VU petitions court to modify trust in order to sell artwork

In an email to the campus community on Tuesday, VU President Jose Padilla said the university had filed the petition and they would update the campus once the court made a ruling.

“We will continue to take steps that we believe are in the best interest of all our students, in support of our mission and the University’s future,” Padilla said in the email.

The artwork in question is Georgia O’Keefe’s “Rust Red Hills,” Frederic E. Church’s “Mountain Landscape” and Childe Hassam’s “The Silver Vale and the Golden Gate.”

Under the current terms of the Percy H. Sloan Trust, which provided the artwork in the Brauer Museum of Art or funding for them, the paintings can only be sold if the proceeds are reinvested into the museum’s collection. 

The petition, filed before Porter Superior Court Judge Michael Fish, stated the terms of the agreement have become “impracticable, impossible and wasteful.” The university noted its student enrollment decreased by nearly one-third in the past five years and a projected $9 million operating deficit has resulted in its inability to provide financial resources for museum improvements, or for it to display the three paintings in the museum securely.

The artwork pieces have been in storage since last September.

The university also argues in its petition that the O’Keeffe and Hassam paintings are considered modern art and don’t fit with Sloan’s condition that income from the trust is used to purchase conservative art. VU further claims Richard Brauer — the museum’s founding director and namesake — knew of the “conservative” restriction when he purchased both artworks.

VU said in the court filing that funds from the sale of the three artwork pieces would be used to renovate freshman dorms and to create the “Sloan Gallery of American Painting” to display other works of the Sloan collection to students as a way to increase student enrollment and “more consistently honor Sloan’s intent of furthering conservative art and art education.”

The O’Keeffe piece has previously been valued at $15 million, while Hassam’s has been valued at $3.5 million and Church’s at about $2 million.

Brauer and Philipp Brockington, a law professor and museum benefactor, filed a lawsuit last year to block the sale. A Porter County Superior Court judge ruled in October neither man had standing to sue.

Brockington died in November.

VU first announced its intentions to sell the painting to fund renovations for freshman dorms last February. The announcement received pushback from the campus community, as well as art museum directors and curators.