Ohio State has seen a number of talented artists pass through its doors on their way to brilliant careers.

A few names that are tossed around with some frequency are American realist painter George Bellows and cartoonist Milton Caniff.

But you’ll have to go farther than campus if you want to see a painting by one of our most famous alumnus, Roy Lichtenstein. Some of the difficulty in locating his work on campus is not because there aren’t any, but because of the lack of an art policy at OSU.

The university is weeks away from having a working first draft of a comprehensive policy on art, according to Robert Haverkamp, assistant vice president of Business and Finance.

Haverkamp was the chair of a committee created to come up with a new art policy for the university and said the new policy should be finished by the start of autumn quarter.

The new policy was modeled after the Wexner Center‘s art policy, which was formally adopted by the Board of Trustees in November 1999.

“It was the Wexner Center that actually encouraged the university to adopt our collection policy to ensure that the care of all art on campus fell under the same guidelines that apply across the museum field,” said Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center.

“We are very pleased that the university wants to adopt our policy,” Geldin added.

One of the reasons it took so long for the university to create an art policy was because of the Communication Workers of America strike in May. “A number of people involved were the same people involved with the strike,” Haverkamp said.

A much bigger reason it has taken the university so long to form a policy is that the university has no real definition of what it considers art.

Haverkamp cited this as the major reason why OSU has no dollar figure for how much art it owns. “One of the things we’ve found is that there are an awful lot of collections that faculty members and offices have. For instance there is a collection of eyeglasses that the College of Optometry has that I never knew they had.”

“Anything given to Ohio State becomes the property of the people of Ohio,” said Dave Ferguson, university spokesman.

“We have art, we have sculptures, we literally have buildings that are pieces of art,” Ferguson said. “How do you appraise Orton Hall? It’s a piece of art. If I’m not mistaken, it’s on the national registry.”

Patrick Maughan, director of Security Services, likened the amount of people it would take to appraise all of the University’s numerous and varied collections to the PBS TV show “Antiques Roadshow.”

“Someone who is maybe good with 20th century oil paintings may not know anything about bronze statues,” Maughan said.

Maughan, who subscribes to Internet news groups on art, said, “The other thing that happens is that prices fluctuate.”

Treasury Management Officer Ernie Holladay said as far as he knows, “We have not requested any specific appraisals of specific artwork.”

Haverkamp said developing a definition for what is considered art at OSU might be too ambitious. “The major purpose of the policy is to make sure that we protect all this stuff, so that it can be used and accessed by the students and faculty.”

“One of the things that I think will come out of this when the policy is adopted, is an inventory,” Haverkamp said.

An inventory sounds similar to a project that Security Services has been working on for the last five years called Reducing the Risk Database.

In a sample image of the database from the Security Services Web site, a sculpture is shown in front of the James Cancer Hospital titled “Hope.” It is accompanied by information, such as a map showing its location, what the sculpture is made of, how the university acquired it and a picture of the sculpture. Several fields, such as value, are left blank.

Maughan, who is in charge of the database, said there are three goals he would like to see the database accomplish.

“Our main focus is to raise awareness in the community. There are hundreds of buildings on campus, if you’re aware of pieces of art or objects or collectibles or historic memorabilia – it doesn’t have to be valuable, but if it has some place in the university’s history – let us come out and get a visual image of that, and then if it would come up missing, we at least have a place to start.”

“Also if there was a fire and a piece was damaged, if we have a good photographic image and could enhance that; it could be used to restore the piece back to its original condition,” Maughan said.

Maughan said the third goal would be a risk management decision, including a security evaluation and a cursory environmental evaluation. “If we become aware that something has gone up exponentially in value, then we may need to notify our insurance carrier.”

Maughan gave 70 percent as a rough estimate of the amount of items the university has catalogued out of what they know is out there, and said the goal now is to do a new round of inquiries to find the items that they don’t know exist.

This includes contacting individual departments to get them to add their collections to the database.

Ferguson said according to the new policy, OSU has no plans for a centralized department to handle its art and artifacts. Instead, they will rely on the deans of the colleges and individual faculty and staff to be the “caretakers” of the university’s art collections.

“If a collection is housed in the College of Engineering, then it’s the dean of the college who would be responsible for those objects,” Haverkamp said.

He added, “Once the policy is adopted, I think one of the first things would be to send something out to all the chairs and deans and say, ‘We’d like you to fill out a form of what you’ve got.'”

“I would think that we’ll have a working draft within a month or so,” Haverkamp said. “It’s mainly a matter of getting the pieces put together.”

Haverkamp said if all goes according to plan, the committee should be ready to go to the Board of Trustees with the policy sometime in the fall.

