Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert landscapes leave the viewer with the impression that here is an artist who understands the way time changes a thing. So it is ironical that a judge in Nashville, Tenn., is blocking efforts by Fisk University — to which the artist gave a 105 works of art— to sell two of those paintings. Fisk, the college that educated W.E.B. Du Bois, received the paintings in 1949 on the promise that it would display the entire collection. What time has done is seen the value of the artwork soar enormously, and Fisk currently has it in storage, fearing that it does not have the resources to provide the security the collection warrants.

The case catches our eye because the question of de-accessioning comes up now and again in New York, most recently in the dispute over Kindred Spirits. That was the painting by Asher Durand that was sold by the New York Public Library to Alice Walton. The sale created an enormous hubbub in the pages of the New York Times, which reckoned it, rather than the trustees of the Library, should decide what, if any, paintings the library ought to be permitted to sell and to whom they ought to be able to sell them and at what price. Now, in the Fisk case, that role is being taken up by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation.

It strikes us that Fisk is being a model of responsibility here. Only about 30 persons a day were going to see the paintings, before they were put into storage. Fisk hasn’t moved to break up its O’Keeffe holdings. It is proposing to sell but two of the 105 paintings and photographs. It proposes using the sale to increase its endowment and improving its departments of math and science. The judge in the case, Ellen Hobbs Lyle of the chancery court in Tennessee, has put herself forward not only as a chancellor but as an art critic. She has ruled that one of the paintings Fisk wants to sell — of O’Keeffe’s iconic radiator building in New York — is “the signature piece of the collection.”

That will strike many as, with all due respect to the chancellor, ridiculous, particularly since by no means all of the 105 pieces that O’Keeffe gave to Fisk are O’Keeffes. All but four of the pieces were originally part of the art collection of O’Keeffe’s husband, the photographer and collector, Alfred Stieglitz. The rest were from O’Keeffe’s personal collection. Fisk says the conditions under which it contracted not to sell the paintings do not apply to the pictures it is proposing to sell, which are from O’Keeffe’s collection, and not her husband’s holdings. A trial is going to be held next month. What is of interest in the case is the authority of the governing boards of not-for-profit institutions that hold art to exercise the judgment entrusted to them.