1.26.09 6:53pm Subject: Important Message Regarding the Rose Art Museum
January 28, 2009
Outcry Over a Plan to Sell Museum’s Holdings
By RANDY KENNEDY and CAROL VOGEL
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said on Tuesday that it planned to conduct a detailed review of Brandeis University’s surprise decision to sell off the entire holdings of its Rose Art Museum, one of the most important collections of postwar art in New England.
The decision to close the 48-year-old museum in Waltham, Mass., and disperse the collection as a way to shore up the university’s struggling finances was denounced by the museum’s board, its director and a wide range of art experts, who warned that the university was cannibalizing its cultural heritage to pay its bills.
“This is one of the artistic and cultural legacies of American Jewry,” said Jonathan Lee, the chairman of the museum’s board of overseers, who said that “nobody at the museum - neither the director nor myself nor anyone else - was informed of this or had any idea what was going on.”
Jehuda Reinharz, the university’s president, said in a statement that the decision, made on Monday by the university’s trustees, was agonizing but necessary as Brandeis faces a deepening financial crisis, with its endowment, once $700 million, significantly diminished. “Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university’s core teaching and research mission,” he wrote.
The museum’s collection includes some 6,000 works - among them seminal paintings by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein - that are believed to be worth $350 million to $400 million, although they could bring less in the current ailing art market.
“It couldn’t be a worse time to sell expensive art,” said Robert Storr, the prominent curator and art historian. “It is not only unprincipled, but bad economics.”
He added: “This sets a terrible precedent. The Rose Art Museum has been known for four decades as a hospitable place to show serious and challenging art in an academic context. They are throwing away one of their prime assets.”
Mr. Johns, represented in the collection by the 1957 painting “Drawer,” which was on view in a large exhibition of his work last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said when notified on Tuesday of the closing: “I find it astonishing. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Emily LaGrassa, director of communications for the state attorney general, Martha Coakley, said that Brandeis had informed the office on Monday of its decision, but had not consulted with the attorney general in advance. The attorney general has approval powers over certain actions of nonprofit institutions in the state.
Ms. LaGrassa said that in the case of Brandeis, the attorney general would review wills and agreements made between the museum and the estates of donors to determine if selling artworks violated the terms of donations. “We have not yet offered any opinion on any aspect of the proposed sales,” she said, adding, “We do expect this to be a lengthy process.”
Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for the university, said it would have no comment on any legal questions related to the proposed closing and the sale of the art. The university said in a statement that the Rose would shut down by late summer and be turned into a teaching center with a gallery and studio space.
Like other universities around the country, Brandeis depends on income from its endowment to cover much of its operating expenses. And like most such college endowments, Brandeis’s fund has been seriously eroded by the economic downturn, although officials on Tuesday declined to give a figure on the extent of the drop. Several of the university’s large donors have been hit particularly hard by losses connected to Bernard L. Madoff, the disgraced financier accused of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
David Alan Robertson, president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, said it was by far the largest closing of an academic museum in his memory, and he said he could not think of a mass dispersal of important works from a college or university that would compare. “One fears that this opens a floodgate,” said Mr. Robertson, director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. “And it’s a detriment to all of our institutions.”
Far more limited proposed sales of art by some smaller colleges and universities have already drawn controversy. In 2005 Fisk University in Nashville moved to sell paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley to bolster its finances, but was blocked from doing so by a court that determined that the sale would violate the terms of O’Keeffe’s gift of the two works to the institution. Fisk has appealed. In 2007, Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., sold a Rufino Tamayo painting and proposed selling three other works to raise money for its endowment. The museum’s director, Karol Lawson, compared the experience to a mugging and resigned.
Michael Rush, who has been the director of the Rose Art Museum since 2006, said he heard the news only on Monday afternoon when Marty Krauss, Brandeis’s provost, called him into her office. “She said, ‘This is going to be a very difficult meeting - the university is facing dire financial restrictions and has to close the museum,’ ” Mr. Rush recalled. “I was shocked. I’m still shocked. I feel horrible. It’s a sad time for art and for the art world.”
He emphasized that even though the museum might have lacked a large audience - its annual attendance is 13,000 to 15,000 - its art is everywhere. “We have loans in Spain, France, a piece being loaned to the Guggenheim, a Jasper Johns going to the ‘Cezanne and Beyond’ exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum. Our art is seen by hundreds of thousands of people a month as clearly being identified that they are from us.”
