Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs under the name Culturegrrl, has an interesting post about her experience last weekend at a symposium of museum professionals. During a question period she asked MoMA Director Glenn Lowry about the fund financed by a few MoMA trustees that quietly paid him several million dollars in addition to his salary over a period of years. (It was the subject ten days ago of a front page New York Times story.) Specifically, Rosenbaum asked whether that fund produced a potential for conflicts of interest, for instance, by leading people to wonder whether the museum might favor gifts or acquisitions from the collections of the trustees who paid into it. Lowry eventually replied that no individual curator “and certainly not the director” has the authority to accept a gift or to buy a work of art.
That’s a useful answer as far as the question of gifts and acquisitions go. But there are other ways that a museum director might favor the handful of trustees who are supplementing his base pay. And even if he had no such intention, the very existence of the trustee fund could leave the museum’s actions under a cloud. One example: when the greatly expanded MoMA re-opened its doors in October 2004, many people were surprised that the first gallery of the permanent collection now featured on a prominent free standing wall what seemed like a relatively minor canvas — Paul Signac’s portrait of Felix Feneon.
When the late William Rubin had been chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, he had reserved the equivalent of that first position (the layout of the galleries was somewhat different in the old building) for Cezanne’s The Bather. Rubin’s intention was to make the point right from the start that modern art as MoMA defined it descended crucially from Cezanne. When a reporter told Rubin about the prominent positioning of the Signac, he expressed himself as very surprised, calling it a “candy box” painting.
When MoMA elevates a painting to a place of importance it matters, because MoMA plays such a unique role in determining what’s crucial and what’s secondary to the history of modern art. As it happens, the Signac, which no longer hangs on that prominent wall, was a “fractional gift” of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, the same David Rockefeller who is one of the chief contributors to the fund that supplemented Lowry’s pay. Fractional gifts, which have been reined in recently by Congress, allow donors to give a museum a partial and gradually increasing interest in a work of art — say 10% at first. Over a period of years that percentage can rise in increments until the work has been donated in its entirety. Meanwhile the donors can keep the work at home for a portion of each year while enjoying a tax deduction on whatever percentage they have bequeathed so far. The deduction depends on the appraised value of the painting. It increases if the value increases.
The re-hanging of MoMA’s permanent collection was largely the work John Elderfield, the museum’s new chief curator of painting and sculpture, along with his curatorial staff. All the same, Lowry holds ultimate authority what what hangs in his museum — as I was reminded by the always gracious people in the MoMA press office after I wrote about the MoMA re-opening in Time and described Elderfield’s role in the re-hanging in a way that they thought failed to give Lowry due credit. Was the decision to put the Signac there Lowry’s or Elderfield’s? If it was Lowry’s, should we now suppose that Lowry’s gratitude to Rockefeller as his personal benefactor could have played a role in elevating to a very visible place a painting in which Rockefeller maintained an interest? Even if that seems unlikely, it demonstrates how the payments to Lowry might very well create the appearance of a conflict of interest.
And that would be a pity, because MoMA, for all that people snipe at it, remains far and away our most important institution of modern art. It’s authority as the arbiter of what matters in the history of that art depends on our belief that its curatorial judgments are not bent to the interests of its trustees. This question has already come up recently in connection with the current and somewhat surprising show of work by Armando Reveron, a Venezuelan painter who is heavily collected by another of MoMA’s trustees. We want MoMA to surprise us, but lately some of the surprises have been the wrong kind.