A lawsuit to stop the planned sale of three of Valparaiso University’s most notable works of art Brauer Art Museum permanent collection was filed April 24 in Porter County Superior Court, Indiana. The paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe Rust red hills (1930), Frederic E. Church’s mountain landscape (1865) and Childe Hassam The silver veil and the golden gate (1914) – were estimated to have a combined value of $20 million, and Jose D. Padilla, the university’s president, publicly announced in February that the money generated from their sale would be used to upgrade freshman dorms with “amenities and features that prospective students appreciate and expect.”
The lawsuit – which names Padilla, Valparaiso University and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, as defendants – claims that the “proposed sale violates the intent of the donor”, which was “to serve and promote the cause of arts education in both a practical and cultural context”. way” by creating galleries at the university to exhibit the donated art. “Plaintiffs and the general public will suffer irreparable harm if Valparaiso University violates the intent of the donor and liquidates trust assets for purposes not intended by” the donor. (The Attorney General was appointed not because of an allegation of wrongdoing on his part, but to induce Rokita to stop the sale, since Attorneys General are responsible for ensuring that charitable corporations comply with legal requirements, that their assets are properly managed and expended and that directors and officers fulfill their fiduciary duties.)
Valparaiso University joins other educational institutions, such as Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, who over the past two decades have sought to carve out their art collections in order to raise funds for other campus needs.
The history of the origins of the Valparaiso University art collection, which dates back to 1953, is a little more anomalous than that of other colleges and universities. In 1953, a trust containing 400 works of art and approximately $188,000, created in 1945 by Percy H. Sloan (1870-1950), a Chicago public school teacher, was donated to the university by Louis P. Miller, the executor of the trust. According to Richard Brauer, the founding director of the Valparaiso University Art Museum, later renamed the Brauer Museum of Art in his honor – who never met Percy Sloan but learned of him when he was hired by Valparaiso University to be its museum director in 1961 – Sloan had spent nearly 20 years searching for a museum that would accept his collection which included mostly landscape paintings by his father, Junius R. Sloan (1827-1900).
Percy Sloan was unable to find museums that would only contain his father’s work, but he decided to purchase the work of other landscape painters, including some by noted 19th-century American painters. “He created a respectable body of 19th-century American art to give context to Junius’ work,” Brauer said. Of the 400 works of art in the trust, 140 of them were by artists other than his father. These non-Junius paintings “reveal the culture that inspired Junius and give Junius a purpose”.
Three years after Percy Sloan’s death, Miller was able to reach an agreement with the University of Valparaiso to accept the 400 paintings, and the agreement stipulated that the museum “would display a representative selection of the works of said Junius R. Sloan in a location appropriate not less than once a year”.
Childe Hassam, The silver veil and the golden gate1914, Brauer Art Museum of the University of Valparaiso Via Wikimedia Commons
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Brauer and Philipp Brockington, professor emeritus of retirement law at the university and benefactor of a fund specially created to endow the Brauer Museum of Art, claim that nothing in Percy Sloan’s last will and testament nor in the Trust Agreement with Valparaiso University” includes what is commonly referred to as a “disposal policy” to permit Valparaiso University to sell items donated or acquired using the trust corpus of the Percy H. Sloan Trust”.
In decades past, it was not uncommon for donations of objects to museums to come with strings attached, such as the requirement that the pieces be regularly displayed, the donated objects must be displayed together rather than selected, or nothing could be sold, but nowadays museum administrators can refuse gifts with certain conditions. Museum directors and curators are aware that tastes and priorities change, and they are very reluctant to make commitments that tie the hands of their successors. Brauer acknowledges that the 1953 Sloan Trust gift would not be welcome in 2023. “We are constantly struggling with the problem of the conditions attached to the gifts,” he says.
Yet Patrick B. McEuen, the attorney representing Brauer and Brockington in that action, says “attitudes have changed over 70 years, but restrictions have not.”
