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A carved redwood relief by the artist Sargent Johnson.<\/p>\n
BERKELEY, Calif. \u2014 Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, or how, three years ago, it mistakenly sold this work, valued at more than a million dollars, for $150 plus tax.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a><\/div>\nSargent Johnson at work in 1940.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The university\u2019s embarrassing loss eventually enabled the Huntington Library<\/a>, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a large museum and research center in San Marino, Calif., to acquire its first major work by an African-American artist.<\/p>\n The circuitous tale of Sargent Johnson\u2019s huge redwood relief involves error, chance and a partnership of unlikely art-world figures, including an art and furniture dealer who stumbled upon the panels at the university\u2019s surplus store; an antiques dealer who was on a first-name basis with Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles; and a lawyer whose hobby is buying lighthouses and who convinced the government that even though the art was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration<\/a>, it could still be sold publicly.<\/p>\n Harvey Smith, president of the National New Deal Preservation Association, called what happened a betrayal of the public trust. \u201cWe all pay for this art and we all own it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine losing something longer than a pickup truck,\u201d he added, referring to what he called Berkeley\u2019s \u201camazing incompetence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s astounding,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In correspondence with the federal government, Andrew Goldblatt, who has the stressful-sounding title of assistant risk manager for the university, described the sale of the Johnson piece as \u201can error of ignorance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe do regret it,\u201d Mr. Goldblatt said in an interview. \u201cSomething went wrong, and it just cascaded.\u201d<\/p>\n Johnson (1888-1967) is considered one of the finest sculptors of the Harlem Renaissance, though he spent most of his life in the Bay Area<\/a>. He was never able to earn a living purely from his art<\/a>, but in recent years interest in him has resurged, said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, an associate professor of American art at the University of Pennsylvania, who is writing a book on him. In 1937, under the auspices of the W.P.A., Johnson designed two large Art Deco redwood reliefs, one of which depicted an idealized natural world of gilded gazelles, open-beaked birds, spiky-leafed plants and a boy clapping cymbals.<\/p>\n Designed to cover organ pipes at the old California School for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley, this natural-world relief was affixed to a wall until 1980, when the school moved. As squatters (and rats) took shelter there, the university, which had taken over the premises, moved any valuable property to a secure basement warehouse, and the organ relief was disassembled. But one of the organ screens was misidentified as belonging to Berkeley\u2019s graduate schools, so when the university reopened the building three years later, only one of the two Johnson reliefs was returned to its rightful place. The other remained in storage until 2009, when the university emptied the storage space in preparation for the sale of the building and transferred the relief to the university\u2019s surplus store.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where, in late summer of that year, Greg Favors, an art and furniture dealer, came upon eight cracked but still handsome panels in a plywood bin. Mr. Favors did not know what they were or who had created them, but he thought them \u201camazing and cool,\u201d he said. He paid $164.63, including tax.<\/p>\n In need of a restorer, he contacted Dennis Boses, owner of Off the Wall Antiques in Los Angeles, who has provided eye-popping objects for celebrities like Jackson and for flashy restaurants including the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, and who has been an expert on the popular A&E reality show \u201cStorage Wars.\u201d Mr. Boses trucked the panels to his warehouse in North Hollywood, where he restored them. He was hoping the art might fetch $10,000 to $11,000.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Mr. Favors scoured the Internet searching for the artist\u2019s name.<\/p>\n On Oct. 16, 2009, at 9:03 a.m., he e-mailed Gray Brechin, a Berkeley scholar of historical geography who specializes in New Deal art, asking for help.<\/p>\n At 9:08 a.m., the response arrived: \u201cYou BOUGHT this? They SOLD it?\u201d He identified Sargent Johnson as the artist and added, \u201cI am astounded that they deacquisitioned it.\u201d<\/p>\n Armed with that information, Mr. Boses spoke to Michael Rosenfeld of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery<\/a> in New York, an authority on African-American art. Mr. Rosenfeld was relieved to learn that the piece had not been chopped for firewood or turned into a trellis. He recalled telling Mr. Boses, \u201cIn the unlikely event you get a release from the G.S.A, I would buy it.\u201d (Mr. Rosenfeld was referring to the General Services Administration, which is the official custodian<\/a> of artwork produced under the aegis of several public programs during the New Deal and is working with the F.B.I. to recover misplaced or stolen art and have it displayed in public locations.)<\/p>\n For help in getting clearance from the agency, Mr. Favors turned to his friend Bradley Long, whose e-mail handle, bradcansell, suggests that no transaction is beyond his abilities. And Mr. Long, through his mechanic at Benz Autobody in Redwood City, Calif., met Michael L. Gabriel, a lawyer whose hobby is buying lighthouses from the General Services Administration. Mr. Gabriel found a loophole in the laws governing W.P.A. art.\u00a0 Movable art from the W.P.A. falls under federal jurisdiction. But according to a November 2010 e-mail from a General Services Administration lawyer to the university, which Mr. Smith of the National New Deal Preservation Association obtained last month through a California Public Records Act request, the federal government does not retain ownership of W.P.A art affixed to nonfederal buildings.<\/p>\n Jennifer Gibson, director of the General Services Administration\u2019s art in architecture and fine arts program, said in an interview that despite the ruling, her agency hoped Johnson\u2019s work would go \u201cto an institution that provides public access.\u201d<\/p>\n The University of California, Berkeley, tried to be that institution. It hired appraisers who valued the Johnson work at $215,000 but, facing extensive budget cuts, it did not have the money to make a deal. Late last February, Mr. Rosenfeld bought the Johnson relief for what two of the partners said was $225,000.<\/p>\n But the art didn\u2019t even make it to Mr. Rosenfeld\u2019s New York gallery. One week after his purchase, Jessica Todd Smith, curator of American art at the Huntington Library, near Los Angeles, and John Murdoch, the museum\u2019s director of art collections, paid Mr. Rosenfeld a visit, looking for works to fill their newly expanded American galleries.<\/p>\n The Johnson panel had not yet shipped from the North Hollywood warehouse, so Mr. Rosenfeld showed them photographs. On her first day back at the office, Ms. Smith visited the warehouse to see what she called \u201cJohnson\u2019s monumental work.\u201d She added that it \u201cconfirmed and surpassed our expectations.\u201d It became the year\u2019s first acquisition of the Huntington art collectors\u2019 council.<\/p>\n Ms. Smith declined to divulge the price. Mr. Rosenfeld, who said he had sold small Johnson sculptures \u201cthat you can hold in your hand\u201d for more than $100,000, said the relief was worth over $1 million, but that the Huntington had paid considerably less. He didn\u2019t seek market value, he said, because the work was so important that it belonged in a museum. (Lowery Stokes Sims, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and an authority on African-American artists, called Mr. Rosenfeld\u2019s assessment \u201cno exaggeration,\u201d and said it was not unusual for a gallery to sell an important work to a museum at a discounted price.) When the Huntington\u2019s new American wing opens, in 2014, Ms. Smith said, \u201cyou will be able to open the doors to the gallery and see it at the end of the vista, holding down the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Mr. Smith of the National New Deal Preservation Association is unforgiving, saying that the university, in its role as steward of this art, exhibited a \u201ctotal disregard for our country\u2019s artistic legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens A carved redwood relief by the artist Sargent Johnson. By CAROL POGASH Published: February 20, 2012 BERKELEY, Calif. \u2014 Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-archives-in-the-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libnews.binghamton.edu\/specialcollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n