Susan Moore

Museums in dire straits forced to sell treasure to raise funds

It is a desperate state of affairs when museums and art galleries sell outstanding works of art in order to raise funds. It is even worse, perhaps, when they do so because they no longer want them. Next month, on 5 June, Sotheby’s New York is offering some 25 classical carpets on behalf of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, which includes what the auction house describes as ‘one of the most important and revered carpets in the world’. No one taking the trouble to contemplate the 17th-century Isfahan ‘Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet’ (right) for more than a minute could fail to be entranced by it, or to recognise that this most beautiful and astonishingly complex of textiles is a remarkable work of art. That is, in one sense, precisely why it is being sold.

Such a sale is alarming for several reasons, not least because it may represent just the tip of an iceberg. In 1925, Senator William A. Clark bequeathed some 997 predominantly European fine and decorative arts to the gallery William Corcoran had founded in 1869. Yet there is no mention of this or any of the gallery’s European holdings in the Strategic Framework for a New Corcoran issued by its board of trustees in April. It seems that the current regime has decided to revise the museum’s mission, as American museum trustees are wont to do. The gallery will now narrow its focus to contemporary art, American art and, a new category, design.

This strategic plan was prompted by the financial difficulties of the privately endowed Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, and its process included identifying the institution’s core mission. This is the latest example of what could be called ‘museum mission creep’, an exercise offering an automatic green light to justify sometimes radical change — and cash in the coffers for future, and more fashionable, acquisitions.

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