Richard Brauer, a nonagenarian art history professor who has opposed a controversial plan by Valparaiso University in Indiana to sell three key paintings from its collection, said he will request his name be stripped from its museum building, which currently honors him.
Brauer’s statement, which was distributed to ARTnews through his attorney on Thursday, comes after a recent court ruling allowing the university to amend the terms of the legal trust that endowed the artworks. The change means the school is legally permitted to move ahead with the art sale.
One of the works the university plans to sell, Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Rust Red Hills (1930), was the second work the Brauer acquired for its collection. The university said it was worth about $15 million, making it the most valuable of the three pieces. Frederic Edwin Church’s Mountain Landscape was valued at $2 million, and Childe Hassam’s Silver Vale and the Golden Gate is valued at $3.5 million.
The university initiated plans last year to sell the works to raise funds that would go to completing a dorm renovation project for freshman students. Brauer argued in his statement that the paintings are a cornerstone of a museum that has set Valparaiso apart from other small liberal art school. Sales of the works would raise an estimated $20 million. The museum has argued that it can no longer afford to safeguard such valuable works due to high security costs.
Brauer first began teaching at the university in 1961, later overseeing what was then-termed the Valparaiso University Museum and Collections, housed in its Moellering Library. In his statement, Brauer said that his decision to drop the lawsuit to halt the sale of the paintings is to avoid “serious financial risk” from ongoing legal fees.
“I still hold out hope the President and the Board of Directors will back away from this very dangerous wager,” Brauer said in his statement. Brauer said that if the school ends up selling the paintings, he’ll officially divest from school officials and the museum. “I will be ashamed to have my name associated with this affair,” he said.