Norman Rockwell’s “Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop” and Frederic Church’s “Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada” on display at Sotheby’s on auction day (all photographs by Timothy Cahill)
So it has begun. The first 13 of the 40 works marked for deaccession by the Berkshire Museum have been sold. George Lucas has bought Norman Rockwell’s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop” (1950) for his new museum and a baker’s dozen more were sent to the block earlier this month at Sotheby’s spring sales. These were the first works sold at auction following the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, museum’s settlement with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. In February, Healey approved the sale designed to pad the museum’s endowment and radically reshape its mission, capping the spoils at a maximum of $55 million. The agreement, which to critics is a bit of a farce itself, has turned the sale into a three-act melodrama. The art is to be disposed of in three separate groups or “tranches,” until the total dollar amount is achieved. Tranche is a banking term derived from the Old French word for “slice”; the settlement, Healey’s office insists, was the best half-a-loaf compromise existing law allowed to mitigate the sell-off. Watching the auctions over the past two weeks, it felt more like death by a thousand cuts.
First to go were a drawing by Henry Moore, a Francis Picabia watercolor once owned by Apollinaire, and an early motorized sculpture by Alexander Calder. This last was acquired in 1933 by the museum from the sculptor himself. It was bought back, in effect, by Calder’s grandson for the Calder Foundation for $1 million, half the pre-sale low estimate. The sculpture was one of six works sold at such a discount. A large Daubigny landscape fell short of the minimum by $15,000, and Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington missed by $20,000; the Moore undersold by $160,000, and two works by Bouguereau were off by a half million or more each. Nineteenth-century works by Alberto Pasini and Frederic Church failed to meet their reserves and went unsold.
Rembrant Peale’s portrait of George Washington was the last of the of the first round of sales by the Berkshire Museum.
As the auctions went on, a sinking suspicion grew that, like so much the Berkshire Museum touches these days, even the liquidation was being bungled. Of the 13 artworks, only three sold at or slightly above their estimated minimum. These included the second of the two Norman Rockwells, “Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop” (1940), which, like “Shuffleton’s Barbershop,” was gifted to the museum by the artist himself. Estimated at between $7 and 10 million, “Shaftsbury” barely made it to the low end and stalled. Only two works performed above expectations: a pair of magnificent Northern Renaissance paintings by Adriaen Isenbrandt, undervalued by both the auction house and the museum.
Demonstrators from Save the Art – Save the Museum protest the sale of Berkshire Museum artworks at Sotheby’s
The Calder and two other works will relocate to public collections. Lucas will no doubt give his new Rockwell gem pride of place when his eponymous Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles in 2021 (until then, it’s on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum). And Church’s lush “Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada” (1875), after foundering on the block, was purchased via private sale by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which promptly offered Berkshire residents free admission in perpetuity to come visit it.
The remaining 10 pieces were taken by unnamed private collectors, a particularly appalling aspect of the sales. These works, all formerly available to artists, scholars, and the general public, have now vanished from view. ‘Deaccession,’ far from being some arcane museum term, is rooted in the concept of access, with its implications of consent, permission, and unencumbered availability. Deaccession negates these qualities; it takes from the people what once was theirs. Legally, museums control the works in their collections, but ethically they don’t “own” them so much as care for them on the public’s behalf. That’s the whole purpose of their tax-exempt status. The trustees of the Berkshire Museum are ultimately stewards of the public good. If they were going to let their artworks go for so little, they should have made more of an effort to sell them to other institutions.
As the song says: “You take what you need and leave the rest. But they should never have taken the very best.” Museums generally cull from the bottom, deaccessioning works of lesser importance. The Berkshire Museum skimmed the cream. It placed its finest artworks in the auctioneer’s hands, at the mercy of the highest bidder, which generally means some anonymous merchant prince on the telephone. Privatization is one of the sins that brought demonstrators to picket outside Sotheby’s York Avenue entrance during the auctions. They held red and black signs evoking the “three billboards” of last year’s movie, condemning the sale as an “#artheist” and warning of dire consequences: “Is your museum next?”
Demonstrators from Save the Art – Save the Museum protest the sale of Berkshire Museum artworks at Sotheby’s
The demonstrators represented Save The Art – Save The Museum (STA), the grassroots collective from the Berkshires that led the resistance against the deaccession. STA quickly formed on Facebook after the Berkshire Museum dropped the d-bomb in July 2017. It advocated alternatives to the sale, countered the museum’s specious talking points, and made continual noise. Photographs of STA protesting outside the museum were published around the world. (Full disclosure: since last August, I have been close to the STA inner circle as a supporter and as a writer bearing witness to the fight.)
