would instantly recognize as coming from the brush of Georgia O’Keeffe. She painted Rust Red Hills in 1930.
In a recent appraisal, Church’s painting was estimated to be worth about $2 million and Hassam’s about $3.5 million. But the true “moneymaker” as ArtNet News sharply described it, is the O’Keeffe which has a current estimate of about $15 million. Tune in next week to see what happens when there’s $20 million on the table.