When the museum opened in 1961, it had no acquisitions budget. So its collection grew mainly through gifts. Among the most significant was a $50,000 donation from the collectors Leon Mnuchin and his wife, Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin, to be used to buy contemporary art. The only restriction was that no individual work should cost more than $5,000. With that money, Sam Hunter, the museum’s founding director, was able to buy 21 paintings by then-young artists like Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Mr. Johns that are among the most valuable works in the collection today.
Robert Mnuchin, the Mnuchins’ son, who runs the Manhattan gallery L & M Arts, said he had no idea of Brandeis’s plans until he read about them. “It’s such a shame, particularly at this time in the world,” he said, adding, “Obviously as a dealer I’d like to be involved either in buying them or selling them. It’s emotional for me.”
Over the years, highlights from the museum’s collection have been included in major museum exhibitions around the country. Among its masterpieces is Warhol’s “Saturday Disaster,” from the artist’s car-crash series, this one from 1963-64, a work that experts believe is worth around $30 million. It was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Warhol retrospective in 1989 in New York.
“Second Time Painting,” a work by Rauschenberg that was included in a show of his combines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005, could fetch $12 million to $15 million, experts said. Dealers in postwar art said that Mr. Johns’s 1957 painting could potentially bring $15 million to $20 million.
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/01/26/brandeis_to_sell_schools_art_collection/
Brandeis to sell school's art collection
By Geoff Edgers and Peter Schworm, Globe Staff | January 26, 2009
Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.
The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries. Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush declined comment this evening, saying he had just learned of the decision.
Brandeis is also discussing a range of sweeping proposals to bridge a budget deficit that could be as high as $10 million, such as reducing the size of the faculty by 10 percent, increasing undergraduate enrollment by 12 percent to boost tuition revenue, and overhauling the undergraduate curriculum by eliminating individual academic programs in favor of larger, interdisciplinary divisions.
Other plans under consideration include requiring students to take one summer semester, allowing the university to expand its student body without overcrowding, and adding a business program. The changes would take place, at the earliest, in 2010.
“This is not a happy day in the history of Brandeis,” President Jehuda Reinharz said tonight. “The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it’s a hidden jewel. It does not have great foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are just not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.”
Brandeis said the museum would be closed late this summer. It was founded in 1961; a new wing designed by celebrated architect Graham Gund was added in 2001.
Announcement of the closing came as Rush was searching for a chief curator. A leading expert on video art, he had arrived in 2005 with plans to expand the museum. He also launched a full scale analysis of the museum’s value by Christie’s auction house. Dennis Nealon, the university's director of public relations, would not say how much the collection is worth.
Experts on university art collections said the move was unusual, but not unexpected.
“Clearly, what’s happening with Brandeis now is that they decided the easiest way is to look around the campus and find things that can be capitalized,” said David Robertson, a Northwestern University professor who is president of the Association of College and Univertsity Museums and Galleries. “It’s always art that goes first.”
But there is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose's stature. Internationally recognized, the collection is strong in American art of the 1960s and 1970s and includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler.
“I’m in shock,” said Mark Bessire, the recently named director of the Portland Museum Of Art. "And this is definitely not the time to be selling paintings, anyway. The market is dropping. I’m just kind of sitting here sweating because I can’t imagine Brandeis would take that step.”
http://www.thejusticeonline.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=89da31b1-14ed-4cae-ae15-8ac47b759566
Rose Art Museum to be closed
By: Andrea Fineman, Hannah Kirsch and Mike Prada
Posted: 1/27/09
CORRECTION APPENDED SEE BOTTOM
The Rose Art Museum, which houses a collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces, will close in the summer of 2009 after the Board of Trustees voted unanimously yesterday to do so in the wake of the current financial crisis, according to a campuswide e-mail sent by University President Jehuda Reinharz.
The decision stunned many current and former Rose staff members, University faculty and students, all of whom did not learn of plans to close the museum until after the decision was final.
The University will publicly sell all of the art that is currently housed in the museum, according to a University press release. The building will be converted into a "fine arts teaching center with studio space and an exhibition gallery," according to the release.
"No one feels really good about closing the Rose," Executive Director of Media and Public Affairs Dennis Nealon said. "It is being done with a strict emphasis on what is best for the students who are here now and what is best for the students who are going to be coming in future generations," he added.
