Museums Special Section - A Master Showman’s Old Masters - NYTimes.com
JOHN RINGLING, one of five brothers who created the Ringling Brothers Circus (which later acquired the Barnum & Bailey Circus), was an avid art collector. With a fortune that placed him among the country’s richest men, Mr. Ringling and his wife, Mable, bought thousands of art objects from 1920 to 1930 and created the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla., to display them.
“It is one of the most significant museums in America,” said George Wachter, co-chairman of Old Master Paintings Worldwide at Sotheby’s. “Ringling was a showman, and he was attracted to big, showy pictures.”
Best known for its Baroque Italian and Flemish works, the museum owns one enormous tapestry and five cartoons — preparatory works for tapestries — by Rubens, as well as paintings by van Dyck and by Italian Renaissance masters like Titian and Tintoretto. It also has antiquities, including 2,200 that Mr. Ringling bought from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cesnola collection in 1928.
In 1936, Mr. Ringling willed the property, including his home, Cà d’Zan, to the state and left $1.2 million to support the museum. The museum went through good times and bad, and by 1996, Cà d’Zan had deteriorated so badly — with so many leaks that visitors found buckets on the floor to catch the water — that the museum board closed it for a six-year renovation financed by the state and local fund-raising.
In 2000, the state handed governance of the museum to Florida State University, an arrangement orchestrated by John McKay, then president of the state Senate and a member of the Ringling board, who is expected to be elected its chairman this summer.
“It had been treated like a redheaded stepchild and had not received enough money to meet its potential,” Mr. McKay said. “There are benefits to placing it under the guardianship of a university.” For example, once the museum was governed by the university, the university essentially had to match any gift the museum received.
For nearly a decade, money flowed in from gifts and grants: for a circus museum, new exhibition space and other benefits, and the art museum itself, presided over by the museum director, John Wetenhall.
In 2002, “we got a huge grant of $49 million for expansion through Florida State University,” recalled T. Marshall Rousseau, the museum’s interim director, who is also a Ringling board member. In turn, the museum expanded its endowment, which now holds $24 million, with more pledged.
The Ringling also mounted exhibitions with other museums, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which helped put it on the national map.
But with the financial crisis and the recession came cutbacks and casualties. Because the museum is governed by the university and financed by the state legislature, it appears to have been caught between the two when they struggled over the budget. Last spring, Florida State, which supplies roughly half the museum’s $13.5 million budget, said it might have to stop providing financing.
“The university itself was facing a 25 percent budget cut, bigger even than California,” said Sally McRorie, dean of the College of Visual Arts, Theater and Dance at Florida State. “It was not as if we were a state that had always invested heavily in higher education, so there was not a lot of cushion, and we had to look at budget items very carefully.”
Since the spring, the university and the museum have been seeking strategies for cutting costs and increasing revenue.
Mr. Wetenhall resigned in August. He declined to comment, but several people with knowledge of the situation said he was weary of the political wrangling.
“Closing was never an issue, but the museum needed to find additional sources of revenue,” Mr. McKay said.
The Ringling has cut its budget 20 percent, according to Mr. Rousseau, and has avoided layoffs. Equally important, the museum, its trustees and the university trustees have avoided any devastating battles over the future of the collection, like the one at Brandeis University, where the museum collection was almost sold until an uproar from donors and the public stopped the process.
Much of the collection is protected by the provisions that Mr. Ringling made before his death in 1936.
“He was a populist and stipulated that the art could not be sold, nor could any portion of the facility,” Mr. McKay said. “Otherwise, everything would revert to his heirs.” Art bought since his death is not subject to those provisions.
In recent months, the Ringling has found other means to stabilize its situation. It focuses more heavily on exhibitions drawn from its own collection, rather than relying on art borrowed from other institutions. The current “Gothic Art in the Gilded Age,” for example, is drawn from its own collection.
“I am committed to doing exhibitions focused on our permanent collection,” said Virginia Brilliant, one of the museum’s two curators.
The museum is also strengthening ties to the university. Students can take courses at the museum as part of a graduate program in museum studies. Ms. Brilliant is teaching at Florida State, traveling more than 300 miles to its campus in Tallahassee and sometimes having students come to the museum. The other curator, Matthew McLendon, will join the program in the fall.
In another effort to increase the museum’s profile, this winter the Ringling, with the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, mounted an arts festival and sold 93 percent of the tickets.
Despite the weak economy, the museum is visited by more than 300,000 people a year and has 10,000 members, far more than the average membership of university museums, which is 1,000, according to Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums.
For now, the speculation about closing appears to be over. But the financial pressures remain. Hearings on the state budget resumed this month, and Florida still faces a deficit.
