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In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze,” a flat-footed constable asks Sherlock Holmes:
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” replied Holmes.
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Nashville’s visual arts landscape is currently shadowed by its own dark night—Fisk University’s proposed sale of two stars in its Stieglitz Collection of Modern American and European Art: Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Radiator Building—Night, New York” and Marsden Hartley’s “Painting No. 3.” And the curious incident is that the city’s arts community seems to be doing nothing.
Fisk officials placed the entire collection in storage at the Frist Center in November 2005 after concluding that the Carl Van Vechten Gallery (where the art was displayed) “is not sufficient to provide the necessary protection and stable environment.” The university says it needs $570,000 to deal with gallery inadequacies, money Fisk doesn’t have. But moving the collection to the Frist has had an out-of-sight, out-of-mind effect: the public can no longer see for themselves just what’s in the collection.
The university has petitioned the state attorney general and Davidson County Chancery Court to assess its legal rights to sell the O’Keeffe and Hartley. The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which represents the interests of O’Keeffe’s estate, quickly challenged the university’s freedom to sell, citing a letter of June 8, 1949, to then-Fisk president Charles S. Johnson. In the letter, which assigned the collection to Fisk, O’Keeffe specifies that the university “will not at any time sell or exchange any of the objects in the Stieglitz Collection.”
Since then, while the lawyers wrangled and Fisk gradually revealed details of its dire financial straits, the only sound emanating from Nashville’s arts advocates has been a sigh of dismay. There’s general agreement with Fisk’s claim that the Stieglitz Collection is a financial burden the university can’t afford. But there has been no apparent attempt to devise a strategy to keep the collection intact and in Nashville. This is distressing for several reasons.
“Radiator Building” is the most famous of the series of skyscraper images O’Keeffe painted in the 1920s, shortly after her marriage to Alfred Stieglitz. The work is an emblematic portrait of Stieglitz—his name is displayed in red neon on a billboard in the scene. Both she and Stieglitz were celebrating modern architecture as well as the almost magical transformation that the tall building was enacting on the cityscape. “One can’t paint New York as it is,” O’Keeffe explained, “but rather as it is felt.”
Hartley’s “Painting No. 3” is from 1913 and reflects the influences of Kandinsky and cubism. Thus it is a prime and early example of abstraction in an American voice. Clearly the loss of either painting would have a serious impact on Nashville’s cultural landscape.
Yet the collection as a whole is more significant than any one or two paintings in it because of who collected it. Stieglitz was a titan of early 20th century American art history. Many chapters in many books have been written about how he established photography as a fine art. He also introduced European modernism—Picasso, Picabia, Braque—to America, and nurtured the homegrown version with exhibits in his galleries and direct financial support to artists. Fisk’s collection represents this man as artist, collector and patron more than any other in the country because, as art consultant Susan Knowles puts it, “it contains all the periods of Stieglitz’s gallery life.”
Fisk’s collection features multiple examples of the artists Stieglitz most particularly championed: Charles Demuth (8), Arthur Dove (9) and John Marin (12), as well as Hartley (11). According to Stieglitz biographer Richard Whelan, “In her division of the works that Stieglitz had collected, O’Keeffe strove to achieve a balance between preserving the continuity of each artist’s development and enriching institutions throughout America.” That continuity will be shattered with the piecemeal sale of these paintings, and Nashville will be the poorer for it.
Insufficient Funds The Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk
photo: ericengland.net
Despite Fisk’s pledge that only the O’Keeffe and Hartley will be sold, the university’s petition to the court is for legal sanction that “Fisk is not restricted in any manner from selling some or all of the Stieglitz Collection should it elect to do so.” This leads to the obvious fear that this sale would be merely the first of many, as other pressing needs loom on the school’s horizon. The effect would be, as Stieglitz himself once commented, to “scatter the works of Shakespeare over the face of the earth, page by page.”
Another less obvious impact must be understood in the context of Nashville’s art scene in general. Taken together, the Cowan Collection at the Parthenon and the collections of the Cheekwood Museum of Art, the Tennessee State Museum and Fisk present a solid survey of American art of the 19th and 20th centuries. The works at Fisk “dovetail beautifully, because they pick up where we leave off,” says Parthenon director Wesley Paine. Former Cheekwood board president Sigourney Cheek points out that in the 1990s, “Cheekwood focused on collecting [the group of realist painters known as] ‘The Eight’ to complement Cowan and Fisk.” And while the State Museum has traditionally focused on Tennessee artists, its recent acquisition of works on paper by leading late 20th century practitioners—Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist—extends this survey close to the present.
