Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Rust Red Hills” was the second painting Dick Brauer recommended Valparaiso University purchase for its budding art collection, initially on display in the basement of Moellering Library.
The year was 1962, one year after Brauer arrived at the university to teach in the art department and, as part of his noninstructional duties, oversee what was then Valparaiso University Museum and Collections.
“It’s a painting that has a gravitas about it,” Brauer said Monday of O’Keeffe’s 1930 work, which has since been lent to museums across the globe.
The painting was selling for $5,700 at the time and Brauer said he’d never bought anything like that in his life.
“I thought it was kind of high,” he said, adding he urged the museum collection committee, of which he was a member, to move forward with the purchase. The painting lacked O’Keeffe’s signature so Brauer wrote to the artist and asked her to authenticate it.
The purchase was one of many that propelled both the museum’s reputation and Brauer’s, culminating in 1995 with the opening of the Brauer Museum of Art. The Urschel family, which owns Urschel Laboratories, offered a $3 million gift to the university with the stipulation that it be named for Brauer and that the 17,000-square-foot facility also have a basement.
“It’s the highest honor I’ve ever had,” said Brauer, who chaired the university’s art department for 10 years as well as serving as the museum’s director.
Now Brauer is threatening to remove his name from the museum after finding out that the university’s board of directors voted first in October and then again at a meeting last month to sell “Rust Red Hills” along with two other pieces of art, collectively worth millions of dollars, to fund improvements at dorms for first-year students.
Jose Padilla, the university’s president, confirmed the sale, without naming the artwork, in a campus email Wednesday morning.
The university’s board of directors, according to correspondence between Brauer and Padilla, approved the sale of three cornerstone pieces of art from the museum in October and reaffirmed that vote during a late January board meeting.
The other two pieces are Frederic E. Church’s “Mountain Landscape” and “The Silver Vale and the Golden Gate” by Childe Hassam.
Brauer and John Ruff, a senior research professor in the English department who has long been involved with the museum, said the sale would be in violation of the covenants of the restrictive trust which provided for the pieces and also would be against the protocols of various art museum associations, that state funds from the sale of artwork must go toward the purchase of additional works.
“Nobody would have guessed they were going to do something like this,” Brauer said.
Though the appraisals are admittedly dated, Ruff said the O’Keeffe painting was appraised around 2016 at $15 million; the Church at about $2 million in 2009; and the Hassam at $3.5 million in 2008.
“It may appear to be low-hanging fruit. They went through a period of cuts and (Padilla) may think he needs money to make the dorms more attractive,” Ruff said Monday, when he joined Brauer at his apartment at Pines Village Retirement Centers to discuss the sale of the artwork.
Jonathan Canning, hired as the museum’s director last year after the COVID-19 pandemic put its activities on hiatus, referred questions about the sale via email to Padilla and Rebekah Arevalo, chief of staff for Padilla’s office and liaison to the university’s board of directors.
Padilla confirmed that museum art sales will be used for dorm improvements in his statement to the campus, though he did not specify which paintings or their estimated current value.
“The Board granted me the authority to sell the paintings at its October 2022 meeting. We have not yet sold the paintings. At this point, we are still completing the due diligence process that customarily precedes — and is a condition of — any major transaction of this nature. We will be sure to inform the campus community as soon as there is something else to announce in this matter,” Padilla said in the statement.
“I want to make one thing perfectly clear about this transaction. We would use the sales proceeds from the paintings solely to improve the student experience. No portion of the proceeds would be used for operating expenses.”
In an email response to questions from the Post-Tribune, Padilla reiterated that proceeds from the sale are earmarked “specifically and exclusively” for renovation of first-year residence halls, which he said are an impediment to student recruitment and retention.
“The University remains committed to our campus art museum as a vital and vibrant destination for students and the local community, and will continue to exhibit selections from the museum’s American art collection, as well as host special exhibitions and event series,” Padilla said.
The university’s financial struggles are no secret. Despite a slight uptick this academic year, enrollment has been on the decline overall since the fall of 2015 when, including the now-closed law school, the university hosted a peak of 4,544 students.
By last fall, the number of students was down to 2,939, though the university gained around 100 students when students returned in August.
Additionally, since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, VU has had a 17% reduction in full-time faculty and staff positions, or 135 positions in total. That includes 55 faculty and staff members who took an incentivized early retirement after Padilla started as president on March 1, 2021.
The board of directors approved a new strategic plan in July, which Padilla officially unveiled in the fall during a community town hall meeting when he said the university is on a solid foundation going forward as university leaders embark on what they said is an ambitious five-year plan to boost enrollment, create student leaders and further diversify the campus by making the university a Hispanic Serving Institution.
Brauer emailed Padilla Jan. 31, not long after the January board meeting, to express his concern about selling the artwork and noted if it went forward, it would break the 1953 Sloan Trust Agreement under which the art was purchased, and said he would contact the Urschel family about withdrawing his name from the museum.
