Deadline Passes for Fisk Paintings with no Valid Offers

 

A deadline set last month for Fisk University to find an alternative to selling-off two prized paintings from the school’s collection passed at 5 p.m yesterday. And still, there’s no confirmed buyer who’s agreed to purchase the works and keep them at the school as the donor wished.

One of the paintings is Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic work Radiator Building – Night New York. The other is Marsden Hartley’s Painting #3. The sale would provide much needed cash for Fisk, which has been in a state of financial crisis.

School officials, however, have confirmed to The Tennessean that unsolicited offers have come in at – or in excess – of 20-million dollars for the O’Keeffee work alone. Those offers, though, don’t meet the terms set by the state attorney general last month that Fisk would have to find funding to keep the paintings on campus or sell the O’Keeffee to a museum in her name in Santa Fe for a negotiated price of just 7-million dollars.

Art experts tell the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper that the O’Keeffee museum would be getting the painting at a bargain-basement price and say that on the open market “the sky’s the limit” for Radiator Building.  

Vanderbilt University art historian Vivien Fryd [freed] says it may come down to selling the painting deeply discounted just so Fisk can recover from its financial woes.

 

“I would hate to see the painting leave Nashville. I think that would be a great loss, so either way there’s going to be a loss for the city of Nashville. You’re either going to lose Fisk University’s potential to continue as a university if it doesn’t have the money, or you’re going to lose the painting.”

All parties are expected to meet early this week.