Robert Frederick Blum Sanford Robinson Gifford John White Alexander Frederic Edwin Church Museums Send Art to Auction Auction Action: 1979–1988 American Paintings River Stories

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According to the paper, the academy's leadership and board had considered several different solutions to its ongoing budget problems, including selling its Beaux Arts home on Fifth Avenue along with two other buildings and relocating, a move that could have brought the organization $150 million, but that proposal was vetoed by the organization's membership of 337 artists, known as academicians.

Some trustees are now blaming the academy's woes on the artists, who each donate a work to the organization upon becoming members, citing both their failure to help out the museum financially and their inexperience with handling financial matters. Board vice chairman Robert A. Levinson said, “They just live in another world and don’t understand fiduciary responsibility.” He told the Times that the trustees had met last week to discuss changing the organization's constitution to take away financial control from the academicians.

The artists did vote in favor of the deaccessioning of two works from the academy's collection: Frederic Edwin Church’s Scene on the Magdalene from 1854 and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Mount Mansfield, Vermont from 1859, which together brought in $13.5 million. One member, Richard Haas, said the highly criticized measure was taken only with "great trepidation," but another, architect Cesar Pelli, said he thought it was “perfectly fine” and that "museums don’t need to be black holes where every work of art that enters them can never leave.”

The move was highly contested by the board, however. Two trustees resigned when the sale was proposed: board chairman Lawrence A. Larose, and his wife, Janet Y. Larose, who wrote in their resignation letter that the deaccessioning "strikes at the very heart of the Academy’s mission."

John P. Driscoll, owner of Babcock Galleries in Manhattan, says he resigned from the board last year “because of the immovable, unrealistic, hostile, and from my point of view totally unacceptable abrogation of cultural responsibility on the part of the Academicians and their leadership.”

The academy's previous director, Annette Blaugrund, who had supported selling the building, resigned last December. The board struggled to find a replacement, only appointing Carmine Branagan, who has nonprofit experience but none at an arts institution, this month.

Branagan has her work cut out for her. The museum has been dipping into its $10 million endowment, $3 million of which is restricted, to pay basic operating costs and has been running at a deficit for years. Now, as a result of the AAMD's censure, which requires that member institutions cease all collaborations with the academy, planned exhibitions are in danger.  “It actually devastates the academy’s exhibition program,” said Branagan, who added that the academy was in “a compromised and wounded position” and is struggling “to get our footing and move forward.” She said the museum's main problems are lack of direction and fundraising operations. As of now, the organization's only ongoing effort to raise money is an annual gala. “We’re really looking at the place from top to bottom," she said.

The academy hopes to raise $1.5 million by selling two more works, John White Alexander’s Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Hastings from 1901 and Robert Blum’s Study for a Japanese Beggar from 1891, when the market improves.