Art: The Met: Beleaguered but Defiant

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The current Met ruckus goes back to 1970, when the museum bought Velásquez's portrait of his black apprentice, Juan de Pareja, for $5,544,000 —the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. To pay it, Hoving and his Acquisitions Committee had to liquidate the capital left in the museum's Fletcher Fund, about $6,000,000, and commit themselves to pay back at least a part of it, in yearly installments of $160,000 through 1976. In effect, the buying power of the Metropolitan's 17 departments had been partly mortgaged for several years in advance against one painting. The result: the Met needed money. Hoving proposed to get it through "deaccessioning" pictures—the barbaric museum jargon for preparing to sell. Last September, the Met revealed that it had deaccessioned a major work from the De Groot bequest, Henri Rousseau's The Tropics, and secretly sold it, along with Vincent Van Gogh's The Olive Pickers, to Marlborough Fine Art galleries. No price was given, but the reliable figure was $1.5 million for the two. This is well below their market value; the Rousseau alone was resold only days later to a Japanese collector for $2,000,000. Everett Fahy, 31, the Met's brilliant curator of European paintings, did not want to lose the Rousseau and refused to sign the deaccession form. On this occasion, Hoving overrode him, though, in theory, the Met's official de-accessioning procedure is full of checks and balances. "Generally," says the Met, "the curator recommends de-accessioning of a work of art to the vice director, curator in chief and the director," whereon the final decision to de-access lies with the Acquisitions Committee or, if the object —like the Rousseau—is worth more than $25,000, with the board of trustees itself. But such safeguards are in practice vulnerable to a strong impetus from the director, since very few of the present trustees are in any real sense art experts.

Backed by Vice Director Theodore Rousseau, Hoving defends the sale on the ground that The Tropics was "superfluous and third-rate." But why, in that case—since the Rousseau was by general consent the best painting in her collection—did the Met court Adelaide de Groot? To most art critics, it is in fact a major Rousseau.