London in Lynchburg: Randolph and National Gallery Initiate Parternship

Written By: Mariah Sager '18

Published November 2014

Professor Andrea Campbell facilitates discussion between students and Dr. Ashok Roy of the National Gallery in London during a lunch in the President's Dining Room on October 8th.
Photo Courtesy of Randolph College Office of Relations

On October 7th, Dr. Ashok Roy, Director of Collections at the National Gallery in London, visited Randolph College. He gave three lectures, and met with small groups of students in two private lunches. Some art and art history professors took advantage of this opportunity by requiring class attendance at the lectures, or encouraging students to attend the lunches with Dr. Roy. His visit marks the first event of the College’s budding partnership with the National Gallery, which began in February of this year after the sale of the Maier’s George Bellows painting Men of the Docks to the museum, making Randolph the only educational institution in the United States with such a relationship to the Gallery. President Bateman said that “Dr. Roy turned out be an excellent public speaker and a gracious and engaging person. I think that the success of the many events that we hosted the week he was here was a great way to start the partnership.”

Although visits from museum staff are to be arranged by the administration, faculty and staff members have their own hopes for the partnership. According to President Bateman, an exhibit in the Maier Museum of pieces lent by the National Gallery may be in the making. “There are some very technical conditions we have to meet,” he says, such as certain humidity and temperature requirements, but “we’re very optimistic.” The loan being discussed at the moment is to be of Renaissance works. In addition, the National Gallery will be offering internships to Randolph students. This is exclusive to our partnership: the museum does not allow any other students to hold such a position. Dr. Leanne Zalewski, Assistant Professor of Art, says that “students are very excited about the internship opportunity.” This opportunity is not exclusive to art history students. Dr. Roy himself is a chemist, and students of all majors, from Chemistry to Communications, could benefit. These internships, because they must be in London, will most likely take place in the summer rather than during a semester. Moreover, the National Gallery has said to President Bateman that “they are interested in selecting from among the interns that we send each year to invite one of them back for a ten-month paid position the following year.” This opportunity was not laid out in the original contract, which has turned out to be very flexible: says Bateman, “[the partnership] is ending up being even richer and providing more opportunities for our students than we had initially imagined.” 

For instance, Randolph may be able, on occasion, to borrow Men of the Docks from the National Gallery. Randolph will also be holding a reception for alumnae and alumni at the National Gallery in London in mid-July. The contract with the museum allows the College to hold such receptions several times in the first ten years of the partnership, at no cost.

This partnership started with a process begun in 2007, when the Maier Museum put this work on auction. Men of the Docks, created in 1912, was one of the Maier’s first acquisitions. It was bought directly from Bellows for $2,500 in 1920 and had for many decades been the centerpiece of Randolph’s collection: Scott Jaschik of the website Inside Higher Ed called it “by far the most valuable and artistically significant” piece in the Maier Museum. When the College decided to sell the painting, it then received a lot of backlash. Both the museum’s director, Karol Lawson, and associate director, Ellen Agnew, resigned from their positions in protest. The College Art Association said that “Randolph College has compromised the educational and cultural mission of the [Maier] by treating its collection as a fungible asset rather than as a vital part of the institution’s artistic heritage,” and Lee Rosenbaum, art journalist and blogger, proclaimed “shame on Randolph College.” 

Furthermore, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which includes 3,500 institutions, blacklisted Randolph, prohibiting the Maier from borrowing works from other college museums. The AAM called the sale of the painting a “flagrant, egregious violation of our Code of Ethics for Museums” and said that it threatened the “lofty status” of museums throughout the world as collections held in the public trust. As Scott Jaschik writes, “the policies of several art and museum groups state that museums should sell art only to buy more art, not to improve their finances.”  The sale of Men of the Docks did not benefit the Maier, but the $25.5 million profit went instead to the college’s endowment.

However, Randolph is not the only college to make such a move. In 1991, Brandeis University auctioned off eleven works to cushion their endowment. The Memphis College of Art decided in 2012 to sell much of their collection, including works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, to increase their finances. Fisk University sold a fifty-percent share of a collection they had been given by Georgia O’Keeffe, which included four pieces by the Modernist painter herself, as well as artists like Picasso, Cézanne, and Renoir, in order to raise $30 million for their endowment. 

President Bateman, who had not yet begun his tenure as College president when the sale took place, said in February 2014 that Randolph “is a college, not a museum,” and that “the primary fiduciary responsibility of the college’s Board of Trustees,” which decided to sell the painting, “is to provide the highest quality liberal education available.” In 2007, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools issued Randolph a financial warning, and the profit from the painting was a significant addition to its endowment, which was around $136 million in 2013. Bateman says of the College’s partnership with the National Gallery, “This is a remarkable opportunity to keep our connection to the Bellows and have it in a place where the public can see it while at the same time make a big step toward becoming financially sustainable.”

George Bellows himself might not have been in opposition to the sale; according to Lee Rosenbaum, a Maier Museum newsletter from 2007 stated that T. Moody Campbell, one of the professors involved in the purchase of the painting, said that Bellows thought “most artists, he being one of them, were [most concerned] about having [their paintings] in a place where they would be appreciated.”  The National Gallery in London garners six million visitors, of which one million are American, every year, meaning Men of the Docks will be viewed by many more people than it previously has been, but many Randolph students, faculty, staff, and alums feel the absence of the painting in the Maier Museum as a great loss, both personally and to the College. According to Abigail Gautreau ’06, Men of the Docks was selected by Randolph-Macon Woman’s College’s very first art professor, Louise Jordan Smith. She, along with a German professor, founded The Randolph-Macon Art Association of Lynchburg, “a coalition of students, faculty, alumnae, and local townspeople” who raised the funds necessary to purchase the painting. She says, “It was the first masterpiece in the collection. Men of the Docks was not simply another valuable piece in a large collection; it was one of the first, and it had special meaning attached to it due to the circumstances of its acquisition.”

In spite of the controversy surrounding the sale of the Bellows painting, the fact remains that students and faculty are already benefitting from the partnership between Randolph College and the National Gallery. The lectures by Dr. Roy offered tangible evidence of this benefit. Dr. Roy is a conservator who studies technology used in art conservation and restoration such as x-radiography and pigment sampling and analysis. The lectures included one titled “F for Fake, R for Real: The Fall and  Rise of Two Madonnas,” which discussed how such technologies are used to “confirm, and sometimes contest, the identity of the artist credited with a work of art,” specifically speaking on two Italian Renaissance paintings housed in the National Gallery.

In his other lectures, he addressed the issue of the stability of color pigments and “the technical analysis of a Renoir painting and its impact on our understanding of the work.” Students, faculty, and others in the Randolph community can look forward to similar visits in the future by National Gallery staff, and there were four applicants for the first internship positions that will take place in London. “I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for our students and a great opportunity for us to be able to showcase the excellent students that we have here at Randolph,” beamed President Bateman.