Pennsylvania Academy sells a Hopper

A number of years ago, the St. Louis Art Museum discovered a second work on the back of its lone Cézanne while cleaning it. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch trumpeted the news: "Art Museum Doubles Its Cézanne Holdings!"

Philadelphia has exactly two oil paintings by Edward Hopper, both in the possession of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Now, through the announced sale of Hopper's 1934 work, East Wind Over Weehawken, the city will be cut down to one.

Several seasons back, Thomas Jefferson Hospital created a big stir locally by announcing the sale of Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, an iconic work by a Philadelphia master of historic as well as artistic importance. Never mind that the painting had languished in a nook of the hospital for decades, all but ignored except by scholars. Suddenly, "saving" The Gross Clinic for Philadelphia became somehow central to the city's identity.

Since Alice Walton coveted it with her Wal-Mart billions, civic boosters raised the preposterous sum of $68 million to keep it in town under the joint custody of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy. Part of the money was raised by selling another Academy-owned Eakins, The Cello Player, to a private buyer.

Thousand-fold profit?

The planned sale of East Wind may not create a similar civic crisis. But it raises similar questions, including museums' role as custodians of our culture.

That role was long presumed to be a critical one. But no longer.

The Academy, which acquired East Wind in 1952 for a reported $2,750, now hopes to sell it for a ten thousand-fold profit (Christie's, which is handling the sale, expects East Wind to fetch more than $28 million) in order to add to an endowment for the purchase of contemporary art. Three years ago, with little fanfare and for the same purpose, the Academy sold a slew of works, including those of Arthur Carles, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast and Jack Twachtman.

In other words, the Academy— America's oldest museum— has significantly redefined its mission, without public input or discussion.

So, to whom does the place belong? To whom does any public or publicly supported museum belong?

Philbrick's rationale

The Barnes Foundation, a teaching institution, was repurposed as a museum through a series of maneuvers that completely transformed the original intent of its trust. Harry Philbrick, the Pennsylvania Academy's director, makes the opposite case for selling East Wind: that the Academy is not only a museum— that is, a permanent repository— but a training ground for future artists. Therefore (runs the argument) it must keep abreast of the contemporary art world through new purchases.

This argument implies that it doesn't matter whether the new art collected is as good as the old art being sold to buy it, since the principal point is to buy representative rather than exceptional art.

Philbrick acknowledges that buying contemporary art is a "crapshoot." He adds, sympathetically, "The pain of selling [East Wind] is immediately apparent. The gain won't be apparent until 50 or 60 years from now."

One director's taste

I guess the obvious response to this reasoning is that most of us won't be around to see the gain, if there is any. And by then, today's art will be yesterday's art, and therefore fit only for sale itself (assuming the Academy can find buyers for it at $28 million, or 28 cents for that matter).

But the real philosophy behind Philbrick's rationale— a philosophy that has become general in the commercialized world of the modern museum— is that all holdings are fungible assets whose value is determined at the auctioneer's block. This means that the idea of a permanent or core collection is obsolete, and that a museum is to be defined by the fancy of whoever happens to run it at a given moment.

(Philbrick has also using funds from the new endowment to buy 19th-Century Hudson River School art, which may better suit his personal taste but will hardly afford students a better vision of modern art than Hopper.)

Storm over Brandeis

In choosing this path, the modern museum reflects the corporate mindset, which regards all values as measured by monetization. By this logic, ultimately museums themselves can be liquidated if their assets can be more profitably disposed elsewhere.

This is not a theoretical issue. In 2009, Brandeis University announced that it was selling the entire contents of its Rose Art Museum to bolster the university's finances. The firestorm created by this bombshell forced Brandeis to retreat, but the point was made. If museums have no essential public or custodial function, why shouldn't they be sold off in whole or part to pay the bills, just as any private collector may sell what he owns at will?

Albert Barnes's notion

The Barnes Foundation— which still maintains a teaching program, although its permanent collection was sealed at Albert Barnes's death in 1951— was premised on the idea that the fundamental principles of art remain the same through all changes of style and content, and that a collection that properly reflected those principles did not need to be updated. This notion had the important corollary that the collection's art possessed only aesthetic value, since it couldn't be translated into financial terms by sale, loan or lease.

Albert Barnes thus set himself against the commoditization of art that is the hallmark of our time. For this reason more than any other, his trust had to be destroyed.

Mona Lisa or Schnabel?

Of course, museums buy, sell and exchange art all the time, and sometimes for reasons that are compatible with their public responsibility. But a painting of the caliber and historical importance of East Wind Over Weehawken shouldn't be lost to Philadelphia at the will of a single individual or board, or for the purposes announced.

I'm sure the Louvre could have bought plenty of Julian Schnabels by auctioning off the Mona Lisa. But it wouldn't have been a very good idea.

East Wind depicts a distressed urban community in the depths of the Great Depression. A "For Sale" sign hangs prominently in the picture's foreground. Perhaps Hopper was warning us that, in a time when the privileged few can destroy the patrimony of the many, no value but cash value remains. He didn't exempt himself, and his moral is more apposite today than ever.♦


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