In the final days of January 2009, Carl Belz, former director of the Rose Art Museum, lost part of himself. First, he lost his lower left leg to an amputation. Then he lost the museum where he had been director for twenty-three years. Jehuda Reinharz, the president of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, had announced that after a unanimous vote by the board of trustees, the university would be closing the Rose Art Museum this summer and would sell off its collection. For the leg, says Belz, there was no decision to be made—the battle was lost. But for the museum, he feels, there is no such urgency; cutting off the Rose is unnecessary.

Michael Rush, the museum’s director, was informed of the board’s decision one hour before its announcement to the press on January 26. No museum staff or overseers were included in any talks, which went on over a period of weeks preceding the vote. Though the vote was termed unanimous, Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon said that “most” board members were present at the meeting. Sources close to a few board members say that of the forty-five members, twenty were present to vote, and ten voted by telephone. Fifteen were neither present nor informed of the agenda, and did not vote. They were notified after the fact. Whether it was Reinharz or certain board members who pushed for the museum’s closure remains unclear. 

Reinharz has said that the university is in financial trouble, and needs to make up for a reduction in endowment funds and operating shortfalls. Some of the university’s largest donors were hard-hit by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, and cannot come to the rescue. The quick-cash solution to dissolve the Rose as a public museum, and take control of its considerable assets, violates standard museum codes of ethics, which prohibits the sale of artworks for any use other than to buy other artworks. No one with a clear understanding of museum culture would have thought that this was going to be an easy solution to the university’s financial mismanagement.

The collection, estimated to be worth $350 million a year or so ago, is worth considerably less in today’s depressed market. It is not the time to unload a valuable collection in a hurry and at a discount.
The Rose Art Museum itself is not in financial trouble, and has been financially self-sufficient since 1991, with the exception of a small subsidy to cover heat, lighting and maintenance, which it would pay regardless of the building’s function. Roughly ninety percent of the museum’s collection comes from gifts.

In addition to what most see as an inordinately shortsighted financial solution, the legal prospects of cashing in quickly are not at all certain. Joseph D. Ketner, Rose Art Museum Director from 1998–2005, explains, “No one has ever entered into this kind of legal quagmire in terms of the decision to deaccession 7,000-plus objects, almost all of which have their own terms. It’s unfathomable—essentially, every one of them is going to have to be dealt with as a different case.”
An anonymous source familiar with museum operations said that the last time the museum had to research the terms of an object to be sold, it took nearly two years.

“There are going to be legal impediments to doing this at all,” adds Rush. “So if indeed, this is a financial solution to the university’s woes, and it can’t happen—then what does that mean for the university?”

Most artworks are given as unrestricted gifts—meaning the museum could deaccession items later, to purchase other artworks that might better reflect the focus of the collection as years go on. But generally, donors assume they are giving works to a museum to care for in perpetuity, for academic and public study, display, and professional museum care. If the works do not fit in with the museum’s collection, museums can refuse the donation to begin with. 

Rush clarifies that what is happening now is not a series of cases of deaccessioning: “Deaccessioning is a professional term that refers to museums that are functioning within the AAM (American Association of Museums guidelines) that want to do the right thing. We’re not talking about deaccessioning, we’re talking about selling. There’s a big difference.”

“Initially, they were going to close the art museum so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the ethics of these things,” says Rush.

Many donors and artists are calling the museum every day, asking for their artwork and gifts of money back, according to a museum source.

Legal challenges are underway from several quarters. Sources were unwilling to disclose specific complaints, or hypothesize on the likelihood of any resolution that would reverse the original decision made by the university.

“If the Attorney General permits this to happen,” says Ketner, “It opens an extraordinary floodgate of terrible precedent that will have repercussions not just in universities, but in museums and cultural institutions all around whose primary public trust will become liquid assets in order to ensure survival of a structure. And we couldn’t even begin to fathom what institutions, in our economic downturn, are struggling, and which ones will get to the point of such rash drastic decisions to liquidate assets, in order to survive. If this is set as a legal precedent, it will undermine the museum profession in the United States for generations. Because you won’t ever be able to get this stuff back. It’s gone.”

In a phone call, the Attorney General’s office said that the examination of this case is “ongoing.” Since the museum is not a separate non-profit institution from the university itself, there may be little Rose supporters can do to stop the dissolution of the museum as a public museum. The legality of individual gifts, including the donation of the building by the Rose family and funds with which to buy art, are all under review and pending a thorny thicket of lawsuits. Fifty Rose family members are opposed to the proposed actions. 

Underlying the surreptitious move to close the museum is a fundamental difference in the understanding of the role of the museum in the larger New England community. The difference in values between the university administration and the museum has jeopardized the museum’s collection before, but not to this extent, says Belz. “I think the administration, over the years, saw the museum as this conduit for their own developmental purposes. It’s a really nice place to take potential donors, and to hold receptions and things like that.”

