Five (more) to go: The latest from SLAM

Here are images of five more paintings to be sold by the St. Louis Art Museum this fall at Christie's. Between these five and the Cassatt I posted yesterday, only one potentially significant painting remains unseen: the Metzinger. (And the Metzinger is the one I'm most interested in: It's SLAM's only Metzinger oil. The museum is also selling its only Utrillo, but from the thumbnails I've seen it's less interesting than the Metzinger.)

I think I'm beginning to come to a firmer opinion on SLAM's deaccessioning: Can't blame 'em. Of the paintings I've seen, only the de Vlamnick could be considered interesting -- and it's such a clear crib from Cezanne that 'interesting' may not be much of a compliment. (It was last on view in December, 2006.)

To be frank, the Matisse is angry and looks, well unfinished. No wonder it's never been on view at the museum. The Renoir, with its chunky rosiness, could have been Barnes candy. The Braque sunflowers are depressing and the Braque still-life is discombobulated. (You can't see it from the tiny JPEG here, but the fish in the dish is downright Seussian.) I'm showing the five paintings at about the same size here, but of course that's a bit misleading. The Braques and the Matisse are all similar in size: none is more than 20 inches tall. The Renoir is a bit bigger, at 22-inches-by-18-inches, and the de Vlamnick is 26-inches-by-32-inches.

A couple other notes from my chat with SLAM assistant director for curatorial affairs Andrew Walker:

The museum does not have a written policy of only selling modern works to buy other modern works, but that's pretty much the way it works: "We are fairly rigid about how those funds are directed," Walker told me." What happens at our institution here, given its size and our opportunities, is that it's very much a divisional conversation that involves the departments broadly. A painting like a Cassatt would never go to buy an antiquity. But because she was an American working in France... funds from a Cassatt could go to a European painting, sure."

Walker also took care to distance SLAM from the Albright-Knox's sales. One of the disappointments in how the Buffalo museum handled its deaccessioning was that it refused to acknowledge on-the-record that the hot art market was a factor. And the A-K's decision to put the money brought in at auction into an acquisitions endowment rather than to specifically earmark it for new art was controversial. (Which isn't to say that it would have made a lot of sense for the A-K or any other institution to spend tens of millions of dollars in one year on contemporary art, either.)

"We don't' (talk about market heat)," Walker told me. "[SLAM director Brent Benjamin] has been good about guiding us. We tend to sell in the market that we want to buy in. It's not necessarily the most prudent decision to sell and hang onto the money for 30 years."

Related: You can see the Christie's estimates here.