Monet, “Sailboat on the Little Branch of the Seine, Argenteuil,” 1872 ($3.5 million at Sotheby’s)
Two of the three Havemeyer paintings that sold well above their presale estimates at Sotheby’s on Tuesday had a connection to the Metropolitan Museum going far beyond their 1993 appearance in the museum’s exhibition of the Havemeyer Collection.
As disclosed in Sotheby’s auction catalogue, the Monet (above) and one of the Pissarros remained at the Met, on loan, until some time this year. What’s more, Gary Tinterow, the museum’s curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, recently informed me that those two paintings “were often on view in our galleries” during the period from 1994-2009.
The Met’s connections to these paintings go even deeper: Tinterow’s co-organizer of the Havemeyer show, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen (the Met’s curator of American decorative arts), is married to George L.K. Frelinghuysen. He’s the son of the late Marian Kingsland Frelinghuysen, from whose estate (according to a NY Times report by Carol Vogel) the three Havemeyer pictures were sold this week.
This history suggests that the Met should have gotten those paintings for its own collection, augmenting its already extensive Havemeyer holdings. Instead, it enhanced their value with its imprimatur, only to see them eventually removed from the museum to be sent to market. On Tuesday, I asked a Met communications spokesperson whether Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen would financially benefit from the sale of the works. I have not yet received a reply. Marian Kingsland Frelinghuysen died on June 26; her obit lists Alice as one of the survivors.
Tinterow recently informed me:
When the lender of the Pissarro and the Monet [whose identity he did not disclose to me] died last year, we had the opportunity to purchase the works from the estate. Given the strength of our collection in this area, established by the Havemeyer bequest of 1929, we passed.
Given the exhibition history of two of the works, I doubt that the Met would have passed had they been offered as gifts.
This is certainly not the first time that the Met has displayed a work on long-term loan from a private collection that subsequently achieved an very strong auction price. Who can forget Siegfried Kramarsky‘s van Gogh—the $82.5-million “Dr. Gachet”?
The difference here is the curatorial connection. Since this is a matter of inheritance, not private collecting, this does NOT strike me as a grave violation of curatorial ethics. Offering them first to the Met was the right thing to do. But if the curator financially benefitted from the sale of works that had been long hanging at her institution, she’s reaped a gain at the expense of her own museum.