Good morning. It's Wednesday. Today we'll find out why a university with endowment assets of $2.5 billion is selling two Abstract Expressionist paintings that it has owned for nearly 70 years. We'll also get details on a twist in Mayor Eric Adams's unusual political relationship with former President Donald Trump.
Rockefeller University in Manhattan has endowment assets of $2.5 billion and took in $777 million in a five-year fund-raising campaign that ended in June. But it is selling two paintings by Joan Mitchell, an Abstract Expressionist artist, that it has owned for nearly 70 years. The two large canvases are expected to bring in as much as $32 million when they go on the block at Christie's on Nov. 19. "Science is very expensive," the university's president, Richard Lifton, said. "I'm no connoisseur of art, but it did not escape our attention that Joan Mitchell's paintings have dramatically increased in value in recent years," he said. "We're not a museum. We recognize it might not be great to be hanging onto works that are this valuable." Lifton said that the money from the paintings would go toward biomedical research — programs "that we're eager to support better," including artificial intelligence, "which has really taken off in terms of its potential for life science." He also mentioned the university's work on neurodegeneration, which is the loss of function and structure in neurons in the brain. And basic science "is becoming harder to support as the technology grows more expensive," he said, because the cost of doing such work has outpaced grants and contracts from federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health. The paintings have not been seen beyond the Rockefeller campus since they were acquired for the school in the 1950s. They were chosen by Dorothy Miller, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art, with Wallace Harrison, the architect of many of the projects that the Rockefellers were involved with, including Rockefeller Center and the university's campus. The school had been founded as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901. By the 1950s, John D. Rockefeller's grandson David Rockefeller had taken over as chairman of the school's board. He credited his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, "for the art collecting vision" that sent the paintings to the campus, said Max Carter, a vice chairman at Christie's. Mitchell — whom The New York Times critic John Russell described as "an ecstatic and inventive colorist with a way of putting on the paint that was unmistakably her own" — completed the two canvases in 1955. Carter said it was "a watershed year" for her career. For years, one of the two paintings — "City Landscape" — hung in the dining room of the building named for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. More recently, it had been given a place in a newer laboratory facility that stretches over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. The other painting, "Untitled," was in the president's house. "They weren't in a gallery space," Carter said, noting that "City Landscape" had been in the place where scientists gathered daily for meals. "Nothing to our knowledge ever got spilled on them," Lifton said. "The paintings were in great shape," but officials were concerned about exposure to sunlight in buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows. This is not the first time that the university is selling art it owned. In 1977, when it was coping with deficits that averaged $2 million a year, it sold a painting by the neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David for about $4 million. Charles Wrightsman, an oil industrialist, bought it and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lifton said that "the scientists were very pragmatic" about the decision to sell the two Mitchells. He said there was a sense that the paintings had become so valuable that "we wouldn't want these paintings to be housed here under these conditions." WEATHER Today will be mostly sunny with a high near the low 70s. Tonight, expect a partly cloudy sky with a low around 60. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Nov. 1 (Diwali and All Saints' Day) The latest New York news
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Two days after Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden turned into a parade of insults, grievances and hate speech, the strange political courtship between the former president and Mayor Eric Adams took another unusual twist. Asked if he stood by what he had said during a news conference on Saturday — that Trump was not a fascist — Adams, a Democrat, on Tuesday dismissed question after question as "humiliating," "silly" and "insulting." "With all that's going on to everyday New Yorkers, we are asking questions that is someone a fascist or is someone Hitler," Adams said. "That's insulting to me, and I'm not going to engage in that." He added: "Everyone needs to turn down the rhetoric because after Election Day, we still have to be the United States and not the divided states." Asked by a reporter when he last spoke to the former president, Adams told his media staff, "Give me another question, please." He told the reporter, "You lost your opportunity." Adams was asked if he agreed with remarks by Brad Lander, who is the city comptroller and is running for mayor, that he was undermining the Democratic Party by refusing to characterize Trump as a fascist. Adams responded by disparaging Lander. "Lander, ooh, he's the moral authority of life, you know," the mayor shot back. "Listen, next question." My colleague Jeffery C. Mays writes that the comments further distanced Adams from his party and from Vice President Kamala Harris, the party's nominee for president. As Election Day has neared, she and her supporters have echoed warnings from Lt. Gen. John Kelly, a former White House chief of staff under Trump, that Trump met the definition of a fascist and had praised Hitler. Trump has defended an embattled Adams, who was indicted last month on federal bribery and corruption charges. Trump has said that Adams, who pleaded not guilty, is being politically persecuted for criticizing the Biden administration's handling of the city's recent migrant influx. On Tuesday, Adams defended Trump's right to hold the rally but denounced the racist comments that were made there. METROPOLITAN DIARY Dancing in the Street
Dear Diary: I met Luce on the way to my first swing-dance class just off Herald Square. The crowds, the grime, the traffic — it all melts away with the evening breeze and soft sunlight. Luce was in the audience at a pop-up jazz performance nearby. There was something in the air that made me crave a dance. So I leaned over to Luce, caught her eye and asked for a dance. She smiled, took my hand and let me give her one slow spin as the band played its final notes. I learned that like me, she had grown up in the city. And like me, she had spent her youth dancing across the New York streets. I thanked her for the dance and went on my way, thinking that one day in the future a lovely stranger might ask me to dance, too. — Madeleine Virginia Gannon Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: The university selling treasured art
October 30, 2024
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