The Met: Beleaguered but Defiant

SHE was a difficult old woman," remarked a staff member of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, musing on the late Adelaide de Groot, heiress to a vast fortune derived from her father's success in the China trade. "The more presentable junior employees had to take turns squiring her around, pushing her wheelchair. And all to get that damn bequest!"

The bequest was considerable, but so is the acrimony it has since roused. In the past year, the Met has quietly sold or traded off 50 of the 211 paintings Adelaide de Groot willed to the museum on her death in 1967, including works by Rousseau, Modigliani, Picasso, Gris and Bonnard. The New York Times's persistent reporting of this, over the past five months, has taken on the character of a vendetta. Sometimes the Times seems to hint darkly at sins where there were no sins--or at most only dubious transactions. But the publicity has caused a violent row over a great museum's duty to its benefactors and public. New York State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz opened an inquiry into the "legality and prudence" of the Met's behavior. At stake are the Met's prestige and that of its director, Thomas P.F. Hoving.

It is common in America--though not in Europe--for museums to sell their unwanted objects. So why the fuss? Because, his critics charge, Hoving's administration had disposed of important works to raise cash, tried to conceal it and made special arrangements with favored dealers instead of putting pictures up for auction or on the open market. Furthermore, by claiming some of the sold pictures were "superfluous" and "duplicates," the Met bent its standards of taste and scholarship. "In the history of painting there are no duplicates," said Britain's leading journal of art history, the Burlington Magazine, which called Hoving's policy "sinister."

The distinguished College Art Association of America censured the Met for "contradictory public statements and inconsistent administration of professed standards for de-accessioning." In answers to questions from TIME (in writing, the Met stipulated), the museum staff replied that the C.A.A. board "appears not to understand" that the Met will eventually run out of space and therefore must get rid of some pictures. "In time, all other museums in the country will have to do the same."

When political, the art world resembles a castle populated by Coney Island ghosts. Fluorescent skeletons jiggle their pasteboard bones in each recess; the cellars resound with prerecorded mutters, wails and injunctions to silence; entrepreneurs tap their way down the corridors, prodding each moulding in the hope that a panel will fly open, revealing a lost Titian, an undocumented Goya, or a Japanese gingko-nut tycoon with an open checkbook. Collectors do not want the taxman to know how much they paid for what, and neither do dealers. The availability of a painting may be the occasion for as much conspiratorial hoo-ha and discreetly vicious elbowing as anything in the annals of industrial espionage. It is fun. It becomes a habit of mind, a badge of club membership. And some of the Met's difficulties, it seems, arise from this deeply ingrained reflex.

The current Met ruckus goes back to 1970, when the museum bought Velasquez's portrait of his black apprentice, Juan de Pareja, for $5,544,000 --the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. To pay it, Hoving and his Acquisitions Committee had to liquidate the capital left in the museum's Fletcher Fund, about $6,000,000, and commit themselves to pay back at least a part of it, in yearly installments of $160,000 through 1976. In effect, the buying power of the Metropolitan's 17 departments had been partly mortgaged for several years in advance against one painting. The result: the Met needed money. Hoving proposed to get it through "deaccessioning" pictures--the barbaric museum jargon for preparing to sell. Last September, the Met revealed that it had deaccessioned a major work from the De Groot bequest, Henri Rousseau's The Tropics, and secretly sold it, along with Vincent Van Gogh's The Olive Pickers, to Marlborough Fine Art galleries. No price was given, but the reliable figure was $1.5 million for the two. This is well below their market value; the Rousseau alone was resold only days later to a Japanese collector for $2,000,000. Everett Fahy, 31, the Met's brilliant curator of European paintings, did not want to lose the Rousseau and refused to sign the deaccession form. On this occasion, Hoving overrode him, though, in theory, the Met's official de-accessioning procedure is full of checks and balances. "Generally," says the Met, "the curator recommends de-accessioning of a work of art to the vice director, curator in chief and the director," whereon the final decision to de-access lies with the Acquisitions Committee or, if the object --like the Rousseau--is worth more than $25,000, with the board of trustees itself. But such safeguards are in practice vulnerable to a strong impetus from the director, since very few of the present trustees are in any real sense art experts.

Backed by Vice Director Theodore Rousseau, Hoving defends the sale on the ground that The Tropics was "superfluous and third-rate." But why, in that case--since the Rousseau was by general consent the best painting in her collection--did the Met court Adelaide de Groot? To most art critics, it is in fact a major Rousseau.

And why the relatively low price? One possible reason involves the offer of both the Rousseau and the Van Gogh to Italian Auto Tycoon Giovanni Agnelli. Agnelli also happens to have an interest in Marlborough, a firm that --under the guidance of Frank Lloyd, a dealer of legendary if unloved astuteness--has in the past decade become the world's richest gallery complex, with main offices in New York, London and Rome, a branch in Tokyo and a network of holding companies in Liechtenstein. Fiat had agreed to design and build four air-conditioned "Artmobiles" equipped to carry shows all over the U.S. The American branch of Fiat was to give these to the Met as a public relations gesture. Though the Met officially denies it, sources within its staff believe that the gift of the buses was to be treated as part payment for the works of art. Then Agnelli -- so the story goes -- went cold on the paintings, fearing that the sale would be used for propaganda in the labor disputes that almost paralyzed the Fiat plant last fall. Neither he nor Marlborough told Hoving this; so Hoving went on believing that both paintings were in Turin, and actually said so to the Times in October 1972.

