The Art of the Deal

WHEN THE PHONE rang on a November afternoon in the D.C. office of Earl “Rusty” Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, he couldn’t have realized what was about to happen. One guesses that in retrospect, Powell wishes he hadn’t picked up: It was the Governor of Pennsylvania calling, and the Governor wasn’t in a very good mood.

Ed Rendell had just attended a private meeting called by Arlen Specter that featured the Senator, Philadelphia Museum of Art CEO Anne d’Harnoncourt and Mayor Street, all pleading the cause of keeping Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia to a group of the region’s wealthiest people. The meeting was held in the dim, brown-walled Eakins Gallery in Thomas Jefferson University’s Alumni Hall — inside enemy territory, one might say, since Jefferson had stunned those present a few days before by announcing it had sold The Gross Clinic jointly to the National Gallery of Art and Crystal Bridges, a nascent museum in Arkansas, for $68 million. As is well-known now, Jefferson offered Philly institutions 45 days to match the offer. “I got there 10 minutes early because I wanted to talk to Arlen,” says Rendell, who had never viewed the huge painting before, “and when I saw it, I realized how important it was, and that really fired me up.” (Which gives you an idea of the painting’s impact, since Rendell is better known for his love of the Eagles than a passion for art.) Rendell characterizes the mood at the meeting as not especially hopeful, saying, “If there was optimism, it was guarded optimism.”

So after he left, Rendell impulsively dialed the National Gallery’s Powell, which conjures the priceless image of the white-haired museum director elegantly squirming in his office while Rendell barked at him. “I said, ‘This is a national disgrace. You shouldn’t be taking this Philadelphia painting out of Philadelphia,’” remembers Rendell. “I called Anne d’Harnoncourt and said, ‘I just called this guy on a whim, you might want to follow up with him.’” (Uh-oh.)

Rendell’s technique was a bit more blunt than the way things are typically handled in the art world, but hey, this is Philly, and really, nothing was the norm in l’affaire Gross Clinic. Even today, it’s hard to find anyone involved who isn’t somehow irked; you get the feeling there would be fewer hard feelings if the canvas had been stolen from Jefferson by cat burglars one night, spirited to Las Vegas, and secretly brokered to Steve Wynn.

The furor that swirled up around the sale of the university’s acclaimed painting took Jefferson’s president, Robert Barchi, in particular by surprise — which isn’t easy to do. Barchi, a tall, poised, polite molecular neuroscientist, is one of the more intelligent people around, but he’s pained by being cast as a mercenary Grinch who — at Christmastime — ruthlessly cashed in a Philly treasure. “Frankly, we weren’t equipped to display or conserve a painting of this caliber,” Barchi says, while construction workers labor on a new medical education building rising up just outside his window. Not coincidentally, the university and the hospital are in the middle of a $500-million-plus expansion and transformation, partly funded by the sale of Gross Clinic and, in April, another Eakins canvas, Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand, for about $20 million to — where else? — Crystal Bridges.

The all-out flap that exploded over the past six months about Gross Clinic — a painting that few Philadelphians were aware even existed — does seem excessive, but then again, it’s rare that Philly finds itself with all the ingredients of Da Vinci Code-ish drama: big money, secret meetings with a legendary auction house, a ticking clock. There was Jefferson as the villain, and as subplot villainess, Alice Walton, the country’s second richest woman and patroness of the Arkansas museum. Far richer than Oprah, the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was pilloried for trying to grab a Philly painting with her $16.6 billion fortune made selling cheap toilet paper.