$80.4-Million Question: Why Hasn’t Crystal Bridges Disclosed Purchase of Major Works by O’Keeffe & Johns?

More on this here and here.

Contrary to standard museum practice, Crystal Bridges Museum has yet to announce two highly important purchases that occurred almost three months ago—a Georgia O’Keeffe and a Jasper Johns, acquired for a total of $80.4 million at separate Sotheby’s auctions in November.

In my earler post about a radio interview last month with Rod Bigelow, executive director of Crystal Bridges, I had speculated as to whether this might have been one of the “fantastic new acquisitions” he then alluded to, without disclosing their identity:

Others had already speculated (as reported by Carol Vogel in the NY Times) that Alice Walton, Crystal Bridges’ founder and chief benefactor, had picked up this pricey Veteran’s Day souvenir at Sotheby’s Nov. 11 evening contemporary sale:

The suppositions about both of these iconic paintings were right. I’ve now learned from a highly reliable, knowledgeable source that they were among the “fantastic acquisitions” referenced by Bigelow in his conversation last month with Sara Burningham of Fayetteville public radio station KUAF. (My source for this was neither Bigelow nor Margaret Conrads, about whom I wrote in Friday’s post about her appointment as the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.)

After the Johns sale, I had asked Crystal Bridges’ spokesperson whether the “Flag” rumors were accurate. Her reply: “I don’t have any information at this time.”

Alice’s new estimate-defying outlays suggest that the Walmart heiress is returning to her earlier practice of aggressive, money-no-object purchases for her museum. A period of seeming restraint in spending had followed some controversial acquisitions. The O’Keeffe splurge continues her past practice of snapping up iconic works wrongheadedly jettisoned by other institutions—the New York Public Library’s Asher B. Durand; Thomas Jefferson University’s Eakins; Fisk University’s Stieglitz Collection (in which Crystal Bridges bought a half-share).

The O’Keeffe was deaccessioned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to benefit its acquisitions fund. But that sale could be self-defeating in more ways than one: By disposing of an important work that should never have left its collection, the Santa Fe museum trounced the previous auction record for O’Keeffe, thereby singlehandedly raising the bar for other works it might hope to acquire.

Paying top-dollar is Walton’s right. But the museum’s secrecy about two major works acquired in November is wrong. Bigelow’s coy reference in January to “fantastic [but undisclosed] acquisitions” demonstrates a misunderstanding of the responsibility of museums to make information about the works in their collections (not to mention the objects themselves) available to the public. When it comes to museums’ artworks, the guiding principle is transparency.

It is possible that Walton acquired these objects personally, with the intent of later putting them on long-term loan at the museum. But Bigelow’s public reference to them as “acquisitions” subjects them to his museums’ responsibility for full disclosure about its holdings.

Crystal Bridges’ role model for future acquisition announcements should be another deep-pocketed museum that also roiled the market in its early years, became more restrained in its using its market muscle, and now seems to be ramping up its spending again—the J. Paul Getty Museum. It bought its $65.125-million Manet, “Spring,” at Christie’s on Nov. 5 and officially announced that acquisition the very next day:

Now on to the next question: Did a Qatar museum buy that purportedly $300-million Gauguin?