It was a singular gesture for a profession whose lubricant, next to money, is tact; but in Manhattan last week, the Art Dealers' Association of America, representing the 86 leading art merchants in the country, loosed a statement denouncing the world's most powerful museum, the Metropolitan, and its director Thomas Hoving. "The sale by museums of important works in their collections," said the A.D.A., was "in the nature of a breach of a public trust."
For decades the Met has been selling—or, in the museum's oblique officialese, "de-accessioning"—works of art to raise money for other purchases. This is common and legal museum practice in the U.S., though not in England or Europe. But what provoked the A.D.A. was the discovery, reported by John Canaday in the New York Times, that last May the Metropolitan had secretly sold two paintings to the Liechtenstein branch of a leading international dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. The pictures were Henri Rousseau's The Tropics and The Olive Pickers by Van Gogh. Last week the Met disclosed that two more of its paintings, a Modigliani and a Juan Gris, had also been traded to Marlborough for two unnamed works of art. Though the Metropolitan refuses to confirm or deny it, it is an open secret in the art world that these are a painting by Clyfford Still and a sculpture by David Smith, both of whom are represented by Marlborough.
The A.D.A.'s chief objection was to the secrecy of the Rousseau-Van Gogh sale. Its statement urged that, when a museum sells a work, other American museums should have "ample opportunity" to buy it, and that if they do not, the work should be "offered widely in the market so that the maximum proceeds are assured to the selling institution." Neither of these conditions was met by the sale to Marlborough, the dealers insist. Finally, said the A.D.A., "if a museum does not subscribe to the foregoing principles and offers works ...privately or secretly," dealers were wholly entitled to buy them.
If this last clause was soothing to Marlborough (whose client for the Rousseau, Italian Industrialist Gianni Agnelli, instantly cancelled the deal when the story broke), it was balm to Hoving, who derides the A.D.A. statement as "an absurd document—perfectly specious and contradictory." The Rousseau, he adds, "was of no importance to us" (although the Met owns only one other). This is not a view shared by most art experts or by Marlborough's senior partner, Frank Lloyd, who says, "In my opinion, it's a masterwork." Hoving defends the disputed sale in terms of the need to trim redundancies from the collection.
"For the first time in history, we know what form the Met's building will take forever. We can count every cubic foot of space we'll have. So now our policy is refinement rather than expansion. We're trying for zero population growth, weeding out and stabilizing the collection. Our criteria for de-accessioning are much stricter than our criteria for acquisition."