Art for the Ozarks

THOMAS EAKINS'S MASTERPIECE, "The Gross Clinic," is housed in a locked gallery bearing the sign: "To arrange entry see security at front counter." Having notified the security desk at Thomas Jefferson University, the Philadelphia medical school whose alumni bought the painting in 1878 for $200, I was escorted into the Eakins Gallery by a silent, suited attendant. Eakins's depiction of a surgery course at Jefferson, widely considered the greatest American painting of the 19th century -- and, by some scholars, the greatest American painting, period -- attracts just 500 visitors a year.

Surprising, then, the outcry in November, when Jefferson announced that it was selling the painting for $68 million to Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, in a joint bid with the National Gallery of Art in Washington for display in D.C. and at Walton's new museum of American art in Bentonville, Ark. The Sunday after the sale was announced, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a front page story, described the painting as "irrevocably identified with Philadelphia." The sales contract allowed local institutions 45 days to match Walton's price, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts quickly launched a joint "Fund for Eakins' Masterpiece," complete with a dedicated "Thomas Eakins Masterpiece Hotline" to take pledges.

Despite a fund-raising schedule that Kathy Foster, curator of American art at the PMA, called "brutal" (three years, she said, would be a "reasonable" amount of time to raise $68 million), the hot line phone kept ringing. Philadelphia philanthropist Leonore Annenberg of the Annenberg Foundation made the largest pledge: $10 million. The fund-raising drive ultimately raised $30 million, secured a bank loan for the difference, and thus ensured that Philadelphia will keep the painting, which will henceforth be displayed jointly by the PMA and PAFA, both located in central Philadelphia. In the cultural life of cities, apparently you don't know what you've got till it's (almost) gone.

That was how New Yorkers felt when the original, neoclassical Penn Station building was demolished in 1963, prompting a push in cities around the nation for the preservation of historic architecture. In response to Walton's pursuit of the Eakins painting, Philadelphia Mayor John Street has submitted legislation to the City Council that would amend the city's historic preservation ordinance to create a register of historic objects. According to the proposal, potential out-of-city buyers of certified historic objects would have to obtain a "removal permit" similar to a demolition permit for a historically certified building.

Claims of cultural patrimony have become more and more common in the art world in recent decades -- just this past September, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston agreed to return 13 antiquities to Italy. Yet such claims are generally made for ancient works or works made by indigenous peoples that have been stolen from their country of origin -- not for ones created in major cities in the contemporary West and purchased at auction. Should the outrage of residents of America's richest cultural cities over the sale of a painting on the open market be given the same weight as that of indigenous Peruvians deprived of ancestral Inca artifacts by tomb-raiders?

While there is broad acceptance that art should not move because of shifts in military power (art seized by the Nazis, for example, has been repatriated), the idea that art should be protected from swings in economic power is far more radical. Before the Eakins matter was resolved, Jefferson denounced the mayor's historic objects proposal, arguing it would "restrict the university's control over its own property." What's more, a market where art goes to the highest bidder has benefited many established American museums, which owe their collections of European art to the acquisitions and donations of Gilded Age business magnates like New York financier J.P. Morgan and Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Mellon.

The PMA's Foster, the intellectual driving force behind the push to keep the Eakins, counters that while art has followed power for millennia, "Should we just shrug and say let it be? Should we just let the new robber barons just move stuff around in that same way? Since World War II, the local people have been standing up and saying 'you can't do this to us.'"

But can a painting really be so connected to the cultural life of a city that it should never move -- or is this just a convenient argument to preserve a status quo that benefits places like Philadelphia at the expense of places like Bentonville?

The Philadelphia story had a different ending than the first time Alice Walton struck. In 2005, the heiress bought Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits" off the walls of the humanities and social science reading room of the New York Public Library for $35 million. Durand's Hudson River School painting depicts New York artist Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, the New York poet for whom Bryant Park, the square behind the Fifth Avenue library, is named. That deal was arranged by silent auction at Sotheby's when Walton outbid a joint offer by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Washington's National Gallery (perhaps motivating the National Gallery to align itself with Walton the next time around).

