For Thomas Jefferson University, the issue boiled down to raising a ton of money in one fell swoop.
Solution? Sell Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, in a sizzling art market.
For the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, co-purchaser of Jefferson's asset, the issue amounted to the same thing.
Solution? Sell Thomas Eakins' fine portrait, The Cello Player, and escape onerous long-term debt.
For the academy's partner in the purchase, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the solution to the same conundrum has yet to emerge; but an art sale is almost certainly forthcoming, officials there say.
The Gross Clinic affair has rumbled through the corridors of Philadelphia cultural institutions like an uncontrolled bowling ball. As Jefferson and the academy discovered, institutional selling, or deaccessioning, can generate controversy and raise hosts of questions about cultural identity and how nonprofit institutions safeguard and manage their holdings, according to museum professionals, concerned citizens and public officials.
But the art market tempts. And as Derek Gillman, head of the Barnes Foundation, notes, it's better for institutions to sell into a strong market than a weak one.
Financially troubled Fisk University, the historically black college in Nashville, is now seeking to sell two prize modernist paintings from its famed Stieglitz collection, a bequest of painter Georgia O'Keeffe, widow of photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
The university, arguing severe fiscal hardship, wants to use millions from the sales for gallery renovation, endowment replenishment, operations and faculty support.
The plan has caused anguish to many at Fisk and in the area.
More than a year ago, guardians of the O'Keeffe estate went to court to block the sale or seize the entire collection, given to the university in 1949.
But now a settlement has been negotiated that allows the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., to purchase one of the paintings, O'Keeffe's Radiator Building - Night, New York, for $7 million; the other, Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3, may be sold by Fisk on the open market.
The Tennessee attorney general, however, citing a public interest in keeping the collection intact, last month put a 30-day hold - until next Sunday - on the O'Keeffe settlement and sale in the hope that a buyer will step in to retain the works locally.
In doing so, Attorney General Robert E. Cooper Jr. acknowledged the Philadelphia model, where local institutions were granted a 45-day period to try to match the record $68 million Gross Clinic purchase price.
Cooper, who approved the Fisk settlement contingent on the hold's being implemented, said he suggested the delay after being presented with "two bad choices."
"One was the loss of the core of the collection if I approved," Cooper said. The other: "If I did not approve, it would prove financially difficult for Fisk.
"So I borrowed from the experience of The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia."
Ultimately, such delays hark back to the so-called Waverly criteria, rules governing the export of "national treasures" from Great Britain. There, if an artwork is identified as a treasure by the government and is sold to someone outside the country, a stay ranging from a few months to more than a year may be placed on the export, allowing time for local institutions to match the sale price and retain the work in Britain.
Three government funds provide money toward such purchases, and public fund-raising is often employed, most recently in a successful effort to keep J.M.W. Turner's 1842 watercolor masterpiece, The Blue Rigi, in the country.
The Waverly criteria, in place for half a century, have had some success in keeping art and archaeological treasures in Britain, officials say. But higher-priced works still tend to escape due to funding shortfalls.
"There's not the political will in this country to either put in the public funding to acquire the works or to amend the tax system to allow private philanthropy to do so," said Gerry McQuillan, head of the acquisitions, export and loans unit of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in London.
In Nashville, no serious offers for the O'Keeffe and Hartley paintings have been received, and members of the Fisk community, as well as the regional cultural world, say the collection will be broken up, although O'Keeffe directed the university to retain all 101 paintings as a condition of her bequest.
"There's an outcry in the art community. People who are artists, people who are engaged in the arts, are very, very alarmed by this," said Vivian Green Fryd, a professor of art history at Vanderbilt University. "There's also a recognition that Fisk is having a really hard time financially."
Hazel R. O'Leary, Fisk's president, did not respond to requests for comment last week.
One Fisk faculty member, who asked not to be named, said simply, "I'm sick about it. We were not expecting this. We were not part of this discussion."
Victor Simmons, director of the Fisk's galleries, said the Stieglitz collection, which is in storage because of gallery roof leaks, among other facility failings, was well integrated into the university's art history and studio programs.
"It's an incredible touchstone for the teaching of the history of modernism," he said. "As curator of the gallery, I certainly don't want these paintings to go anywhere. It's a great potential loss not to have the works in the collection."
Nevertheless, he said, "I don't want to see the school crippled" by lack of funding.
Lisa Tremper Hanover, president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, a national service organization, said the ethical guidelines for her organization and for other professional associations in the field generally allowed art sales from collections only if the money will be used to acquire other works.
The Fisk plan, she said, "violates every ethical standard."
Fisk is not a member of the association.
While the university has contemplated selling the entire Stieglitz collection, the current administration has said only two works would be sold.
Hanover wonders about the wisdom of that decision.
"What's to stop them from going to the well next year and selling more?" she said. "They're at the point now where they need to make a decision about deaccessioning all of their collection. If they can't truly care for it and integrate it into the curriculum, sell them all."
In Buffalo, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, well known for its modern collection, set off a particularly nasty firestorm when it announced in November that it would sell off about 200 antiquities and older artworks. Proceeds from the sales - which include a first-century Roman Artemis and stag bronze and a 10th-century bronze South Indian Shiva - are expected to top $15 million.
The work will be sold at Sotheby's beginning later this month, and the proceeds will be used to acquire contemporary work, according to gallery officials.
"The process leading to the decision took two years of discussions among the board of directors and the professional staff," Louis Grachos, Albright-Knox's director, wrote in an e-mail. "People from outside the board were involved in the discussion. We created a national advisory committee, composed of respected professionals, and I personally consulted with the directors of about 30 museums around the country and sought their counsel."
Many in the community, however, were unhappy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis has been instrumental in rallying local opposition to the plan.
"We didn't find out about the decision to make the older art irrelevant until November," he said. "We believe they should have gone to the members beforehand and there should have been community discussion.
"But when we found out about it, the decision had already been made and the contract had already been signed with Sotheby's. We felt there was a real violation of openness and transparency."
That's precisely the issue many members of the Jefferson community groused about when presented with the surprise announcement that The Gross Clinic, an emblem of the school for more than a century, would be sold.
Jefferson alumni were particularly critical of the sale, in part because the painting had been donated to the school in 1878 by alumni.
(Officials at Jefferson last week declined to comment on The Gross Clinic sales process or on plans for the rest of the university's 1,000-work art collection, which includes additional pieces by Eakins; his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins; William Merritt Chase; and other artists as diverse as Man Ray and Salvador Dali.)
At the Pennsylvania Academy, trustees seeking to deaccession work to help pay for The Gross Clinic said The Cello Player was an attractive candidate at least in part because the academy had purchased it and no potentially hurt and angry donor was involved.
But the tight-knit academy community was upset anyway. While officials had warned in December that a sale would have to be made to pay for Gross, they neglected to mention that it might involve one of the academy's best-known canvases - and an Eakins to boot.
What links all these sales and planned sales is the closed circle of decision making.
"I can't think of an instance of a museum saying, 'We're thinking of selling, and it might cause a stir, so let's talk about it,' " said Hanover, who is also director of the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Montgomery County.
"We emphasize transparency in the [ethical] code," said Jason Hall, director of government relations and media affairs at the American Association of Museums, a Washington-based service organization.
But the association has no power to enforce its code.
"Museums are public-trust institutions," said Hall. "They get tax advantages and they get them because they are presumed to serve all of us. . . . If through our actions we diminish that trust, we diminish our ability to fulfill our mission."