Keepers of Art or Bottom Lines?

This week in New York, the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts held a highly charged meeting to discuss the possible sale of Jasper Johns’ monumental painting, “Numbers, 1964,” which was commissioned expressly for the lobby of the New York State Theater and installed there for nearly 35 years. Bought for $12,000, the Johns is today valued at some $15 million. You could practically hear them drooling over the potential windfall all the way to the West Coast, since Lincoln Center always needs money for operations, building improvements and such.

At the meeting, however, the center abruptly pulled back from the brink. Yielding to a firestorm of public opposition against trading art for operating funds, the board voted not to sell the irreplaceable painting.

Does Lincoln Center’s slavering for cash at the expense of art sound familiar? It should. A similarly sorry saga has been unfolding in Los Angeles--albeit with the leisurely speed of molasses.

Five years ago, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center sold off the Leicester Codex, a scientific manuscript written and drawn by Leonardo da Vinci between 1506 and 1508, which was part of the original bequest to the museum by its late founder. Following two minutes and 40 seconds of nerve-racking bidding at Christie’s New York auction house, the only Leonardo manuscript in America made the tragic journey from a public collection into private hands, in exchange for $28 million (plus a 10% buyer’s premium to the auctionhouse).

At the time, the reason given for this outrageous sale was that a war chest--politely dubbed a reserve fund--needed to be set up to protect the museum in lawsuits and tax disputes that might be filed against the estate of Armand Hammer. Prudently, as UCLA was taking over management of the formerly private museum, the university was unwilling to assume financial responsibility for the recently deceased rapscallion’s legal problems. The Leonardo reserve fund would be held in escrow for eight years, and whatever remained would be released to the museum in 2002.

To date, no successful suits have been brought against the museum, and none are expected. So what will become of the $28-million fund (plus interest, which currently totals some $5 million) when the UCLA/Hammer Museum gains access to it three short years from now? At present, it looks like the money will go toward committing institutional suicide.

According to widely accepted professional guidelines, a museum’s only ethical use for money raised by selling art is to create a fund for buying other art. Yet--shades of greedy Lincoln Center--that’s not what the UCLA/Hammer has in mind. Instead, the museum seems determined to turn the Leonardo fund into a convenient cash cow for discretionary expenditures: operations, exhibitions, even capital construction projects (the Hammer building opened in 1990 but is still unfinished).

Those inappropriate uses were even spelled out in the March 1994 agreement in which UCLA assumed operational control of the Hammer Museum. The agreement stipulates that, at the end of the eight-year reserve period, up to half the income produced by the Leonardo fund may be used to pay for exhibitions; the rest can be spent on virtually anything, at the unanimous discretion of the board of trustees.

Almost eight months after the operating agreement was signed, Henry T. Hopkins, then-director of the UCLA/Hammer Museum, repeatedly insisted that the Leonardo fund would actually be subject to the profession’s ethical restrictions. In a November 1994 article in The Times responding to a column critical of the sale, Hopkins wrote that any principal and accrued interest would “be used for art purchases.” The following month, in a letter to the New York Times published in response to an Op-Ed piece by author and art editor Lee Rosenbaum condemning the sale, Hopkins reiterated that “all money remaining in the fund, and interest, [will] be used only for buying art.” He also claimed that UCLA had insisted on the restriction and the Hammer had concurred.

But, apparently not. A call to the museum last week confirmed that the inappropriate spending scheme outlined in the 1994 operating agreement is still very much in place.

The plan plainly violates the profession’s ethical standard, which isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. The basic principle is this: A museum’s art does not exist to serve the needs of the institution; rather, the institution exists to serve the needs of art and its public.

Hopkins stepped down as director late last year. His successor, who took the reins earlier this month, is Ann Philbin. Her energetic, eight-year directorship of New York’s Drawing Center, a non-collecting showcase for exhibitions of works on paper, has been widely praised.

At the UCLA/Hammer Museum, Philbin has inherited an especially hot potato. The fate of the multimillion-dollar Leonardo fund is certain to be a defining episode in her tenure as director. For if Pandora’s box is opened and the museum’s art collection loses sanctity, the practical fallout could be ruinous.

Here are four of many reasons why:

* In the difficult world of charitable fund-raising, competition is fierce. The public’s perception that a museum can come to its own rescue by selling objects from its collection makes that museum less appealing as a candidate for outside support. Next time the UCLA/Hammer Museum follows a hospital or family services agency to a corporate benefactor with hat in hand, a logical retort would be: Need money? Sell your Van Gogh.

* If the collection isn’t sacrosanct, a crucial program safeguard no longer applies. The pressure on museums to continually expand public programs and services is limitless, checked only by priorities established within finite budgets. Let’s hear the UCLA/Hammer suddenly have to argue why keeping that minor Vlaminck still life in its collection is more important than expanding outreach programs for seniors, mounting a lavish retrospective for a local hero or some other program that’s subject to passing political winds.

* The decision hinders the museum’s capacity to acquire art. Next time a collector is deciding where to make a bequest, two immediate thoughts might be: Not the UCLA/Hammer, because someday it might sell my Fragonard to buy a new furnace; or, OK, but I’m going to encumber this gift with more strings than you’ll find in the L.A. Philharmonic.

* The larger community of art museums is jeopardized. Next time another art museum goes in search of corporate or private funds, perhaps it’ll hear: Why not sell something from your collection? That’s how the UCLA/Hammer does it.

Other nasty possibilities abound. All demonstrate why selling from the collection to fund operating expenses amounts to institutional suicide.

Lincoln Center, which isn’t even an art museum, finally got the hint. Thanks to a strong and vocal constituency, the Jasper Johns will stay put.

It’s too late for the Leonardo manuscript, which is long gone. But still the UCLA/Hammer Museum hasn’t gotten the message. Perhaps it’s hoping that, by 2002, everyone will have forgotten whence the big pile of money came.