O'Keeffe Painting Is at the Center

Of a Modern Fight

Fisk University Could Use The Money,

but Tennessee Delays a Deal to Sell

By COREY DADE, from the WSJ on Online, February 16, 2007

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Two modernist masterpieces from the early 20th century sit in a storage chamber here at a downtown museum. They have been in this city for most of the last half century, but they've been out of view long enough that many residents may have forgotten about them.

Their owner, tiny Fisk University, has decided it's too expensive to continue insuring and caring for the paintings, by Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley. Fisk wants to sell them both to help solve a financial crisis.


Georgia O'Keeffe's, 'Radiator Building -- Night, New York'

But a legal battle erupted over whether Fisk has the right to do that. Ms. O'Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 98, gave the two paintings and many other artworks to Fisk in 1949, on the condition that they never be sold. This week, Tennessee Attorney General Robert E. Cooper Jr. stepped in to try to keep the paintings in Nashville. State law authorizes him to weigh in on the sale of charitable donations intended for public use.

The O'Keeffe painting, "Radiator Building -- Night, New York," and Mr. Hartley's "Painting No. 3" each were appraised at $8.5 million two years ago. The whole collection was valued at $33 million. That's more than the total endowment of Fisk, a historically black school and the alma mater of such luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington and historian John Hope Franklin.

"It was a very, very bitter decision" to sell them, says Fisk President Hazel O'Leary, former secretary of energy in the Clinton administration and a Fisk graduate. "On the other hand, you ask yourself 'Do you want two pictures or do you want Fisk University for the next 50 years?'"

Many of the nation's 101 predominantly black colleges and universities, including Fisk, have struggled financially in the wake of the racial integration of higher education. They have lost prospective students and tuition revenue to better-funded, predominantly white universities. Contributions from their early benefactors, many of them white philanthropists, have diminished, and donations from alumni and foundations have not made up the difference.

Fisk decided in 2005 to sell several of the paintings and to use other artworks as collateral for a loan, then settled on selling only the O'Keeffe and the Hartley, the two most valuable. Under state law applying to the sale of certain charitable gifts, it sought approval from Davidson County Chancery Court in Nashville. The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation filed a motion to block the sale, arguing it would violate the directives of Ms. O'Keeffe.

Last November, Fisk struck a deal with the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which had taken charge of the painter's estate from the foundation: The museum, located in Santa Fe, N.M., would pay $7 million for her famous oil painting, a 1927 depiction of New York's American Radiator Co. skyscraper. Fisk could sell the Hartley painting, a 1913 abstract, to a Tennessee buyer, so long as the buyer permanently lent it back to Fisk for display.

Then Mr. Cooper stepped in. Exercising his statutory power, he has taken the position that both paintings should stay in Nashville. The city best known for country music and the Grand Ole Opry, he contends, should rally to help Fisk and to recognize the artworks as treasures worth keeping.

Mr. Cooper told the school and the museum that he would approve their settlement only if both paintings were first offered for sale to any buyer who agrees to lend both back to Fisk. If no such buyer surfaced within 30 days, he proposed, the O'Keeffe museum would get its namesake's painting for $7 million, and the Hartley would go on the block. Both Fisk and the museum agreed to the terms, and the 30-day period begins today. Under the agreement, $560,000 from any sale will fund renovations to the gallery where the collection is housed. Ms. O'Leary says the rest will be used to restore the endowment and cover the annual operating deficit.

The collection "has been taken for granted," says Mr. Cooper. "There is nothing like a deadline to focus attention," and to "prod and gauge what the public's interests are here."

The plan mirrors a deal brokered in December in Philadelphia that stopped Thomas Jefferson University from selling Thomas Eakins's 1875 painting, "The Gross Clinic," to the National Gallery of Art and a museum in Arkansas for $68 million. That deal allowed 45 days for local museums and foundations to raise money to purchase it.

Last year, Atlanta's mayor rallied business leaders to drum up $32 million to buy the writings and personal papers of the late Martin Luther King Jr. The civil-rights leader's children had planned to auction the documents, which now are held at his alma mater, Atlanta's Morehouse College.

Fisk, which was founded in 1866, was long one of the nation's most important African-American schools. But it was virtually unknown to most whites when Ms. O'Keeffe's husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died in 1946.

Ms. O'Keeffe donated the bulk of his valuable collection of photographs and art to well-known institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. But at the suggestion of a friend, New York photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten, she gave 101 pieces to Fisk. Mr. Vechten, who was white, collaborated with, and was a patron to, black artists and writers during the Harlem Renaissance, and was a friend of Fisk's president at that time.

The bequest included works by many modernist painters championed by Mr. Stieglitz

The bequest included works by many modernist painters championed by Mr. Stieglitz at his famed "291" gallery in New York. Photographs by Mr. Stieglitz were also included, as were prints by Picasso and lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne. The O'Keeffe painting is said to be her only work bearing a reference to her husband, whose name appears in red neon lights to the left of the subject building.

Courtesy of Fisk University

Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 3," 1913

From the beginning, there were questions about whether Fisk would have sufficient resources and expertise to safeguard and display the collection, according to Ms. O'Keeffe's published correspondence. The campus gym was converted into a gallery for the exhibition's debut in 1949. When Ms. O'Keeffe arrived several days before the opening, she angrily made wholesale changes, repainting every wall white and ripping out ceiling lights, her letters say.

By 1972, the paintings needed to be taken down and sent to New York for restoration. Ms. O'Keeffe gave the school $20,000 to help. But Fisk couldn't afford the whole job, and the art wound up in storage in New York. By 1983, Fisk was nearly $3 million in debt. Its buildings were crumbling, and at one point, the gas company shut off heat in its dormitories.

Civil-rights leaders and affluent blacks and whites rallied to help. Bill Cosby donated $1.3 million. President Reagan gave $1,000 and appointed a committee to examine the plight of black schools. Fisk raised $27 million over seven years, and in 1984, the Stieglitz collection returned to a renovated gallery.

By the mid-1990s, however, Fisk was once again in financial trouble. The departures of four presidents in less than a decade had interfered with fund-raising efforts. Some trustees who had been instrumental in raising money rotated off the board, and others resigned after disagreements over financial matters

Fisk had no resources to promote its art, and gallery attendance slumped. At its main gallery, named for Mr. Van Vechten, the roof leaked and climate controls failed.

In 2004, Ms. O'Leary took over as president, raising hopes for a turnaround. To spark donations, she publicized Fisk's dire condition. Five straight years of $2 million budget deficits, she said, had consumed half of its endowment, leaving just $7 million. She said she had little choice but to sell part of the Stieglitz collection.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation argued that the plan would violate the artist's sale prohibition -- and would void the donation and necessitate the collection's return to the O'Keeffe museum. Fisk maintained it had the right under state law to sell the paintings -- and that in a later letter Ms. O'Keeffe had withdrawn her prohibition of a sale.

Saul Cohen, president of the museum's board of directors, says the attorney general's plan to solicit other bidders for 30 days would help Fisk, while still leaving the O'Keeffe museum a chance to get the painting.

Says the attorney general: "We will let the Stieglitz collection go if it means maintaining the survival of Fisk."

Write to Corey Dade at corey.dade@wsj.com