I received a forwarded e-mail today from Josephine Hogan of Irish Classical renown. In it she issues a call to action for WNY residents concerning the upcoming sale of select pieces from the Albright Knox Gallery collection at Sotheby’s next month. Â
Below is her email that includes an article from the Wall Street Journal relative to the sale. The article is long, but well worth reading.
If you are interested in joining the ranks of the petition signers, email me and I will send you the petition.
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February 18, 2007
To All-
On February 17, Buffalo Art Keepers held an open meeting at the Crane branch library to talk about our campaign to stop the sale of treasures from the Albright Knox. What is the next step? We need to sign TWO petitions. But the FIRST and MOST URGENT petition is an authorization by 300 members of the gallery for legal action to prevent the sale of the Albright’s treasures.Â
The signed documents have to be in our lawyers’ hands by next Sunday, February 25. Signing this document does not make you liable in any legal way; it merely identifies you as a concerned member of the gallery.
So, what can you do? Please download the attached file, print it, sign it, and mail it IMMEDIATELY to Buffalo Art Keepers, P.O. 693, Buffalo, New York 14213, or mail or hand deliver it to Carl Dennis, 49 Ashland Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222. Email copies are not acceptable, unfortunately.
The second petition will reach you by mail, directly from the Albright Knox. It’s purpose is to get a sufficient number of member signatures to call for a general meeting with the director and the Board.
Both petitions are important, but the attached is MOST urgent. We encourage you to make copies and get others, who are members of the Gallery, involved.
Thanks for your commitment!
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Shuffled Off in Buffalo
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery will sell off some 200 “superfluous” works.
BY TOM L. FREUDENHEIM/ Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, November 15, 2006 12:00 a.m. EST
And so another museum goes to market. Last week Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery announced it plans to sell some 200 objects from its permanent collection.
Included on the hit list are a Greco-Roman bronze statue of “Artemis and the Stag,” an ancient Chinese bronze wine vessel that the Buffalo News reports is one of only a handful in existence, and a 10th-century, life-size statue of the god Shiva that a Sotheby’s specialist told the Associated Press is “without question the most important Indian sculpture ever to appear on the market.” In addition, African, Pre-Columbian and Egyptian objects and Old Master paintings are to be sold.
The sale, which Sotheby’s will hold next year, is expected to bring more than $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. The museum is best known for its collection of seminal works by such Abstract Expressionists as Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky.
Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos argues that the works to be sold fall outside the institution’s historical “core mission” of “acquiring and exhibiting art of the present.”
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Having grown up in Buffalo and haunted the museum’s halls until I left for college, I thought I knew something about that mission: providing access to all kinds of high-quality art in a medium-size, not unsophisticated, formerly important industrial city, which also boasts key examples of American architecture and has a powerful musical tradition.
This is the place I have often cited in lectures and in writing, describing how my local museum inspired me to enter the art history and museum world. With no claim to an encyclopedic collection, the Albright Art Gallery (as it was known then) nevertheless helped me to see a wide range of wondrous art objects that became my friends through repeated viewings.
The elegant bronze “Artemis and the Stag” was the first work of Classical art I ever saw–over and over again–from the time when a young boy looked at the Bambi-like stag until the teenager was more interested in what are now called “perky” breasts showing from beneath the goddess’s drapery.
I haven’t seen the complete list of “superfluous” objects, but wonder if it includes the little writhing Baroque ivory “Repentant Thief” before which my father and I used to stand in wonder. Or the small ancient Mesopotamian “Mountain Deity”–my first visual contact with anything that old. I do know it includes the lovely 13th-century French “Eucharistic Dove,” the first work of medieval art I ever saw.
Mr. Grachos has pledged that he “will never touch 19th and 20th century work,” which suggests that Hogarth’s dramatic “Lady’s Last Stake” or Reynolds’s puzzling “Cupid as a Link Boy” are up for grabs. These form part of a small but significant group of 18th-century English paintings (also including works by Gainsborough, Romney and Lawrence) purchased for the museum by the Knox family in 1945.
This doesn’t quite conform with the museum’s claims that the concentration on contemporary art is “a tradition that has been in place since the museum’s inception in 1862.”
That this project has the unanimous assent of the museum’s trustees tells us a great deal about how my hometown hasn’t changed. It’s the museum equivalent of Buffalo’s 1950 demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic and innovative 1904 Larkin Building, which vies with the loss of New York’s Penn Station for high marks in public vandalism.
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But the issue is bigger than the nostalgia of a single museumgoer or the history of one city. It’s a problem that’s become endemic to the profession. Museums are devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history–supposedly what museums are all about–is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for the work of the present.
Ironically, this plan is driven by perceptions about the notably erratic and currently inflated contemporary art market, rather than by any dire financial crisis.
The museum maintains that these disposals follow the policies of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which allow museums to sell in order to buy. If so, then perhaps it’s time to revisit those policies, rather than taking for granted that trading art for art, whatever the merits of the work, is acceptable. (Disclosure: I am an AAMD emeritus member.)
It’s not comforting to think that a “special advisory committee” of fellow museum directors was invited to assist in what Mr. Grachos calls the “careful vetting process” that produced the list. Museum folks are notorious for covering up each others’ missteps: Just watch the constant buying and selling that characterizes what used to be called “collecting” but that has now obliterated whatever lines once differentiated the roles of curator and dealer.
Richard Armstrong, director of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum and a member of the Albright’s committee, suggested that the process was made in an “elegant and open way that sets a national standard.” Do we really want this kind of national standard that robs communities of their assets?
The message is, once again, that those entrusted with the sacred task of safeguarding our public patrimony have become as irresponsible as the money-grubbing executives who have given corporate America such a bad name.
The works of art in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery don’t belong to the directors or curators, who move in and out of communities as job opportunities present themselves. Nor are they the property of the trustees, who are meant to hold them in trust for the people of Buffalo, but who now show that they cannot be trusted.
Many museums lack the resources to be encyclopedic; nevertheless, their often sporadic range of works assists in forming a sensibility about art’s endless scope and roots and possibilities.
What sort of message does a community museum present in suggesting that everything begins and ends with modernity, arbitrarily defined?
Pity the Buffalo kids of the future, deciding that you have to leave town to see anything that predates the 19th century after finding out that the foxes were guarding the henhouse.
Mr. Freudenheim is a former museum director who served as assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.