Another anomalous element of this dispute is that neither Brauer, 95, nor Brockington, 83, are related to and have ever met Percy Sloan, a lifelong bachelor with no offspring. Brauer has what McEuen calls “common law standing” because he can and will demonstrate a personal interest in the outcome of the litigation, which is the reputation associated with the use of his name in a museum of a university “. Brauer adds that “if the university proceeds with the sale of these paintings, I want my name removed from the museum.”
Brockington’s connection to the art museum is through his contributions to the Brockington Reeve Endowment Fund, which aims to “acquire, restore and preserve” works of art and artifacts for the Brauer Museum of Art. According to the complaint, the endowment states that “if the University finds that the donor’s original intent can no longer be fulfilled, the university may hold and administer the fund” for a purpose that most closely coincides with the original intent. principal contributor, which is to support art at the Brauer Museum of Art’.
Brockington says the paintings the university is seeking to sell form “the heart of the art museum” and that selling them would put the Brauer “in disrepute with other museums” across the country. Unlike Brauer, Brockington does not wait for the university to sell these works to take action: “I have already changed my will to do the Porter County Museum” – a local history museum also located in Valparaiso, Indiana – “the beneficiary of my domain.”
Unlike some other university museums, the Brauer Museum of Art has a particularly strong relationship with professors in Valparaiso, especially when it comes to the first-year core curriculum. Classes are held regularly in the museum, where works of art from the collection are highlighted as they relate to the subject of the class, and “faculty from campus come to discuss their own research and evaluate one or more works of the collection as a springboard. talking point,” says Jonathan Canning, the museum’s current director. Salena Anderson, associate professor of English, says she’s “used the Brauer in my classes to integrate appreciation for art and literature,” most recently for a discussion of Alison’s graphic novel Bechdel. fun house (2006). Other faculty members noted a meteorologist running a class at the Brauer to point out types of clouds in certain landscape paintings and a botanist using artwork to identify plant species.
Tabitha Porter, a first-year creative writing student at Valparaiso, says she visits the museum regularly, saying that “this semester I’ve been to the Brauer about six times on my own, and probably about nine or ten for lessons and assignments that took place there.
Frederic E. Church, mountain landscapecirca 1849, Brauer Museum of Art at the University of Valparaiso Via Wikimedia Commons
Of the three works of art scheduled for sale, only one was purchased by Percy Sloan himself – the work of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church – while the other two were purchased by Brauer with funds included in the trust. Brauer described Percy Sloan’s own taste in art as “conservative, a bit formulaic. He resisted modernism. Of the O’Keeffe painting that Brauer purchased for the museum’s collection, Sylvia Preston, the daughter of Percy Sloan’s aunt and closest and last remaining relative, who died in 2011, told Brauer that “Percy would have ended up loving it.”
Padilla’s announcement was welcomed by several museum associations, including the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and the Association of Art Museum Curators, as well as by a resolution of the faculty senate of the university, affirming that the loss of these works of art from the museum would diminish the prestige of both the university and its museum and that the policy accepted on the ground of the museum requires that all proceeds from the sale of objects in a permanent collection be used only for new acquisitions and not for other purposes.
“The situation in Valparaiso is no different from any previous instance in which a museum or its parent institution decides to sell art in order to finance capital investments, repay debt or cover other operation,” said Julia Marciari-Alexander, President of the AAMD. and director of the Walters Art Museum, said in a statement. “As we have stated in the past, we believe that the AAMD rules apply to all art museums, even those that are not members of the Association, as they are the best approach for manage museum collections for future generations.”
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, for example, recently announced plans to sell seven paintings from its permanent collection, including works by Edward Hopper, John Marin and Maurice Prendergast, but the announcement states that proceeds from the sale of these works at Sotheby’s on May 16 would be used only to “support future acquisitions”, making it by most measures an acceptable practice in the museum field.
John Ruff, Senior Research Professor in the Department of English at Valparaiso University, argued that “if the three works were sold, it would really hurt the prestige of the museum, which would hurt the prestige of the university”.
