The recent sale of an oil painting by American modernist Marsden Hartley for $3.2 million, the second highest price fetched for a Hartley painting, has brought an unexpected windfall and some criticism for the small central Kansas gallery that sold the piece.
Sotheby’s sold the painting, “Untitled (Still life),” at auction Dec. 1 for the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kan. The New York-based auction firm estimated the painting would bring about $700,000 to $900,000.
Dara Mitchell, head of Sotheby’s American paintings and drawings department, oversaw the auction and said she was not surprised the painting brought more than anticipated.
“It was just the perfect storm,” she said. “You had a great painting that had been out of circulation really since 1919 and had come directly by the artist to the donor who gifted it to the Birger Sandzen museum.” She said the auction drew several bidders but she would not identify the buyer, saying only it was a private American collector.
The $3.2 million sale price was the highest price brought for a Hartley still life, and the second highest price for a painting by Hartley, who died in 1943, she said. The highest price for a Hartley work was $6 million for the painting “lighthouse,” which she said sold at auction in 2008.
“It’s very exciting, and it’s somewhat of a bittersweet thing for all of us,” said Ron Michael, curator of the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery.
Michael said gallery officials decided to sell the Hartley, which had been at the museum since 1968, because a recent fundraising campaign for renovations at the 54-year-old gallery fell short about $700,000. He said the board felt it was the right thing to do in part because the Hartley did not mesh with the core collection of the museum, which is devoted to the works of Birger Sandzen, an artist who taught at Bethany College for years. He died in 1954.
The Hartley painting, which depicts a cactus in bloom in a clay pot on a red & white striped with a desert landscape in the background, had been at the Birger Sandzen since 1968 when it was bequeathed to the museum by a friend of Birger Sandzen’s, Michael said. He said the gallery will receive $2.8 million from the sale, and that it was unclear exactly where the remainder of the proceeds will go after the $1.7 million renovation is completed.
“We’re just trying to stress again that this is going to the collections and not operations,” Michael said. “We would look forward to developing the collection and caring for the collection.”
Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kan., said she is “bereaved” over the sale of the painting.
“It’s a loss,” Hardy said. “It’s the reason we exist, to share our collections with the public and hold them there in good faith.”
She said deaccessioning, or selling off art from a collection, is problematic. The Association of Art Museum Directors prohibits the use of funds from selling artworks for anything other than for building a museum’s collection, Hardy said. The Birger Sandzen museum is not a member of the AAMD.
“I’m very sorry that this happened, and I do think it compromises all of us when a museum decides to take a different path. … I think it’s very unfortunate for Kansas.
“I feel bereaved to have that painting leave our state, and particularly leave a part of the world (where) a lot of students would have seen Hartley for the first time there and for whom it would have had singular importance.”
Another organization, the American Association of Museums, however, says proceeds from the sale of artworks can go toward buying more art or to the care of the collection, which would include rehab work on the site’s facility, said AAM spokesman Dewey Blanton.
Michael, curator at the Birger Sandzen, said gallery officials considered the Hartley sale very carefully, and, he does not regret the decision.
“It was certainly appreciated, the painting. But it just really didn’t meet our core collection,” he said. “When I see what these proceeds can do for our collection, I’m very pleased with that. But still it’s difficult to give up a major piece like that.”