Sotheby’s may have broken records with a $236 million Gustav Klimt last night, but its most eyebrow-raising sale this season may still be yet to come. Among the auction house’s high-profile offerings in its new Breuer Building home this week are three masterpieces from the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, whose deaccession has drawn criticism from the public and a member of the Phillips family.
The three Phillips Collection paintings hitting the auction floor on Thursday, November 20, are Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Large Dark Red Leaves on White” (1927), Georges Seurat’s “Clowns et poney” (1883–84), and Arthur Dove’s “Rose and Locust Stump” (1943). They are expected to fetch up to $14.8 million in total, money the Phillips Collection says will go toward new acquisitions and collection care. The museum will also sell seven other works, including the Pablo Picasso sculpture “Tête de femme” (1950) and Milton Avery’s “Spring Landscape” (1953), in a sale yet to be announced.
While museum watchdog organizations, including the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the American Association of Museum Directors (AAMD), generally approve of deaccessioning works to fund future acquisitions and collection maintenance, the Phillips Collection sale has generated opposition — notably from the granddaughter of museum founders Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, Liza Phillips, who rebuked the move.
“We treasure those pieces,” she told the Washington Post. “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.”
The specific items included in the deaccession sale were determined by the Board of Trustees, in line with AAM and AAMD standards, a Phillips Collection spokesperson claimed. Plans to sell the works were also approved by an 11-person “Members group,” which does not have fiduciary or administrative authority and includes descendants of Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, the representative said.
“We understand and respect the concerns raised by Liza Phillips and the Members,” the spokesperson said in an email to Hyperallergic. “The Board and staff engaged the Members — a non-governing body that includes Liza Phillips as Chair, and who also serves on the Board of Trustees — thoughtfully throughout the deaccessioning process and subsequent months.”
Arthur Dove’s “Rose and Locust Stump” (1943) is among the paintings for sale at Sotheby’s this week.
The spokesperson also said that the Phillips Collection was deaccessioning 10 works in total as part of a “strategic plan” overseen by its CEO and Director Jonathan P. Binstock and the institution’s board of trustees. That plan includes initiatives to collect works by living artists, which the institution claims aligns with Duncan Phillips’s vision for an evolving art museum.
Hyperallergic has inquired into how the remaining seven works will be sold, as they do not appear in Sotheby’s auction catalogue.
The painting by O’Keeffe, created at the Lake George estate of her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s family in Upstate New York, is expected to fetch the highest bid of the three works, carrying an estimate of $5 to $6 million. Seurat’s work is estimated to sell for $3 to $5 million, and Dove’s for $1.2 to $1.8 million.
In an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal, the paper’s editor of leisure and arts, Eric Gibson, called the sale “reckless.”
Gibson compared the sale to the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) controversial attempt to sell works by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden, and Clyfford Still to fund Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in 2020. The AAM has historically discouraged the use of deaccession funds to cover museum daily operations or for “capital investments.” After opposition, the BMA backpedaled on selling two of the works just hours before the auction.
“Binstock and his board are sacrificing time-tested objects of established and undisputed historical importance to acquire new works whose long-term value cannot be predicted,” Gibson wrote of the Phillips Collection sale.
Gibson suggests that the institution should launch a fundraising campaign instead. “That’s how these things used to be done, before museum directors started seeing dollar signs inside those gilded frames instead of paintings and drawings,” Gibson charged.
The specific financial strain that may have led the institution to the decision is unclear, but the nonprofit museum reported a net loss of $3.6 million on tax documents last year, versus $4.65 million in income in 2023. The institution reported $121.6 million in total assets in 2024, about $1 million more than the year prior.
Hyperallergic has asked the AAM for its opinion on the ethics of this particular sale.
