A battle to confine art treasures within city limits

Recent deals have revealed a struggle over the ownership of community-beloved art.

By Chris Gaylord | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 16, 2007 edition

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Florence is a city known for its art – and often, for its art feuds. So it was no surprise to many in the Tuscan city that last Monday, Italian Sen. Paolo Amato chained himself to the entrance of the Uffizi museum.

Senator Amato, a vocal proponent of keeping one of Florence's most precious paintings within Florence, was protesting the museum's plan to loan Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, "The Annunciation," to Japan. He was ultimately unsuccessful.

The protest marked a low point in a battle that has long roiled Europe's art circles: Can a city lay claim to a piece of art? Or does art belong to individual collectors and galleries? The Florence fiasco is all too familiar to the United States art community, which is increasingly ensnared in its own fights over ownership.

"It's often not a legal argument – 'who owns art?' – but it's an important question," says Richard Powell, an art history professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "Communities develop strong connections to art. And when you take it away, people are going to say something."

On Sunday, Tennessee's attorney general will probably close America's most recent bout – an uproar over Fisk University's intention to sell two of its most prized paintings, Georgia O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building" and Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 3." The Nashville school argues it has little choice but to sell the pair, together worth more than $10 million. Operating costs are slowly depleting Fisk's endowment – even the gallery that normally displays the pieces is closed due to a leaky roof. The university hopes the proceeds from the sale can repair the gallery and aid the school financially.

The paintings were given to Fisk, a historically black college, in 1949 as part of a larger collection from O'Keeffe herself. Her donation was a pre-civil rights era statement that every community should have access to great art on campus. In giving the paintings up, many argue, Fisk is depriving its students of art that they see as their own.

"It's a Catch-22," admits Fisk sophomore Ijeoma Ike. "Selling art that has been a part of the university for so long is like taking away the spirit of the school.... But if it comes down to keeping the paintings or keeping Fisk, how do you choose?"

After a year of legal wrangling, the state's attorney general put a 30-day freeze on the sale, ending March 18, to allow the public an opportunity to contest. But with few days remaining, opponents have little hope of derailing the deal.

"It's too bad," says Jeffrey Fuller, an art dealer in Philadelphia. "There are those heartbreaking deals where the owners have cleared the sale, but the public says, 'Wait, what about us? Don't we get a say?' "

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