In less than a week, the Phillips Collection will sell masterpieces by Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Georges Seurat at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Director Jonathan Binstock said funds raised by the sales will be used, for the most part, to commission new works by living artists — but the plan has drawn passionate opposition from some influential supporters of the Phillips and museum members.
In less than a week, the Phillips Collection will sell masterpieces by Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Georges Seurat at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Director Jonathan Binstock said funds raised by the sales will be used, for the most part, to commission new works by living artists — but the plan has drawn passionate opposition from some influential supporters of the Phillips and museum members.
The works, which were acquired by the museum’s founder Duncan Phillips and his wife Marjorie, will be sold at an evening sale on Nov. 20 at Sotheby’s new headquarters, the Marcel Breuer-designed former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue.
Sotheby’s estimates the Georgia O’Keeffe painting to be worth $6 million to 8 million. The Seurat, a drawing in conté crayon, is expected to fetch between $3 million and 5 million, and the Dove painting $1.2 million to 1.8 million.
“Like many of my museum colleagues,” said Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita at the Phillips, “I’m deeply saddened and appalled that the Phillips Collection would so irreparably mar the vision of the founder by selling such carefully chosen works.”
The dispute, which has taken place for more than 18 months largely behind closed doors, came to a head last week. At the 11th hour, the museum’s leadership and the opponents of the sales reached an agreement that will allow the planned tranche of sales to go ahead but will restrict future sales from the collection.
The new restrictions relate to which works can and cannot be shed from the collection, a practice known as deaccessioning. According to the previous deaccessioning policy, since 2000, any works published in a catalogue titled “The Eye of Duncan Phillips” were designated as belonging to the core collection and therefore ineligible for removal. But that 1999 publication listed only a small fraction of the permanent collection — implying the rest could be sold.
Now, after a compromise between the Board of Trustees and the Members, a second board charged with preserving the institution, the core collection will be defined not by what is in “The Eye of Duncan Phillips” but by a much more inclusive 1985 publication: “The Phillips Collection: A Summary Catalogue.” Henceforth, any works listed in that catalogue may not be deaccessioned “without special exception.”
Asked whether she was disappointed that the November sales will go ahead, Liza Phillips, a granddaughter of Duncan and Marjorie Phillips who is chair of the Members, said: “Yes. Very much so. We treasure those pieces. They are integral to the character of the museum. They belong to the public. They are now probably going into private hands. It’s just a shame.”
Binstock, in two phone interviews with The Washington Post, insisted the deaccessioning plan was in line with Duncan Phillips’s vision of the museum and had overwhelming support.
“This is about strengthening the institution,” he said. “All of these sales will generate funds that will go into a permanently restrictive endowment to generate acquisitions.”
Binstock joined the Phillips in March 2023. His new strategic plan for the museum, which “honors the past” while focusing on acquiring living artists and diversifying the museum’s art and audiences, was unanimously approved by trustees in June 2024.
Sotheby’s will also auction off works in the Phillips Collection by Anish Kapoor, Leland Bell and Howard Mehring at its contemporary sale on Nov. 19 and a still life by the 19th-century Frenchman Henri Fantin-Latour on Nov. 21. It will sell a sculpture by Pablo Picasso and a work on paper by Milton Avery at later, to-be-determined dates.
The works being sold, said Binstock, “don’t add sufficient additional value to the Phillips’s ability to represent the voice of these artists and the legacy of Duncan Phillips.”
Debates over deaccessioning have rocked the art world for years, as museums face financial pressures exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Art museums, facing ever-increasing overhead and the need to stay current, are sitting on permanent collections worth millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars — much of it artwork the public rarely sees displayed. The temptation is always to see the works as assets that could be sold or rented out.
Strict restraints, imposed by outside organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors as well as internal guidelines, govern the process. Museums that ignore these guidelines can be ostracized by the community of museums or otherwise sanctioned.
Arguments against deaccessioning include that it breaches a public trust, jeopardizes museums’ tax status as nonprofits, and discourages philanthropy. (Why would donors give money or art works if they know the museum might raise revenue by selling art?)
Binstock serves on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors. He said he’d listened to the arguments against selling the works.
“We’ve paid very close attention. Based upon the research we’ve done, the arguments don’t measure up. They’re not good arguments. They’re not better arguments than the ones we have.”
“George Seurat,” said Binstock, “is not an artist you come to the Phillips for.”
