“Here’s a case where the quick buck lost out to something more lasting,’’ says Jonathan Lee, a former member of the Rose’s board of overseers who sued the university because of its plans to sell art. The case was settled earlier this year, with Brandeis promising not to sell the collection. “This is a wonderful conclusion to what was an ugly event.’’
In January 2009, Brandeis’s then-president Jehuda Reinharz stunned the art world and the Brandeis community by announcing that the Rose would be closed and its collection, valued at more than $350 million, sold to help resolve a university budget crisis. “We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice,’’ he said at the time.
The response was swift. Students held protests. Donors sued the university. Museum director Michael Rush spoke out against the plan, and his contract was not renewed. Figures including renowned Pop artist James Rosenquist and video artist Bill Viola pulled out of planned exhibitions. And some of the world’s most famous contemporary artists, from Chuck Close to Frank Stella, gathered at a New York gallery to publicly oppose the move.
The university eventually backed down, but not until new Brandeis president Frederick M. Lawrence arrived in January 2011. Until then, the Rose remained a public relations disaster.
Lawrence has been praised for helping save the museum and restore the faith of the art community and public in the Rose. Under Lawrence, Brandeis has moved forward on the search for a new Rose director. Meanwhile the university has found budget reductions in other areas, and the economy has improved to the point where Brandeis’s endowment is nearly back to its pre-crash high of $712 million, according to Andrew Gully, Brandeis’s senior vice president of communications and external affairs.
