Branded a Pariah, the National Academy Is Struggling to Survive

By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: December 22, 2008

Dwarfed by the Guggenheim Museum’s commanding Frank Lloyd Wright building and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s stately Carnegie mansion, the National Academy Museum’s graceful but relatively diminutive town house on Fifth Avenue could be a metaphor for its squeezed condition.
National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts
Sanford Robinson Gifford’s “Mount Mansfield, Vermont,” was one of two paintings the National Academy Museum recently sold.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

A proposal to sell the academy’s building at 1083 Fifth Avenue was rejected by the institution’s artist members.
The 183-year-old academy, a museum and school that played a pathbreaking role in fostering a New York art scene in the 19th century, is in serious trouble. Having sold two important Hudson River School paintings from its collection this month to pay bills, the institution was recently branded a pariah by the Association of Art Museum Directors. That group views such stopgap measures as a breach of basic principles, stipulating that museums can sell art only to finance new acquisitions.

The association urged its members to cut off all loans to the academy and forgo any collaborations.
To the academy’s leadership, such censure was not only an indignity but also a shove for an institution on a financial precipice. The academy has been running a deficit for five years, and this year’s shortfall is estimated at around $1 million. It has a $4 million annual operating budget.

The academy has been borrowing heavily from its $10 million endowment — $3 million of which is restricted — to pay the bills and has had difficulty paying the museum guards and the heating bill. Its very mission is in disarray, and several board members have resigned over the last six months to protest the institution’s direction — or what some say is a lack thereof.

A recent proposal to sell the academy’s Beaux Arts museum building on Fifth Avenue and two additional buildings on East 89th Street, and to relocate, was supported by the academy’s 20-member board, known as the council. But the move was rejected by the institution’s professional artist members, known as academicians. The academy also has an advisory board.

Among the 337 academicians, elected by their peers, are many of the country’s leading artists and architects, including Chuck Close, Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Gehry. In a practice going back to the institution’s founding in 1825, each new academician contributes a piece of art as a membership requirement.

The academy’s previous director, Annette Blaugrund, who had championed the sale of the building, resigned last December. The board had difficulty finding a replacement and only this month appointed Carmine Branagan, who has worked at several nonprofit organizations but has no art museum experience.

In an interview in her office Ms. Branagan said the academy’s main problems were the lack of a strong fund-raising mechanism and of clear direction. “I think they recognize there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said. “We’re really looking at the place from top to bottom.”
Robert A. Levinson, vice chairman of the advisory board, said the trustees met last week to discuss changing the academy’s constitution so the academicians would no longer have financial control.

Mr. Levinson argued that artists are ill equipped to make financial decisions about the institution’s future. “They just live in another world and don’t understand fiduciary responsibility,” he said.
Even though it has been operating essentially hand to mouth, the institution has had no formal fund-raising operation in place, aside from its annual spring gala. An effort last year to start a capital campaign produced very little. Some trustees fault the artist members, who have not leapt into the breach by making big donations or helping to raise funds.

The artist Richard Haas, a member of the academy, called some of the criticisms unfair. “This organization existed for 183 years, in large part because artists are very creative in their thinking,” he said. Still, when asked how the academy had landed in its current situation, Mr. Haas allowed that some “somewhat intransigent age-75-and-over artists probably had something to do with it.”

Founded as the National Academy of Design, with the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a model, the academy serves as an honorary association of American artists, with a museum that focuses on American works and a school. It has one of the largest public American art collections in the country, more than 7,000 works from the 19th century to the present. Most of the academy’s collection consists of gifts from newly elected academicians, although bequests have also been made.

