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This indicates a radically transformed market structure. In art as in other markets at the end of Reagan's economic follies, America sinks and Japan rises. In this context it is fatuous to utter bromides about art's being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash in money," says New York's leading dealer in old-master drawings, David Tunick. "And when something really good goes to Japan, you feel it has vanished into an abyss."
Of course, this would have been exactly the feeling of a cultivated Japanese in 1885, watching his cultural patrimony being politely stripped by American collectors, led by Ernest Fenollosa and the "Boston bonzes." The emerging lesson of the late '80s, which is unlikely to change in the '90s, is that America no longer controls the art market to any significant degree. Mostly, it sells. Its buying power is fading fast.
Some museums, however, have continued to make remarkable purchases. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, under the direction of Edmund Pillsbury, is a leader here (as New Yorkers can currently see from a loan show of its holdings at the Frick Collection). At least one museum, the Getty in Malibu, Calif., with its $3.5 billion endowment and almost limitless spending power, seems unaffected by the rise in price. In May it was able to buy Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier at Christie's for $35 million and last week Manet's acridly ironic view of a flag-bedecked Paris street with a war cripple hobbling along it for $26.4 million.
One recourse for some museums is to raise funds by selling work from their permanent collections, as MOMA recently did. In order to purchase an indubitable masterpiece, Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin, for an undisclosed price, the museum sold and exchanged seven paintings. But this encourages museum trustees to think of the permanent collection as an impermanent one, a kind of stock portfolio that can be traded at will: not a good omen.
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue and a fleet of Rolls-Royces -- all sitting over my fireplace.' Then the temptation to respond to a dealer who offers $50 million for it is insurmountable. That's the real danger: the pressure on our trustees and close friends. We will get squeezed out of the package."