The Newark Museum’s problematic auction at Sotheby’s yesterday (May 19) of 11 works of American art (not 12, as stated in a previous version of this post) from the 19th to mid-20th century was marred by surprising irregularities and outright gaffes. It got off on the wrong foot when the sale’s unlikely auctioneer, Quig Bruning, Sotheby’s head of jewelry(?!?) in New York, described the first of the museum’s offerings—Marsden Hartley‘s “Shell”—as coming from “the New York—excuse me—Newark Museum.”
Behind him: Milton Avery, “Blue Gulls, Blue Sea” (not from the Newark Museum)
Adding injury to the insult was the Hartley’s hammer price—a scant $170,000, slightly more than half the low end of its presale estimate. (Estimates are predictions of hammer price, not final price, which is bloated by the auction house’s substantial fees, including the buyer’s premium and the new 1% overhead premium.)
It was not a great start, and not a great Hartley—appropriately, for a work that had been deemed expendable:
Presale estimate: $300,000-500,000
But let’s cut to the chase. (I don’t mean William Merritt Chase: No works by that American Impressionist were offered by Newark at Sotheby’s.) I am referring to the sweeping Thomas Cole landscape—the planned disposal of which had been widely decried by museum professionals and American art experts, including Holly Pyne Connor, the Newark Museum’s own curator emerita of 19th-century American art. Connor was the organizer (under the directorship of Mary Sue Sweeney Price) of the groundbreaking 2006 Newark Museum show (which I saw) about “the late 19th-century emancipated woman.”
The signature image on that exhibition’s catalogue (my copy, below) is a Newark-owned John Singer Sargent, “Mrs. Charles Thursby, ” ca. 1897-98:
As for the ex-Newark Cole, his “Arch” held up nicely yesterday (a lot better than this arch, which has just collapsed in the Galapagos). You can see what it fetched, here:
Presale estimate: $500,000-700,000
The identity of the Cole’s buyer has been disclosed. This (belated) message from Sotheby’s hit my inbox today:
The Cole from Newark and the Cassatt from Brooklyn [my link] were acquired by the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation [my link], with [as yet unspecified] plans for long-term loans of both works to institutions.
I had already learned about this yesterday, from Zachary Small‘s online NY Times article, which puzzlingly reported that William Coleman, a leading critic of the Cole sale, “said that he had spoken with the [the Jacobsen foundation’s] collectors [note the plural], who plan to make both paintings available to museums as loans. ‘This is the second-best outcome,’ Coleman said.”
This can’t be accurate, unless Coleman channeled Thomas Jacobsen via séance: The St. Louis banker has been dead for almost nine years. When I asked Coleman to explain, he replied: “That was an understandable error by Zachary, to whom I conveyed clearly that I am in regular communication with Diane but that she acquired it on behalf of the foundation of both names.”
More importantly, Small ought to have fact-checked the muddled definition of “deaccessioning” in his Times piece. He wrote:
Talk of deaccessioning, the sale by museums of artworks to cover some operating costs [emphasis added], had been divisive earlier this year.
For a brief refresher course on what “deaccessioning” by museums actually means (a lesson that regular CultureGrrl readers don’t need), let’s refer to the Association of Art Museum Directors’ (AAMD’s) explanation (p. 19):
Deaccessioning is defined as the process by which a work of art or other object…, wholly or in part, is permanently removed from a museum’s collection. Disposal is defined as the transfer of ownership by the museum [i.e., by sale] after a work has been deaccessioned [emphasis added].
Contrary to Small’s claim that “deaccessioning” means, “the sale by museums of artworks to cover some operating costs,” the use of sale proceeds by art museums was customarily restricted to the purchase of other works for the collection. Only under the temporarily relaxed guidelines may proceeds be used for the ambiguously defined “direct care of collections.”
Speaking of misunderstandings, a mix-up involving a Sheeler in the Newark auction was a whopper: In my four decades covering art auctions, I’ve never witnessed a sale where a lot went unsold at a certain price, was publicly re-offered later in the same auction (because of a “technical oversight,” as a Sotheby’s spokesperson later told me, without elaborating) and then sold for a mere 55% of the earlier unsuccessful bid.
Such was the complicated fate of this simple painting, which had failed to sell at $450,000 and was put back on the block later in the same auction, hammering (and selling) at only $250,000 (plus fees):
$250,000 hammer price ($315,000 final price)
Presale estimate: $500,000-700,000
I can think of several scenarios that might have triggered this crazy misfire, but those would be sheer speculation on my part, so I’ll leave you to your own imaginings. What I feel reasonably confident in assuming is that either the museum agreed to dramatically lower its reserve (the amount that it was willing to accept), or Sotheby’s decided to make amends for whatever had caused the work to be re-offered and then relinquished so cheaply.
The only thing more dispiriting than an under-sold work is an unsold work, of which there was one among the Newark consignments: As your may remember, I had stated in my prior post previewing this sale that only one of Newark’s consignments might be plausibly regarded as “embody[ing] outdated and harmful narratives [emphasis added] that have hung in our galleries without enough questions being asked,” in the words of the museum’s director, Linda Harrison.
As it happened, the work that I had pinpointed was the one that failed to find a buyer yesterday:
Presale estimate: $400,000-600,000
If you’re looking for “narratives” that aren’t “outdated,” the Smithsonian American Art Museum has just announced plans for “a nationally touring exhibition re-examining the American West through modern and contemporary art.”
On a positive note, the top lot among the Newark consignments was this high-flying eye candy:
Presale estimate: $500,000-700,000
I expect to have more to say about the Newark sale and its broader ramifications in a subsequent post. For now, let me suggest that in light of how AAMD’s relaxed deaccession guidelines have been misconstrued and misinterpreted, it might want to consider the unintended consequences of its “Financial Flexibility” resolution. It wasn’t intended to help museums “right previous misrepresentations, ensuring that as many voices as possible are heard” (Newark’s sale rationale), as desirable as those goals may be. It was meant to help them surmount the challenges of maintaining their operations, in light of the severe financial challenges posed by the (now receding) pandemic.
At the very least, our country’s leading professional organization for art museums should explicitly clarify what is and is not contemplated by the temporary guidelines. As it happens, we’re due for a thorough update of Professional Practices in Art Museums, AAMD’s detailed professional guidelines, which are revised every 10 years.
Happily, museums are now reopening. Maybe discussions about what constitute appropriate deaccessions and permissible uses of sale proceeds should reopen too.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated incorrectly that the Newark Museum offered 12 works (not 11) at the May 19 American art sale. I had mistakenly counted a work sold by Newark at Sotheby’s May 14 Impressionist/Modern day sale—Giorgio de Chirico‘s Horse and Zebra by the Sea, which sold for $2.32 million (with fees), trampling its $250,000-350,000 presale estimate of hammer price.
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