"Support the DIA", pleads the website of the Detroit Institute of Arts. It might seem like the kind of message every museum puts out, inviting people to become friends or make donations – but under the civilised tone is a note of panic.
The DIA is the first of the US's great museums ever to face the break-up of its collection for financial reasons. With Detroit officially bankrupt, creditors are pressurising the city to sell off some of the museum's first-rate art. The fatal coincidence of a broke city and a rampaging art market makes this temptation very real. Can Detroit's art museum survive?
This is an extraordinary image of the US in decline. There are many amazing things that strike visitors to the country, but the superb museums that exist across this vast nation are among its glories. These museums are monuments to the rise of the US to the forefront of global economies between 1880 and 1960. Palaces of culture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Menil Collection in Houston bear witness to the largesse of triumphant capitalists in an age of robber barons, oil wells and skyscraper ambition.
The Detroit Institute of Arts is a classic example. In its expansive Rivera Court is a mural by Diego Rivera – the Marxist painter who, paradoxically, was in demand to decorate citadels of American wealth in the 1930s. Rivera's mural is a homage to the workers in Detroit's motor industry. The success of that industry loaded Detroit's art museum with riches, just as the industry's demise now threatens it.
So what are the artistic riches Detroit's creditors are salivating over? This museum's outstanding collection includes one of the most celebrated American paintings, Cotopaxi (1862) by Frederic Church. It also boasts Van Gogh's Portrait of Postman Roulin (1888), The Three Skulls (c1900) by Cezanne and Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875).
Just to name these paintings is to realise that the DIA really is one of the US's great art galleries. Will it now be broken up by the very market forces that created it in the first place?
I can't helping thinking this has the seed of a great American novel about money, culture and tragedy. Let's hope it has a happy ending and that American civilization will triumph over American market savagery.
