SLAM's deaccessioned Cassatt revealed

Earlier this afternoon: The Albright-Knox buys a Philip Taaffe.

First on MAN: This is Francoise in Green, Sewing (ca. 1908 says SLAM, 1911 says Christie's), the Mary Cassatt that the St. Louis Art Museum hopes to sell at Christie's this fall. The estimate for the roughly 32-inch-by-26-inch painting is $1.5-2.5 million. It's the first SLAM sale image to pop into my email. (Thanks to Christie's and Christie's Images Ltd. for sending it over.) As images trickle in, I'll post more about what SLAM is selling, why, and whether its deaccessioning is routine museum collection-culling, or whether it's a Big Deal.

"It is our only Cassatt painting," Andrew Walker, SLAM's assistant director for curatorial affairs told me. Walker's area of art historical expertise is American art. "I have a certain love of Cassatt, of course, and we do have very much a priority, a goal, to find a Mary Cassatt that meets the quality of our collection. I think the challenge of many of these works -- certainly the Cassatt -- is that they weren't of a quality that matches the rest of our collection. We have the goal to acquire a Cassatt that does. Cassatt is high, high on our list of priorities. Either a pastel or an oil."

The Cassatt was last on view at the museum in late 2001, for just five weeks. The painting isn't exactly in demand from other museums either: Before that it last left storage in 1981. I'm no Cassatt expert -- if I had to pick the most over-rated artist in American history I'd pick Cassatt -- but I'd say it's fairly clear that this Cassatt isn't as good a Cassatt as SLAM's great Beckmanns are Beckmanns, etc. I mean... is Francoise working a plug of tobacco in her right cheek?

The other paintings SLAM is selling mostly have thin exhibition histories. The museum has never shown the Matisse. The Renoir was last on view in 2001, for eight months. (It has been included in two shows in the last 20 years: In Columbus, OH, and in Nagoya, Japan.) One of the Braques hasn't been exhibited in 55 years, and the other was last shown for seven months in 2001-02. Only the Metzinger has been on regular view: It was up from September, 2002 until September, 2006.

My major question about SLAM's sale has been this: How much of the Degas will be covered by deaccessioning? (After all, I wrote multiple posts praising the museum for raising money to both buy and build. Now it looks like they may be mostly deaccessioning-to-buy, and building.)

"We are interested in seeing how our sales do, and my sense would be that we just really can't look in the crystal ball yet," Walker said. I'll have more as more images come in...