Art Museums Growing Leery of Loans : Auctions: Collectors are putting on the block pricey works that were intended to be gifts.

Artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles are up for grabs in May auctions. In most cases, the works belong to financially strapped museums that are selling assets to raise funds for other acquisitions, but two paintings from the Met are different.

Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” and Rembrandt van Rijn’s “St. Peter in Prison” are long-term loans that the museum hoped would be donated by private collectors.

The Van Gogh portrait, valued at $40 million to $50 million, is the star attraction of a sale of Impressionist and modern art on Tuesday at Christie’s New York. The Rembrandt, expected to bring between $10 million and $15 million, is the top lot in Christie’s May 31 auction of Old Master paintings.

Another Van Gogh, “The Bridge at Trinquetaille,” was loaned to the Met for three years before its 1987 sale for $20.3 million at Christie’s London. Both Van Goghs were the property of the late Siegfried Kramarsky, a New York banker and philanthropist whose daughter, Sonja Kramarsky, consigned the paintings to auction. The Rembrandt is being sold by Joel Friedland, a Miami real estate developer.

Many intended gifts to museums have turned up at auction over the years, but such sales are causing increasing concern as escalating prices entice borrowed crown jewels onto the auction block. The most highly publicized case was the Frick Museum’s loss of “Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici” by Jacobo Pontormo, a 16th-Century masterpiece that had been on view there for nearly 20 years. The Pontormo might have disappeared into a private collection if the J. Paul Getty Museum hadn’t bought it last June for $35.2 million at Christie’s New York.

The Getty also rescued Van Gogh’s “Irises,” which had been on long-term loan to Westbrook College in Portland, Me. before Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond bought it in 1987 for a record $53.9 million in a controversial sale, highly leveraged by Sotheby’s auction house. When Bond’s financial empire tumbled and he was unable to pay off a $27-million loan from Sotheby’s, he put the painting back on the market.

Shock waves from such multimillion-dollar sales now ripple around the Met, as two more loans to that institution go on the block this month. But John Ross, the museum’s press officer, insisted that there is no cause for alarm. The Met only accepts loans from people with whom it has long-standing relationships, generally those who have been generous donors, he said.

Loans make up “a tiny proportion” of artworks in the museum’s galleries that are devoted to its permanent collection--”scores among hundreds of thousands, though they include some very fine things,” Ross said.

Most of the Met’s galleries of paintings include at least one loan, however. Works by such important figures as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Hendrick Goltzius bear labels saying they were “lent anonymously.” So does Rembrandt’s “Rape of Europa,” a small 1632 painting identified by the museum as one of the artist’s first mythological pictures and one of his most important landscapes.

In the heavily trafficked great hall of 19th-Century paintings, featuring the Met’s Impressionist treasures, anonymous loans include one of seven Van Goghs on view in a central display. The painting of a well-worn pair of men’s shoes may not have the popular appeal of “Irises” or “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” but it was executed in 1888, in Van Gogh’s mature style and most highly prized period. Also on anonymous loan is “Scene of Fantasy or the Fisherman,” an 1873 painting by Paul Cezanne that the museum has labeled “one of the most important genre paintings of Cezanne’s early maturity.”

Will these paintings leave the Met and turn up in future auction catalogues? Only time will tell, but the economic climate is not favorable for museums. At the same time as art prices shot up into the millions, the 1986 income tax law made it more difficult for collectors in the top tax bracket to deduct the appreciated value of donated artworks. As a result, donations have plummeted.

Loans from private collectors are only one small part of an equation that continues to diminish museums’ power to collect art, but the termination of long-term loans can be devastating. Does this mean that museums are rethinking their loan policies?

“We have always been conservative, but we are more leery of loans now because of the tax laws and the market. We do not want to enhance a work of art to the benefit of a collector,” said Ruth Kaplan, press officer at the National Gallery in Washington. The gallery has about two dozen loaned works on display among its 5,000-piece collection, she said.

The Museum of Modern Art has an even tighter policy. “We don’t accept loans,” said Kirk Varnedoe, director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. “The works in our permanent collections galleries that came from private collections are outright gifts or, on occasion, promised gifts”--that is, artworks that have been irrevocably promised to the museum.

MOMA’s no-loan policy has been in place since the ‘60s, but Varnedoe doesn’t see other museums moving closer to that approach. “In a complex way, I think movement may be in the opposite direction. . . . As prices go higher and collectors have less incentive to give, museums may be pressured to flesh out their collections with loans in hope that they will become gifts. There’s a saying that if you put enough pictures on the wall, some of them will stick,” he said.

But spokesmen from some other museums indicated that if policy changes are in the wind, they are blowing toward caution.

The days are long gone when private collections were farmed out to the nation’s top museums for the summer and picked up in the fall, according to Earl A. Powell, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While small, impoverished institutions may welcome loans under any conditions and most museums borrow works for temporary exhibitions, major museums generally restrict their permanent collection galleries to works they own or expect to receive as gifts.

“If you rely on a work by painter X and you do not pursue other examples by painter X, you may not be able to replace that painting if it is removed,” Varnedoe said. That situation can arise even with a no-loan policy, as MOMA recently discovered when heirs of photographer Edward Steichen sued the museum for the return of a Matisse painting that Steichen’s daughter, Charlotte Kate Rodina Steichen, willed to the museum in 1973 but later bequeathed to her grandniece, Ariana Rodina Calderone Stahmer. When expected gifts are retracted, museums not only lose the art and the opportunity to buy a replacement, they forfeit any money they have spent on insurance, conservation and maintenance.

The most serious case at the County Museum of Art was Armand Hammer’s decision to withdraw his collections and build his own museum--a project that is currently threatened by lawsuits by shareholders of Occidental Petroleum, which has borne much of the cost.

A 1989 auction of the Hal B. Wallis collection deprived LACMA of another collection it had hoped to own. The collection of Impressionist paintings was on “permanent loan,” but the museum thought it had no legal grounds to object when the late producer’s son, Brent Wallis, decided to sell the works to benefit a charitable foundation. Later discovering a letter of instructions from Hal B. Wallis ordering that the paintings be kept permanently at the museum or at some other publicly owned facility, the museum sued the foundation. The case has not been settled.

Powell said that the County Museum of Art has no plans to change its policy, but it has become more conservative over time. “We have sent back most of the loans that we were just paying insurance on. We do accept loans now, but we generally ask for some sort of commitment and we try to make them promised gifts,” he said.