This month’s Apollo contains an article by Alistair Brown discussing the enormous amount of artwork held by public institutions that goes unseen. That this is a situation well known to anyone in the art and heritage industries is without question, but for those who seek to serve the wider public, this phenomenon is sinfully akin to hoarding treasure that, if sold, could generate revenue for other ill defined but generally considered more worthy, and more immediate, public uses.
During the recent troubles of the Detroit Institute of Arts, with tremendous pressure to sell off its collections to pay mostly for the city’s unfunded public pensions, I had written that, in light of the city’s shrinking population and the now limited numbers of those who darken the museum’s threshold, a sale of its collections didn’t seem a bad idea. Moreover, nothing like this is historically precedent setting, as what most public collections hold was gathered from somewhere else, and usually that somewhere else contained a provenance of some previous, and now long-defunct, collection.
Something that’s certain, though, is the reason much of the fine and decorative art objects public collections hold in storage and deign not to put on display is because, face it, the pieces are not worthy of display. And herein lies the tale- public collections are burgeoning because items are often taken in willy-nilly with no particular accession plan or objective. In my experience, what’s acquired is often a function of who’s offering it, rather than what is offered. Far be it from any museum director or curator or accessions committee chair to risk offending a local grandee who seeks a tax deduction in exchange for a selection of quilts or matchbook covers.
No question, public institutions are often treated by the great and the not so good as their personal artistic fiefdoms. One of our local institutions, on the ropes financially for many years, nonetheless was inveigled by one of its so-called benefactors to enter into an arrangement of patronage with an artist who was a pet of the benefactor. That he sought to ensure a living for an artist was laudable; that the benefactor used the museum as means to store and display the artist’s work- in which the benefactor held a large stake and with the objective of using the museum as a shill for the making of a market for the artist’s work – was at the very least reprehensible.
Still, this happens time and time again, and it is with death that public collections are able to offload donations they really didn’t want in the first place. Several years ago, I was invited to look at an overlarge piece of furniture acquired by a well-known museum using funds contained in the bequest of a deceased estate, the testator a Hollywood celebrity equally well known. Displayed for a few years as something from the workshop of Thomas Chippendale, it was taken from view by a subsequent curator who had doubts about the piece, which doubts were profoundly underscored by me. The piece was soon thereafter deaccessioned and sold- for I might add fractionally its cost of acquisition just a few years before.
For those public institutions that can afford to- Tate Britain and Tate Modern are notable examples- items from their permanent collections are rotated frequently, a bit frustrating in the case of the Tate galleries, as one might have made a special trip to see something to find its been taken down, but for the institution, an expensive proposition involving staff time to move, remove, store, adjust lighting, and all often for just a few days’ showing.
For very many public collections, much of what might be on display isn’t- and never will be. Given that narrow criterion, it might be argued that for those pieces held in store, arguably the preponderance of most public collections, a better use would be for them to be deaccessioned. However, this too cannot be considered wholesale. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Metropolitan Museum sold through Christie’s a large selection of English furniture from its collections, to the great delight, I must say, of private collectors. Many of these pieces had notable provenance, were featured in the literature, and had in years past been prominently on display. Perhaps in the years since the Met were given them better examples were acquired, but one also wonders, though, with a perception that period material both in the fine and decorative arts is slightly out of fashion if that didn’t inform this disbursal. A public institution, while it must certainly be discreet in its acquisitions, must never the less let the solecism of following fashion interfere with connoisseurship in the management of its collections.