Prickly Provenance

As the fate of a motion to stop the sale of four paintings from Randolph Macon's Maier Museum hangs in the balance, art blogger Lee Rosenbaum and the News & Advance's Christa Desrets both notice that Christie's (the auction house putting the works on the block) has conveniently omitted their provenance from press materials. (In the lot details on Christie's website, the pieces are listed as "property of Randolph College.") One of the paintings, George Bellows' Men of the Docks, carries an estimate of $25 million - $35 million and has the potential to break the current auction record for an American painting — that record belongs to Bellows' Polo Crowd, which got $27.7 million in 1999.

Spin can only take you so far. Randolph Macon's timing couldn't be worse. With Fisk University in Nashville trying to sell a stake in its Alfred Stiegiltz Collection to Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, too, the topic du jour for arts writers (and bloggers, of course) has been museum deaccessions. It's unlikely that anyone who follows the art world on a semi-regular basis doesn't know about the controversy surrounding the Maier Museum's sale, so wouldn't it have been better to opt for full disclosure?