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Oct 2 2007 9:46AM EDT

A Bellows to the Highest Bidder

The trustees of Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia voted yesterday to sell four paintings from the collection housed in its Maier Museum of Art as part of an attempt to solve its financial troubles. The most valuable, George Bellows' Men of the Docks is expected to bring $25 million to $35 million. It will go on the block at Christie's in New York along with Edward Hicks' A Peaceable Kingdom, Ernest Hennings' Through the Arroyo, and Rufino Tamayo's Troubador.

An e-mail sent out by the president of the board of trustees said that they had looked into "shared partnership opportunities" (Alice Walton wasn't interested?) and was quick to point out that these pieces weren't bought with funds from the Louise Jordan Smith trust--last month, a joint petition asked a Virginia court to deny the college's request to sell works bought with the liquidated assets of Smith, its first art professor--but Randolph is still going to catch hell for this.

The bottom line is that Randolph is selling educational resources to the highest bidder. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the pieces were headed for another collection available to the public, but it's highly unlikely that a museum or similar institution will be able to afford the Bellows, even at the low end of its estimate. Maybe they have a shot at the others, which are more modestly priced at $1 million to $6 million.

A sad way for Randolph to celebrate its museum's centennial.


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