Indian art to be sold in Chicago

CHICAGO -- The Field Museum wants to sell 31 American Indian portraits and paintings of Western scenes by 19th-century artist and adventurer George Catlin to raise millions of dollars for its anthropology collection. The effort is being criticized by some who fear Chicago will be robbed of a scientific and cultural treasure. The paintings, purchased shortly after the museum was founded 111 years ago, could be auctioned as soon as Dec. 2 at Sotheby's in New York. The auction house is predicting the works could fetch between $9 million and $15 million. Field anthropologists recommended selling the paintings years ago, saying they were valuable as art but were of little scientific worth. Most of the paintings have been stored unseen for decades.\n"You have to ask what kind of museum you are," John McCarter, the Field's president, said. "If we were an art museum, those would be important paintings for us, but our strategy is different from an art museum's."\nMcCarter said the museum's mission is to collect current ethnographic materials that are at risk of disappearing, rather than storing paintings of indigenous Americans by a European American. Some are questioning the ethics of the museum's decision-making process. Chicago business consultant Edward Hirschland resigned from the museum's board of trustees after a 30-2 vote approving the sale.\n"The rationalizing that has been done to support this sale has been unbelievable," Hirschland said. "They call it 'monetizing a non-performing asset.' I think the museum administration has been blinded by the economic potential of the paintings, the money to be made by selling them."\nWilliam Sturtevant, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., says the Field Museum's assessment of Catlin's paintings as art history and not anthropology is wrong.\nSturtevant said Catlin probably produced the works in the field and then used the images as a guide to make more carefully executed portraits later in the studio. Sturtevant said the Indians likely posed in their finest clothing, holding valued objects in their hands. The decorative beadwork and feathers they wore had tribal significance, as did objects such as tobacco pipes or weapons.\n"When he did his studies from life, he probably was pretty accurate in his portrayal of all that information," Sturtevant said. "In his studio back home after his Western travels, he sometimes added in or removed pieces of jewelry and beadwork (in later portraits) to make them more pleasing artistically."\nThe alterations ruin the value of the copies as ethnographic records, he said.\nCatlin made several trips into Indian country in the 1830s to capture on canvas the tribal people he was convinced would soon be extinct. He wanted to document American Indian culture before it was altered or erased by contact with the invasion of settlers. He painted some of history's most notable Indians, including the Sauk and Fox Chief Black Hawk and his lieutenant White Cloud. The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns nearly 500 paintings by Catlin. All but eight of Field's Catlin paintings have a close copy in the Smithsonian collection. Many believe the Field Museum's paintings are more valuable than most of the Smithsonian's because the ones in Chicago seem to be works Catlin painted directly from life.