brandeis university

University Plans To Loan Museum Art To Raise Funds

Filed under: Art

Last year Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts caused an uproar when it announced plans to close its Rose Art Museum and possibly sell off the art. Now the university has a different plan, one that carries its own controversy. The Boston Globe reports that the university plans to hire Sotheby's auction house to act as a broker to loan out selected works from the Rose's well-regarded collection. Usually art loans take place between museums and don't usually bring in revenue but in some cases some museums have paid millions to borrow key works for certain shows. Some people have expressed concern that works could be loaned out to prviate collectors or corporations who don't have conservationists on staff and might not adequately care for the works.

In just under 50 years the Rose has amassed a collection of 7,500 objects that is said to be worth as much as $350 million. The Rose Art Museum collects American art of the 1960s and 1970s and has pieces by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Although the museum is in better financial shape than it was a year ago and it still faces an annual structural deficit of between $10 million and $15 million. The university expects to sign a contract with Sotheby's sometime next month and could begin entertaining art loan proposals this fall.

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The Battle Over The Rose Art Museum Gets Ugly

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

At the start of the year I mentioned the fact that Brandeis Unversity's Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts would be closing and that the museum would be selling off some of the artwork. But the Boston Globe reports that the museum is not going down without a fight. A board of overseers has filed a lawsuit to stop the university from closing the museum, selling the artwork and using the museum's endowment for any other purposes. The lawsuit was filed in the state's highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court, and is the first legal challenge to the move to close the museum.

The plaintiffs include museum benefactors Meryl Rose, Jonathan Lee, and Lois Foster. They have asked for a preliminary injunction to keep art from being sold and an order to keep the museum open. They would like to see Brandeis surrender the artwork and endowment funds to another organization which would create a permanent, public art museum. This is no modest college museum, it has around 7,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art with an estimated value of $350 million. 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 lawsuit draws attention to the fact that the museum is more than just something of value on a monetary level but that it is also of cultural importance to the community and that the university's acceptance of the art and funds represents a contract with the benefactors.

Thomas Reilly, the former Massachusetts attorney general and outside counsel for Brandeis had some harsh words for the overseers' lawsuit. In a statement he said that the university has a responsibility to offer the best education it can and that "apparently, these three overseers are oblivious to the Brandeis mission.'' Brandeis has commissioned a report to examine the Rose's future and are currently transitioning the public art museum into an educational arts center for Brandeis students and faculty. This is a move that Jonathan Lee sees as a route to help make it easier for the art to be sold. Lee's mother started donating to the museum from her collection of American Expressionist art shortly after the museum's founding in 1961 and court documents say that if the Rose is no longer a public art museum then her artwork should revert to her estate to be donated to other museums. Reilly has said that the university will "aggressively defend'' its position in court.

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