Getty hangs ‘for sale’ signs on 39 paintings

The J. Paul Getty Museum is having what amounts to a garage sale -- only theirs is expected to bring in as much as $2 million.

Through Sotheby’s auction house, the Getty plans to dispose of 39 paintings, mainly 17th century Dutch and Flemish works that Scott Schaefer, curator of paintings, said were acquired by J. Paul Getty to hang at his homes. Museum curators never thought they had the right aesthetic stuff, and they’ve been in storage or were hung only in decorative-arts displays -- window-dressing, more or less, for exhibitions from the Getty’s collection of French furniture.

Schaefer said the Getty Trust’s board has earmarked all proceeds from the sale for fresh acquisitions of European paintings. A spokeswoman for Sotheby’s said most of the batch will be sold in an auction of Old Master paintings in New York on Jan. 25 and 26; others will go under the gavel in Amsterdam in March.

The most desirable painting, going by Sotheby’s price estimate, is Salomon van Ruysdael’s “Travellers Halting Before an Inn,” estimated to fetch $300,000 to $500,000.

The Getty traded a 40th painting -- a Nicholas Berchem landscape -- plus an undisclosed sum, to a dealer for another Berchem, “Rest After the Hunt.” “It’s just a better painting,” Schaefer said. “It’ll go up in the galleries as soon as we’re finished cleaning it.”

Selling works from a museum’s collection -- “de-accessioning” -- has been controversial because it means art passes out of the public sphere, leaving it up to private owners whether to loan them for display or give scholars access.

“It has become a dirty word in the press but has never been a dirty word for museums,” Schaefer said. “It’s a very normal process.” Since the paintings in the Getty sell-off have had hundreds of years to prove themselves, there were no reservations about de-accessioning them, Schaefer said.

The Getty offered two of the paintings it’s selling as long-term loans to other L.A. museums but found no takers, Schaefer said. Another painting that otherwise would have been sold did find a local home: The Skirball Museum had borrowed Max Liebermann’s “An Old Woman With Cat” for a recent exhibition and will now keep it on long-term loan. Schaefer said he had hung the Liebermann in a Getty gallery at one point but decided “it was kind of an odd man out.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com