An Indiana judge has ruled in favor of Valparaiso University, allowing the private Lutheran institution to sell three valuable paintings from its Brauer Museum of Art collection, including a work by Georgia O’Keeffe. The university plans to use the estimated $20 million raised from the sale to renovate its aging freshman dormitories. This decision comes amidst financial difficulties and declining enrollment, with the university arguing that modern dorm facilities are crucial to attracting new students.
Valparaiso faced legal and ethical challenges due to the conditions tied to the artwork. The university’s collection was funded by a 1953 gift from Percy Sloan, donated in honor of his father, artist Junius R. Sloan. The gift stipulated that any income from the collection should be used for maintaining the artwork or acquiring new pieces. Furthermore, the will specified that any paintings purchased with the gift had to be “of the general character known as conservative.”
Two of the paintings in question—Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills and Childe Hassam’s The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate—were purchased in the 1960s with Sloan’s funds. Valparaiso successfully argued in court that these works do not meet the “conservative” requirement. The university contended that O’Keeffe’s modernist style and Hassam’s impressionist approach did not align with the stipulations in Sloan’s will. The third painting, Frederic E. Church’s Mountain Landscape, was a direct donation from Sloan and was not part of the “conservative” argument.
The court did not clarify its interpretation of “conservative,” leaving the term open to debate. However, Gretchen Buggeln, an art history professor at Valparaiso, suggested that Sloan may have intended the term to mean representational rather than abstract. She pointed out that Rust Red Hills is clearly a representational landscape, as it depicts rust-colored hills.
The university, struggling to protect and preserve the paintings, placed them in a storage facility last September. Valparaiso also temporarily closed the museum in June. In its legal petition, the school argued that the sale of these paintings would serve the greater good by funding dorm renovations and building a new gallery to display other works from the Sloan collection, in line with the trust’s intention to promote art education.
The ruling marks a significant decision in the ongoing debate over whether institutions should be allowed to sell art to fund non-art-related expenses, with many in the academic and art communities closely watching the outcome.
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