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Ralph Colin, the peppery former trustee of the Museum of Modern Art who is the A.D.A.'s vice president and attorney, disagrees: "There's a much broader issue here than the sale of pictures. It's the complete surrender by trustees of a public institution of their duty as trustees. I can't believe the trustees acted as anything but sheep, following Hoving's instigation."
The sales, Hoving insists, were made privately "because we got a better deal." Not so, says A.D.A. member Frank Perls, perhaps the leading Modigliani authority in the U.S. Though routinely consulted by the Met on insurance values for their Modiglianis, Perls was not informed of the Met's decision to sell. The rumored cost of the painting to Marlborough was $80,000. To Perls, "a conservative auction value for it would be $150,000-$180,000, and any dealer would pay $100,000 cash for it. The objection is: Why does Hoving sell cheap?"
Masquerade. The natural safeguard is to sell publicly, aboveboard and preferably at auction. (The Met itself has slated some 235 paintings for disposal at an auction by the end of 1972.) But despite Hoving's fervent disclaimers, there is the nagging reflection that the museum may be paring its own bones. The Metropolitan has acute financial problems. And if money is needed there is an inherent pressure to sell not marginal or minor works, but what will fetch most. But the interpretation of "quality"—a concept Hoving believes to be objective, beyond argument and independent of the vicissitudes of taste—changes. Selling the Rousseau is an act of taste (Hoving's) arrogantly masquerading as historical necessity. The Met's public responsibility is not solely to buy masterpieces but to preserve a broad field of performance, greater and lesser, across which artists may be studied. By selling the Rousseau in particular, Hoving has narrowed that field.