« Return to news

Museum’s closure means breaking up of unique art collection

From Tuscaloosa News (http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/news/20180830/museums-closure-means-breaking-up-of-unique-art-collection)

Two days from now, it’ll require a labyrinthine road trip to view the amalgamation often described as the finest privately held American art collection in the world.

The Westervelt Co. will close the Tuscaloosa Museum of Art after Friday’s regular opening hours. There’s a final Art With Friends reception Thursday night, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. It’s free and open to all.

Some core art, including Basil Ede’s Wild Birds of America series, and some of the Founding Fathers works, will remain in Westervelt headquarters at 1400 Jack Warner Parkway NE, but will no longer be viewable by the public. There are currently no plans to offer tours.

“The remaining works are being prepared for sale, for shipment,” said Susan Poole, Westervelt’s corporate communciations manager, though no sales have been announced.

Asked why the museum was closing, Poole said “It aligns with our long-term strategy as a company, our long-term strategy and growth plan.”

Westervelt’s core business builds around forestry, forest recreation, renewable energy and wood products manufacturing, she said. “It aligns with those core competencies.”

Thursday night’s final Art With Friends offers a chance for patrons to say goodbye.

“We called the monthly receptions Art With Friends because every single piece in this collection is a friend of mine,” said Will Hawkins, who’s worked with the Warner collection almost a decade, dating back to when it was part of an even larger grouping housed in the Anchorage at North River. He’s still processing the shutdown.

“For years I’ve worked to understand how Jack spiderwebbed this together, to where everything is related to everything else. It’s still astounding.”

Jonathan Westervelt “Jack” Warner, CEO and chairman for almost 50 years of Gulf States Paper, the family business which became the Westervelt Co., helped turn the American art market around with the wave of a hand. Collectors who saw Warner walk into an auction at Sotheby’s or Christie’s would often turn and walk away.

“Jack would stand there and just hold his hand up, and never put it down” until he’d won, Hawkins said. But even while running from Warner at auction, collectors followed his vision. “He was one of the forebearers of bringing American art back into prosperity.”

Inspired by his love of John James Audubon’s paintings, Warner commissioned Ede’s wild birds series, and segued from there into Hudson River painters. He then followed a chronological and geographical progression west, to painters of the Rockies, the Grand Canyon and elsewhere throughout the raw, early United States, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

After another collector paid $7 million for Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 “Niagara” painting, the American art market exploded. Warner helped lead the charge, investing in paintings and sculpture built around his personal hero, George Washington, and in American impressionists such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassat and James McNeil Whistler.

Warner was largely self-taught, working by instinct. As he told Kathie Thurman, a coordinator of the collection for 12 years: “You want to collect? Buy what you like.”

“He had a relationship with every piece,” she said. Warner, who died last year at 99, loved giving tours, where he’d explain not only the art and artist, but tales of how he came to acquire the work, and why he’d longed to own it, how it spoke to him. “We had more than one person say taking a tour with Jack was like walking through the painting.”

Touring other museums or collections with Warner was always entertaining, Hawkins said. “The guide would say, ‘Mr. Warner, here’s our Bierstadt. But yours is better.’ ”

At its height, Warner’s collection included hundreds of paintings, pieces of neoclassical furniture, sculpture and decorative objects representing virtually every major American artist, and numerous other artists and craftspeople less-known, but fitting within his vision. Spread originally throughout Gulf States headquarters, the University Club and other residences around Tuscaloosa, the collection became a who’s who of American art: Thomas Cole, Church, Sargent, Cassat, Whistler, Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand, William Merritt Chase, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Paul Revere, Duncan Phyffe, Sanford Gifford, Robert Henri, Edward Potthast, Charles Bird King, Rembrandt Peale, Evan Wilson and more.

Both Art and Antiques and American Art Review magazines named Warner as among the top collectors in the world. In 2010, he was given the Frederic Edwin Church award for assembling the collection, some bought with his personal funds, but the majority purchased through the corporation.

