What Do They Do With $2.8 Million?
Affluent New Trier High Can't Decide How to Spend Windfall From Painting's Sale

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 31, 2006

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.

Yet some have argued that New Trier, whose students perform countless community service projects, should share its new cash more directly in a region where school funding levels and student performance vary dramatically. Several told the school board that the money could make a far bigger difference in the lives of students who have less and need more.

"All the people who presented were extremely eloquent," said Hank Bangser, the school's superintendent. "However, we've also received a legal opinion that we're not even legally able to write a check, so that won't happen."

Northwestern University art historian Stephen F. Eisenman said: "It's ironic that's where the work of a communist painter was found and will enrich the budget of one of the wealthiest school districts in the country."

Davis, an inventive painter who studied realism under Robert Henri before drawing on European modernism, painted the colorful "Still Life" in 1930, after returning from Paris. The State Department bought the painting in 1946 for a tour of Latin America and postwar Europe called "Advancing American Art."

Members of Congress, aware of the leftist politics of many of the artists, objected to the exhibition and the fact that 79 oils and 38 works on paper had been bought with public money. The State Department sold them to educational institutions.

Two went to New Trier, thanks to Holland, a teacher and part-time art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times; the other has disappeared.

"Still Life" moved back and forth from hallway to classroom to art faculty office for many years until it found its way into a storeroom for much of the 1970s and 1980s, according to Bangser. He said an art teacher recognized the work as something valuable and alerted superiors, who put it in a bank vault. Bertani, the school's personnel and communications director, was in the bank in the early 1990s when specialists from Christie's and Sotheby's examined the work.

"They came out and they were just blown away. I can still remember their faces," Bertani said. "When they removed the covering, one of the auction house representatives, her eyes got wide and she just gasped."

The painting stayed at the Art Institute for 13 years until someone pointed out, as Bangser put it, that "Stuart Davis is hot and this particular painting is very important in his line of work."

After the Dec. 1 sale in New York -- to a buyer who, Bangser has heard, intends to show the painting in public -- the suggestions flowed in. As it now stands, a big chunk of the money will go for renovating the school's main arts building. A piece, said Bangser, could go to a program that New Trier and schools outside the district could share.

But in New Trier terms, the money simply is not huge.

"The painting proceeds will not have a significant effect on any particular thing that we will do that we would not have done before," said Bangser, who reported that the Painting Proceeds Committee is expected to make a recommendation by December. "I do think it will inspire some very interesting thinking about projects, and may well fund a portion of those projects."

"Still Life With Flowers" was not the only valuable artwork in New Trier's collection. Ivan Albright, who did the painting for the film "The Picture of Dorian Gray," is a New Trier alumnus. He gave the school a typically macabre self-portrait, which Bertani said is now worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It's not for sale.