“For Valparaiso University’s Museum of Art to have my name has conferred a high honor on me, but with this sale it will wrongly reflect my approval of its utterly disgraceful, irreparably existentially diminishing, unethical and seemingly unnecessary, museum art collection sale actions!” Brauer wrote.
Padilla, in a Feb. 2 email response provided by Brauer, said he, university provost Eric Johnson and board chair Robert Hansen “respectfully disagree with you.”
“Our actions will be based on the best interests of our students, mission, and entire campus. Not just one small piece of it, especially when that piece is not part of our strategic plan and our core mission of educating students and giving them the best campus residential experience,” Padilla wrote. “We recognize that not all will agree with our decisions in redirecting noncore resources to support the strategic plan. But the plan takes priority because it puts all our students, faculty and staff on the path to growth and success.”
Brauer and Ruff bristle at the suggestion that the museum and its cornerstone pieces are not part of the university’s strategic plan and its core mission. They noted the role the museum plays in instruction for all of the university’s disciplines, not just art. Ruff, a professor of early American literature, said the museum’s collection dovetailed with his curriculum and that of other instructors as well.
Over the years, he and other professors took students to the museum as part of a core class, with 1,000 students visiting the museum each semester.
“I have found a way to use the Brauer in everything I teach,” Ruff said.
Art is at the core of the educational experience, Brauer said, and that should be available to everyone. Those involved with the museum, he added, have been working on increasing its educational use.
“None of us wanted this to become a story,” Ruff said.
Ruff, a member of the university’s collection committee and the search committee for a new director, said he’s had a glorious time over the years with his involvement with the museum and never imagined he’d be talking about something “so wrong.”
“I think some of these decisions are unwise,” he added.
Padilla met with Brauer late last month, after the board’s vote about selling the artwork.
“I let him say what he wanted to say but I got very emotional. I said that’s wrong and he left,” Brauer said.
Ruff said representatives from two international art brokerage firms have visited the museum, Christie’s in late June and Sotheby’s in early January, before the board meeting.
Discussions to sell the artwork, he added, likely went on while he and others on the search committee for a new museum director were working to fill the position, though the committee didn’t know about the plan at the time and neither did Canning, the new hire.
“I held out hope when the board met that maybe there would be a change of heart because we weren’t sure the board knew all the ramifications,” Ruff said.
The ramifications, Ruff and Brauer said, go beyond the museum’s loss of the artwork to provide funds for dorm renovations, and also point to a decision, made without faculty consent, that is likely to stun the campus.
Both agree that violating the covenants of the restrictive trust that provided the artwork makes it unlikely that prospective donors will give to the museum or the university in the future.
“You just attract a lot of really bad publicity,” Ruff said, adding other museums won’t lend their material to or borrow from a museum that de-accessions its works without putting those resources back into their collection. Those reciprocal agreements, he added, are critical. “It’s one of the ways you spread your brand.”
Numerous other universities have jettisoned art in similar fashion and faced repercussions from the art community.
Ruff noted Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where the Maier Museum of Art was censured by the Association of Art Museum Directors after the 2008 sale of Rufino Tamayo’s painting “Trovador.” The association sanctioned the museum six years later when it went on to sell George Bellows’ “Men of the Docks,” according to a statement on the association’s website at the time of the sanction, which noted the funds were being used to support the college’s operations.
The association reached out to the college unsuccessfully with the hope of finding another solution.
“The prohibition against the sale of works of art from museum collections for such purposes is a violation of one of the most fundamental professional principles of the art museum field. That Randolph College, which is responsible for establishing policies for and overseeing the operations of the Maier Museum, continues to take such actions is a matter of grave concern to AAMD, art museums everywhere, and the public they serve,” the association’s statement said.
The sanctions, a more stringent measure than censure, included instructions to association members to suspend any loans of works of art to and any collaboration on exhibitions and programs with the Maier Museum of Art.
Such sales, the association said, “not only erodes the credibility and good standing of the Maier Museum, but also affects all art museums and the trust that the public has placed in them.”
Per the association’s protocol, the decision to de-accession artwork should only be made to improve a collection and support the long term goals of a museum. Proceeds “are to be used only to acquire other works of art — the proceeds are never used as operating funds, to build a general endowment, or for any other expenses.”
Brauer forwarded his correspondence with Padilla about the sale of the artwork to the university’s faculty senate Wednesday morning. The faculty senate’s next meeting is Feb. 15, Ruff said, and he expects the sale to be one of the topics of discussion.
He and Brauer are weighing their next steps and what they can do to stop the presumptive sale of the artwork.
Padilla, Brauer said, is being driven by the university’s financial situation to sell the museum pieces and given the millions of dollars the artwork could bring to the university, “he’d be willing to take a little criticism.”
alavalley@chicagotribune.com
