(4 of 5)
By no means have all the Met's sales ended up as profits for deserving merchants. Recently, the museum's collection of antique coins went on the block at Sotheby's in Zurich, turning a handsome profit. In a letter to the Times, Douglas Dillon, the Met's president, pointed out that "the museum's record on acquisitions has been extraordinary, due in part to our ability to acquire fine works of art through the exchange and sale of lesser works." Over the past 20 years, sales and trades amounted to $7,000,000-$8,000,000, by the museum's estimate, while acquisitions probably amounted to $400 million.
Amid the furor, one principle is certain. The Metropolitan Museum is constitutionally allowed to sell works from its collection—unless a bequest specifically forbids it, which the De Groot will did not. It was precatory, and merely expressed her wish that her pictures stay in the museum—or be sold or loaned to other museums. In fact, the Art Dealers' Association officially offered two weeks ago to buy or take on consignment any pictures of stature that the Met wanted to deaccession as an alternative to the Met's present policy, which they described as "contrary to the public interest."
Sales as important as that of the Rousseau are very rare in the museum's history. Hoving points, by way of precedent, to a clearing sale the Met held in 1955-56; but this was at public auction and the average price of the lots (scarabs, unwanted minor antiquities and the like) was around $10, and the costliest item fetched $5,000.
The borderline between the masterpiece and the good secondary work is wide and fluid, and Hoving's administration has not been fastidious enough in mapping it. That, at any rate, is the troubled view of scholars like Rewald and Leo Steinberg, as well as the College Art Association's members.
Against this background, the travels of Ingres's Odalisque in Gray begin to look peculiar. The Odalisque—long considered one of the Met's treasures —was sent to France about a year ago. There were none of the usual formal documents to authorize its removal. Its destination? Wildenstein & Co., in Paris. Before it went, according to the former assistant to the museum's registrar, Edith Pearson (who eventually resigned in protest), it was listed as deaccessioned. Last month, in an overhaul of its attributions, the museum announced that the Odalisque was not an Ingres. As proof, it cited an ambiguous mark on the lower right corner, which looked like a C in a circle. This, said the Met, was the monogram of Ingres's studio assistant, Armand Cambon.
Recently, Everett Fahy began to feel that his reading was wrong. The "monogram" is really a sketch location for a waterspout emptying into a square pool. What made the Met's reasoning doubly odd is that a study of the Odalisque by Ingres Expert John Connolly that pointing this out had been published in a leading art journal before the Met made its reattribution, and that Connolly himself had been refused access to the painting earlier last year by the Met, which admitted that it was out of the museum but refused to say where.