After all my hemming and hawing about getting information from the Seattle Art Museum on the objects it sells from its collection to fund new objects for its collection—a transaction called "deaccessioning"—I found three of the museum's sales, dated May 24, buried, but very much publicly available, in the Sotheby's online archive.

The works are Roses and Gloucester Fantasy, both late oil paintings by American modernist Marsden Hartley, and the pastel on paper Françoise in a Square-Backed Chair, Reading by Mary Cassatt. They went for $1,352,800, the Cassatt bringing in the highest price at $548,000. (Buyers are confidential.) I haven't seen these in person, and frankly, neither have many people. According to exhibition records, they've been in storage the entire time SAM has owned them, since they were donated in the late 1950s/early 1960s. There is no record of Roses ever being exhibited in a museum; the auction record of Gloucester Fantasy indicates it was seen in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum in 1965 as part of the show The Seashore in Paintings of the 19th and 20th Centuries (!); and Françoise was up at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie in the 1920s.

"We wanted to use these minor works... to help us acquire major works of American art," American art curator Patti Junker wrote in an e-mail. (SAM has three other Hartleys, including the great Painting No. 49, Berlin, and five Cassatts.)

The loss doesn't bother Hartley scholar (and former Tacoma Art Museum chief curator) Patricia McDonnell, who remarked delicately about Roses and Gloucester Fantasy, "We all have good days in the office, and bad days."

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Last week, the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott wrote a right-on story asking, "Why Has Maya Lin Retreated from the Battlefield of Ideas?" I wish I'd thought to ask that in print when Lin was here as this year's big commissioned star at the Henry Art Gallery.

Her installations, with one exception (the three-dimensional grid of an underwater mountain in Water Line), were gimpy and irrelevant—poor substitutes for real contributions to contemporary art, as commissions of this scale ought to be. Her interviews were thin, and everyone I've spoken to who attended her lectures was struck by Lin's lack of insightfulness.

The only time the exhibition really moved me was recently, when I found out from the Henry how much it had all cost: $288,000. That may make it the highest-priced exhibition the museum has ever put on—spokeswoman Betsey Brock said she didn't know. The cost included $90,000 to pay for a crew of 16 fabricators.

Every few years, the Henry commissions a major exhibition from a contemporary artist. It's a noble act with plenty of risk involved, and the Henry can't entirely be blamed for a dud. But let's not pretend this one was an achievement. It was sad, small, disappointing, and very, very expensive.

jgraves@thestranger.com