New York Public Library sells off art to support book habit
ABOVE: detail from Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849). The painting and 18 other works are being auctioned off by the New York Public Library to prop up its flagging endowment.
The NYPL is selling off 19 works from its collection in order to patch up its tattered finances, the library announced. This Poughkeepsie-centric article, from the Poughkeepsie-centric Poughkeepsie Journal, interviews various local library officials who speculate about the NYPL’s move. James Mundy, director of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College—in Poughkeepsie!—clucks that this amounts to “heating the house by burning the furniture.”
Library Journal adds that the library is giving preference in the bidding to New York-based public institutions, to try to keep the art in the country and on display. But in the end they need the cash: the auction, which includes not one but two Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington, is expected to fetch more than $75 million. Discover™ cards out, everyone.
[…] A rash of museum sales in the U.S. are coming in the next few months, as institutions with depleted endowments and cashflow problems sell off some of of their collections. The New York Public Library touched off this little wave earlier in the year when it sold almost 20 works in order to raise money for their primary mission of collecting books. Now, the Met, the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art all have dates at the auction block to help clean out their closets. […]