The volunteer group’s commitment and sustained pressure during the first months of the crisis was nothing short of heroic. Its actions held the press’s interest, inspired a pair of lawsuits, and helped persuade AG Healey to launch an investigation that eventually knocked the artworks off Sotheby’s auction block in November. STA exposed just how widespread opposition to the sale is, and set an agenda, parts of which even the museum has tacitly acknowledged. Michael Firestone, Healey’s chief of staff, told STA leaders during a February conference call, “Without you, all of these pieces would have been auctioned last fall.”
In the end, it turned out to be a lost cause, and perhaps it was from the beginning. Fifty-five million dollars attracts a lot of high-powered influence and self-interest, including all the resources of an international auction house, the services of a gold-plated legal firm, and, news reports have hinted, possibly even some political arm-twisting. This formidable army of Goliaths proved too strong for the anti-sale Davids. Why does STA endure? In the wake of “defeat,” what compelled the demonstrators to take off work and leave Pittsfield at 5am in order to stand outside Sotheby’s brandishing their placards? Because the law failed to protect the art or the public interest. Because the treasures are being sold. But also, because what remains — not just of the museum, but of decency and ethics — is there to defend and may yet be saved.
Demonstrators from Save the Art – Save the Museum protest the sale of Berkshire Museum artworks at Sotheby’s
It was a splendid collection, and each rap of the auctioneer’s gavel struck like an executioner’s blow. This month’s auctions netted the museum $12,755,000, plus whatever part of the buyer’s premium Sotheby’s may have thrown in to sweeten the deal. Some undisclosed millions were added last week when Sotheby’s brokered the sale of the Church landscape to PAFA. Educated guesses suggest that Lucas paid $30 million for his Rockwell. All told, the Berkshire Museum has added something in the neighborhood of $45 million to its coffers (the $42 million initially reported, plus an undisclosed sum for the Church painting, which had a pre-sale estimate of $5 to 7 million). Let’s not pass blithely over this amount. It’s too easy to repeat these numbers until they become abstractions; $45 million is a vast fortune for an institution with an annual budget of $2 million, in a city with a population of 43,000. These are assets all out of proportion to any museum its size.
With this self-induced crisis, the Berkshire Museum has decimated its collection, laid waste to its reputation, and riven the Berkshire cultural community. There are no more multi-million-dollar artworks left in the vault. To reach the AG’s allowed cap of $55 million, the museum will have to sell all or nearly all of the remaining two tranches, heaping destruction on destruction. Or, the museum’s trustees can say, enough. They may not get everything they want, but how much more can they really need? What, beyond money-lust and an insatiable will-to-power, would induce them to continue this sale?
Timothy Cahill is a journalist who has covered the Berkshire Museum for more than 35 years. He is at work on a book about the deaccession.
The Berkshire Museum had, before the auction, a grand total of 40 artworks; the 13 that have been sold were all of the works that were of any note, and contrary to what the anti-sale people were proclaiming, none of those notes was very high. The collection happened by chance, with no plan, and showed it. The 2 Rockwells have already gone to museums that specialize in Rockwell – surely happier places where they will be seen by more people and taken better care of than at a museum whose main mission is educating local school children about science and history – which is what the majority of its displays and collection are about. The art snobs need to ask themselves why it offends them so deeply the other works meet similar fates.
Yes, and Berkshire school kids are now mostly deprived of the central humanist lesson as to how art, science and nature intersect, a notion that goes back to Leonardo and the Renaissance. The Church painting of a South American subject speaks volumes about how science is grounded in close observation of nature even while aesthetics enables our sense of wonder to soar beyond mere description. It’s much more than the Berkshire school children’s loss, it’s an example of mind-sets that would deny local audiences the experience they now must travel to Philadelphia or Los Angeles or perhaps Asia to now experience in person. Museums need to get over thinking that serendipity or “accidents” are a bad thing; it’s pretty much how anything of value happens–from the origins of the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum. It’s what creative people do with happenstance that counts. And, it is fundamentally part of a museum’s institutional history, something of value for its own sake and what gives most museums their distinctive character. Small-mindedness and removing evidence of openness to diversity and connectedness to the wider world is how we get Trump. From a more pragmatic standpoint, monetizing collections as the Berkshire museum has done, jeopardizes the non-profit standing and tax exempt status of all museums. It’s actions have rightly been condemned by the American Association of Art Museum Directors on ethical grounds but, equally important I suspect, because it puts every museum at risk with regard to their status as tax exempt charitable organizations.