Going Coastal

The National Academy, the venerable artist-governed museum and school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has quietly sold two Hudson River School paintings from its collection to shore up its finances and enable it to show more of its holdings on a consistent basis, the academy’s officials said on Friday.

Frederic Edwin Church’s “Scene on the Magdalene” (1854), an oil on canvas.
The sale of the paintings, Frederic Edwin Church’s “Scene on the Magdalene” from 1854 and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s “Mount Mansfield, Vermont” from 1859, was sharply criticized by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has a longstanding policy of strongly discouraging museums from deaccessioning artworks unless the money is being used to acquire other works and to enhance a collection — not to raise operating funds.

The association asked its members to cease lending artworks to the academy and collaborating with it on exhibitions.

“The National Academy is now breaching one of the most basic and important” principles of the museum world, the association said in a statement, “by treating its collection as a financial asset, rather than the cornerstone of research, exhibition and public programming, a record of human creativity held in trust for people now and in the future.”

But Carmine Branagan, the academy’s interim director, said the sale, which raised close to $15 million, was made after long and careful consideration by the institution’s membership, which includes famous American artists and architects like Jasper Johns, Wayne Thiebaud and Frank Gehry. Ms. Branagan said the academy’s members viewed the sale as the only way for the 183-year-old National Academy, whose finances have long been troubled, to survive and to exhibit more actively one of the country’s largest collections of American art.

The academy owns more than 7,000 works, most of which have never been publicly shown.

Ms. Branagan also argued that the academy, founded and long known as the National Academy of Design, has never functioned as a traditional museum — it does not buy works of art but acquires them only through donations — and should not be considered as such by the museum directors association, from which the academy recently withdrew.

If not for the sale, she said, “the academy would close — and that is an honest and sincere statement.”

“There are vendors who have not been paid,” Ms. Branagan added.

The sale was reported early on Friday by Lee Rosenbaum, a blogger at artsjournal.com.

Last year the academy’s members voted against a proposal to sell the institution’s six-story mansion at Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, which has been its home since 1942. They then began discussing the possibility of selling art that was not so-called diploma works, those created by the academy’s members and given to the institution when the members are inducted.

Such works are the heart of the collection and would never be sold, Ms. Branagan said. Though Church and Gifford were both academy members, the two paintings that were sold were donated to the academy in 1865 by another painter, James Augustus Suydam.

The sale was approved last month by a vote of 183 of the academy’s 370 members. Only one member voted against the sale, and another abstained.

Ms. Branagan said that the deal had been arranged privately and that she did not know the identity or location of the buyer, only that it was “a private foundation that has agreed to hang the paintings publicly.”

The membership also approved the sale of two other paintings, more minor works, but those are being held back for now because of the uncertain state of the art market.

Ms. Branagan said the academy would start using the money to repair its operating budget and to begin renovations and painting conservation that it hopes will enable it to begin exhibiting much more of its collection in about two years. The academy also hopes to organize more exhibitions of American art borrowed from elsewhere, she said.

“This institution has a role to play in the cultural life of New York City and the country,” Ms. Branagan said, adding that it wanted to be known “as a place to come to celebrate American art and American artists.”

The sale is reminiscent of the New York Public Library’s decision in 2005 to sell “Kindred Spirits,” an 1849 masterpiece by Asher B. Durand — a founder of the National Academy — to raise money for its endowment. The Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton bought the canvas for an estimated $35 million.

The library was criticized for allowing that beloved Hudson River School painting to leave New York. It said in its defense that it was not a museum and that the sale of the painting — among 19 works deaccessioned from its collection — would help it focus on its mission of buying books and improving its branches.

By RANDY KENNEDY
New York Times