There’ve been so many deaccessions this fall that they seem routine, hardly worth noting — but this one is a darn shame. Even the seller, the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery of Bethany College in Lindsborg, KS, admits that it’s selling one of its treasures, and a curator at another museum calls it the collection’s “crown jewel.”
I saw the painting myself over the weekend, at Sotheby’s American paintings exhibition, and although Sotheby’s gave watercolors by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper the place of honor, this painting stood its ground, making a convincing case that it’s the best work on offer. (OK, perhaps the Martin Johnson Heade orchid/hummingbird painting contends. The top lot, a Homer oil called Reverie, is nice, but — it’s not his best in that genre either, imho.)
Marsden Hartley’s untitled still life from 1919 — which hung between two other Hartley still lifes that showcased the difference between good (them) and great — dominated the room. It’s one of some 40 window still lifes, Sotheby’s says, and perhaps not one of the very best — but it’s still very good.
The Birger Sandzen gallery is selling the piece, estimated at $700,000 to $900,000, to finance the renovation of what it calls an “outdated” building. The gallery’s capital campaign fell short of its goal, and it decided to sell to focus on “promot[ing] Birger Sandzen and his contemporaries and associates,” according to an article in the Kansas City Star.
The gallery owns no other Hartleys, but says it doesn’t care because he was not part of the Birger Sandzen group. But as Randall Griffey, a Bethany Alum who is now curator at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst, noted, Kansas is now losing “one of the finest paintings by a modern American artist in the state.”
The Witchita Art Museum, for example, has two Hartley paintings, according to a search of its collection online, but — see for yourself which painting is better here and here.
My view of deaccessioning is more liberal than others — cases like this should be arbitrated — but I can’t see the wisdom of this sale, at all. I believe it would have failed my arbitration process; the gallery does not appear to be in extremis.
UPDATE, 12/1: The painting sold today to a private American collector for more than $3.2 million, including the buyer’s premium — way above its estimate.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s