NASHVILLE Tenn.
A financially faltering historically black university is seeking a quick ruling on whether it can sell a 50 percent stake in a 101-piece collection of artworks donated by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949.
But first Fisk University will have to overcome the protests of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which has tried to force Fisk to forfeit the entire collection to it.
Saul Cohen, president of the museum's board, said Fisk has violated O'Keeffe's wishes by not displaying the collection and by trying to sell off artworks.
"Since the conditions (of the bequest) have been breached, the gift should revert to the museum, which is standing in Georgia O'Keeffe's shoes," he said.
But Fisk and an O'Keeffe expert disagree with Cohen about whether the museum is entitled to speak on the late artist's behalf.
"The Museum is not a credible arbiter of O'Keeffe's intent," Fisk's lawyers said in a court filing Friday.
Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, said: "Saul Cohen is fantasizing about what he thinks O'Keeffe wanted."
O'Keeffe in 1949 divided the bulk of her late husband Alfred Stieglitz's nearly 1,000-piece collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and photos among six institutions.
The artworks given to Fisk included O'Keeffe's own 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building Night, New York" and works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
Reynolds argued that the O'Keeffe Museum should have no claim to the collection since it came from Stieglitz's estate and not O'Keeffe's.
Nashville Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle rejected an earlier settlement between Fisk and the O'Keeffe Museum that would have sent the "Radiator Building" painting to New Mexico for $7.5 million and allowed the school to sell another painting by modernist Marsden Hartley on the open market.
Reynolds estimated that the "Radiator Building" painting alone could fetch more than $25 million on the open market, and Cohen said Hartley's "Painting No. 3" could go for between $15 million and $20 million.
