Brooklyn Museum Sells Artwork to Create Long Term Collection Care

By: Helen Zablani

The Brooklyn Museum, struggling to pay its bills, has started selling works of art from its collection. A deficit is nothing new to the 197-year-old museum, which has been making ends meet for decades with only a small endowment and staff assigned to care for some 150,000 pieces of art in its collection. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March, however, shuttering all NYC museums for months, revenue plunged to new lows for the museum, and furloughs followed.

As reported by Bloomberg News, on Thursday, the museum sold Lucas Cranach’s “Lucretia” at Christies for $5.1, which is almost triple the high estimate for the 16th century oil painting. This month promises to bring more auctions of pieces from the museum. Sotheby’s said it will offer multiple Impressionist and modern art works from the museum at its Oct 28 sale. The Brooklyn museum is hoping to create a $40 million fund with the upcoming sales, which are slated to include pieces by Claude Monet and Henri Matisse.

Museums were historically only allowed to sell art in order to buy more art, not to make ends meet. The Association of Art Museum Directors, however, altered that rule in April, due to the pandemic, announcing that for the next two years institutions can sell works and utilize the proceeds for “direct care,” the definition of which is flexible and set by each institution. “It’s a fundamental change” said Adrian Ellis, founder of AEA Consulting. “It’s putting the artworks back on the balance sheet.”

The esteemed 560,000-square-foot Brooklyn Museum is not the only institution selling off art. The new relaxed regulations led several others into selling their works as well. Last week, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, also tapped Christie’s to sell its only Jackson Pollock painting for $13 million. The Baltimore Museum of Art aims to raise $65 million whilst selling three paintings at Sotheby’s. Similarly, the Palm Springs Museum of Art will try to sell its Helen Frankenthaler painting with Christies.

As per Bloomberg, the next actionable pieces from Brooklyn include Monet’s landscape “Les Iles a Port-Villez,” and Jean Dubuffet’s “Le Messager”, each estimated at about $2.5 million to $3.5 million. Of course, there are those who still oppose the thought of a museum selling off its art. The Brooklyn Museum isn’t selling “anything that could be considered a crown jewel of our collection,” museum director Anne Pasternak said in response.

In an e-mail correspondence sent to the Jewish Voice by Taylor Maatman, the director of public relations at the Brooklyn Museum clarified the museum’s position by saying, “In an important effort to support responsible and proper collection care, the expense of which has grown exponentially in recent years, the Brooklyn Museum is deaccessioning select artworks to create a permanently restricted Collection Care Fund. This effort is designed to support one of the most important functions of any museum — the care for its collection, and comes after several years of focused effort as the Museum builds a plan to strengthen its collections, repatriate objects, advance provenance research, improve storage, and more. The collection care fund will support expenses related to the direct care of the collection.”

Maatman added that, “It includes many activities related to the storage, conservation, and research of the collection, while also includes a small amount of pay for staff who directly care for the collection. It does not offset operating expensive. All funds earned from the sale of artworks will only support the direct care of our collection. While seeing any art work leave can be painful, in no way does the departure of any of these works undermine the strengths of our collection, and all decisions were made with the utmost care and research, guided by industry best practices and laws.”