Rather than valuing the museum for its cultural and intellectual contribution to the students and faculty at the university, “They see works of art as commodities,” says Belz. “I remember in the early days of President Reinharz’s tenure, he would say—proudly—that ‘We’re going to run this university on a corporate model’. He wasn’t the only university president to do that. For someone in my

generation, this is why we went into teaching, and university life, in the first place—because it didn’t follow the corporate model, it subscribed to other kinds of values.”

Yet after nearly two months of news and opinion articles, a massive e-mail petition, condemnation by the major professional museum associations, and letters from all around the world, there has been no change in the university’s original decision to close the Rose, despite a series of carefully worded retractions, apologies, and clarifications issued by Brandeis’s high-octane public relations firm. The university recently created a special committee to work on the Rose’s future. The handpicked committee does not include individuals that were recommended by Rose staff, according to a source close to those parties.

“Really, the situation is as it has been pretty much from the beginning,” says Rush. “The university is talking about ‘repurposing’ the museum to a study center, but the public
museum, the Rose museum as we have known it, will be closed. And art will be sold. There have been some semantic changes, but nothing substantial.”

“The only remedy in terms of the viability of the museum is to have the decision rescinded. And a legally tight statute of some kind, disallowing this from ever happening again. Short of that—you will have no donors, you will have no lending, you will have no professional people working here.”

The Rose Art Museum was founded in 1961. Sam Hunter, the first director of the Rose, was given $45,000 from a $50,000 gift by Leon and Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin, to buy artworks for the museum’s collection. Hunter and Leon Mnuchin would go to the galleries and artists’ studios in New York together to select paintings to purchase: Hans Hofmann, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Adolph Gottlieb, and Jim Dine among them. The collection at the Rose has been estimated to be worth $350 million dollars; many of the most highly valued objects originate with Hunter’s early purchases of modern and contemporary art.

To close the museum seems to be an abrupt and unwelcome change in direction for the university. “It goes contrary to the founding of the university. This was a pretty radical, adventurous place,” says Belz. “Everyone talks about Sam [Hunter]’s purchases, and how much money they’re worth. Forget about the price tag on those things, and think about how adventuresome that was! In 1962, you’re buying Andy [Warhol], and Roy [Lichtenstein], and Morris Lewis, and Ken Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. That was intellectually cutting-edge. Whether you like pop art, abstract expressionism—it doesn’t matter—it was cutting-edge, and that was in the spirit of the university.”

There is no other museum in the region with such a strong collection in modern and contemporary art, according to the many curators, museum directors, artists and academics in the region who spoke to me in shock and horror when the news broke. There will be no replacing such a collection if it is to be sold off, piece by piece.

Most university museums try to have encyclopedic collections, explains Ketner. “They attempt to be mini-Mets, and in the process end up not being really strong in anything. But the Rose is so tight, so highly focused in its areas where it’s good, it matches major institutions, and exceeds them in those areas.”
”What you have at the Rose,“ says Belz, is a record of post-WWII art. “At a university museum, that’s a spectacular thing to be able to offer.” If the Rose is allowed to continue as a university museum, he says, “This sounds really outrageously pretentious, but—it will be the [Harvard University’s] Fogg of its period.”

“What would be lost, if we lose this museum? You’re losing a sense of history of the art of our time. It would be like losing part of yourself,” says Belz.

The cuts would be deeply painful, agrees Ketner. “You just cut the modern and contemporary collection out of the entirety of New England. Where are you going to get that kind of experience? You have to go to New York.”

The consensus seems to be that Brandeis is reneging on its mission to preserve Jewish history and culture. “It’s a painful prospect for an institution that professes its Jewish identity to be one of the four pillars of the institution, to be willing to cut off the cultural arm of that pillar,” says Ketner.

Rush agrees the loss would be enormous. “Brandeis, and the Rose collection in particular, was built from the philanthropy of the Jewish community. Culture and art within the Jewish community at large is enormous, and there are stories of people carrying their artwork to the [concentration] camps, not wanting to let go. There would be no culture in America were it not for the Jewish philanthropic community, and there would be no collection at the Rose without the Jewish philanthropic community. So, the very identity, particularly the postwar identity of the Jews in the United States, is so intimately bound with the arts, that to have this happen is an enormous sadness, really.”

“That’s so unthinkable that they don’t reverse course,” adds Belz. “I think the loss could be catastrophic. It seems if they were to continue on this path, they would never attract any gifts of works of art.”

“I don’t know why they turned to the museum,” laments Belz from his hospital bed. “They’ve gotten directors after me who have been able to build, and develop, and to maintain the financial self-sufficiency of the museum. And it’s continued to go along and do exciting, adventurous programming.”

“Why do they want to cut it off? Why do they want to cut it off?”

“They want the dough, they want the dough. Seems so shortsighted to me. And $350 million—that was yesterday’s art market, too. As if you can sell 7,000 pieces of art overnight.”

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