A Small College, Painted Into a Corner
Strapped Randolph College Weighs Sale of Its $100 Million Art Collection

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- In the spring and summer of 1920, students at Randolph-Macon Woman's College came up with a heady plan for the small school in a postage-stamp corner of the nation. They would pool their nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars to enhance the school's fledgling art collection by obtaining a masterpiece: George Bellows's "Men of the Docks."

Under the direction of art professor Louise Jordan Smith, students put together $200. The college came up with $495. Townspeople and alumnae scraped up $1,500. As the students closed in on the purchase price of $2,500, the student paper jauntily reported: "Yesterday, one friend of the college donated $24 and another $50. Of course, the plan will come to a glorious end. Randolph-Macon undertakings always do. Who would like to donate the next $100?"

Talk about your glorious endings: "Men of the Docks" became the cornerstone of the school's $100 million collection of American art, including works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and William Merritt Chase. The works, many of them bought directly from the artists, were displayed for decades in common rooms and open hallways and gave the 700-student college an identity of culture, refinement and prescient artistic taste.

The federal government sure thought so back in the day -- it located "Project Y," a Cold War emergency shelter for the National Gallery of Art's masterpieces, in a museum-quality building at the back of the school. The nukes never flew, and today that shelter is the school's Maier Museum of Art.

Now college administrators say they may sell some or share part of the collection to prop up the school's sagging finances.

Many alumnae say such a move would be so breathtakingly outrageous, such a strike at the school's core identity, that it'd be as if the college started admitting men.

Oh. They did that this year, too.

"We have very hard financial issues we're trying very hard to deal with," says John E. Klein, president of the school, now called Randolph College. "The art is obviously a large asset that cannot be overlooked."

That sort of blunt financial assessment, translating the school's most prized cultural possession to dollar figures, has set off alarm bells throughout the school, its 13,000 alumnae and the usually hushed realm of campus art museums.

"This collection was built painting by painting, with blood and sweat and tears from students, faculty, alumnae and the Lynchburg community. It belongs to the students of this college and to our community -- not to the Board of Trustees," says Ellen Agnew, an alumna who resigned in protest last month from the school's art museum, where she had worked for 23 years.

"If the arts aren't sacred at a liberal arts college, where are they sacred?" asks Laura Katzman, who resigned her tenured position in the art department in April, also in protest over the school's proposal to translate art into finance.

"The ethics are very clear: You don't sell artwork to fix the boiler," says Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums.

Undeterred, the school filed a circuit court motion recently asking a judge for permission to amend Smith's will to allow it to sell some of the artwork that her estate had donated to the college. (Meanwhile, an alumnae group has filed suit to force the school to stop admitting men.)

There's not much time for subtlety on either side.

The school, already on warning from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools regarding its financial reserves, faces a December deadline to convince the accrediting agency that it has slowed the school's spending rate, shored up sagging enrollment and laid the groundwork for a viable future -- with or without its historic art collection.

Emily Mills, president of the school's alumni association and a voting member of the Board of Trustees, says the school has no easy choices.

"I don't want to sell the art," she says, "but if we don't do something, we're not going to have the college, and we won't have any art at all."

Drive and Vision

Louise Jordan Smith knew a lot about art and a lot about young women, and it was her conviction that the former should be an integral part of the lives of the latter. Which is something that lots of people said back at the turn of the previous century, especially in the upper echelons of small Southern towns. But most people took it to mean something about piano lessons and sketchbooks and easels set up in the shade of languorous Sunday afternoons.

Smith was possessed of uncanny drive and vision, though, and by 1900 she was an accomplished painter who taught at Randolph-Macon, then a tiny, nine-year-old college in a tiny town in Southern Virginia (one of five Virginia schools in the Randolph-Macon System of Colleges and Academies). In 1907, she helped the students buy their first major painting, a portrait of the college president by Chase, then one of the most respected artists in the country. In 1911 -- at the time when the school's most famous student, future Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck, was taking classes -- Smith helped found an annual exhibition and instituted the practice of buying one of the best paintings in each show (which was the origin of the Bellows masterpiece). In 1914, she was one of the first professors in the nation to teach a course solely about American art.