Fisk says it has no alternative to selling art if the institution is to pull itself out of financial free fall. This is unfortunate, because the sale will devalue the schools artistic heritage and the legacy of Charles S. Johnson, one of the founders of New York’s Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the first African American president of Fisk (1947-1956). The Stieglitz Collection came to Fisk because of Johnson, specifically because of his friendship with Carl Van Vechten, another leading Renaissance proponent who donated to Fisk collections of music and books on fine arts. Van Vechten was also a friend of O’Keeffe and urged her to consider Fisk for a part of the Stieglitz Collection.
Johnson and Van Vechten saw no dichotomy in an African American institution featuring a collection of art that was not produced by African Americans. And they would have seen no inconsistency in the Stieglitz Collection as being one part of an art collection that has come to encompass African as well as African American works. As key players in the Harlem Renaissance, they viewed art by African Americans, both literary and visual, as a vehicle to “prove the existence of a distinctive African American culture” and “reveal its centrality to American culture,” according to an essay by Rudolph Byrd. For them, art was the bridge of integration, and the Stieglitz Collection at Fisk was just another aspect of that bridge building.
So why is Nashville apparently willing to surrender the integrity of the Stieglitz Collection without a struggle? Some of the city’s longtime arts patrons (none of whom would speak on the record) say they’ve just given up. “Face it, this isn’t a visual arts town,” says one. “The most obvious arts supporter with the deep pockets to do something is Martha Ingram, and she does music. There isn’t the same kind of leadership coupled with wealth for the visual arts.”
Another collector feels dollars spent to keep art at Fisk are dollars wasted. “I’m not giving money to keep the paintings at Fisk because they’ve historically been bad stewards of their art. Hell, O’Keeffe took it back once.” According to Roxana Robinson’s biography of O’Keeffe, “When it became apparent [in the early 1970s] that the university lacked the funds for the maintenance and insurance of the collection, O’Keeffe reclaimed it for restoration.” The artist only allowed the collection to return to the university in 1984, after a campaign led by the late Peggy Steine and the late John Hill produced sufficient funds to renovate the gallery.
If the proposed sale hasn’t generated public outcry in Nashville, the same is not true at the national level. According to Joseph Mella, director of Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Gallery, there’s been great concern among members of the university museum crowd about the Fisk case because it sets such “an awful precedent. [Fisk is] telling the world that it looks at its collections as resources that are expendable, which goes against museum ethics. Deaccessioning of art is relatively common, but the revenue produced is supposed to go back to enhance the collection. That’s not the case here.”
Fisk has stated that of the money it receives from the sale of the two paintings, approximately $600,000 will go to renovate the Van Vechten Gallery. The remaining millions will be used to replenish the paltry $7.6 million endowment, endow chairs in business, science and math and provide seed money for a new science building. This shift by Fisk to an emphasis on science at the expense of its art is one that has occurred over the last 20 years and is also caused by financial necessity, according to a former Fisk faculty member. “It’s a lot easier to get grants for science than for the arts. The vast majority of grants to Fisk are from the government for science.”
So what’s to be done? Well, the first thing is for the Frist Center to stage an exhibit of the collection it now holds in storage. Then at least the citizens would be able to see what they’d be missing if the collection gradually vanished over the horizon.
More long-term, the citizens with the wherewithal need to start talking to each other and pooling their resources. The most recent appraisal estimated the worth of the entire Stieglitz Collection at $33 million. This is certainly low, so lets double that to $66 million. Perhaps a group of donors could offer Fisk some sort of lease/purchase arrangement in which the university would relinquish the collection in exchange for a series of annual payments made over a definite time period, say five to 10 years. This would have the advantage of keeping the collection intact (a key provision of O’Keeffe’s), which might satisfy both the defenders of her estate and the donors (provided, of course, that the art is relocated to another Nashville venue).
Donating the collection to the Frist Center would violate that institution’s non-collecting policy, but perhaps administrators could be persuaded to make an exception. There’s also the Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture in the works, although the Stieglitz Collection doesn’t feature works by African Americans. Another candidate is the Tennessee State Museum (TSM)—after all, the Stieglitz Collection has been here for over 50 years and is part of our history. Governor Phil Bredesen has given TSM funds to begin planning for a new facility, and administrators are currently working on the program for a new building with the Boston museum planning and design firm of E. Verner Johnson and Associates. Surely the program could be tweaked to accommodate the Van Vechten Gallery, with the history of the university and the collection prominently displayed on panels at the entrance. The black caucus of the state legislature, led by Sen. Thelma Harper, might find this scenario appealing because it would give Fisk a higher profile in the city and allow students (including Fisk students) to take advantage of this artistic treasure.
Saving Stieglitz isn’t rocket science. Fisk needs money and Nashville needs art. Let’s work the problem, people.