That’s what Culturegrrl, aka Lee Rosenbaum, reported on her blog yesterday. She spoke to Fisk University’s lawyer, C. Michael Norton, about the final ruling in the long-running lawsuit over Fisk University’s decision to sell a half share of its Alfred Stieglitz Art Collection to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art for $30 million, money Fisk desperately needs to stay in business. Georgia O’Keeffe donated her late husband’s collection to Fisk in 1949.
Rosebaum quotes Norton, thusly:
As for the sharing schedule, the joint agreement stipulates that the Collection will remain at Fisk [in Nashville] until the Fall of 2013, then spend two years at Crystal Bridges and then return to Fisk. The contemplation is for a two-year rotation, but the oversight committee can set another schedule, so long as the exhibition time at each location is equal.
The Association of Art Museum Directors is unhappy about the Fisk decision; it issued this statement Dec. 8, 2011:
AAMD believes that art collections owned by colleges and universities are an irreplaceable component of academic and community life and that they should not be treated as disposable financial assets. Art museums and galleries — standing alone or operated as part of a college or university — fundamentally compromise the field’s core principles and negatively impact the entire art museum community when they sell art to support operations.
Here’s a question that I’d like someone to answer: If the struggling black university had to close, what would happen to the artwork? Would it go on the auction block? Or would it have gone to the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe? A Tennessee appeals court ruled in 2009 that the collection was not part of O’Keeffe’s estate and the museum had no claims on it. It’s impossible to know, of course, what O’Keeffe would have made of the sharing plan. She and
Alice Walton, who created Crystal Bridges, might have hit it off.
The collection includes O’Keeffe’s “Radiator Building,” which the O’Keeffe museum sought to buy for $7 million, and French impressionist work along with important American paintings, including Marsden Hartley’s “Painting No. 3.”
For a list of work in the collection, go here.
UPDATE: Crystal Bridges has issued a press release about the art-sharing agreement. (It does not include the “detail” mentioned in paragraph 7 about Fisk’s plan to use the money; Crystal Bridges spokesman Dianne Carroll provided me a link to the missing information.