Taking a page from the problematic playbooks of the Berkshire, Everson and Baltimore museums, the Greenville County Museum of Art (GCMA), South Carolina, has become the latest poster child for deplorable deaccessions. Below is the “poster”—a painting by the vibrant colorist, Alma Thomas, sold privately by the GCMA to an anonymous buyer for $2.8 million (as reported last week by Nikie Mayo of the Greenville News), in order to bankroll less pricey, more diverse acquisitions:
Image from the Greenville County Museum’s Facebook page
This painting was to have been loaned to an upcoming Thomas show touring among three southern museums and the Phillips Collection, Washington (information below). Perhaps reflecting the artworld’s increased focus on Black artists (and, particularly, on Black female artists), that show is to be followed by yet another touring Thomas show in 2023, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum,.
Below are eight works (including a later Thomas) that the Greenville museum acquired with proceeds from its deaccession windfall:
—Beauford Delaney, “Untitled Abstraction,” ca. 1959
—David Drake, “Poem Jar,” 1840, alkaline glazed stoneware
—Hughie Lee-Smith, “Counterpoise II,” 1989
—John Wilson, “Maquette of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” 1982, bronze
—Hale Woodruff, “Untitled,” ca. 1950
—Jamie Wyeth, “Catching Pollen, ” 2012
—Another (later) painting by Alma Thomas, which the Greenville museum touts as “among the rarest examples of her final full year of experimentation (1977), one of her “hieroglyph” paintings that shows a new direction in the work of the 86-year-old artist and a culmination of her experimentation with color effects–a truly original statement.”
According to the museum’s spokesperson, it was purchased for $600,000 from Berry Campbell Gallery, New York:
The sale of the more lyrical Thomas, which had been exhibited at the GCMA in “rotating collection installations” (in the words of its spokesperson), yielded a tidy profit over the $135,000 for which the Greenville County Museum Commission had bought it in 2008 from Hollis Taggart Gallery.The $2.8-million sale price “surpass[ed] Thomas’s auction record by almost $200,000,” according to the museum’s Mar. 31 press release about the sale and the resulting purchases. “A condition of the sale was confidentiality, and the identity of the buyer is not known to the GCMA [emphasis added],” according to the self-described “premier American art museum in the South.” Pace the High Museum, Virginia MFA, Houston MFA, , Chrysler Museum and Crystal Bridges (which is poised to begin a major expansion).
The name of the buyer who plucked “Alma’s Flower Garden” from Greenville is not the only thing that “is not known” about this dicey transaction, as evidenced in my emailed Q&A (below) with Paula Angermeier, head of communications for the GCMA. Her responses about what “is not known to the GCMA” raise additional questions as to whether the museum was sufficiently rigorous in honoring its fiduciary duty to its ultimate beneficiaries—the public:
ROSENBAUM: Will “Flower Garden” still be loaned to the Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful exhibition, in which it was set to appear [beginning on July 9 at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, and traveling to the Phillips Collection, Washington; Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA]?
ANGERMEIER: No, at least not [loaned] by the GCMA. [As I noted in my email to Angermeier, loans from new owners are “sometimes arranged in such circumstances.” The painting that had set the auction record for Thomas—“A Fantastic Sunset,” dated 1970—was requested for that exhibition, according to Christie’s auction catalogue.]
ROSENBAUM: You said that the buyer is unknown to you and that the painting “was sold privately.” Who represented the purchaser in contacting you and arranging the sale? Was it a dealer, private agent, an auction-house staffer, someone else known to you?
ANGERMEIER: The transaction was contingent on confidentiality of all parties to the purchase.
ROSENBAUM: How did your contact with the buyer come about, since you say that you don’t know how the buyer knew that the painting was available for sale?
ANGERMEIER: The buyer’s agent called the museum.
ROSENBAUM: How do you know that you couldn’t have gotten a higher price if it were made available to a wider group of potential buyers?
ANGERMEIER: No one can know that; we might have realized less. We set the price; there was no negotiation.
ROSENBAUM: Did you consult with anyone in setting the price? If not, why not?
