Collection of Detroit Institute of Arts Cannot Be Sold, Its Director Says

Correction Appended

Paul Sancya/Associated Press Rodin's “Thinker” outside the Detroit Institute of the Arts in Michigan.

The director of the Detroit Institute of Arts said on Friday that he believed the museum's collection was “held in the public trust” and could not be sold by the city to help pay down its multibillion-dollar debt, and that he expected the city's emergency manager and his office to reach the same conclusion.

“They're interested in making a healthy and viable Detroit,” the director, Graham W. J. Beal, said on Friday in a telephone interview. “We believe that that kind of action - diminishing our collection, the cultural value - would not be in the long-term interest.”

Mr. Beal's remarks came in response to a report in The Detroit Free Press that Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager appointed to oversee operations in Detroit, was exploring whether the museum's collection of art could be sold to help cover the city's debt of nearly $15 billion.

“We have no interest in selling art,” Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Mr. Orr, told The Free Press. “I want to make that pretty clear. But it is an asset of the city to a certain degree.”

Mr. Nowling added: “We have to look at everything on the table. As much as it would pain us to do it - and it does; I'm a great lover of art and so is Kevyn - we've got a responsibility to rationalize all the assets of the city and find out what the worth is and what the city holds.”

Mr. Beal said the museum had known Mr. Orr was pursuing this course “for about a week.”

“Personally, of course, someone in my position is bound to find that dismaying,” Mr. Beal said. “Quite why they're doing this is not something that I really know.”

He added, however, that he believed Mr. Orr and his staff would conclude that the art could not be sold “when they've looked into the situation in the light of their ultimate goals.”

The Detroit Institute of Arts, which was founded in 1885, has a collection of more than 60,000 works, including pieces by Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Diego Rivera, Alexander Calder and other master artists. When the museum reopened in 2007 after a renovation, Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times that it was “a vulnerable institution in a spirited but depressed town” whose history was “one of modest triumphs mingled with failures.”

The Free Press estimated the market value of 38 of the museum's greatest works at $2.5 billion, with individual paintings like van Gogh's “Self Portrait” valued at $100 million to $150 million.

“As far as we're concerned,” Mr. Beal said, “as objects held in the public trust, they actually don't have a value. I know people find that odd.”

The ability of the emergency manager to sell off the museum's collection was not immediately clear, though Mr. Nowling told The Free Press that Detroit's creditors “can really force the issue.”

But the fact that such a possibility was even being discussed was widely condemned by patrons of the museum and by other cultural institutions.

Thomas P. Campbell, the director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said in a statement on Friday that the “disheartening reports out of Detroit today will undoubtedly shock and outrage the city's residents,” as well as “the millions of people who admire the Detroit Institute of Arts and the entire cultural community who rightly believe that art is a permanent, rather than a liquid, community asset.”

Mr. Campbell added that when New York City faced its own fiscal crisis in 1975 and the nationwide financial crisis of 2008, “the cultural treasures closely identified with our own city were never on the table - never considered an asset that might be cashed in during a crunch to bridge a negative balance sheet.”

“I am sure that many museum directors around the country join me in condemning the Detroit emergency manager's consideration of the D.I.A.'s collection as an asset,” Mr. Campbell said. “This direction should be quickly and firmly rejected. Art for the public is not interim, fungible or liquid.”

Correction: May 24, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of an art critic for The Times. He is Holland Cotter, not Carter.

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/25/2013, on page C2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Detroit Museum's Art Cannot Be Sold, Director Says.