St. Louis asserts itself in best possible way

So how big is the St. Louis Art Museum's $10 million purchase of this Degas? As best I can tell, it's the most expensive single acquisition by an American museum since the MoMA bought Rauschenberg's Rebus in 2005. (And no, the Ronald Lauder/Neue Galerie Klimt doesn't count. That's a different kind of thing.)

All the more stunning: SLAM did the Degas while in the midst of raising money for its David Chipperfield-designed expansion. (The museum is in the 'quiet' phase of its fundraising campaign. No goal has been publicly announced, but it will be north of $80 million. I've heard whisper numbers as high as $120M.) So because it's a huge buy, and because it's coming at an unusual time, I talked with both curator Charlotte Eyerman and director Brent Benjamin about the purchase. Eyerman and I talked about the art, Benjamin and I talked about the how. I'll have the Q&A with him tomorrow. But first, Inadvertent Q&A Week on MAN continues with Eyerman:

MAN: You were at the Getty before moving over to SLAM. In fact, you were in LA when the Getty purchased its Milliners painting. Any connections between the two?

Eyerman: I was the assistant curator working with Scott Schaefer and I did a lot of research on that picture, so I was familiar with these kinds of paintings and the bibliography and the market for them. It came to my attention that the new St. Louis Degas might be coming up last November. This painting was not on the radar when I was working on that Getty painting. Although they did have similar provenances and were made at similar times.

MAN: The Getty's painting has been x-rayed and studied pretty carefully. Has this one? Are there similarities between the paintings?

Eyerman: The Getty Milliners is very similar in date, and it shares a lot of interesting characteristics with our picture in terms of palette and formal concern. One of the figures seems to be identifiable as the same in the Getty picture. Degas is so interested in repetition, the ballet dancers, and so on... it's about rehearsal and repetition. In these paintings Degas gets interested in repeating this subjects and trying them out. The Getty has more psychological complexity because he did rework it. Ours is different because I did discover in my research -- both in terms of market research and art historical work -- is that there was a pastel Degas did, in color, for our picture. The pastel is exactly the same composition. It was sold at auction, at Christie's, in 1996 and I would like to track it down in the event I ever do an exhibition or publish on our picture. It makes the important point that he did plan the picture.

MAN: So tell us the story of how you happened to find your new painting.

Eyerman: When I talk to art dealers, primarily in New York, London and Paris, they ask me what I'm looking for. Because [my area of responsibility] spans a collection of 200 years, I try to identify the major gaps in the museum collection. So when I talked to dealers they say, 'What are you looking for?' Because I was trained at the Getty I always say, 'Extraordinary works,' and a Degas oil was high on my list. I didn't expect I would find one.

So I had that initial conversation in November, went to Paris, and ended up looking at lots of things. Some were minor and attractive, but I told the dealer who was showing me things that I was looking for something major. I asked him, 'Do you have a Degas oil?' He said no, but he said that his partner had one coming up. He would send me other things like an obscure 19thC sculpture and I would say, 'That's very nice, but how about the Degas?' I was very persistent.

And then as luck would have it, the Degas painting did become available. The dealer started sending me information in February. I saw the JPEG and it was intriguing, but it wasn't until I walked in the door of the warehouse in Geneva in March that it took my breath away. It was a real 'Wow!' moment.

MAN: Then you had to go ask your director for $10 million even though the museum was in the middle of a capital campaign.

Eyerman: I put it on Brent's desk knowing it was bold and assertive. He was very captivated by it and we started talking about how to do it. Your point is very well taken. We're all aware that we're asking our patrons to make gifts to our capital campaign, we are building a building. But the museum had the vision and the ability and the tenacity to buy the painting under very happy circumstances, privately, without going to auction. I negotiated the painting down. The director wants the public to understand that even though we're building, the museum is about art first.