Museum Under Fire for Selling Its Art

Censured Delaware Art Museum Plans to Divest More Works

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If the Delaware Art Museum has a signature painting, surely it is Howard Pyle’s “Marooned.” A native of this city, Pyle is justly remembered as the father of American illustration. His “Marooned” (1909) is an image of genuine drama and distress. It shows a pirate near death, curled up on a sand bar, a tiny figure enveloped by a burning yellow sky.

The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.

The spanking came one day after the museum sold a painting from its collection, William Holman Hunt’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil.” Trustees say that the sale was the only way to help settle a $19.8 million expansion debt and plump the museum’s endowment. Now, in a move that has not previously been reported, they are in the process of selling two more works. The first, Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time” (1875), is a masterpiece of American genre painting, a quietly intense farm scene in which a mother and son turn away and gaze over a wooden fence that seems to say something about held-back emotion. The Homer will be offered in a Sotheby’s auction this fall, unless a buyer turns up first. “That is our plan of attack,” Gerret Copeland, the chairman of the Delaware Museum board, explained. “If we find a private buyer, it will go sooner.”

The second work slated for sale is Alexander Calder’s “The Black Crescent,” a mobile which arched gracefully above the museum’s double-height East Court.

“They’re just cherry-picking the best things in the hopes they get to where they need to be,” said Timothy Rub, the president of the museum directors group, as well as the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “If, as with the Holman Hunt, they fall flat on their face, it’s going to be a double tragedy.”

Auctions are risky. Christie’s, entrusted with the Holman Hunt, confidently estimated its value at $8.4 million to $13.4 million. But the painting sold for $4.25 million — half the low estimate.

In some ways, the situation in Delaware can be seen as a cautionary tale about the perils of overexpansion. In 2005, the museum completed a construction project that doubled its space. Glass wings rose up on either side of the original building, a trim, red-brick, Georgian-style structure that brought to mind a suburban bank.

But renovating and enlarging art museums, which has become so popular you might think size was the goal of art, is no guarantee of larger audiences. Revealingly, the Delaware Museum’s membership is down to 1,600 households, from a peak of about 3,000 in 2001, said Jessica Jenkins, a museum spokeswoman.

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