University To Close Down Art Museum, Sell Off Great Works

The news is full of bad news for museums lately with many cutting hours and jobs to try and stave off budgetary disaster. One that hasn't made it is the Rose Art Museum which is part of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reports that the museum will sell off a 8,000 work art collection. The Rose Art Museum collects American art of the 1960s and 1970s and has pieces by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. The move comes as Brandeis is looking at finding ways to cope with a multimillion dollar budget deficit. Because the museum has a lot of valuable art but not a lot of foot traffic it was seen as a place to make cuts.

The museum will close late this summer. Christie's has been working on analysis of the value of the collection. While this is not the ideal time to be selling any art, especially modern and contemporary pieces, the depth and breadth of the Rose Art Museum collection will attract a great deal of attention.