A battle to confine art treasures within city limits

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

from the March 16, 2007 edition

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Last year, however, Mr. Fuller's hometown bucked the trend. The city's art community seethed in November with news that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia would sell Thomas Eakin's "The Gross Clinic," possibly the most important American painting of the 19th century, to Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, for her upcoming Bentonville, Ark., gallery. The price tag: $68 million, the most ever offered for an American painting created before World War II.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art responded with a campaign that argued that the painting has a "special relationship with the city" and removing the piece from the city limits would betray Philadelphia's patrimony.

Jefferson University gave the city 45 days to match Walton's bid and keep the piece in the Philadelphia museum. Thousands contributed, donating $30 million – short of the $68 million needed. In the end, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts ended up selling "The Cello Player," a less important Eakins canvas, and saved the "Gross Clinic."

At one point last year, the city's mayor proposed creating an art registry – a catalog of definitively local works – to regulate the sale of any listed items. The plan seems to have lost momentum, but such laws are common in Europe. Italy regulates which works may be sold or lent outside of the country. England is bound to the Waverley Criteria, a government check that asks if a work about to be sold is "of outstanding significance" to the community. If a piece is deemed a national treasure, local institutions have a right to make competing offers.

In both Philadelphia and Nashville, similar, one-time policies were adopted to halt the sale of local art. But the 30-day freeze on the O'Keeffe painting and Jefferson University's postponement of the Eakins deal were temporary fixes; neither action established any lasting legal precedent.

"I don't think America is going to take on laws like those in Europe anytime soon," says Patricia Hills, a professor of art history at Boston University. "We're too much of a free-market economy for that."

In fact, she argues, the free market is one of the catalysts for America's recent art spats. Buying art is a booming business. In November, The New York Times reported that movie mogul David Geffen sold a Jackson Pollock drip-and-pour piece for $140 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting. The problem with these highly publicized transactions, objectors fear, is that museums are looking past the importance of their collections and are now seeing million-dollar checks hanging on the wall.

"We are going to see more big art deals," says Professor Hills. "And the bigger the paintings that are for sale, the more likely that we will have feuds."

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