What Do They Do With $2.8 Million?

Affluent New Trier High Can't Decide How to Spend Windfall From Painting's Sale

CHICAGO -- The high school art teacher thought the oil painting would make a good teaching tool.

"Still Life With Flowers," a lively and whimsical work by Stuart Davis, was being unloaded by the State Department, which had drawn criticism for staging a traveling exhibition that included works by leftist artists. The year was 1948, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was in full cry.

At New Trier Township High School, north of Chicago, teacher and part-time art critic Frank Holland spotted an advertisement for the sale and got permission to buy the painting. He hung it in a school hallway, carting it back and forth to class as an example of American modernism. Students pondered the painting's musical notes, the flower-as-gramophone, the college pennants, the French hotel facade.

The cost to New Trier: $62.50.

Eventually forgotten in a storeroom, the painting was rediscovered in the 1990s after Davis had become famous. The school lent the piece to a grateful Art Institute of Chicago.

"It's the kind of painting we dream of, that we hope will fall from the sky," said Eric Widing, an expert in American art at Christie's. Recently it did, and the auction house sold it to an anonymous bidder.

The price tag: $3.1 million.

Talk about buying low and selling high. The painting's odyssey left New Trier with some unforgettable lore and a windfall, after commission, of $2.8 million. If it were a Hollywood film, the school would lie in a hardscrabble neighborhood and the sudden riches would turn bleak dreams into gold.

But New Trier is considered one of the elite high schools in Illinois. Its two campuses are rooted in the prosperous heart of Chicago's North Shore. An annual budget of $75 million underwrites enviable capital programs, a student-teacher ratio of 14 to 1 and an average teacher salary of $84,151. The 105-year-old school offers more than 300 courses and graduates 98.5 percent of its students, who are overwhelmingly upper middle class and white.

Noted alumni include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Reps. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and Mark S. Kirk (R-Ill.), as well as actors Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret and Bruce Dern.

New Trier has even registered its motto: "To commit minds to inquiry, hearts to compassion, and lives to the service of humanity." ®

Where will the "Still Life" money go? Most of the windfall will go to programs and capital improvements to the art department. One proposal is to establish a program for artists-in-residence who could help "bring our students together with other communities and learn from each other in the arts," said Painting Proceeds Committee member Laura Bertani.