A trial court in Indiana recently dismissed a lawsuit challenging the proposed sale of three works of art by Valparaiso University: Rust Red Hills by Georgia O’Keefe, Mountain Landscape by Frederic Edwin Church, and The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate by Childe Hassam. This controversy highlights many of the issues surrounding the deaccession of art by American museums. In ruling that the former director of the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso and the museum’s key benefactor both lacked standing to sue the university over the planned sale, the decision tracked other recent results about non-profit oversight, highlighting just how critical the engagement of a state’s Attorney General is.
Whatever the merits of this rule on standing are, however, the university seems to be violating a condition of the 1953 agreement it made to obtain these works of art, yet nine months on the Attorney General has not exercised his undisputed prerogative to stop it. Non-profit governance is hard in a world of finite charitable resources. But universities caught in the arms race of new dorms and laboratories would do well to consider the core mission and what makes it possible. The chance to sit with a painting by Hassam, Church, or O’Keefe was well recognized by the original benefactor Percy Sloan, and this university agreed to abide by that condition. It should keep its word. Selling art to plug budget holes is like eating the seed corn; it robs the future.