The academy raised $13.5 million from its recent sale of Frederic Edwin Church’s “Scene on the Magdalene” from 1854 and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s ”Mount Mansfield, Vermont” from 1859. Ms. Branagan said that the deal had been arranged privately and that she did not know the buyer’s identity, only that it was a private foundation that had agreed to hang the paintings publicly.
The academy hopes to raise an additional $1.5 million from the sale of two other works, John White Alexander’s “Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Hastings” from 1901 and Robert Blum’s “Study for a Japanese Beggar” from 1891; Ms. Branagan said the academy would delay offering those paintings until market conditions improved.

Ms. Branagan said she felt the museum directors’ association had been unduly harsh in its reaction to the sale. “We all knew we were on the wrong side of those standards,” she said of the group’s policy on selling artworks. “I don’t think any of us were prepared for the aggression with which they came after us.”

The association is not the only outraged party. Upon learning in June that the academy was considering the sale of artwork, known as deaccessioning, two members of the academy’s advisory board — Lawrence A. Larose, the chairman, and his wife, Janet Y. Larose — resigned. “Your proposal strikes at the very heart of the Academy’s mission,” they wrote in their resignation letter.
In a recent interview Mr. Larose, a lawyer, said, “To think about raiding the cookie jar in order to keep the lights on I find culturally irresponsible.”

He faulted the artist members for blocking the sale of the buildings. He said the institution had stood to gain as much as $150 million and had considered new locations like the former Dia Foundation galleries in Chelsea.
In an e-mail message to Michael Conforti, president of the museum directors’ association, after the sale of the Church and Gifford paintings, John P. Driscoll, the owner of Babcock Galleries in Manhattan, explained that he had resigned from the academy’s advisory board and council last year “because of the immovable, unrealistic, hostile and from my point of view totally unacceptable abrogation of cultural responsibility on the part of the Academicians and their leadership.”

Mr. Driscoll added that the academy members refused “over several years to explore graceful and culturally responsible ways to alleviate their financial woes” and that “its artist membership deserves our contempt and any sanctions that can be applied.”
“I fear for the collection as a whole, which is now at considerable risk,” he continued, “as it is clear there is no one there to keep the barbarians from the gate.”

The recent sale was not the academy’s first; it sold Thomas Eakins’s “Wrestlers” in the 1970s and Richard Caton Woodville’s “War News From Mexico” in the 1990s, according to David Dearinger, a former curator. When the academy later applied to the museum association for accreditation, Mr. Dearinger recalled, it was asked about the Woodville sale and promised not to repeat such a move.
“I don’t blame them for being upset,” Mr. Dearinger said of the association. “They were made fools out of.”

Consultants hired by the academy last year to explore a $5 million capital campaign had concluded that the goal actually needed to be $21 million, but that the institution was capable of raising only $800,000. “I think that woke up the artists,” Mr. Levinson, the advisory board member, said of their decision. “They started to come out of the dream world.”

Mr. Haas said the artists agonized over the proposal to sell the works before voting 183 to 1 in favor (with one abstention) in November. “It was with great trepidation that we went into this,” he said. “I don’t think there is any artist who feels otherwise.”
The architect Cesar Pelli, an academy member, said he thought the sale was “perfectly fine.”
“Museums don’t need to be black holes where every work of art that enters them can never leave,” he said.
Brian T. Allen, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., and a critic of the sale, suggested that one challenge facing the National Academy was to forge a high-profile identity.

“They are in a pretty prison,” he said. “The Fifth Avenue location is prestigious, but they’re having trouble competing with other cultural institutions. The National Academy has never found a niche. It really handicaps them.”
Long-planned shows at the academy are now in jeopardy because the museum directors’ association warned other artists against collaborating with the academy. “It actually devastates the academy’s exhibition program,” Ms. Branagan said. She said the academy was in “a compromised and wounded position” as it struggles “to get our footing and move forward.”

Currently on view at the academy are a retrospective of George Tooker’s works and a show on Ralph Albert Blakelock, both of which run through Jan. 4.
“The collection is wonderful, the shows they do are great,” said Mr. Allen of the Addison. “They just have to find a way to develop a mission that will allow them to succeed.”