"A Rothko Fills a Museum's Breach" @wsj

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., opened last November to good reviews—mostly. But some critics zoomed in on a big failing: the absence of top works by artists of the postwar period, when American art marched to the front of the international stage.

image
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Mark Rothko's 'No. 210/No. 211 (Orange).'

Now Crystal Bridges, lavishly financed by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, has filled one major gap with the purchase of a 1960 painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, "No. 210/No. 211 (Orange)." An example of his most prized works, it has been shown publicly only twice and has been in a private Swiss collection since the mid-1960s. "Each orange has a different glow—it's very vibrant," says museum director Don Bacigalupi.

He declined to disclose the price tag, but Marc Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, pegged it at about $25 million.

Rothko works have been selling well. One of Sotheby's anchors in its big New York fall auction series will be the 1954 "No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)," which it expects to sell for at least $35 million. Last May, his fiery "Orange, Red, Yellow," from 1961, fetched a record $86.9 million at Christie's, way past its high presale estimate of $45 million. Crystal Bridges looked seriously at that painting, though Mr. Bacigalupi declined to say whether the museum bid. When the opportunity to buy "No. 210/No. 211" came along, in a private deal brokered by Christie's, the museum jumped. (The unusual numbering is Rothko's own.)

The public will first see the painting on Oct. 13, at the opening of a special exhibition, "See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art." The show focuses on artists' use of light, starting with the mid-19th century landscape "luminists" and continuing through American Impressionists and modernists like Rothko and Dan Flavin to contemporary artists like James Turrell. When that show closes on Jan. 28, the Rothko will join the permanent-collection galleries.

Mr. Bacigalupi says that he'll use the Rothko purchase as an opportunity to rethink the display of the museum's postwar galleries. In fact, they and other galleries have already changed since the opening, as the museum has added works. They include an early glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly; paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, Theodore Roszak and Miriam Schapiro; and a collection of 466 American prints and drawings that includes images by Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Reginald Marsh, Charles Sheeler and James Abbot MacNeill Whistler, assembled over 30 years by a European.

—Judith H. Dobrzynski

"Legal Battle Over Fisk University Art Collection Ends" in @nytimes

By RANDY KENNEDY
August 3, 2012, 1:07 pm

 Georgia O'Keeffes's "Radiator Building -- Night, New York" (1927).
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University
Georgia O’Keeffes’s “Radiator Building — Night, New York” (1927).

The long battle over the fate of Fisk University’s art collection is finally over.

After a decision in April by the Tennessee Supreme Court upholding a lower court decision, a plan has now been completed to allow Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville, to sell a 50 percent stake in its101-piece collection, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe, to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., founded by the Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

Crystal Bridges will give the financially troubled university $30 million to be allowed to display the collection two out of every four years, along with the right of first refusal should the rest of the collection ever come up for sale.

Officials at Fisk had said that the school might be forced to close without the infusion of cash from the partial sale of the collection, whose annual display costs it has said it cannot afford. (Ms. Walton has pledged an additional $1 million to improve the university’s display facilities.)

The share plan, approved Thursday by the Davidson County Chancery Court in Nashville, was opposed by the Tennessee attorney general, who argued that it would inhibit future donations by overriding O’Keeffe’s stipulations that the collection never be sold or broken up.

The collection includes four works by O’Keeffe herself, along with 97 others – by artists including Picasso, Cézanne and Renoir – collected by O’Keeffe’s husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe donated the works and her own paintings – including her well-known “Radiator Building – Night, New York” – in 1949, in recognition of the school’s mission to educate blacks at a time when Southern universities remained segregated.