That division was key to the breakup of the collection in 2011, when the Westervelt Co. -- Jack stepped down as president and CEO of Gulf States in 1995, and named his son Jonathan Westervelt Warner Jr., known as Jon, to succeed him -- took advantage of a 2010 tax change to cash in, selling off major works for undisclosed amounts, but estimated in the tens of millions, or even more.

In 2002, Warner had brought the collection together, operated by his personal foundation as the Westervelt Warner Museum of American Art, into NorthRiver’s Anchorage building. To his surprise, early in 2011 Durand’s “Progress (The Advance of Civilization)” was boxed and shipped out to a new owner, who remains to this day unknown. “Progress,” considered one of the central masterworks of the collection, had alone been valued as potentially high as $50 million, though that’s the high end.

Mike Case, CEO and president of Westervelt at the time, said the company was taking advantage of a one-year-window provided by the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, a federal stimulus bill passed by Congress. “Our obligation is to maximize the value for our shareholders. We want to grow,” Case said, in a February 2011 story in The Tuscaloosa News, ”... and we kind of know the things we want to spend (the proceeds) on.”

Other works continued to go out the doors, often surprising Hawkins and Thurman as they arrived at the Anchorage; at one point, robbery was feared. Among those sold to private collectors -- where their fate remains unknown or unrevealed to the public -- or at auction include Cole’s “The Falls of Kaaterskill,” Daniel Garber’s “Tanis,” a rare historical work by Edward Hopper, and Church’s “Above the Clouds at Sunrise,” which illuminates the cover of the coffee-table book “An American Odyssey,” about Warner’s collection.

At the time of the sell-off, Warner lamented ceding control of the company, and thus losing the bulk of the collection.

“I regret the lack of communication I have with the company,” Warner said, in that same 2011 Tuscaloosa News story. “I don’t talk with (Jon) and he doesn’t talk with me about anything like this.... We don’t know how much of (the collection) they want to sell.”

After the Westervelt Co. declined to renew its partnership with the the Jack Warner Foundation, which had been operating the Westervelt Warner Museum at losses of $250,000 to $300,000 annually for years, Warner moved his privately collected art out, and the Westervelt Co. began shifting the remainder to company headquarters. Even after the sales and split, thousands of pieces remained in the collection, which opened as the Tuscaloosa Museum of Art in December 2011.

Although Warner’s assemblage was renowned throughout the world, it remained too often without honor in its hometown.

“It was one of of Tuscaloosa and Alabama’s hidden gems,” Hawkins said. “It’s a one-of-a-kind art collection that will never be duplicated: One man’s vision spanning the scope of American history from pre-Columbian South America through the early 20th century.

“You can walk through the story of America inside the collection, through the eyes of master artists.”

The museum saw visitor upticks each quarter, Hawkins said, but they still continued to hear “I never realized!” The next most common reaction were oohs and ahhs, Thurman said.

“We heard a lot of ‘Oh my god. This is in Tuscaloosa,’ ” she said. “A lot of people are astounded that a collection like this ever existed.”

Thursday night’s final Art With Friends, 5:30-7:30 p.m., will offer the usual wine and light hors d’ouevres, and give all a chance to say goodbye. Since the announcement earlier this month, hundreds of calls, emails and Facebook messages have rolled in, offering condolences, memories of visits and commiseration. Thurman and Hawkins have one plan in common: Do not cry. But that resolve may fail, both admitted.

“My kids have literally grown up in this museum,” Hawkins said. They’re still working with the 4-year-old on not touching. “My 10-year-old can come in and tell you all about her favorite painting, every detail....She loved it, and she’s attempted to draw it hundreds of times.”

As to where various works might travel, it’s anyone’s guess. The Walmart family’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, apparently purchased at least two of the older collection works, and more could now go that way. Thurman and Hawkins hope some of the art stays in the region, at places such as Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, or the Birmingham Museum of Art. Each hopes for anything better than the unknown, private-collector fate of “Progress.”

“Any place public, I would be ecstatic,” Hawkins said. “This is art that tells the story of us, and it needs to be seen, outside of somebody’s private home, or private collection.

“Art is made to be seen, not tucked away in a corner.”