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March 1, 2006
The Judd Foundation Sale, Part Two
On May 9 Christie's will auction 35 Donald Judd sculptures owned by the Judd Foundation. The preview exhibit for that sale will be the biggest Judd sculpture exhibit in New York since Judd's 1988 Whitney retrospective. Is Judd's legacy well-served by having his largest NYC show in nearly 20 years held in an auction house?
No. Yesterday I laid out some of the recent Judd Foundation financial history that is motivating the sale. (Since yesterday's post I've learned that the Brown Foundation has given Judd $6,000 since July 1, 2005 and that Brown board chair Louisa Sarofim has given the foundation $40,000, its largest private-individual donation in years.)
Here are my problems with the Judd Foundation auction: It took a sale of last resort and made it Option No. 1. Next, having decided to go to auction en masse, the Foundation made no effort to make works available to museums for an artist's-legacy-enhancing pre-sale.
No one I've talked with in the last four days begrudges Judd an endowment and everyone agrees that the Foundation selling Judd's work is proper. But the announcement of a major sale, just 32 days after a new executive director starts work, indicates that the Foundation didn't allow its new ED to fully explore long-term strategic options. The new director was given no time to build the board, to hold fundraisers, to try working with admiring artists (as the Chinati Foundation is doing) to build its endowment. Instead of using Judd's works as a strategic asset, the Foundation is having a blowout sale.
My second objection is the way Judd's legacy, the promotion of a wider appreciation of Judd's work (to quote the Foundation's mission statement), is being sacrificed in pursuit of the quick buck. I've talked to half a dozen museum curators over the last few days. Every single one of them was frustrated that their institutions weren't given a first-chance to work something out on these 35 pieces before the auction was scheduled. They're not sure they could have afforded the works, but a few thought that there might have been a way.
This is a more salient point than you might expect. Major American museums such as LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, MAMFW, the Dallas Museum of Art, and SFMOMA all have major Judd gaps. Working with institutions pre-sale should have been an opportunity for the Judd Foundation, not an inconvenience.
"We have been in discussion with various museums over various periods of times and those discussions have been inconclusive," Judd director Barbara Hunt McLanahan told me, speaking of conversations between the foundation and museums before she was hired. "Museums work at a leisurely pace. We couldn't spend the next three years... trying to resolve separate issues."
Hyperbole aside -- threatened with a 35-piece auction, interesetd big museums with deep-pocketed donors would be able to move substantially more quickly and creatively -- why not?
McLanahan also pointed out that before she was hired, the Foundation found that museums wanted donations of works or wanted to pay below-market prices for Judds. Well, sure, maybe the NGA would have only been able to pay $600K for a nice Judd and not the $1 million the Foundation hopes to make at auction. But maybe along with that $600K, the NGA introduces some donors to the Foundation. Maybe it shares a major-donor list. Maybe there was a relationship to be built between Judd and LACMA now that Michael Govan is going there and now that LACMA is going to have a big contemporary art building to fill. Maybe the Roses, Rachofskys, Hoffmans and Stoffels that have so generously donated money, contemporary art, and a house (!) to the Dallas museum would have been willing to help the foundation of a home-state artist if the DMA had been given a first chance at some primo work.
Maybe that opportunity still exists: When I pressed on this point, McLanahan said that the Foundation would be willing to sell works to institutions through Christie's before May 9. Still, that's not quite the same as strategically using Foundation assets to work with institutions, their boards and major donors to raise money and to place Judds in the best possible places.
Obviously former Judd Foundation board member and Chinati Foundation director Marianne Stockebrand was frustrated by the sale too. She quit the Judd board in protest, telling the New York Times: "I was in favor of a slower approach, to sell things one at a time and place them in collections carefully, which would have been better for Judd's legacy. With auctions, you have no control over where things go."
Or that they go at all. Or that you get anything close to $20M. (The Foundation got a guarantee from Christie's, but I don't know how much.) The art market is about to be saturated with Judds.
"We hope this is going to be the only sale," McLanahan said. "We do not plan any future sales at this time."
Posted March 1, 2006 11:05 AM