When she died, unmarried and childless in 1928, she left almost everything to the school, about $28,000, and established a fund that was to be used to "form a permanent collection of art."

To say the college's arts staff made judicious purchases with those funds would be an understatement: They bought 35 paintings, now worth more than $40 million. Until the late 1970s, those and other artworks hung in school hallways, where students fondly remember smoking, drinking sodas or chatting beneath magnificent American artworks -- and marveling, later on in life, that none were ever damaged or stolen.

"That's one of my favorite memories of being a student," says Mills.

In all, the school has 3,500 works, many of them sketches and drawings, almost entirely by American artists, with an estimated worth of more than $100 million. There are no deep holdings of any one painter's work, but rather a one-of-each collection of major American artists.

The collection is kept in a structure the feds built in 1952 to house the National Gallery's masterpieces in case the Soviets ever sent A-bombs toward Washington. The museum building was kept ready for emergencies -- with hanging racks for the paintings, and sheets, towels and a toaster in an adjacent home for a curator -- but was never used. (There was a test run to see if the trucks could fit in the loading docks, but that was about it.)

"The heritage and history of the collection are, in a sense, as important as the quality of the collection itself," says Sarah Cash, a former director of the Maier Museum and now a curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. "To break it up, in part or in whole, would be a huge disservice. It's like they're undoing their own greatness."

A Puzzle

Here's the financial puzzle, according to a May study by the consultant group Campus Strategies:

The school has seen enrollment decline for years, from a high of 800 to about 680 this year. In a bid to reverse that trend, the school has been offering huge tuition discounts -- an average 68 percent discount per student. To compensate for the loss of tuition, the school has been spending from its $140 million endowment principal and interest at a rate of 13 percent per year -- twice the national average. This year, the school is planning to pay more than 40 percent of its operating expenses from its endowment, a percentage the consultant deemed "staggering."

This sort of financial performance led to the warning from SACS last year. If the school doesn't improve by December, the agency could put it on probation, which could, over the next several years, lead to losing its accreditation altogether, which is a nice way of saying it would close.

The financial review suggested the school freeze hiring, abandon plans to build athletic facilities for its male students and "leverage" its art collection to inject cash into the endowment.

The school laid off 15 percent of its staff this summer and reduced the average tuition discount from 68 to 55 percent this year. College spokeswoman Brenda Edson says the latter move alone generated an extra $680,000 in revenue.

But here's the rub: No one has ever said exactly how much money the endowment needs. Is it $4 million? $40 million? SACS did not say, and neither will the school administration, saying there are many pieces of the financial puzzle that are still undetermined.

"We certainly did not tell them to sell any art," says Belle S. Wheelan, president of the accreditation agency. "There are standards that we set. They are not in compliance with those. . . . We don't ever tell members how to settle their finances. That's a choice for their board to make. They could have done any number of things -- hot dog sales, bake sales. It's strictly their choice."

Klein stresses the school has not made any firm decisions with another institution about selling or sharing any of the art (the latter would be an agreement in which an institution would buy partial ownership of a painting, and could display it for part of the year).

"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure it remains part of the fabric of the college. . . . We'll only do what we really have to do."

The Cost of History

What is any painting worth? Is it like a stock, something that rises and falls in value, and should it be sold at peak value?

In the display space of the Maier Museum -- a small building that draws about 7,000 visitors and students per year -- there is the quiet alienation of Edward Hopper's "Mrs. Scott's House," the warmth of the barefoot woman in John Sloan's "Sun and Wind on the Roof," the intelligent clarity in the eyes of "Tom," by Robert Henri.

And there is the cold unspoken poverty of Bellows's "Men of the Docks." Heavy-coated men of a hundred years ago, faces slack, hands in pockets, looking into the morning sunlight by the warehouses and steamers and grimy tugboats, looking for labor, looking for warmth, looking for any sort of answer to the questions that life has imposed upon them.

You wonder what that view of the eternal means to the American experience, both as art and as history, and you wonder if the dreams of Louise Jordan Smith ever put a dollar value to something like that.