Deaccessioning Bernard Smol

La Forêt Enchantée (The Enchanted Forest)

The Georgia Museum of Art currently owns the five paintings by Bernard Smol (French, 1897–1969), all currently on display in museum’s Martha Thompson Dinos Gallery. As the museum’s curator of European art, I have proposed removing four of them from our collection. The paintings do not align with the collection goals as defined in the museum’s mission statement and acquisition policy, the paintings have not generated any scholarly interest or interest from the public in more than 50 years, and they have not been exhibited during this time.

Les Pleureuses (The Mourners)

About the artist

“His is a world of color and dreams, of design and poetry, of music and the daily round of the circus and magic, of dance and religion.” George Huisman, Directeur Général Honoraire des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1958

Smol worked in a late post-impressionistic idiom, creating encaustic paintings with vibrant colors. Encaustic is a technique of painting with hot beeswax mixed with pigments that creates a translucent but textured surface. The jewel-like quality of Smol’s paintings often drew comparisons to stained-glass windows by critics of his day. His typical subject matter included romantic landscapes and interiors populated with harlequins, dancers, bohemian poets and mystical figures that give the viewer a sense of experiencing a dream. Still relatively unknown in the United States, Smol exhibited widely in Europe in the mid-20th century. The artist came to the attention of the Georgia Museum of Art's founding director, Alfred H. Holbrook, during a 1958 exhibition at Chase Gallery in New York, after which Holbrook visited Smol’s studio in Paris.

Le Prophète Job (The Prophet Job)

Deaccessioning

Deaccessioning is the legal and permanent removal of an object from the museum's collection in accordance with policies and procedures defined by the Board of Regents, the University of Georgia, the laws of the State of Georgia and the United States and the standards of the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors. The museum received authorization from the University System of Georgia Board of Regents to deaccession objects starting in 2011, after a process involving formal vote and input from staff members, outside experts, the Board of Advisors, and the university’s provost. Whenever possible, works chosen for deaccessioning are sold at public auction. Proceeds are reserved in a designated account to be used only for the acquisition of new objects into the collection and never for operations or other expenditures. If the work to be deaccessioned was a donation to the museum, the donor or donor’s heirs are informed, whenever possible, and the credit for the gift is applied to any new acquisition made with funds from the donated work’s sale.

Deaccessioning is a carefully and necessarily lengthy process. At this point, the Georgia Museum of Art has yet to deaccession a single object from its collection of more than 10,000 objects in the museum’s 55-year history, although other objects are currently under consideration. I am recommending the deaccessioning of all but one of the paintings by Smol in our collection, all on display in this exhibition. During the course of the exhibition, other members of the museum’s collections committee and I will pursue subsequent steps in the deaccessioning process, making all documents and information available as part of the exhibition.

Le Village Inondé (The Inundated Village)

What do you think?

We would also like your input going forward. Which paintings or paintings would you keep? Which would you deaccession? Come visit in person to vote or tell us what you think in the comment section here.

–Lynn Boland, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art

La Robe de la Mariée (The Wedding Dress)

Excerpt from May 20, 2013, memorandum from Lynn Boland to GMOA Collections Committee:

Bernard Smol (French, 1897–1969) was an accomplished artist and should remain represented in the museum’s collection; however, the evolution of our collection and collection plan for European art over the last 50 years makes it unnecessary to have five large paintings by Smol from the same period and in the same style. These paintings are highly unlikely to be requested for loan or for inclusion in any of the museum's exhibitions or other programming in the foreseeable future, with the exception of the upcoming exhibition “Deaccessioning Bernard Smol,” May 25 to July 7, 2013. These paintings have not been exhibited at the museum since 1959, they have not been on view elsewhere since two traveled to Middle Georgia College shortly thereafter, and there is no indication that information about them has been requested at any time since or that they have been viewed by anyone other than museum staff during this time. There is no indication that Smol has been included in any publication since 1959, further demonstrating a universal lack of scholarly interest in the artist and his works. They were considered for inclusion in the 2011 permanent collection reinstallation as part of the European display in the H. Randolph Holder Gallery but deemed of insufficient quality or art historical significance to merit indefinite display, especially given their large size compared to other paintings in the museum’s collection. Their size also makes them a burden on the museum’s already taxed storage facilities. I recommend that the following paintings, all museum purchases rather than gifts, be deaccessioned and, through public auction, made available to other institutions or individuals better able to display and appreciate them:

La Forêt Enchantée (The Enchanted Forest), n.d.

Encaustic on canvas

34 1/2 x 50 3/4 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum Patrons Fund purchase, 1959

GMOA 1959.683

Les Pleureuses (The Mourners), n.d.

Encaustic on canvas

31 1/2 x 39 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum Patrons Fund purchase, 1959

GMOA 1959.684

Le Prophète Job (The Prophet Job), n.d.

Encaustic on canvas

31 1/2 x 39 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum Patrons Fund purchase, 1959

GMOA 1959.685

Le Village Inondé (The Inundated Village), n.d.

Encaustic on canvas

34 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum Patrons Fund purchase, 1959

GMOA 1959.686

I propose keeping one painting to represent Smol in the GMOA collection:

La Robe de la Mariée (The Wedding Dress), n.d.

