On its website, Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum styles itself as “an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art widely recognized as the finest of such collections in New England.” Now you can color it gone — the Boston Globe is reporting that Brandeis, a highly rated private school in Waltham, Mass., is going to close the museum this summer and sell off its collection of more than 6,000 art works.
Works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg are part of the cache that will come on the market as Brandeis strains to plug what’s reported to be a budget deficit as high as $10 million.
…A major Brandeis donor, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, was hit hard by investing with financier Bernard Madoff, the alleged Ponzi-schemer. It had given more than $3 million to Brandeis in 2007, according to media reports.
And if Merkin also puts his Rothko collection up for sale? Talk about a Modern Movement!
January 27th, 2009 at 1:30AM
Absolutely stunning. If true, it would be hard to imagine a more short-sighted action. (A hundred years from now the judgment of history will fall very hard on "the president who destroyed our museum.") One almost wonders if they aren’t playing a game of chicken, announcing that it’s going to be sold off in the hope that a donor will appear to bail them out.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:39AM
I wondered the same thing, RJO. It’s SO radical a move — the whole collection, etc. — it makes you think they’re figuring maybe this dramatic desperate gesture will, as you say, draw out some donor. But who’s got that kind of money these days?
January 27th, 2009 at 1:57AM
> But who’s got that kind of money these days?
China.
It’s only by the accidents of economic history that the world’s great examples of Greek sculpture are in London, and the manuscripts of John Keats are in Massachusetts. There’s no reason why, in a hundred years, the great historical collections of American art won’t be in Shanghai or Guangzhou.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:10AM
Or Saudis and the Emirates. Even though the price of oil has tanked, they still have scads of dough. Russian oligarchs also spring to mind.
January 27th, 2009 at 10:27AM
It will be interesting to see if this particular collection turns out to consist of artworks whose re-sale value is considerably lower than estimated. Perhaps there’s one form of Ponzi investment being used to recoup the losses from another.
January 27th, 2009 at 10:43AM
Ha, guess who over at IHE thinks these complaints about the decision-making of the Brandeis administration are just more Monday morning quarterbacking.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:19PM
Idiotic. This kind of collection is a cultural patrimony that no responsible academic institution should liquidate. It sometimes happens that smaller/poorer institutions have items that are so valuable that insurance and security costs are ruinous, but Brandeis is certainly not in that situation. I hope that this is simply a gambit to shake some money out of donors.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:16PM
It’s really terribly sad…I studied at Brandeis and spent lots of time at the Rose, which was a really lovely, charming, place. The message came to us completely out of the blue from Jehuda Reinharz, the President of the University: "I am satisfied that our commitment is unwavering; that someday we will look back and say that when the quality of education and student services was at stake, we made hard choices so that Brandeis could emerge even stronger!"
There’s to be a lot of online discussion among students and alumni about this decision, and the fact that it was neither transparent nor sensible. Also various suggestions about what might be done to prevent this (hopefully UD can post some of this on the blog).
It seems like an unbelievably short-sighted decision, not least because prices for art are so low in this market. I never thought it might be a purely strategic move on their part…comforting in a sense, but surely something is wrong if Brandeis needs to do this kind of thing to help with their budget.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:40PM
Strikes me that there’s material here for a UD limerick contest:
There once was a President named Reinharz,
Who evinced a distaste for fine arts
…
February 15th, 2009 at 2:45PM
The Rose Art Museum supporters will be able to save the museum. The act of making a donation for a charitable purpose creates a charitable trust. Brandeis is a trustee of the art collection and has fiduciary duties to honor the intent of the donors and to protect the beneficiaries of the trust (those beneficiaries being the public in the case of a charitable trust). See the recent memorandum of law filed by the WCAL supporters at http://savewcal.net.
The state Attorney General has a statutory duty to enforce charitable trusts. If she fails to act, then the Rose supporters may take direct action to prevent the breach of trust.