National Academy’s spiral staircase
The National Academy, New York, which famously ran afoul of the Association of Art Museum Directors because of its stealth deaccessions to pay for capital expenses and operations, has just announced that its exhibition galleries and lobby (including its shop) will be closed next month and remain so until September 2011. The stated reason is “to renovate its exhibition galleries and create a new visitor center and a school studio gallery.” The Academy’s current juried student exhibition closes this Sunday.
The renovations are being funded through recent bequests by Eleanor D. Popper, a former Academy student, and author Geoffrey Wagner, in memory of his wife, painter Colleen Browning Wagner, a National Academician. The renovated galleries will “for the first time in over 100 years provide space dedicated to the semi-permanent exhibition of notable works from the Academy’s collection of over 7,000 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by American artists and architects,” according to the announcement.
One of the reasons given for the secret deaccessions had been to pay for the creation of permanent-collection galleries.
The Academy’s museum never regained its previous momentum after it was censured by AAMD in December 2008 for the Sotheby’s-brokered disposal in November of two of its greatest American masterpieces—paintings by Frederic Edwin Church and Sanford Robinson Gifford. (I broke the story of the deaccessions, and subsequently speculated about the buyer, who has never been publicly identified.)
The Academy’s director, Carmine Branagan, had originally told me that the sale agreement, at the Academy’s request, had stipulated that the deaccessioned paintings were to be hung publicly, probably on long-term loan. But in the year and a half since the sale, they still haven’t surfaced.
Wait a minute! What’s this I see in the “collections” section of the Academy’s website? The deaccessioned Church and Gifford
are still listed as being in the collection! (Wishful thinking, perhaps.)
AAMD’s censure of the Academy, advising the association’s members to cease all art loans and scholarly collaborations, effectively scuttled a planned show of Zorn, Sargent and Sorolla that would have included loans from several major museums. Subsequent Academy exhibitions have been drawn from works in its own collection, art by its members, and pieces by contemporary artists participating in its annual invitational exhibition.
In its report after this month’s annual meeting, AAMD seemed to allude to the Academy’s situation, stating that it would “provide guidance by which institutions may redress the cause for sanctions or censure, obtain AAMD’s professional assistance to restore financial viability if necessary, and rejoin the community of North American art museums.” Thus far, however, there’s been no indication of a change in the Academy’s status.
Is this on new president Kaywin Feldman‘s to-do list?