"Delaware Art Museum's Planned Sale of Homer Work Draws Ire" @wsj by Scott Calvert
'Milking Time' by Winslow Homer, which the Delaware Art Museum is planning to sell to help pay off debt. Bridgeman Images
For a small institution, the Delaware Art Museum is wrestling with a big conundrum.
The museum is moving ahead with plans to sell at least two paintings to pay off a debt, including a popular piece by American master Winslow Homer. The rare move has roiled the art world, where a collection is considered a public trust.
The museum says selling as many as four works is the only way it can retire a $19.8 million debt and replenish its endowment. It says the alternative would be closing the century-old Wilmington institution and its 12,500-object collection.
Disposing of art for a reason except to buy more art violates the ethics policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors. The group warns it may sanction the museum, which could block it from sharing works with most other U.S. museums.
"It's a tragedy when works that belong to the community get sold," said Ford Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums, which also decried the planned sale.
Delaware museum officials say their decision was made with the community in mind. "I am sad about this, but as a trustee of the museum—not any one piece of art the museum holds—I am in support of doing what is necessary to keep the museum open," said Paula Malone, one of 19 trustees.
Other institutions have faced similar struggles. In March, the museum directors association, which represents 240 directors in North America, sanctioned Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., and its Maier Museum of Art after the school sold the George Bellows painting "Men of the Docks" to the National Gallery in London for $25.5 million. In Detroit, some creditors are pushing to sell off at least some city-owned works at the Detroit Institute of Arts to restructure roughly $18 billion in long-term obligations as part of the nation's largest municipal bankruptcy case.
The college's president, Brad Bateman, said the museum was being unfairly punished for the college's decision. Such decisions don't necessarily mean art will vanish from public view: The Maier gets about 7,000 visitors a year, a fraction of the foot traffic at the London museum.
Michael Miller, chief executive of the Delaware Art Museum, declined to comment on specifics except to confirm the museum's previously announced intention to shed "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" by William Holman Hunt. The piece is scheduled to be auctioned this month in London, where Christie's expects the 1867 pre-Raphaelite work to fetch as much as to $13.4 million.
Homer's "Milking Time" could be next. The 1875 painting depicts a pastoral scene, with a woman standing beside a boy who gazes at cows while perched on a wood fence. It is undergoing conservation at Sotheby's ahead of being shopped on the private market, a person familiar with the matter said. Only eight Homer paintings have gone to auction in the past five years.
Sotheby's declined to comment on the Homer painting.
The Delaware museum's former executive director, Danielle Rice, called the two pieces among her favorites in the galleries. A poster of "Milking Time" goes for $15 in the gift shop, and it was used in a 2012 advertising campaign for the museum.
"I'm actually aching inside at the thought of losing those objects for the public," she said.
Ms. Rice said that when the American Folk Art Museum in New York faced financial woes in 2011, it sold its midtown Manhattan site instead of dipping into its collection.
Mr. Miller said selling the Delaware museum's building wouldn't raise nearly enough. The museum says it has cut staff and exhibition funding and tried to refinance the debt. The goal is to raise $30 million, mostly to pay off debt from a 2005 expansion and renovation.
—Matthew Dolan contributed to this article.
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com