Courtesy Christie's

Randolph College sold Rufino Tamayo's "Troubador" at Christie's in 2008 for $7.2 million. The schol is waiting for the market to improve before selling three other paintings.

George Bellows Rufino Tamayo Ernest Martin Hennings Edward Hicks With Kahlo in Front, Christie’s Latin American Art Sale Fetches $16.8 Million All Around Town Latin American Sales Show Robust Results Newsmakers: 1999–2009

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After announcing that it would sell four paintings from its Maier Museum in an attempt to raise funds, Randolph was served with a temporary injunction filed by opponents of the deal, backed by a $500,000 bond. The college won the right to proceed with the sales, and now Lynchburg Circuit Court judge Leyburn Mosby ruled on Friday that $300,000 of those funds should go to the university and $200,000 should be returned to opponents of the deal.

College president John E. Klein expressed mixed sentiments about the deal. “While we are pleased with this settlement,” he said, “it in no way recovers all of the damages incurred by the college as the result of the injunction preventing the sale of the paintings at a high point in the art market.” The college had tried to sell the works in 2007, when the art market was at its crest.

Klein emphasized this new rulings helps to “provide closure” nevertheless.

So far, only one of the four paintings — Rufino Tamayo’s Troubador — has been sold, making $7.2 million on the block at Christie’s in 2008. The museum plans to sell the three remaining paintings when the market recovers. Those paintings are George Bellows’s Men of the Docks, Edward Hicks’s A Peaceable Kingdom, Ernest Hennings’s Through the Arroyo.

Read more at the Lynchburg News Advance.