The loss of the works provoked a storm of protest from art historians, critics and the Art Dealers' Association of America; one prominent scholar, John Rewald, wrote an article in Art in America demanding Hoving's resignation. Then the Met revealed another secret deal with Marlborough. At first it seemed that the museum had swapped two more De Groot paintings, a Modigliani and a Juan Gris, for Becca, a sculpture by David Smith and a painting by California Artist Richard Diebenkorn. Later the Met disclosed that the swap had cost the Met not two but six works -- another Gris, a Bonnard, a Picasso and a Renoir.

In the process, the Met had been royally if quite legally taken by Marlborough. Becca cost the Met $250,000, the highest price ever paid for a Smith. It had been offered to the Met in 1969, and the trustees then refused it at $100,000. But for Curator Henry Geldzahler, it was "undoubtedly the greatest Smith on the market." It had been a star item in the huge centennial show of New York art that Geldzahler organized for the Met in the fall of 1969. Naturally, this drove its price up. "You might call it the principle of indeterminancy," Geldzahler observed. "You change the behavior of an object by looking at it." Or by putting it in a big show at the Met.

Marlborough, by contrast, got Modigliani's Red Head for $50,000--with the astounding guarantee that if it proved to be a fake (both Rousseau and Geldzahler doubted its authenticity) the Met should give $60,000 back to Marlborough. Presumably the extra $10,000 was for air fare, since Red Head promptly went to Tokyo, where an anonymous Japanese bought it for between $200,000 and $250,000.

Marlborough has now picked up six paintings as nearly pure cream from the De Groot sale. The Met's own valuation on these was $190,000, but chances are that Marlborough can sell them for considerably more.

By no means have all the Met's sales ended up as profits for deserving merchants. Recently, the museum's collection of antique coins went on the block at Sotheby's in Zurich, turning a handsome profit. In a letter to the Times, Douglas Dillon, the Met's president, pointed out that "the museum's record on acquisitions has been extraordinary, due in part to our ability to acquire fine works of art through the exchange and sale of lesser works." Over the past 20 years, sales and trades amounted to $7,000,000-$8,000,000, by the museum's estimate, while acquisitions probably amounted to $400 million.

Amid the furor, one principle is certain. The Metropolitan Museum is constitutionally allowed to sell works from its collection--unless a bequest specifically forbids it, which the De Groot will did not. It was precatory, and merely expressed her wish that her pictures stay in the museum--or be sold or loaned to other museums. In fact, the Art Dealers' Association officially offered two weeks ago to buy or take on consignment any pictures of stature that the Met wanted to deaccession as an alternative to the Met's present policy, which they described as "contrary to the public interest."

Sales as important as that of the Rousseau are very rare in the museum's history. Hoving points, by way of precedent, to a clearing sale the Met held in 1955-56; but this was at public auction and the average price of the lots (scarabs, unwanted minor antiquities and the like) was around $10, and the costliest item fetched $5,000.

The borderline between the masterpiece and the good secondary work is wide and fluid, and Hoving's administration has not been fastidious enough in mapping it. That, at any rate, is the troubled view of scholars like Rewald and Leo Steinberg, as well as the College Art Association's members.

Against this background, the travels of Ingres's Odalisque in Gray begin to look peculiar. The Odalisque--long considered one of the Met's treasures --was sent to France about a year ago. There were none of the usual formal documents to authorize its removal. Its destination? Wildenstein & Co., in Paris. Before it went, according to the former assistant to the museum's registrar, Edith Pearson (who eventually resigned in protest), it was listed as deaccessioned. Last month, in an overhaul of its attributions, the museum announced that the Odalisque was not an Ingres. As proof, it cited an ambiguous mark on the lower right corner, which looked like a C in a circle. This, said the Met, was the monogram of Ingres's studio assistant, Armand Cambon.

Recently, Everett Fahy began to feel that his reading was wrong. The "monogram" is really a sketch location for a waterspout emptying into a square pool. What made the Met's reasoning doubly odd is that a study of the Odalisque by Ingres Expert John Connolly that pointing this out had been published in a leading art journal before the Met made its reattribution, and that Connolly himself had been refused access to the painting earlier last year by the Met, which admitted that it was out of the museum but refused to say where.

Did the Odalisque go to France not for "reattribution" but for sale? The Met's reply is that Daniel Wildenstein's opinion was needed, that the painting had to be compared with other Ingres in the Louvre and checked against Ingres documents he had. But the Met rejected Wildenstein's conclusion (he thought the painting genuine), and it seems easier to copy some documents and mail them to New York than to lug a large and valuable painting across the Atlantic. If the Odalisque went to Paris only for study, why conceal its whereabouts from other scholars?

In its answer to TIME, the museum defended "discretion" in its dealings, pointing out that other museums treat purchases or sales as confidential, and observed that many other institutions "conduct certain affairs legally, traditionally and responsibly" without necessarily being accused of secrecy. But the fact is that because of the Met's wheeling and dealing, potential donors may be scared away, finding other homes for their paintings or else entangling their bequests with a profusion of restrictive clauses. The solution can only lie, if the museum must sell, in doing it through public and open sales, preferably to other museums and with advice from the large scholarly community, which the museum's recent actions have so violently alienated.

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