Big Box Buyer

Alice Walton has a knack for pursuing controversial acquisitions.

She just put in an offer to acquire a 50 percent share in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, owned by Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, for $30 million, with the collection spending half of its time at the university and the other half at the museum Walton's building in Bentonville, Arkansas. The Tennessean has the story here. Fisk has been trying to deaccession works in the collection, donated to the university by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, to solve its financial troubles. But the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which represents the artist's estate, says that O'Keeffe gave the collection to the university as a teaching resource for art history professors and that she meant for all of the pieces to stay together. A September 6th hearing is supposed to determine whether or not a settlement proposed by the university and the museum is kosher; the museum would pay the university $7.5 million and get O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York (the "crown jewel of the Stieglitz Collection," according to the Tennessean), which it would loan back to the university for a designated amount of time. Walton's offer is contingent upon the settlement's rejection.

The Walmart heiress' Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is slated to open its doors in 2009, and she's been traversing the country in search of pieces to fill her galleries, often with the help of American art authority John Wilmerding.

When the New York Public Library put Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits on the block in 2005, Walton bought it for a rumored $35 million. The iconic Hudson River School painting depicts the painter Thomas Cole and writer William Cullen Bryant in the Catskills. Durand gave the painting to Bryant, who helped bring Central Park to New York, and Bryant's family gifted it to the library. Michael Kimmelman, a critic for the New York Times, lamented the sale as the loss of a "civic treasure." Then with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Walton tried to purchase Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia for $68 million last November. But citizens were so outraged at the prospect of losing one of their most important works of art, they helped the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts come up with the money to successfully counter her bid. (Walton got Eakins' portrait of Dr. Benjamin Rand from the university for about $20 million instead.)

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