Hartman Jades: From Boston Museum to $41-Million Hong Kong Auctions

Cylindrical Brushpot, Qianlong period (1736-1795)
$7 million at Christie's (presale estimate: $1.3-1.9 million)

Notwithstanding Malcolm Rogers' comments to the Boston Globe, it should be no great surprise that Alan and Simone Hartman turned around and put on the market the Chinese jades (top lot, above) that they displayed three years ago at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Rogers is director. Christie's second auction of Hartman jades today in Hong Kong brought $25.7 million (presale estimate: over $10 million). The auction house sold the first group from the collection a year ago for $15 million.

In his article Saturday about today's Hartman sale, the Globe's Geoff Edgers quoted Rogers expressing disappointment that works from the collection had not been donated to the museum, as had been hoped. Edgers also quoted various commentators on the dicey aspects of granting private owners a prestigious showcase for entire collections that they may turn around and sell.

But the Hartmans' commercial proclivities were no secret. Unmentioned in the museum's description of the exhibition on its website is the fact that the Hartmans aren't just collectors. As Christie's notes in its press release, Alan has long been "an influential and respected dealer...His father opened his first gallery in 1927 specializing in Oriental Art in New York and it was only natural for Alan Hartman to follow in his father's footsteps."

Perhaps it was also only natural that he would think of selling at Christie's. In 2001, that auction house got a Hartman consignment of 48 pieces of Tang polychrome pottery.

As the auction house last year noted:

The entire personal collection of Alan and Simone Hartman was published in 1996 in a catalogue by Robert Kleiner [now a London dealer of Chinese art]....The collection was then exhibited at Christie's New York in 2001, and subsequently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 2003 to 2004.

Some have suggested that private owners should be required to promise that they will not precipitously send to market collections that they display at museums. But collectors are entitled to do what they want with unencumbered private property, so I believe a more stringent guideline is needed:

Museums should continue to borrow and display individual works from private collections, unless such works are known to be on the market (or are about to be). But a museum should not mount a show devoted to a single-owner collection unless that collection is pledged to the museum. The Museum of Modern Art has long followed this policy (although it loosened its standards for the recent show of works from the UBS corporate collection, only some of which had been given or promised to MoMA).

Those of us with long memories can recall the flap over the 1973 disposal at Sotheby's by Allen Funt (host of the "Candid Camera" TV show) of his 35 Alma-Tademas, embarrassing the Metropolitan Museum, which had displayed Funt's collection earlier the same year. (If you have Times Select, you can access the NY Times article about this contretemps here.) The Met learned its lesson the hard way. I don't recall its ever putting itself in such a position again.