In the face of withering criticism from public art advocates and the artist himself, the city of Chicago won’t be selling its multimillion-dollar Kerry James Marshall painting after all.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has decided to pull the Marshall canvas “Knowledge and Wonder” from a Nov. 15 auction at Christie’s in New York City, where the work, commissioned for the Legler Branch of the Chicago Public Library for $10,000 in 1995, was expected to sell for more than $10 million.
“I was swimming and thought, ‘This is not what I wanted, given the city’s contributions to public art, and Kerry’s a friend and also a great ambassador for Chicago,’” Emanuel said Sunday afternoon. “I reached out to him and said, ‘Look, I don’t want this. If you’re not happy, I don’t want to go forward.’”
News of the impending sale drew criticism from curators and art critics nationwide and from Marshall himself. The Bronzeville artist, who has lived in Chicago since the 1980s, said last month, “I am certain they could get more money if they sold the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza.”
Marshall on Sunday had a measured response in talking about the move. “It’s an interesting turnaround,” the 63-year-old artist said. “It’s the right decision to make.”
The decision to sell struck him as “exploitative,” Marshall said. “It just seemed like a way of exploiting the work of artists in the city for short-term gain in a really shortsighted kind of way. It certainly would make one believe there’s no reason to do anything because you have some kind of civic pride as a citizen.”
And he said the painting, a roughly 10-by-23-foot mural depicting African-American children being enlightened by books that was commissioned as part of a city program to bring public art into public buildings, was so site specific that he “couldn’t understand why anybody would think that it was transferable to another place.”
Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the MCA Chicago, said, “I can imagine it was a difficult decision, but they are on the right side of history. … The value of a painting in a public space like a library for the city of Chicago has no equivalent in terms of its ability to educate and inspire. I am thrilled that the mayor has found a way to honor Kerry James Marshall, one of Chicago’s and even this country’s greatest living artists by retaining it.”
James Rondeau, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, also applauded the city’s decision.
“Market pressures are powerful, and I think that’s what we’ve seen here, right?” Rondeau said. “A temporary ability for the potential to monetize a work of public art takes away focus, and now the mayor has returned us to the focus on the object the artist, the context and the audience.”
The situation itself needs to be seen in context, he said: “Our mayor has been terrific on arts and culture broadly and on his commitment to public art across the whole city. … I think he had the best of intentions here, but in this case, the wrong strategy.”
Emanuel had planned to use the auction proceeds to fund a reworking of the Legler, in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, as a regional library, the city’s first on the West Side.
A less ambitious version of the Legler project will go forward, Emanuel said, with the branch getting expanded hours and 50 new computers to help in libraries’ new role as centers of internet use and job seeking. The budget, instead of being in the $10.5 million to $11 million range, will be closer to $1.8 million, the mayor said, money he found in a process he described as “shave this here, get a haircut over there.”
The painting itself will be remounted in the Legler as soon as possible, the mayor said, once additional security for it can be arranged.
Emanuel said he remains adamant that “I’m not going to shortchange the West Side.” Under the new plan, he said, “we have a little down payment toward it.”
The African-American artist’s paintings, a decadeslong project to bring the black figure into the museum, have risen dramatically in price in recent years. His 2016 retrospective exhibition, “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” was widely celebrated at MCA Chicago and then in Los Angeles and New York.
In May of this year Marshall’s “Past Times,” a depiction of people picnicking alongside an urban lake that was a key piece in “Mastry,” sold at auction for $21.1 million, a record for a living African-American artist. The buyer was music producer Sean Combs, and the seller was the Chicago Metropolitan Pier Exposition Authority, which had acquired the work for the McCormick Place convention center for $25,000 in 1997.
Like “Knowledge and Wonder” at the Legler, the work had hung at McCormick for decades with none of the security typically associated with eight-figure artworks in museums.
The lack of protection, the “Past Times” sale and the desire to bring better library services to the West Side all fueled his decision to sell “Knowledge and Wonder,” Emanuel said in an interview last month.
“I own all of it,” the mayor said Sunday. “I own the decision to try and create equity for the West Side. I own the idea of trying to find an elegant solution. And I own pulling it back when it doesn’t work for everybody.”
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
