Art for sale

Lifestyle/Technology | A museum tries to rescue its troubled finances—and lands in hot water | Susan Olasky

Richard B. Levine/Newscom

It isn't a good time to be an art museum director. Government and nonprofit support is down, museum admissions and store sales are down, yet museums must continue to pay ongoing operating expenses, including security, insurance, and building maintenance. So it wasn't surprising when one non-traditional museum in Manhattan chose to sell two paintings to help it deal with a persistent budget shortfall.

The culprit: the National Academy Museum, founded in 1825 "to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition." It is an honorary association of American artists, as well as a museum and a school. Members, invited by their peers, have included Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Eakins, Helen Frankenthaler, Winslow Homer, Jasper Johns, Maya Lin, John Singer Sargent, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andrew Wyeth. Incoming artists donate examples of their work to the Academy's collection, which now consists of more than 7,000 works, many of them rarely displayed for lack of space.