Give Sotheby’s credit for salesmanship: today, announcing the sale of a painting by Rufino Tamayo, which is being deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art, the auction house called Watermelon Slices “a major work…depicting one of his signature themes.”
Estimated at $1.5 million to $2 million, it will be in the Nov. 16 auction of Latin American Art. Carmen Melian, the Latin American expert at Sotheby’s, said “This is one of the most important Tamayo watermelon paintings to appear on the market for several years. Collectors are sure to gravitate towards a work of this iconic subject matter from an important period that also boasts such distinguished provenance.”
Oh, yes, and Tamayo painted the work the same year he participated in the Venice Biennale. And, according to Reuters, “Sotheby’s said the work held a personal significance for the artist because as a young man he helped his aunt sell the fruit at a Mexico City market stand.”
And what does MoMA, which acquired the work in 1953, just three years after it was painted, have to say? Is it just a little bit embarassed by all that?
MoMA says nothing, on the record. But the party line is that MoMA is always reevalutating its collection, deaccessioning things to raise funds for purchases that will expand the scope and breadth of its holdings — and has done so since its founding.
MoMA’s Tamayo holdings include four paintings — Woman, 1938; Animals, 1941; Woman with Pineapple, 1941;and Girl Attacked by a Strange Bird, 1947 (at right), plus nearly 80 of his prints and illustrated books.
I am not against all deaccessioning, as regular readers know. And this is nowhere near Tamayo’s best work, even if one uses the auction market as the evaluator. In May, 2008, Christie’s sold his 1945 painting Trovador for $7.2 million.
But I do wonder what, if anything, in particular prompted this sale. What does MoMA want to buy?
Or was the department really just house-cleaning?
It is the deaccessioning sales like those of the Albright-Knox a few years ago, which traded in ancient works for funds to buy contemporary ones, that most trouble me.
Some museums — the good ones — keep money raised by deaccessions within the department that is selling works.
Therefore, to cite one recent example, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston plans to use money raised from its coming sales of eight European paintings, estimated at $16.6 to $24.3 million, to buy a work by Caillebotte.
I imagine, given its new wing for contemporary art, which houses a small collection full of gaps, that the MFA might have wanted to use those millions to take advantage of the rare opportunity coming up on Nov. 9 — the sale of four works by Clyfford Still. This is probably the last chance for any museum to buy a painting by the AbEx painter (since he left all of the rest, some 94% of his output, intact for the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver).
Now I’m sure the will of George Shackelford, MFA’s about-to-depart curator of European paintings, had a lot to do with this. He’s had his eye on that Caillebotte for a long time, a source at the MFA told me.
But it’s also good policy, preventing — to a certain extent — sales meant to accommodate changing fashions.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Sotheby’s (top) and MoMA (bottom)