Durand exits New York

Kindred Spirits (1849), considered by many to be the most important work by Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand, sold to Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton on May 12 in a silent, sealed-bid auction at Sotheby's in New York. Though the price was not officially disclosed, it was widely rumored to be in excess of $35 million, the highest amount ever paid for an American painting at auction.

Bequeathed in 1904 by the daughter of a friend of poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant to New York's Lenox Library, which was absorbed into the New York Public Library when the latter opened in 1911, the painting was on permanent display at the NYPL. It depicts Bryant and his good friend, the painter Thomas Cole, who had died in 1848, standing together on a ledge overlooking an idyllic Catskills landscape--a fantasy pastiche of two known sites. Bryant received Kindred Spirits as a specially commissioned gift. Among a group of works being deaccessioned this year by the library, the painting was sold separately from 18 other pieces (including two Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington) that will be auctioned in open bidding at Sotheby's in December.

The sale unleashed a wave of controversy, as Kindred Spirits, with its particular connections to New York, was sold in what many considered to be excessive secrecy and haste. The decision to offer the work so suddenly to sealed bidding was the subject of a pair of outraged articles by the art critic Michael Kimmelman, writing in the New York Times; he quoted Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an interested party, as remarking on the sale, "Closed bids are a horror." Sotheby's had promised preferential payment terms to New York institutions seeking to purchase the work. However, pockets were not deep enough at the Met, which, jointly with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., reportedly attempted to buy the painting for around $25 million; moreover, the sealed-bid process did not allow for any last-minute attempts to find patrons willing to help the museums match Walton's higher price.

Walton, who has been assiduously collecting American furniture and art for some years, plans to give the painting pride of place in Crystal Bridges, her Moshe Safdie-designed arts complex to open in 2009 in Bentonville, Ark. (pop. 20,000), the site of her father's first store [see p.176]. In the meantime, the work is on view at the National Gallery through February 2007 and, under the conditions of sale, will appear in a major Durand exhibition slated for 2007, organized by Linda Ferber at the Brooklyn Museum and titled, significantly, "Kindred Spirits."

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