A text on the Seurat drawing, written by Rathbone and sent to the leadership on behalf of Members hoping to persuade them not to sell the work, disagreed. It noted that the Seurat drawing has been in the Phillips Collection for 85 years. “Were it to leave The Phillips Collection, it would be a tragedy of the first order, made all the worse were it to go into private hands.”
Duncan Phillips, noted the letter, greatly admired Seurat’s “Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque),” the painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for which the Phillips’s drawing is an early study. He acquired the drawing in 1939, the same year the Met’s Seurat painting was displayed at the New York World’s Fair.
“Phillips must have been thrilled to discover this particular drawing and to add it to his museum’s collection. He knew when he purchased it that it was the first drawing for ‘La Parade.’”
The most valuable work from the Phillips Collection being sold at Sotheby’s is the Georgia O’Keeffe, titled “Large Dark Red Leaves on White,” 1925. A second text sent by Members to the Phillips’s leadership described it as “the most quintessentially O’Keeffe of them all” and the “most iconic” of the six O’Keeffe paintings in the Phillips Collection.
Phillips conceived of his collection in terms of “units” — small groups of representative works by individual artists that resonated with one another. “To take apart the O’Keeffe Unit that was made with care and thoughtfulness over a period of almost 20 years is indefensible,” stated the text.
Exceptions to the strict guidelines around deaccessioning can be made in emergency circumstances (as for instance during pandemic-related closures). But generally speaking, revenue from deaccessioning should be used only to fund new acquisitions or (a more recent amendment) to pay for the direct care of the existing collection.
When museums do sell works they have deaccessioned, they are obliged to try to obtain as much money from the sales as possible. Inevitably, this puts them in a bind: To justify the sale, they have to talk down the importance of the works they’re off-loading. To get top dollar, they (or their agents) must talk up the works’ importance to potential buyers.
“Museum directors don’t have the benefit of making the ideal decision,” Binstock told the Post. “They make the best decision. We are focused on the legacy of Duncan Phillips. That legacy does not depend on the Seurat or the O’Keeffe.”
Duncan Phillips did not imagine the Phillips Collection as trapped in amber, said Binstock, who, like his predecessor, Dorothy Kosinski, emphasizes Duncan Phillips’s vision of the museum as a place of experiment. He “was a radical in a three-piece suit,” said Binstock. Although some liken the museum to a “jewel box,” he said, “it’s fundamentally not that.”
Instead, he said, the Phillips is “an institution in its adolescence. If you look at it in any other way, you’re missing an opportunity to imagine a bold future — reaching out and welcoming more people, more diverse people, more diverse communities.”
Deaccessioning, he added, is “standard museum procedure. This is everyday business for us.”
Binstock admits that the unusual plan — to use the funds raised by the sales not to buy already extant art of established value but to commission new works — entails risks. But he wants the Phillips to “give opportunities to artists to advance their work.” Duncan Phillips, he noted, “literally supported living artists. He gave a monthly check to Arthur Dove during the Depression and for 15 years.”
Duncan Phillips’s “thumbprint is on” these recent deaccessioning decisions, said Binstock, claiming that by selling the works, “we honor the legacy he left us with.”
It’s true that Duncan Phillips himself was open to deaccessioning, as was his wife, Marjorie. As Post art critic Paul Richard noted in 1987, when the Phillips was trying to sell a painting by George Braque, Duncan once wrote that “whenever funds must be raised at once, and whenever we are under unusual financial strain, there is only one thing for us to do — and that is to sell.” He also said that “only good things sell, and good things therefore must be sacrificed.”
But Rathbone, who headed the museum’s curatorial department for almost 30 years, thinks Binstock has it wrong. Where Phillips necessarily saw his museum as an “experiment station” (his term) in its early phases, by the time of his death, the collection was fairly settled. Although he encouraged new hangs and a handful of new acquisitions each year, he didn’t want anything too drastic. “This creative conception having been achieved,” he wrote of his museum, “it must in the future be maintained and not altered.”
Nuances of interpretation aside, the decision to sell works by artists as universally acclaimed — and beloved by Duncan Phillips — as Seurat, O’Keeffe and Dove has come as a surprise to many.
“While it is true Duncan and Marjorie occasionally sold works in the process of shaping their collection,” said Rathbone, “since their tenure, no one has ever suggested deaccessioning masterworks acquired by Duncan Phillips.”
Liza Phillips said she realized deaccessioning can sometimes be necessary to streamline the collection and move forward. “But what about fundraising?” she asked.
The Phillips family, she noted, didn’t stipulate that things should never be sold. “But we never imagined this,” she said.
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