Just what obligation does a school have to hold on to its gifts of artwork?

It's a question that Fisk University has been grappling with for months as it seeks to sell two paintings from its Alfred Stieglitz Collection to raise much-needed funds. At the moment, however, its plans have succeeded only in raising the ire of some art lovers.

The Nashville school is awaiting a court ruling on whether it can sell a Georgia O'Keeffe painting and a Marsden Hartley painting, both part of the 101-piece collection, which was donated to the historically black college nearly 60 years ago by Stieglitz's widow -- O'Keeffe herself.

The collection also includes works by such artists as Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Arthur Dove and John Marin, as well as some of Stieglitz's photography. According to an IRS filing, Fisk's entire art collection was appraised at $31.4 million in 2002.

"I'm sorry that it has come to this, but I support the president in this decision," Denise Billye Sanders, chairwoman of Fisk's General Alumni Association, says of the move by school President Hazel O'Leary. "We're selling to keep the rest of our collection."

O'Keeffe's "Radiator Building -- Night, New York" and "Painting No. 3" by Hartley could fetch as much as $20 million if sold privately, speculates Gerald Peters, president of the Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., which has sold Hartley paintings comparable to "No. 3."

"[They] could easily bring in 10 million each," says Peters, predicting that "Radiator Building" could break a record set by Christie's, which sold O'Keeffe's "Calla Lilies With Red Anemone" for $6.1 million in 2001.

Fisk plans to use the funds to construct an academic building, endow professorships and improve the security at the gallery that holds the remaining collection, says O'Leary, a former U.S. secretary of energy.

"When I got here, it was clear to me that in order to manage well, you have to have enough capital," says O'Leary, who's been at Fisk for two years. The school's financial troubles have existed for decades, and because there are 11 Hartley paintings in the Stieglitz collection, "to let one go continues to make sense," she says. "Radiator Building," which she called an "iconoclastic piece," is the more valuable of the collection's two O'Keeffe paintings.

Funds from the sale also would help rebuild the school's endowment, drawn down twice in the four years before O'Leary's arrival, says Fisk spokesman Ken West. The endowment is valued at about $15 million, he says.

Since the withdrawals totaling $7.7 million, various pieces of art from the Stieglitz Collection have been listed as part of the endowment to make up the difference.

But to fix financial troubles by selling famous artworks received as a gift?

The decision drew public attention last December when Fisk officials went to court to determine ownership of the gift.

Michael Norton, a partner at Bone McAllester Norton, the Nashville law firm representing the school, says Fisk turned to the courts on its own. "No one was telling us we couldn't do this," he says. "But we wanted a good, clear title to deliver to the buyer."

It didn't take long for the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation to challenge Fisk's plans. It objected, citing a 1949 letter in which then-university President Charles S. Johnson promised O'Keeffe that Fisk "will not at any time, sell or exchange any objects in the Stieglitz collection."

University officials cited a New York Times piece by O'Keeffe in December 1949 in which she wrote, "After twenty-five years the [collections] can be sold if the institutions have no further use for them."

Although Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers had no objections to the sale as long as Fisk tried its best to sell the paintings to a Tennessee buyer, a letter from Summers's office to the law firm representing Fisk acknowledges that, based on the correspondence between O'Keeffe and Johnson, "Ms. O'Keef[f]e may have placed certain conditions upon the gift, including a requirement that the collection be exhibited intact and a prohibition against loaning any items from the collection."

Over his lifetime, Stieglitz amassed more than 1,000 works of European and American modern art, which he gave to O'Keeffe with the right to pass on to "one or more non-profit corporations" during her lifetime.

After Stieglitz's death in 1946, O'Keeffe dispersed the collection to six institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The largest gifts went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and Fisk. O'Keeffe donated the art to Fisk at the suggestion of her friend Carl Van Vechten, a writer and photographer who was also a friend of Johnson's, West says.

The letters exchanged between the university and O'Keeffe listed several conditions, says Norton, including that the paintings be hung on white walls, that the collection be displayed at a museum and that Fisk would not lend or sell the art.

"But that was 1949," he says. "We want the court to know that things have changed since then." Now the school needs money and "those kind of conditions have placed a cloud on what we can do with the art."

Says Saul Cohen, president of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which took over the foundation's position in court after that entity turned all its assets over to the museum this spring: "Fisk is not complying with the conditions that Georgia O'Keeffe imposed."

June O'Keeffe Sebring, 78, a niece of the late painter, is a director on the now-defunct foundation's board. Although the sale of the Hartley and O'Keeffe paintings would be a convenient source of money, "I don't think O'Keeffe would have intended it to be that," she says.

The plan has critics in other quarters as well.

"Getting rid of the 'Radiator Building' is like an institution getting rid of an amazing set of scientific papers," says Richard Powell, who heads the department of art and art history at Duke University.

It was Powell who teamed with Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, to curate "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art From Historically Black Colleges and Universities," an exhibit that toured the East Coast in 2000.

About 30 0f the 105 HBCUs have art collections, but "none of them matches the kind of depth and extensiveness of the Fisk collection," Powell says.

"It's really unfortunate that they can't find a way to maintain their legacy and find some other ways of supporting their institution," he says.

This isn't the first time Fisk has considered selling pieces of the collection. In 1985, it decided against a proposal to sell all or part of the collection to pay down its debt and grow an endowment that had fallen from $14 million in 1968 to $3 million in 1984.

Henry Ponder, a former Fisk president who served from 1984 to 1996, says the school instead "made a few friends along the way" and launched a fundraising campaign to address the problem.

"The collection is a priceless object," Ponder says. "Georgia O'Keeffe is dead; you can't make that anymore." People and institutions have money troubles all the time, and, in Fisk's case, "you just have to assume you don't have the art collection and do what you would if you didn't have it," he says.

Too often the fine-art collections at schools are grossly undervalued, says Tina Dunkley, art gallery director at another HBCU, Clark Atlanta University. "And by 'undervalued,' I'm not referring to the market value but to the instrumental value of the collection, the pedagogical value.

"I still say that if there isn't strong visionary leadership on the part of the board and the president with regards to raising funds outside of deciding to sell your soulful goods, I suspect that they could be back in the same position not too soon after -- selling something else."

Counters Fisk spokesman West, "Our core operation is to educate students to be stewards of social and intellectual and institutional power. "While the [collection] is certainly a part of humanizing the character, this is something we need to do," he says.

O'Leary emphasizes that the move would be a "shot in the arm" aimed at, among other things, saving the remaining 99 pieces of the collection. In previous interviews, she's noted that the school is not equipped to maintain a collection of its value and type. And there are more than 3,800 other pieces of art that Fisk owns outside of the Stieglitz collection, O'Leary points out.

Although a small e-mail campaign denouncing the school's plans for the two pieces went on for months, she says it is fair to say that "the majority of the folks understood."

School officials expect a decision in Davidson County Chancery Court this year.

O'Leary believes that the sale wouldn't discourage prospective donors from giving Fisk art in the future. However, "Anybody that's likely to give me a painting, I'd wish they'd give Fisk 40,000 bucks," she says. "What we need to remain competitive is capital."

By Bravetta Hassell, Washington Post