"Fire Sale" of Famous Art Works at Fisk University

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2006 by Stuart, Reginald

NASHVILLE - A decade ago, Fisk University was putting the final touches on an ambitious plan to showcase its coveted collection of modern art by the masters - Picasso, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keeffe and photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. Money was being raised to upgrade the school's tiny Carl Van Vechten art gallery. A task force was working on exhibits, promotions and tour plans. A new momentum was in the air over the 101-piece collection, one of the few of its kind owned by a historically Black college.

The goal of all this activity was to finally make good on a plan hatched nearly 50 years earlier when the "Stieglitz Collection," as it is called, was given to Fisk by O'Keeffe, the widow of Stieglitz. She and then-president Charles S. Johnson hoped the gift would expand an already impressive art program at Fisk and also serve a greater social purpose in the era of segregation. If White people wanted to see great works, they reasoned, they would be compelled to cross racial lines to do so.

Today, the showcase plan is but a memory. After a hot start, the effort faltered as Fisk was forced in recent years to abandon ambitious projects in order to maintain its bottom line.

Fisk remains beset by financial troubles dating from the late 1960s, woes that have repeatedly stalled its growth plans and frustrated its intent to use the Stieglitz Collection as envisioned. White philanthropists abandoned the school during those "Black Power" years, as anti-White sentiments consumed the campus that had played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement.

Like a person unable to shake a bad case of the flu, Fisk continues to pay penance and sputter financially, despite continuing to produce impressive graduates every year and being recognized this year by Newsweek and the Kaplan survey as one of the nation's 25 "hottest" colleges.

Now, the school's leadership has come up with a new survival plan, one that marks a radical departure from its entrenched position of the last half century: sell the most treasured pieces of the prestigious Stieglitz Collection to help save the school.

Fisk plans to sell O'Keeffe's famous 1927 "Radiator Building - Night, New York" and the prized 1913 "Painting No. 3" by Marsden Hartley. The two paintings could bring Fisk $10 million to $20 million, depending on market conditions.

The Stieglitz Collection is "a mighty prize, but that's not what we do here," says Fisk President Hazel O'Leary. "I don't feel any guilt about selling off part of the collection. I would feel guilty if I failed these students."

O'Leary, a Fisk graduate who served as secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, is the sixth president of Fisk in a decade. That churn at the top has hobbled the school's ability to chart a firm recovery plan and execute it. But with disarming charm and the business acumen of a top corporate CEO, O'Leary is boldly championing a dramatic change in the mindset of Fisk at its highest levels. She's moving Fisk toward practical business judgments and is complemented by a board of trustees that has steadily been overhauled in recent years to include more people willing to rethink long held convictions.

"It's a no-brainer," says Reynaldo Glover, a corporate lawyer in Chicago, chairman of the Fisk board of trustees since 2003 and 1965 graduate.

"This little school has suffered and sacrificed and done all it could to provide a quality education and preserve the Stieglitz Collection. We had to make a choice and decided one mission was more important."

The plan to sell the two paintings, informally referred to by O'Leary as the "two for 99" plan (selling two pieces in order to preserve the remaining art in the Stieglitz Collection), was announced last December. Fisk students, alums and supporters were caught by surprise and have expressed mixed feelings about the proposal. So has the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation of Santa Fe, N.M.

The foundation, which was not advised in advance of the Fisk plan, is challenging the proposed sale, asserting that written correspondence between O'Keeffe and Johnson bars the school from selling the art. These letters, written by O'Keeffe and Johnson in 1948 and 1949, have been at the heart of every debate over whether Fisk has complete control of the collection or is governed in perpetuity by what the museum profession calls the "dead hand rule," restrictions on a gift that continue beyond a donor's death.

Fisk contends that neither Stieglitz's will nor O'Keeffe's correspondence contain any provisions for the "reversion or transfer of the art to any other person or entity in the event that a recipient does not use or display the art in the manner described" in Stieglitz's will or the O'Keeffe correspondence. The school argues in court papers that O'Keeffe's estate "does not, and never has had" an interest in the collection "because the works would have reverted to Stieglitz's estate at her death if not previously disposed of by her." Fisk hopes those arguments, combined with its declaration it simply can't afford to make the O'Keeffe-Johnson dream come true, will persuade the judge that the school should be allowed to sell parts or all of the col lection.