The Metropolitan Museum’s Fugitive Works on Paper: Easy Come, Easy Go CORRECTED

A mystifying missive hit my inbox last week, announcing that the Metropolitan Museum had recently acquired “more than 700 works from the [Leslie and Johanna] Garfield collection, [which] establishes the museum as a leading institution for early to mid-20th century British modernist prints and drawings” (dating from 1913 to 1939). Being a “leading institution” in a narrow collecting field dominated by lesser-known artists would appear to be a relatively low bar. Maybe I’m displaying my own ignorance, but the artists highlighted in the Met’s press release are not known to me: Claude Flight, C.R.W. Nevinson, Sybil Andrews, Edward Wadsworth, Lill Tschudi, Cyril Power.

Here’s the press release’s signature image:

Marring the optics of “one of the largest acquisitions ever made by the [Met’s] Department of Drawings and Prints” is its concurrence with the Met’s series of disposals of prints and photographs at three sales this fall at Christie’s, which have incurred criticism for being “a dismal example of exploiting its art collection as a virtual bank. This move is so egregious that it threatens to harm the entire museum field,” in the arguably overheated words of Christopher Knight, the LA Times‘ veteran art critic. As described by the auction house, the deaccessioned works are “duplicative of works within the museum’s collection” and proceeds from those sales will support care of the Met’s collection, “in accordance with its Collections Management Policy—in line with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) policy [my link, not theirs] that enables institutions to direct funds from deaccession sales toward collection care for a limited period of time, in consideration of earned revenue losses resulting from the ongoing pandemic [emphasis added].”

Knight argues that “the [Met’s] claim of desperate financial need is at best disingenuous,” because its “pre-pandemic endowment of roughly $3.6 billion” has spiked to $4.4 billion—an $800-million “windfall,” as Knight calls it. Although that’s not what AAMD refers to as “earned revenue”—income from admissions, sales, etc.—it does beef up the bottom line. I had not seen Knight’s figure for the current endowment in any of the Met’s reports, but Kenneth Weine, the museum’s chief communications officer, confirmed its accuracy in response to my query.

Museums are customarily limited (by law and by policy) in the amount of their annual percentage “draw” from endowment—usually around 5%. In Fiscal Year 2020 (ended June 30 of that year), the Met “applied a target spending rate of 5.5%,” according to its 2020 Annual Report (p. 72). The Annual Report’s figures for the Met’s total endowment and board-designated endowment net assets (pp. 72-73) indicate an increase of $5.6 million from FY 2019 to FY2020, so the big endowment spike must have occurred after June 30, 2020. Pandemic economics have caused museums to bend the rules, and Knight suggested that the some of the “pandemic dividend”—“the exceptional [endowment] growth since 2020”—could be “made available as a cash reserve fund. The unexpected windfall could be applied to emergency needs.”

Actually, that has already happened: In FY 2020, the Met established “a $75 million Emergency Relief Fund (‘ERF’) consisting of reallocated flexible endowment funds [emphasis added] and new fundraising from Trustees and key donors. The museum used $32 million of this ERF to fund operating losses in fiscal year 2020″ [p. 45 of the above-linked FY 2020 annual report]. Even so, the Met “ended fiscal year 2020 with a $7.7 million deficit, after the transfer of $32 million of the ERF, as compared to a $2.3 million surplus in the prior year….Unrestricted revenue (including auxiliary activities, net) totaled $51.8 million in fiscal year 2020, compared to $93.4 million in the prior year, marking a $41.6 million (45%) decrease over the prior year,” according to the annual report.

Weine told me that “we began using the emergency funds as soon as the pandemic began, in FY20, and expect we will use the funds through FY22.” When I asked Weine whether the ERF had been augmented with additional endowment funds (beyond the $75 million) and “if so, how much more and from where,” he replied: “This will be reported in upcoming annual report [for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021],” to be publicly released “in the next few weeks.” (When I learn more, you’ll learn more.)

But back to the Garfield acquisition: Also marring the optics of that awkward rollout are the strings attached to those works: The Garfields’ trove is part-gift, part-purchase. The Met glosses over its own unspecified financial commitment to secure this, declaring that the acquisition was “generously enabled by the Garfields” [emphasis added]. The press release also doesn’t mention that this transfer isn’t exactly fresh news: It occurred in FY 2020 (which ended on June 30 of last year), as detailed in the Met’s Annual Report for that year (p. 7). The Met’s announcement related to the acquisition and the just-opened exhibition drawn from the Garfield haul (Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939, organized by Met curator, Jennifer Farrell) gives no indication that this is, in part, a memorial exhibition: Johanna Garfield, 90, died three months ago.

As for the Met’s deaccessions-in-progress, the sale results appear lackluster thus far. Linked below are lists of the prices achieved (including fees) in the two sales of Met photos that have already occurred at Christie’s, along with the presale estimates of hammer prices (not including fees) for those lots: 168 Civil War Photographs (of which it appears that only 107 sold), offered Sept. 24-Oct. 7 in a dedicated online sale of works mostly acquired by the Met in the 1930s from the collection of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS) in Massachusetts; 16 other Photographs (of which it appears that only 7 sold), offered in a various-owner live sale. An additional 34 lots will be offered by the Met in A Graphic Century: 1875–1975—a various-owner online sale, which began today (Thursday) and closes on Nov. 18. The total presale estimate for Met’s 219 lots in the three sales was $904,600-1,413,100, according to a Christie’s spokesperson. My request for “the complete list of lots and sale results for the Met deaccessions that have already occurred” has thus far gone unanswered.

Here’s one that sold well:

As it happens, three of the Met deaccessions now being offered at Christie’s are by C. R. W. Nevinson, one of the artists featured in the museum’s press release hyping its Garfield acquisitions. (Here’s the Nevinson with the highest presale estimate of the three.) The highest estimated work from the Met in the in-progress online auction is this Lichtenstein. [CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that a work by Lill Tschudi had been consigned to Christie’s to the Met. The full list of works consigned by the Met to Christie’s “Graphic Century” sale is here. I regret the error.]

The usually frowned-upon use of sales proceeds for operating expenses (mostly for the salaries of collection-care workers, in the Met’s case), combined with the Met’s extensive acquisition of the Garfields’ less-than-stellar holdings (described as “incoherent and oddly selected” by Ken Johnson in his lukewarm NY Times review of a 2008 Met show from that collection), raises doubts about the wisdom of the museum’s current approach to collection stewardship.

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