ANGERMEIER: The auction record to date for an Alma Thomas painting—a little more than $2.6 million—is a reasonable guideline […or maybe not: That record was set back in November 2019.]
ROSENBAUM: Did you receive any outside advice on these transactions and, if so, from whom?
ANGERMEIER: We did not.
ROSENBAUM: How did the interested buyer know that the painting was available for sale?
ANGERMEIER: We don’t know.
ROSENBAUM: Was the buyer connected with the museum in any way?
ANGERMEIER: It’s unlikely. To our knowledge, there is no connection.
To understand what’s wrong with this picture, let’s cross-reference my Q&A with the relevant professional guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors: The preferred method for museum disposals, according to AAMD’s Professional Practices in Art Museums (p. 23), is “publicly advertised auction” or sale through “a reputable, established dealer.” AAMD’s guidelines also state that “attention must be given to transparency [emphasis added] throughout the process. No member of a museum’s board or staff, or anyone whose association with the museum might give them an advantage in acquiring the work, shall be permitted to acquire directly or indirectly a work deaccessioned, wholly or in part, by the museum, or otherwise benefit from its sale or trade.” (That is why the museum’s not knowing the identity of the buyer in this transaction is troubling.)
My request for comment about this situation was turned down by the spokesperson for the Columbus Museum, which is co-organizing the upcoming Thomas exhibition where the GCMA’s now vanished work had been set to appear. Its director of curatorial affairs, Jonathan Walz, who is co-curator of that upcoming show, didn’t respond to my emailed request for comment, but did blow off some steam in conversation with the reporter for the Greenville News.
Here’s what he told Nikie Mayo:
Walz said learning the painting had been sold and not knowing to whom was “like a bombshell.”
“It’s sad to think that a piece like this may just disappear,” he said. “It’s particularly important that Alma Thomas’ work, as the work of an African-American artist, be available for the public to see [particularly in Columbus, GA, where Thomas was born]. If it has gone into a private collection, that’s devastating.”
“Alma’s Flower Garden,” acrylic on canvas painted sometime between 1968 and 1970, is particularly rare, Walz said, because it was painted during a “transitional, experimental period” for Thomas. It is one of Thomas’ only known pieces, he said, in which Thomas painted something personal to her—her Washington, D.C. garden.
This episode recalls the recent deaccession controversies in Pittsfield, MA; Syracuse, NY; and Baltimore, MD (as I stated at the top of this post) because of those institutions’ professionally misguided strategies (aborted at the last minute, in Baltimore’s case) of selling important works—among their highest-valued, by price, popularity and/or art historical importance—to reap the most money for current spending priorities, while leaving big holes in their collections.
Pittsfield, MA-based attorney Mark Gold, self-described as “careen[ing] toward retirement,” rashly championed this approach as a featured speaker at Syracuse University’s recent conference on deaccessioning.
Screenshot from the Syracuse symposium
What happened in Syracuse didn’t stay in Syracuse. Here’s what Gold said during the virtual conference:
If you sell the most valuable thing, in terms of money, in your collection, it doesn’t mean that your collection has been diminished. It may have actually saved you: You could dispose of this one object that’s worth a whole lot of money [like Norman Rockwell’s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop,” the priciest of 22 works unloaded by the Berkshire Museum] because that’s what the market says at the moment, or you can dispose of 3,000[?!?] other objects in your collection that bring the same amount of money.
People will criticize you and say, “You shouldn’t have sold the most valuable thing,” not realizing that if I didn’t do that, I had to do this. I think it’s up to boards and the advice and involvement of the professional leadership to say, “What contributes most to the mission? Does that one painting contribute most to the mission—the one that’s worth the most dollars—or is the 3,000 other objects that we’d have to give up and sell those, if we didn’t sell the one painting?”
Everyone gasps that you’re selling the most expensive thing, without thinking that you may have actually saved your collection in the process. [GASP!]
This sets up a false dichotomy: Sell one important work or offload thousands of others in order to bankroll your current goals. At the Syracuse conference, Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery, DC, posited a third way: “We soldiered on, figured it out and raised the necessary money.”
While a quick-fix cash out of a collection standout is more efficient, it’s a lot less ethical.
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