Politics

Baltimore museum halts sales of three paintings, including Warhol’s ‘Last Supper,’ just hours before auction


The museum said in a statement that it was still committed to its “Endowment for the Future” effort.

“We want to affirm our goals as we envisioned them in relation to the Endowment for the Future,” the statement said. “We believe unequivocally that museums exist to serve their communities through experiences with art and artists. We firmly believe that museums and their collections have been built on structures that we must work, through bold and tangible action, to reckon with, modify, and reimagine as structures that will meet the demands of the future. . . .

“The Endowment for the Future was developed to take action — right now, in this moment. Our vision and our goals have not changed. It will take us longer to achieve them, but we will do so through all means at our disposal. That is our mission and we stand behind it.”

The museum’s board of trustees approved the action Wednesday after emergency meetings requested by six trustees who worried that the “long-standing community of the BMA support is being irreparably harmed” as opposition to the plan mounted.

Since the sales were announced Oct. 2, the BMA has faced growing criticism and community activism, including the call for a state investigation, the resignation of high-profile trustees and the rescinding of $50 million in planned gifts.

The museum stood by its decision until hours before the Sotheby’s auction was to begin. The move came after a statement from the Association of Art Museum Directors, a national oversight organization, that clarified the intent of an April move that loosened deaccessioning rules. That temporary measure was “intended to assist museums facing a financial crisis due to the impacts of the pandemic, between April 2020 and April 2022,” the AAMD said Tuesday. The statement did not mention the BMA.

“The resolutions were not put in place to incentivize deaccessioning, nor to permit museums to achieve other, non-collection-specific, goals,” wrote Brent Benjamin, president of the AAMD board of trustees and director of the St. Louis Art Museum. “I recognize that many of our institutions have long-term needs — or ambitious goals — that could be supported, in part, by taking advantage of these resolutions to sell art. But however serious those long-term needs or meritorious those goals, the current position of AAMD is that the funds for those must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art.”

Fifteen past presidents of the AAMD sent a letter Wednesday to the BMA board in support of Benjamin’s statement, and urged the museum to reconsider the sale.

BMA Director Christopher Bedford has repeatedly stated that his museum is not in financial difficulty but faces a moral imperative to address systemic racism and injustice. The museum planned to spend $10 million to acquire art by women and artists of color and $500,000 for immediate equity measures. The remaining $54.4 million would go into an endowment, and the $2 million to $2.5 million in annual interest would support programs to improve equity, diversity and inclusion.

Critics of the sale celebrated the museum’s change of heart.

“We are grateful to the trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art for responding to the calls of the Baltimore community and the broader museum community by voting to rescind the sale,” said Laurence Eisenstein, a former trustee who led the community effort to block the sale. “We feel this decision affirms the essential roles that artworks, publicly accessible collections, and museums play in providing knowledge of the past, offering opportunities for reflection and learning in the present, and laying the groundwork for positive transformation in the future.”

Eisenstein said he looks forward to working with the museum to strengthen diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that will ensure that the BMA remains relevant and responsive to the community.

Another former trustee, Stiles Colwill, also backed the decision. “I fully support the BMA’s important aims on diversity of all kinds, which I also worked so hard on during my time as Chair of the Board,” Colwill said in an email. “I was after all the first openly gay Board Chair in the museum’s first century. That was a giant step for the BMA. My disagreement is how it was being done.”



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