At the announcement of the sale, many in the New York art world were aghast at the thought of exiling the painting more than 1,000 miles from Bryant Park. Responding to the bad publicity, library president Paul LeClerc defended the decision to sell by arguing that the library's mission is not to collect paintings and noted that all money raised by the sale will be used to create an endowment to fund the acquisition of books and other materials that serve its core mission as a research library. In Philadelphia, Jefferson offered a similar defense, pledging to use the proceeds of the sale to create an Eakins Legacy Fund for scholarships and endowed professorships that further its core mission of medical education.

As in New York, opponents of the sale in Philadelphia argued that its native son's masterpiece was too deeply rooted in Philadelphia's history to leave the city -- that the work was of, by, and for Philadelphia, part of the city's cultural heritage. Eakins painted "The Gross Clinic" for the Centennial Exhibition, held in Philadelphia in 1876 to highlight the scientific and academic prowess of the city and the new Republic. The subject was of personal interest to Eakins, who had taken anatomy classes at Jefferson to hone his skill at depicting the human body. (His interest in anatomy would come back to haunt him. He was fired from teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886 after having a co-ed class sketch a posing male nude.)

Yet even the most vocal advocates for keeping "The Gross Clinic" in Philadelphia would likely concede that the painting has lately been taken for granted at best and ignored at worst. Indeed, Robert Workman, executive director of Alice Walton's museum, cited making Eakins's painting "more widely accessible to the public" as a key reason for the attempted acquisition.

But accessible to which public? Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is being built with a boosterish spirit similar to that of the Centennial Exhibition, intended to signal Bentonville's arrival on the nation's cultural scene. Because of her astonishing resources -- Walton is the richest woman in the country -- she has been able to build her collection not with up-and-comers spotted in gallery shows, but with established masterpieces. (The "Gross Clinic" bid alone exceeds the $55 million cost of the Moshe Safdie-designed museum building, slated to open in 2009.) "Expanding access to art" among the 20,000 residents of Bentonville and the quarter of a million visitors expected to pass through the museum annually, is also central to Walton's vision.

Walton's new museum, far from the cosmopolitan coasts, will surely make fine art accessible to a different group of Americans. Major museums are rare outside of large metropolitan areas, and those that do exist are often located in popular vacation locales (the Clark Museum and Mass MoCA in the Berkshires, for example). Such museums don't expand access to art as broadly as the Crystal Bridges Museum likely will. In this vein, The Kansas City Star hailed the transfer of "Kindred Spirits" from New York to Arkansas as a "victory of sorts for the hinterlands."

Yet it's not just Philadelphians who believe the Eakins should stay put. Phyllis Mauch Messenger, editor of "The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property" and an anthropologist at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks the piece belongs in Philadelphia, "the context where it has a great deal of meaning and sensibility." Messenger hails the broadening of the question of "who 'owns' objects" to encompass works created in the West, and in the relatively recent past. While she allows that deciding which pieces to protect is difficult in the absence of rules or regulations, that's all the more reason to create some.

Those who favor protecting some objects from the art market insist they're not calling for a general lockdown. The PMA's Foster acknowledges that demanding "every Eakins stay in Philadelphia would be ridiculous," but feels that for a painting as intimately tied up with the history of the city as "The Gross Clinic," "the farther you get away from Philadelphia, the more the piece becomes a trophy."

There were other reasons some Philadelphians opposed the sale, namely a sense that the city's cultural standing was being threatened by Sun Belt upstarts -- and from Wal-Mart no less. In a lecture entitled "Ten reasons to keep 'The Gross Clinic' in Philadelphia," Foster, after vowing not to "go negative," couldn't help but briefly draw a parallel between the destruction of local character by big-box stores and the watering down of Philadelphia's local character by Walton's attempted art acquisition.

Whatever the merits of these arguments -- high-minded and otherwise -- it may well be in the narrow self-interest of older cities like New York and Philadelphia (and, perhaps, Boston) to safeguard their artwork. The proposed Philadelphia legislation would essentially mandate the type of local matching period built into the Eakins sale contract. In the meantime, Walton's interest in "The Gross Clinic" will almost certainly make the painting more accessible to the public after all -- just not the public she had hoped.

Daniel Brook's first book, "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America," will be published in the spring.