Word: groote
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...difficult old woman," remarked a staff member of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, musing on the late Adelaide de Groot, heiress to a vast fortune derived from her father's success in the China trade. "The more presentable junior employees had to take turns squiring her around, pushing her wheelchair. And all to get that damn bequest...
...bequest was considerable, but so is the acrimony it has since roused. In the past year, the Met has quietly sold or traded off 50 of the 211 paintings Adelaide de Groot willed to the museum on her death in 1967, including works by Rousseau, Modigliani, Picasso, Gris and Bonnard. The New York Times's persistent reporting of this, over the past five months, has taken on the character of a vendetta. Sometimes the Times seems to hint darkly at sins where there were no sins-or at most only dubious transactions. But the publicity has caused a violent...
...been partly mortgaged for several years in advance against one painting. The result: the Met needed money. Hoving proposed to get it through "deaccessioning" pictures-the barbaric museum jargon for preparing to sell. Last September, the Met revealed that it had deaccessioned a major work from the De Groot bequest, Henri Rousseau's The Tropics, and secretly sold it, along with Vincent Van Gogh's The Olive Pickers, to Marlborough Fine Art galleries. No price was given, but the reliable figure was $1.5 million for the two. This is well below their market value; the Rousseau alone...
Backed by Vice Director Theodore Rousseau, Hoving defends the sale on the ground that The Tropics was "superfluous and third-rate." But why, in that case-since the Rousseau was by general consent the best painting in her collection-did the Met court Adelaide de Groot? To most art critics, it is in fact a major Rousseau...
...JOSEPH L. DE GROOT Plainfield...