Sans Eakins Gallery

The sale of The Gross Clinic by Thomas Jefferson University was shocking when first announced last week. See my earlier post on the issue, The Clinic Sale is Gross. However, the reverberations are revealing in that the Administration and Board were apparently also surprised at the degree of hostility that surrounded that announcement. Ah, that bubble. I guess that it's not limited to Bush-world. The Administration and Trustees at Thomas Jefferson University are experiencing the pop, pop sounds of a bursting bubble, as the reality of the outrage over the sale of The Gross Clinic intrudes on their insulated world.

The reaction within the Philadelphia area and the art community at large has been overwhelmingly negative. The Inquirer reports that Jefferson alums rip sale of Eakins:

At a packed meeting Wednesday night, alumni of Thomas Jefferson University expressed their dismay at the school's decision to sell Thomas Eakins' incomparable painting, The Gross Clinic, and at the secrecy with which the sale was conducted, participants said.

"There was a question about the way this was handled - that's a major, major issue," Lorraine King, president of the alumni association, said in an interview yesterday. "It was such a significant asset and decision that we felt it should have been openly discussed with more than a few isolated members" of the board of trustees.

Damage control by Jefferson is in full force. See this op-ed piece, Symbol and conduit of Jeff's mission, by Chairman of the Board Brian Harrison, trying to justify the decision to sell it's masterpiece. Sure, as though you can justify selling a piece of Philadelphia's history to "Art-Mart" (that is, the museum owned by Alice Walton -- Mrs. Wal-Mart). Further, as blogger Free Frank Warner concisely put it, in ‘The Gross Clinic’ betrayal: Shame on the Thomas Jefferson University trustees:

He failed.

Harrison said that because the 1875-76 painting of Dr. Samuel D. Gross at leg surgery is such an important “symbol,” the board of trustees decided to sell it off for $68 million.

Alumni donated the painting to the university in 1878, expecting it would stay permanently at the Philadelphia institution. Now it’s sold.

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Shame on the Thomas Jefferson University board of trustees. If they can’t buy back the painting with their own money by Dec. 26, they should be remembered forever for their betrayal. . ..They weren’t creative enough to raise money the old-fashioned way. They took the most anti-creative route. They sold the soul of the institution.

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The university’s Eakins Gallery will be left with an empty wall. Eakins without Eakins.

But the trustees already have given us a surgical vision to replace Eakins’. It’s the image of a university removing its own heart.

Yes, Harrison and Jefferson have missed the point. Steven Conn, the author of "Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past," also wrote an op-ed in the Inquirer,It's part of Phila.'s heritage, which does an excellent job of expressing what's at stake:

Thomas Jefferson University wants to raise money. Lots of it. To fund an ambitious expansion of its facilities. It looked around and realized it had a valuable asset that it could sell on the open market. So it has chosen to do so.

That seems straightforward enough. Except we're not talking about an ordinary asset but about Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic, which is arguably the greatest 19th-century American painting.

Jefferson doesn't want the painting anymore, and that's fair enough. The university has never been a good or responsible steward of its Eakins masterpiece. It doesn't know how to take care of it, nor does it really care to exhibit it. A very good case can be made that the painting belongs in an institution prepared to do it justice.

Works of art that carry this level of significance, however, cannot simply be treated as yet one more transferrable financial instrument. Whether Jefferson wants to acknowledge it or not - and statements from the university suggest it is clueless about this - the owner of this painting also owns a considerable public trust and obligation. By putting this painting on the market, Jefferson has violated that public trust and failed in its public obligation.

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Jefferson's defense of its decision simply rings disingenuous. It wants credit for being civic-minded because it has given the city 45 days to match the offer from Alice Walton (Mrs. Wal-Mart). Of course, that begs the question: If Jefferson cared about its civic obligation, why didn't it approach city institutions and philanthropists in the first place? Why was this sprung without warning? A 45-day ticking clock doesn't acknowledge the daunting reality of trying to raise $68 million when the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library, the Barnes and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are busy raising money for other projects.

Jefferson's abrogation of its public trust ought to raise serious questions about the campus expansion it claims this $68 million will help fund. Simply put, can an institution prepared to sell such a valuable piece of the city's cultural patrimony be trusted to expand in ways that won't be equally ruinous for the city, and for its neighborhood?

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Apparently, those who run Jefferson see Dr. Gross purely as a cash cow while everyone else sees a treasure that belongs in Philadelphia. What remains to be seen is whether outrage can be translated into enough money to keep him here. If Dr. Gross leaves town, Jefferson will be $68 million richer, but the city will be impoverished in ways that defy counting.

Likewise, in ...the Visigoths on the Schuylkill Expressway...and other urban myths..., Wilmington blogger Hugh J. McNichol refers to what I call that bubble, saying:

The proposed sale and relocation of the "Gross Clinic" is symptomatic of corporate lack of community integration and cooperation.

Jefferson University, while housed in Philadelphia does not seem to be part of Philadelphia and its cultural past and present.

This pillaging of artistic treasures indicates the true insensitivity that is directed towards preserving local history.

It is happening all over the country, shopping malls are springing up around historic battlefields, condo developments are tucked into architecturally significant buildings (eg. Naval Retirement Home at Gray's Ferry) and even our sacred spaces are being sold off as excess baggage.

WHYY has a page devoted to The Gross Clinic on its website, including audio of the Radio Times report on the sale with Inquirer writer Stephan Salisbury, Julie Berkowitz, former art historian at Thomas Jefferson University, Gary Carpenter, a Jefferson graduate and pediatrician, and Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer specializing in fine art. See also, The Sixth Square, a new WHYY Arts & Culture blog devoted to the sale.

Welcome to Phillyville, who has adopted this as a cause celebre, also has some ideas to protest the sale by Jefferson.

Tags: Philadelphia, Philly, Art, Eakins, Gross Clinic