Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton’s large-scale import of big-name artworks for her just-opened Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., has been the talk of the nation for months.
Now, the board of another museum in the country’s sprawling middle has decided to sell off what one expert describes as the “crown jewel” of its collection.
The Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery on the campus of Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kan., is scheduled to sell its sole work by Marsden Hartley, one of the leading American modernist painters of the 20th century.
Curator Ron Michael said the gallery fell $700,000 short on its recent capital campaign to fund much needed renovations and hopes to raise that amount and more by selling Hartley’s “Untitled (Still life)” (1919) at an auction Thursday at Sotheby’s in New York.
Executed in oil on board and measuring 32 by almost 26 inches, the work is estimated to bring between $700,000 and $900,000.
“It was a very tough decision to make,” Michael said. “The board decided it was in the best interest of the long-term sustainability of the gallery.”
“We really looked at a variety of options,” he added, “and felt this would be the most expedient way to complete the renovation.”
The Hartley still life, featuring a bouquet of flowers in a Pueblo Indian pot before a window with a view of the Southwestern landscape, entered the gallery’s collection in 1968 as a gift from a Bethany piano teacher, Oscar Thorsen.
Thorsen bought the piece in Santa Fe, N.M., during a trip there with Birger Sandzen, a widely exhibited Swedish-born painter whose reputation has climbed considerably in recent years. Sandzen taught at Bethany for more than 50 years. His family founded the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery.
Sandzen admired Hartley, whom he praised as “one of our best American moderns.” In 1919, he included two of Hartley’s paintings in a traveling exhibit he organized in Lindsborg.
When Thorsen died in 1968, he left his entire collection, including the Hartley still life and works by Sandzen and others, to the Sandzen Memorial Gallery.
The gallery decided to sell it, Michael said, “because the Hartley painting didn’t fit the gallery’s mission statement: to promote Birger Sandzen and his contemporaries and associates.”
“We felt the Hartley would be better utilized in another institution,” he added.
At least one illustrious alumnus of the college vehemently disagrees.
Randall Griffey, curator of American art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts, calls the sale “a tragedy.”
“They fell short on the capital campaign, so the board voted to sell its crown jewel,” he said.
Griffey, a Hartley scholar who earned a bachelor of arts degree at Bethany in 1990, said the Sandzen Gallery’s painting played a significant part in the trajectory of his career.
“It was the first Hartley I laid my eyes on when I was in college there,” he said.