The Rose Art Museum opened in 1961 and currently contains a collection of over 6,000 works, almost all of which were gifts from donors; it features three exhibitions each semester.
This semester's current exhibition focuses on the work of noteworthy abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Some of the works assembled in the Hofmann show have never before been exhibited in a U.S. museum.
University Provost Marty Krauss said the idea to close the museum was initiated by the Board of Trustees. "Ultimately it was a decision by the Board, not the administration," she said.
She added that this was an action that the Board had been considering prior to yesterday's meeting, saying "it became a target of discussion among [the Board of Trustees]."
Prof. Steven Burg (POL), a faculty representative to the Board of Trustees, wrote in an e-mail to the Justice, "It is not clear to me where the initiative for this proposal came from, but similar proposals have been made from time to time in the past, in response to similar, but far less serious economic pressures."
Faculty representative to the Board Prof. Leslie Griffith (BIOL) wrote, "Rather than impose cuts on the University that would have an adverse impact on the quality of education and the very nature of Brandeis, the board has chosen to liquidate this University asset. I am sad that this had to be done, but I think it is the right thing to do."
Rose Art Museum Director Michael Rush could not be reached for comment by press time, but the Boston Globe reported that he learned of the decision yesterday.
"That's unconscionable, I mean, utterly unconscionable," Roger Kizik, preparator at the Rose from 1977 to 2003, said of Rush learning about the news yesterday. "I would have assumed that the current director would have, you know, been apprised of this as it was unfolding within his own University. That's just a stunning thing," he said.
Krauss said the University has an arrangement with "a major art dealer that would handle the selling of this collection," but declined to elaborate.
Nealon said the process of selling the art "could take up to about a couple of years, minimum."
He added, "With the market the way it is now, we have no way of knowing right now what the value of the collection is now. It's a very valuable collection, very important collection. We'll know later as we get down the road; that's going to be part of the process, determining the exact value of the collection," he said.
Burg wrote that he was unaware of the specific University plans to sell the artwork, but wrote, "I doubt that "every piece" in the collection of about 6,000 pieces is even sellable."
The decision took many professors, as well as students and staff members who currently work at the museum, by surprise.
"I was shocked when I heard about the decision because the Rose Art Museum has been such a big part of my Brandeis experience-more than most people who may just visit it once or twice a year," Office of the Arts Director Scott Edmiston wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.
"I recognize this is just the first step of a long, very complicated, multiyear process, and I'm trying not to jump to conclusions until we see how things unfold," he added.
Office of the Arts Program Administrator Ingrid Schorr said, "I feel a lot more strongly about this than I do about the [closing of the Linsey] pool. We'll get a swimming pool eventually, but we'll never have that collection of artwork again."
According to an e-mail sent by Beccah Ulm '11 to the Brandeis Budget Cuts Committee listserv, a sit-in at the Rose will be organized to take place Thursday at 1 p.m.
In addition, a meeting to discuss the closing of the Rose as well as concerns about administration transparency will be held in the Student Union office tonight at 8 p.m., according to an e-mail originally sent to the Union Senate listserv by Senator for the Class of 2009 Eric Alterman.
"I think [closing the museum] is a pretty terrible idea-it's just such a Brandeis staple, … a pinnacle for culture," Esther Schloss '09, a Studio Art major, said.
"The permanence of this is scary-losing the Rose Art Museum and selling all of the work is very scary for Brandeis," Hannah Richman '10, another Studio Art major, said.
"These are extraordinary times," Reinharz said in the press release. "We cannot control or fix the nation's economic problems. We can only do what we have been entrusted to do-act responsibly with the best interests of our students."
-Sarah Bayer, Shana D. Lebowitz, Miranda Neubauer and Jillian Wagner contributed reporting
Correction: The article initially referred to Ingrid Schorr as a professor in the Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies Department. She is actually the Office of the Arts Program Administrator.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-28/did-bernie-bankrupt-brandeis/
Brandeis on the Brink
by Judith H. Dobrzynski
January 28, 2009 | 8:27pm
In a Daily Beast exclusive, a top Brandeis official opens up about the university’s financial collapse-including a potential $79 million deficit. The stark choice: Fire more than half of the faculty or sell the Rose art collection.
Brandeis University, which claims Irving Howe, Thomas Friedman, Christie Hefner and Walt Mossberg among its alums-and trustees such as Michael Steinhardt, Vartan Gregorian, and John Rosenwald-has incurred the wrath of the art world for deciding to shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell off its famed collection, which was valued at $350 million in 2007.
