More on deaccessioning

We have written before on why it can make sense for museums to sell. Alas, there are still those cases where the sales don't make sense. Here's a likely example:

The Museum of Modern Art is offering nine works from its permanent collection for sale at Christie’s New York on 4 and 11 May. The auction house estimates that the paintings, which include works by Chagall, De Chirico, Léger, Magritte, Picasso and Pollock, could sell for as much as $27.9 million.

The museum is ostensibly raising funds for new acquisitions to display when it moves back into its expanded, midtown building next year. But the decision to sell paintings by artists whose works fit squarely within the museum’s collection will meet with some controversy. . .

One thing is certain: MoMA’s sales are not a one-off. In 1998 the artist Michael Asher published a pamphlet listing the thousands of works the museum had deaccessioned since its founding in 1929. The inventory includes eight works by Cézanne, four by Kandinsky, and nine by Matisse, among others. Since then, director Glenn Lowry has been pruning the collection regularly. His deaccessions include: George Bellows’s painting “Polo crowd” (1910) which sold for $27.5 million at Sotheby’s in 1999, a record for an American painting at auction; Picasso’s “Man with a guitar” (1913) which was placed with Larry Gagosian and acquired by MoMA board member Si Newhouse Jr in 2000, reportedly for $10 million. He was then obliged to leave the board. In 2001 MoMA sold 350 photographs at Sotheby’s for $4 million, a record for a single-owner photo sale, and last year Picasso’s “Houses on the hill, horta de Ebro” (1909) was sold to Berlin dealer Heinz Berggruen, and Francis Bacon’s “Dog” (1952) was sold to London dealer Gerard Faggionato.

Posted by David on April 23, 2004 5:05 PM