Carmine Branagan, director of the National Academy Museum, says strategic structural changes are needed to restore stability. CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Maybe only in a city as art-packed as New York could a place like theNational Academy, whose Beaux-Arts mansion rises on Fifth Avenue right next door to the Guggenheim Museum, seem as modest and obscure as it does.

The nation’s oldest continuously operating artists’ society, the academy has a collection of American painting and sculpture rivaling that of many larger museums in the country, donated by famous members like Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. But for decades the institution has struggled over whether to remain essentially a 19th-century-style club or to become more of a conventional museum. That identity crisis contributed to financial problems that forced it in 2008 to sell two Hudson River School masterpieces, yet even the money raised by that controversial sale, more than $13 million, has not been enough to help the institution live within its means.

Last month the academy’s director, Carmine Branagan, laid off eight people from its 23-member staff, including its senior curator of 19th-century and early 20th-century art, Bruce Weber; two registrars; its director of communications; and its head of facilities. Ms. Branagan, who was recruited in 2008 to help rescue the institution, describes the staff cuts as a result of more than a year of soul-searching about how to bring the academy into the 21st century while making it more of a New York art destination. But others involved in the operations say the cuts were motivated chiefly by continuing money problems, and they criticize Ms. Branagan for elevating an artist and educator with little curatorial experience, Maurizio Pellegrin, to a newly formed position of creative director for both the museum and the academy’s art school....Continue Reading

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