Other museums have sold off works before but never a whole collection. And selling into a down market struck some people as irresponsible.
No one could understand why, with what was said to be a $10 million operating deficit over five years, the university’s trustees would take such a drastic step. Even the museum’s director went on attack, saying the Rose, which according to the university’s own website “houses what is widely recognized as the finest collection of modern and contemporary art in New England,” not only pays its own way but contributes to the university’s funds. The collection, largely donated over the years, includes seminal works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra, among others.
But in an exclusive interview, Peter French, Brandeis’s chief operating officer, explained that the university’s situation is far more dire than it appeared in news accounts, which extrapolated the $10 million figure from published documents. He objected to the word “bankrupt,” but what would you call an institution with a projected deficit of $79 million over the next six years, a tapped-out reserve fund, a shrunken endowment and “quite a number” of big donors hit hard by the Madoff scandal?
Brandeis has already cut expenses and staff this year and last, and raised tuition and fees. French said the alternative now was either a drastic shrinking of the university or selling the art. Faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members-any of which, French said, would drastically change the university’s mission and essentially cripple it-“We’d rather use Rose.”
Before finalizing the decision, French explained, the university made an emergency appeal to donors, only to confront the Madoff losses. Earlier this month, Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz noted in a fund-raising letter that Madoff’s victims included many “staunch and generous” donors to the school. Among the biggest donors are the philanthropist Carl Shapiro and his wife, Ruth; their family foundation lost an estimated $545 million in Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme, according to The Boston Globe.
Making matters worse, French added, the university is in the middle of a huge capital campaign that has raised $820 million of its $1.2 billion goal. Most of that went to operating programs or is earmarked to construct new buildings, which are “fully funded” and will continue going up, despite the downturn. Only about $240 million of the campaign funds went to the endowment, which is down to $530 million, from more than $712 million last June, and is projected to drop a bit more this year.
But by Massachusetts law, French said, Brandeis can only spend gains, not capital, from the endowment-and it will be some time before there are any of those. Brandeis’s reserve fund, which is included in the endowment for management purposes, is projected to run out in about 18 months.
Borrowing money was out of the question, French explained; Brandeis already has $256 million in debt, and as he put it, “If we take out more debt, what would service it?”
None of this matters to the art world, where Brandeis is being attacked. The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, and the much more important Association of Art Museum Directors (whose members include the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art), issued statements of shock, deploring the proposed sale.
No one can think of a precedent. Other museums have sold off works before-sometimes getting into trouble with the law, with museum associations, and with donors-but never a whole collection. And selling into a down market struck some people as irresponsible.
Meanwhile, Michael Rush, the Rose’s director-who was not told of the impending closure before the trustees’ vote-has started a war with his employer. “I'm encouraging everybody to take every step they want to take,” he told Tyler Green, an art blogger. “There are any number of things going on right now. There are Facebook groups, a ‘Save the Rose’ website. And we have several lawyers on the [museum] board who are absolutely looking into legal issues.” As is the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, which plans to investigate whether selling the works violates any of the donors’ wills or agreements with the university.
Trustees must have known they would elicit such condemnation, but as one told me, not for attribution, “the board had no choice.”
Judith H. Dobrzynski, formerly a reporter and a senior editor at The New York Times and at Business Week, as well as a senior executive at CNBC, is a writer based in New York.
The global financial crisis and deepening national economic recession require Brandeis to formulate and execute decisive plans that will position the university to emerge stronger for the benefit of our students. To this end, our response to the crisis is to focus and sustain our core academic mission. I am writing to tell you that the Board of Trustees met today and voted to close the Rose Art Museum. The decision was difficult and was reached after a painstaking assessment of the university’s need to mobilize for the future and initiate a strategy to replenish our financial assets.
The Rose has been a marvelous addition to the Fine Arts program, and we are grateful to everyone who expressed their love for art and admiration for Brandeis’s academic mission by helping to create, build, and support the museum. Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university’s core teaching and research mission. Today’s decision will set in motion a long-term plan to sell the art collection and convert the professional art facility to a teaching, studio, and gallery space for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty.
Attached you will find the university’s public statement. I will be writing to the community shortly to update you on other initiatives currently under discussion by the faculty and the administration.
Sincerely,
Jehuda Reinharz