Evanescent Permanent Collections: Warhol Museum’s & Fisk University’s Stealth Deaccessions

Recent revelations of secret disposals of artworks held in public trust by a museum (the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh) and a university (Fisk in Nashville) suggest that the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums need to offer periodic refresher courses on professional ethics regarding deaccessions.

Having been called out by me for disingenuously claiming it had “follow[ed] industry guidelines and procedures” when it acquired Andy Warhol‘s “Do It Yourself (Sailboats),” 1962, without disclosing the identities of works it had relinquished in that transaction, the Warhol Museum has now provided me with the previously withheld information about the five works from its collection that it traded to Gagosian Gallery to get this:

Knowledgeable experts can now assess whether these works were expendable and whether the museum got fair value for its trading chips, the most important of which was this:

A larger example of a 1986 red fright-wig portrait sold at Christie’s, New York, in May 2011 for $27.5 million. The museum does own other fright-wig portraits (in different colors and/or sizes), but as the museum-of-record for Warhol, it should lean towards collecting full series, rather than culling “duplicates.”

The other jettisoned works were four differently colored 1976 “Skull” paintings, all of the same image and approximately the same size, including these:

More startling than the Warhol disposals were the secret sales of two works—a Florine Stettheimer and a Rockwell Kent—from Fisk University’s collection.

Here’s the Stettheimer:

As revealed last week, the Fisk works were sold in 2010, during the period when the university’s then president, Hazel O’Leary, was under fire for seeking to cash in works from its celebrated Stieglitz Collection. Since the Stettheimer and Kent were not part of that collection (and therefore not subject to donor Georgia O’Keeffe‘s written no-sale stipulation), perhaps O’Leary thought she could more easily and expeditiously get away with monetizing them to address Fisk’s financial crisis—an expedient forbidden under widely accepted professional guidelines.

Maybe dealer Michael Rosenfeld, who eventually acquired the Stettheimer for his personal collection (as described in the above-linked report by Susan Mulcahy in the NY Times), could be prevailed upon to place it on long-term loan where it belongs—Fisk’s Carl Van Vechten Gallery, named for the critic, photographer and promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, who was satirized in the powerful, entertaining, prematurely closed recent Broadway musical, “Shuffle Along.” (I saw it, late in its run, with an understudy for audience favorite Audra McDonald. Even without her, it was great.)

Van Vechten and Marcel Duchamp, Stettheimer’s friends, are among whites depicted among the predominantly African-American beach-goers in Fisk’s deaccessioned painting. Van Vechten belongs at the Van Vechten.