'The biggest deaccession sale yet'
May 11 2022
Picture: LA Times
The Toledo Museum of Art are selling works by Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir at Sotheby's next week, bringing in an estimated $48m-$62m. In the LA Times, Christopher Knight descibes the sale as the biggest deaccession yet, and gives the decision to sell both barrels:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Asserting that “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” is a ridiculous way to run an art museum.
The for-profit market today leads much of the nonprofit museum world around by the nose. But the core museum mission is collecting, researching and preserving great art, and a conservative strategy of privatizing irreplaceable public assets in the name of liberal progress is backward. The Toledo sale is unconscionable.
Of course, I think it's a shame they're selling such works too. And yet if the Toledo Museum ever decided it didn't need its fabulous Holbein (which I think is probably Catherine Howard) I'd be delighted if it could somehow end up back in the UK.
Update: they all sold, the Cezanne making $41.6m.
