When Bill and Dorothy Harmsen donated their much sought-after Western collection to the Denver Art Museum in 2001, they catapulted a lackluster area of the institution’s holdings into national prominence.
The offering led just months later to the establishment of the museum’s Institute of Western American Art and provided some of its most prized holdings — pieces by such artists as George Catlin, Marsden Hartley and John Mix Stanley.
But the gesture, though generous, made for an imperfect gift.
Among the 750 art works and a related assemblage of American Indian objects were many mediocre and less-important items, not up to snuff for a major museum.
The solution: Sell, give, trade, buy and show.
The museum has carefully leveraged the collection to enhance its overall holdings. The local strategy offers a window into how collecting institutions, short on cash and buffeted by donations, make gifts work for the greater good.
Almost immediately after its arrival, curators began evaluating the Harmsen collection’s contents and removing pieces that did not meet the institution’s standards or fit its collection — a practice known in the museum world as deaccessioning.
To date, the museum has sold 265 works and transferred another 190 pieces to other organizations, ranging from the Art Students’ League of Denver to community colleges across the state.
It has retained 287 pieces, including 39 on view in the recently opened Western galleries on the seventh floor of the institution’s original building.
The politics of gifting
Donations of art from private collectors like the Harmsens, the Denver founders of the Jolly Rancher Candy Co., have been the principal way that American museums have enriched their holdings.
Notable examples include Paul Mellon, who gave more than 1,000 works to the National Gallery of Art, and the Havemeyer Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its spectacular examples of French impressionism.
“American museums have the quality and the range of collections because of gifts that individuals have made to them,” said Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver Art Museum. “Very few museums have had acquisition funds that have allowed them to build their own collections.”
But museums do not accept just any collection offered to them. Deciding factors include artistic merit and whether the works fall under the museum’s collecting purview.
Such gifts can involve tricky negotiations, because donors sometimes insist that the museum keep the collection intact perpetually or display it in its totality.
Stringent conditions, for example, were attached to the 2004 donation of the Clyfford Still estate to the city of Denver. They included a pledge that the city would build a special museum for the famed abstract-expressionist’s holdings and never show the work alongside that of any other artist.
The Harmsens, too, had certain conditions when they first met with museum leaders across the country about accepting their collection, but they set them aside when they finally agreed to cede it to the Denver Art Museum.
“They had been holding out for what they had wanted, and they both had reached a point in their lives and they realized that this was the more reasonable, responsible thing to do,” Sharp said.
In an agreement with the museum, the Harmsens gave permission for their works to be integrated into the museum’s Western collection and sold if necessary as part of ongoing collection refinement.
“The single most important thing with a donor is to be honest and direct with them,” Sharp said.
The removal or de-accessioning of objects from museum collections can spark controversy. In 1990, New York’s Guggenheim Museum drew considerable criticism when it sold three major works by blue-chip artists — Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani — for $47 million.
The proceeds were put toward the purchase of a noted collection of minimalist art for a reported price of more than $30 million. But some outside museum professionals argued the Guggenheim had sacrificed masterworks for lesser-quality works.
“You can second-guess people,” Sharp said. “It doesn’t mean occasionally museums won’t make a mistake, but I would say that the vast majority of the time museums have benefited from doing collection refinement.”
Careful moves
There has been no opposition to the removal of the lesser works from the Harmsen collection, because experts in the field have long known of the mixed quality of the holding.
The more than 250 pieces placed on the market were sold through auction houses around the country, including Christie’s in New York City and the Santa Fe Art Auction.
The museum declined to disclose the amount of the proceeds, but Peter Riess, director of Western art at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, estimated that most pieces drew final bids ranging from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
“Not million-dollar paintings by any means,” he said.
In deciding which paintings to keep and which to remove, Peter Hassrick, director of the Institute of Western Art, said museum curators try to be as objective as possible and give each piece a fair review.
Not every work needs to be a masterpiece, he said, but to be retained, it should be artistically significant or have some social, cultural or historical relevance.
In case of doubt, the museum leans on the side of retention. When Hassrick took over his duties in 2005, he even reversed previous decisions to sell certain works.
“I thought they were curious pieces,” he said. “I thought they were artists who we really didn’t have enough representation of. I thought they were maybe subjects that could help us understand why the West matters. And some of them I just liked as works of art.”
Review of the Harmsen collection is continuing by the members of the Western Institute’s curators, and more pieces could be cut.
“Twice a week we go over and spend 1 1/2 hours going through (storage), pulling every piece out and taking a look at it,” Hassrick said. “Who is this guy or gal? Is this an important piece? Does this have any relevance to what we’re trying to do?”
A recent discovery was “Chari Mountain, Colorado” (1948), a 43-by-29-inch painting of an elk by Charles Waldo Love. He is best known for his dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
“When we pulled it out, all three of us who are part of this team were all enchanted with it,” Hassrick said. “We don’t have anything of that artist. We don’t have anything of the period. And we don’t have anything that represents the connection between art and science the way this piece does in the 20th century.”
So, they all quickly agreed it was a keeper.
According to the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors, proceeds from the sales of artworks must be used for new acquisitions.
Money raised by the Harmsen sales has gone toward the purchase of at least six works — all of which are on display.
Among them is “George Noffsinger,” a 1931 portrait of a cowboy by Winold Reiss. He studied at the Munich Academy and was influenced by the German brand of art nouveau known as Jugendstil.
“It’s one of the proud moments of American portraiture in the Western collections that we have,” Hassrick said.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
