To Sell Prized Paintings, a University Proclaims They’re Not ‘Conservative’

What makes a painting conservative?

An Indiana judge is facing that very question as Valparaiso University contends that it should be able to sell high-value paintings it owns, including a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of the New Mexico desert, in order to finance a renovation of freshman dormitories.

When the private, nonprofit university announced its plan last year, it said the sale was necessary because enrollment had declined, which has also prompted the school to cut some programs and positions.

After opposition to the sale of the art that had long hung in its on-campus museum, the college is now arguing before a court that selling two of the paintings is justified because they should never have been acquired in the first place.

The stipulations of the 1953 gift used to purchase them, which Percy Sloan donated in honor of his father, Junius R. Sloan, a self-taught Hudson River School artist, said it could be spent only on “conservative” works.

The gift, which included money and hundreds of paintings, specified that any art acquired with the funds must be “exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects” and “of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art.”

The paintings in question, are “Rust Red Hills” by O’Keeffe (1930) and “The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate” by Childe Hassam (1914), an American Impressionist. In a court petition, the university says that because the paintings are from modernist art movements and are not representational, they are not conservative and therefore can now be sold.