Encaustic on canvas

31 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches

Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of the artist and Chase Gallery, New York

GMOA 1959.651

La Robe de la Mariée was a gift of the artist and the Chase Gallery as well the personal favorite of the museum’s founder, Alfred H. Holbrook, according to a March 25, 1959, letter from Holbrook to Smol. La Robe de la Mariée is also the only painting of the five exhibited in Chase Gallery’s 1958 exhibition featuring Smol, which Holbrook visited. Three of the four paintings proposed for deaccession have no exhibition history other than the 1959 exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, and Les Pleureuses (The Mourners) appeared only in the exhibition organized by the museum that traveled to Middle Georgia College.

Asset-Stripping

We've written on this blog many times and linked to many an article about deaccessioning, a museum issue with which our director, Bill Eiland, is very involved on professional committees. So it was interesting to see this column on Spiked that argues against the practice of deaccessioning to provide operating support (or, indeed, anything but new accessions) from a perspective of experience with it. Tiffany Jenkins points out that there is nothing forbidding such practices in the United Kingdom, which means it seems to happen more frequently, despite outcry. Here's the money quote, which puts her argument succinctly and well:

There is good reason for this caution: to protect the institution from the vagaries of fashion, politics and financial pressures. Museums are not businesses and it is not their job to sell off their treasures to mend the roof or pay the electricity bill. Their purpose is to conserve, research and exhibit objects and art for future generations. They should think of their collections as important artefacts and art from past human civilisations, not as objects with a price tag.

Important Read

CultureGrrl has an update on the deaccessioning situations at Fisk and Randolph College that all parties who care about the future of university museums should read. The short version is that, even though both institutions have stabilized financially to some extent, the sale of works is now seen as an option, and it's hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

A Follow-Up

When responding yesterday to Rudolph Weingartner's column on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum, we hadn't yet seen James Steward's response in Inside Higher Ed, which is far more eloquent than our dashed off prose and contains some additional excellent points about the value of university museums. He mentions the interdisciplinary nature of the research currently being done and the importance of collaboration across disciplines on campus, calling attention to the fact that even medical schools have found university art museums useful as a training tool for visual acuity. He also puts the answer to "Why collect?" absolutely beautifully:

And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition.

In the way that great texts live in our libraries, available for revisiting and sustained scholarly investigation, the works of art in our museums offer the possibility of deep critical engagement, close looking, and technical analysis -- made all the deeper when brought together as collections in which dialogues arise through the conversation of objects with each other and with their scholarly interlocutors. Surely a key role of the academy -- the advancement of new knowledge and the challenging of past knowledge -- is that fruit of curatorial, faculty, and student research made possible by the sustained presence of great works of art, whose survival for the future is also thus (and not incidentally) guaranteed.

We're sure this discussion isn't over by a long shot, but we would encourage you to go read Steward's entire piece, which is passionate and thoughtful.

Different Thoughts on Brandeis

We meant to link to this last week, but Rudolph Weingartner, former dean of arts and sciences at Northwestern, wrote a column for Inside Higher Ed on the deaccessioning at the Rose Museum that presents the other side of the issue. Weingartner makes no bones about where he's coming from, even early in the piece:

Understand that my print collection went to Northwestern because I had been dean of arts and sciences there for thirteen years. Understand also that regarding this issue, my experience as dean trumps my love of art and that is why I disagree with the views expressed in numerous articles in The New York Times and one this month in Inside Higher Ed called “Avoiding the Next Brandeis."

He argues that university museums do little to promote relationships with the rest of campus, writing

But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded? As dean, I had to bludgeon the Block Gallery to present an exhibit of the work of Northwestern’s prize painters, William Conger, Ed Paschke and James Valerio. (This was before the Gallery was transformed into a Museum and long before its current director, David Robertson, came to Northwestern.) Art history departments are mostly held at arm's length by campus museums who prize their (inappropriate) autonomy. Mostly, the museums don’t even know how to communicate with other than art faculty on campus.

But should deans have such an influence over what the university museum presents? Doesn't that tread on curatorial independence? Weingartner's other major argument is that these museums need not own the works they present, that temporary exhibitions would do just as well to promote the study of works of art:

It is excellent, therefore, that this cluster of issues is being looked at. In my view, however, the goals sought by the task force for campus art museums are not likely to be realized by means of works of arts owned by museums, but rather by means of exhibits brought in and often locally curated for specific pedagogic purposes.

But having works on display for a limited time and inaccessible after that period by necessity limits their study. A permanent collection is a huge asset to a campus, not to mention that the acquisitions of university museums are naturally different in intent than the acquisitions of private institutions, private collectors or galleries. We understand where Weingartner is coming from, and, again, he admits his bias early on, but we also respectfully disagree with many aspects of his argument.

GMOA in the News

This past Sunday, William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, appeared in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in a segment titled "The Art of Survival" that addressed the current trend of museums deaccessioning works to pay operating expenses. The video, unfortunately, has not been posted, but an article that summarizes the piece is online here. Bill was interviewed not only because of his ability to speak extemporaneously and passionately on the subject (which we're sure many of you have experienced personally), but also because of his extensive professional involvement with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and its committee on the matter. If anyone happens to have a digital version of the video, please let us know. We'd love to post it for all to see.