The Delaware Art Museum, which has come under withering criticism for deciding to sell up to four works from its collection to pay down construction debts, announced Monday that it had privately sold one of its most important paintings, Winslow Homer’s “Milking Time,” as well as Andrew Wyeth’s “Arthur Cleveland,” for amounts that it did not disclose.
Last year, the museum privately sold “Black Crescent,” a mobile by Alexander Calder, and the Pre-Raphaelite “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” by William Holman Hunt, which brought $4.9 million in an auction at Christie’s in London, far less than the low estimate of $8.4 million the painting had been expected to bring.
“Today, we close one of the most difficult chapters in the story of the Delaware Art Museum,” Michael Miller, the museum’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We reached our most important goal – keeping the museum open and thriving. We are very grateful for those who have understood the arduous and complex decisions that we encountered during this long and challenging phase.”
While the museum did not say how much the sales raised, it said in the statement that it had been able to fully repay its debt of $19.8 million without “significantly depleting its endowment.”
The museum, which has strong holdings in 19th-century American and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, said last year that it expected to raise $30 million in all, enough to repay the balance of the bond debt, which was incurred as part a 2005 expansion and renovation, and to protect its endowment to ensure that it could remain open.
Repayment terms for tax-exempt bonds issued for the expansion in 2003 became accelerated for various reasons during the financial crisis, the museum said, and at the same time its endowment experienced a significant decline as a result of stock market performance, forcing trustees to conduct layoffs and cut financing for exhibitions.
While museums often sell works to buy other works, an accepted practice in updating and evolving collections, selling pieces to pay for operations or capital projects is widely considered an ethical violation, a betrayal of a museum’s role of holding art in public trust.
Last June, the museum was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions. Timothy Rub, the association’s president and the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said that when museums “begin to look at pieces of a collection as fungible resources that can be monetized we are starting down a very slippery slope.”