The need for a comprehensive university art policy became apparent in February when news broke out that an Ohio Union employee had sold a valuable watercolor painting, “Children at the Beach” by native Columbus artist Alice Schille.

The painting, a gift from the class of 1911, was sold to a local art dealer for $50,000. It was valued at $150,000.

The watercolor was bought back by an anonymous “friend” of the university and is now a part of the Wexner Center’s private collection.

At the time, the university had no art policy impeding the sale of art. Ferguson is quoted as saying the university’s “checks and balances for those sale are not good.”

Ferguson said that adopting the Wexner Center’s policy was a “responsible” solution. “What we need to have – which I understand the Wexner Center has – is an acquisition process and a deacquisition process, so that in any deacquisition, you have to go through a series of steps that people have to sign off on, and then it’s OK to sell it or give it away or whatever.”

A book on Schille written by well-known critic of American art, William H. Gerdts, is scheduled to be published next spring. Jim Keny, owner of the Keny Gallery in German Village and S
chille expert who helped produce the book, said the value of Schille’s painting is expected to increase significantly after the book’s publication.

Keny wondered if some sort of museum might be a good answer to OSU’s problem of what to do with its art. “It makes sense for a major institution like OSU to have some entity to keep track of artwork so that something like that doesn’t happen again,” Keny said.

“OSU has a very rich artistic tradition. Many artists have studied and taught there, and OSU owns quite a few desirable objects,” Keny said. “It’d be nice to let the public see them.”

Keny said he thought OSU was one of the only Big Ten schools without its own art museum.

If you are thinking that the Wexner Center is the university’s art museum, think again.

The Wexner Center does not consider itself a museum, because it is not a collecting institution. Geldin said, “The Wexner Center is most appropriate as a lab and a space for the creation and presentation of new art.”

According to the history section of the Wexner Center for the Arts Collection Policy, when the center opened in 1989, it replaced the University Gallery of Fine Arts at OSU. “As part of this institutional evolution, the Wexner Center assumed possession and stewardship of the University Gallery’s permanent collection of art works, then consisting of some 3,000 works of art.”

The policy goes on to say that at present, “the collection serves a secondary role in the Center’s programs in the visual, media and performing arts. While it is made available to University students and scholars for study, and occasionally drawn upon for exhibitions at the center or elsewhere, it is largely dormant.”

Which brings us back to those Lichtensteins. Roy Lichtenstein received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts at OSU before he went off to New York to become a pop art sensation. He died in 1997.

The university owns about 10 of his works, most of which are limited edition, signed and numbered lithographic prints and silkscreen prints, said Darnell Lautt, director of Marketing and Communications for the Wexner Center. Lautt said that out of the 10, he thought that there was one original.

According to Lautt, when Gordon Gee was president of OSU, he had several of the Lichtensteins hanging in his office because he was a fan of the artist. After Gee’s departure, they were taken to the Wexner Center, where they are kept in the Center’s museum-grade storage facility.

“It is not practical for someone to walk in off the street and say, ‘I want to see a Lichtenstein,’ but there are provisions for someone doing scholarly research,” Lautt said.

Lautt said it was sometimes hard to strike a “balance of putting it out where it’s viewable and making sure that you are adequately protecting the work too.”

“Rather than being a place that collects and holds art, we are using our energies and resources to support the artists in the creation of new works,” Lautt added.

Haverkamp said one of the goals of the new art policy is to get across “the idea that the whole University is a museum, and without getting into what is housed where, make sure that regardless of where a piece of art or an artifact is housed, the same care and attention is going to be given to maintaining, preserving, using, and ultimately – if you dispose of it – how you dispose of it.”

Both Ferguson and Haverkamp said one of the main disadvantages of a museum is that some students would have a harder time accessing the smaller collections that were housed in their individual colleges.

Referring to the College of Optometry’s collection of celebrity eyewear, Haverkamp said, “The problem is, that for optometry students, it’s good to have those historical objects there where the students can get at them.”

“We’re not just talking about art, we’re talking about a lot of stuff,” Ferguson said, “We’re talking about a huge number of things, some of which you can’t hang on a wall.”

Ferguson, referring to the Schille painting, called the prospect of a museum “a gross overreaction to an incident, as serious as it was, and which needs attention. Is that really how we want to be spending our money or do we want to be doing other things with it? And I clearly would come down on the side of other things.”

Besides the cost of building a museum, one of the major reasons Ferguson cited as to why OSU does not need a museum to house its art was “the wonderful Land Grant mission of Ohio State, and that is to share knowledge with the people, with the public. Our mission is to generate information, generate treasures and share them. By having art out here like this you generate discussions, you generate appreciation.”

Ferguson went on to say, “At almost any building on this campus, you can see works of art by Ohio State people, by Ohio citizens.”

Just so long as you’re not looking for a Lichtenstein.