On the Block: Childe Hassam, “Sunset at Sea,” 1911, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Auction houses always tout museum consignments in their presale press releases, because of the cachet and higher market value that distinguished provenance confers. Not so in the press release (click on Nov. 29) for Christie’s upcoming American paintings, drawings and sculpture sale, which highlights major works by George Bellows and Edward Hicks, as well as the “finest example” by Ernest Martin Hennings to appear at auction. It conspicuously fails to mention that they are all tainted by the deplorable deaccessioning disaster at the Maier Museum, engineered by the administration of Randolph College.
Similarly, the Maier provenance is omitted from the press release for this month’s Latin American art sale trumpeting the Rufino Tamayo offered at Christie’s by the Maier.
I guess the auction house doesn’t want potential buyers to be spooked by visions of the Maier Monday Massacre. They want the kind of buoyant bidding that will justify their prediction that Bellows’ “Men of the Docks” will set a new auction record for any American painting and that Tamayo’s “Trovador” may set an auction record for that artist. Might some principled buyers have appropriate scruples about participating in this widely condemned sell-off?
The auction house had no similar reticence, in its press release, about publicizing the museum provenance of two other works in the American sale: Cassatt‘s “Françoise in Green, Sewing,” deemed expendable by the St. Louis Art Museum (which owns no other painting by that artist); and a “shimmering Childe Hassam, ‘Sunset at Sea’ [above] from the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University…a spectacular example of Hassam working at the height of his powers.”
Hasn’t the Rose Museum learned anything?