College Argues For the Right To Sell Art Gifts To Raise Capital

The decision drew public attention last December when Fisk officials went to court to determine ownership of the gift.

Michael Norton, a partner at Bone McAllester Norton, the Nashville law firm representing the school, says Fisk turned to the courts on its own. "No one was telling us we couldn't do this," he says. "But we wanted a good, clear title to deliver to the buyer."

It didn't take long for the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation to challenge Fisk's plans. It objected, citing a 1949 letter in which then-university President Charles S. Johnson promised O'Keeffe that Fisk "will not at any time, sell or exchange any objects in the Stieglitz collection."

University officials cited a New York Times piece by O'Keeffe in December 1949 in which she wrote, "After twenty-five years the [collections] can be sold if the institutions have no further use for them."

Although Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers had no objections to the sale as long as Fisk tried its best to sell the paintings to a Tennessee buyer, a letter from Summers's office to the law firm representing Fisk acknowledges that, based on the correspondence between O'Keeffe and Johnson, "Ms. O'Keef[f]e may have placed certain conditions upon the gift, including a requirement that the collection be exhibited intact and a prohibition against loaning any items from the collection."

Over his lifetime, Stieglitz amassed more than 1,000 works of European and American modern art, which he gave to O'Keeffe with the right to pass on to "one or more non-profit corporations" during her lifetime.

After Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe dispersed the collection to six institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The largest gifts went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Fisk. O'Keeffe donated the art to Fisk at the suggestion of her friend Carl Van Vechten, a writer and photographer who was also a friend of Johnson's, West says.

The letters exchanged between the university and O'Keeffe listed several conditions, says Norton, including that the paintings be hung on white walls, that the collection be displayed at a museum and that Fisk would not lend or sell the art.

"But that was 1949," he says. "We want the court to know that things have changed since then." Now the school needs money and "those kind of conditions have placed a cloud on what we can do with the art."

Says Saul Cohen, president of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which took over the foundation's position in court after that entity turned all its assets over to the museum this spring: "Fisk is not complying with the conditions that Georgia O'Keeffe imposed."

June O'Keeffe Sebring, 78, a niece of the late painter, is a director on the now-defunct foundation's board. Although the sale of the Hartley and O'Keeffe paintings would be a convenient source of money, "I don't think O'Keeffe would have intended it to be that," she says.

The plan has critics in other quarters as well.