Have you heard? Randolph College is selling a few paintings.

Silly question. Of course you’ve heard. The Lynchburg school’s efforts to solve its money woes by cashing in valuable art have been written about in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, to name a few. It has drawn the censure of museum associations, the ire of students and the scorn of academics and museum workers, some of whom have resigned in protest.

“It’s not just four paintings. It’s the whole enterprise that is the museum,” said Karol Lawson , who resigned as director of the Maier Museum of Art when George Bellows’ “Men of the Docks,” Edward Hicks’ “A Peaceable Kingdom,” Ernest Martin Hennings’ “Through the Arroyo” and Rufino Tamayo’s “Troubador” were taken away Oct. 8 to Christie’s art auction house in New York.

“Nobody was taking joy in having to make that decision. There really wasn’t any other option,” said college spokeswoman Brenda Edson of selling the paintings. “We still have an amazing art collection.”

Legal wrangling continues. This past Tuesday, a group opposed to the sale, including students, donors and former college employees, filed a motion for an injunction in Lynchburg Circuit Court to stop it.

Amid the finger-pointing and the bitter words, however, something important has been almost ignored:

The art.

Like children in the midst of an custody battle, they sometimes seem like the last thing on anybody’s mind. But their worth, however defined, may be the only thing not in dispute.

In monetary terms, it’s ridiculously high. Bellows’ gritty 1912 masterpiece “Men of the Docks” alone is valued at $25 million to $35 million. Should all four paintings fetch top dollars on the auction block next month, the haul for Christie’s and the college would be more than $45 million.

And what about the paintings? If we’re lucky, they’ll become the property of a major museum and remain on public view. If we’re not, they’ll vanish into a wealthy household.

“All four paintings are of exceptional quality, and we expect keen interest,” Christie’s spokesman Rik Pike said.

Here’s more about them, from some people who know them well:

“Men of the Docks”

Those who argue George Bellows’ masterpiece could be taught to students just as well through slides and photographs should hear Ellen Agnew talk a blue streak.

Literally. “It’s just this bravada streak of thick impasto paint. Every time I looked at it, it would take my breath away,” said Agnew, a former Maier director, and associate director of the museum until August — when she resigned in protest of the sale. Impasto, or layered-on paint, adds a third dimension to a canvas and affects the way it reacts to light. And it’s the sort of thing that is flattened out and lost in reproductions.

“Men of the Docks,” which depicts immigrant laborers standing in the shadow of a hulking freighter on a cold Manhattan morning, has been the Maier’s showpiece since the day it was bought from the artist in the 1920s.

“The heart and soul of the collection,” Laura Katzman said. To Katzman, the painting is distinctly American: “It shows immigrant workers who have come from Europe to seek better opportunities in America.”

It also shows America’s emerging industrial might, represented not only by the freighter, but also by skyscrapers across the water, and the Brooklyn Bridge. “It’s George Bellows’ best painting, in my opinion,” Katzman said.

The painting “is Bellows at his finest,” said Roanoke artist Eric Fitzpatrick, another fan. “When he was at his best, he could say much with a freedom that few could rival.”

Bellows, famous for unsentimental depictions of New York construction scenes and backroom boxing matches, including “Stag at Sharkey’s,” was said to be touched by the school’s efforts to build a collection, and cut his price for “Docks” to $2,500. The students covered it with a fundraising drive — which Edson said was supplemented by school funds.

“The people of Lynchburg bought it for the school,” said Lawson. “And the people of Lynchburg have lost it.”

Edson said selling the valuable Bellows enables them to keep numerous other, less expensive paintings instead.

The Bellows may be not only the most valuable work in the Maier collection, but also one of the most valuable paintings in Virginia. It’s a safe bet Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who is collecting art for her museum in-progress, Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Ark., will be among its suitors next month. Walton visited the college in May.

“I think you’re going to get a lot of bids on it,” Katzman said.

“Peaceable Kingdom”

“I’m partial to animals,” says Amanda Sandos, a former zoo worker. That’s one reason Sandos, now an art student at Randolph College, loves “Peaceable Kingdom,” a Quaker vision of peace by the folk artist Edward Hicks.

Derived from an Old Testament verse (“And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them”), the painting is a pacifist’s vision of a nature in which everybody gets along, from the lion and the lamb to the American Indians and the white men — William Penn can be seen signing a treaty with the Indians to the left. It is simple and sweet and speaks across boundaries of education, language and culture.

“The message was so personal to me,” said Sandos. “That was my favorite piece here. I always went to it first.”

Hicks was a coachmaker and sign painter who later became a Quaker minister. A self-taught artist, he painted more than 100 versions of “Peaceable Kingdom,” which he gave away to family and friends, in the last 20 years of his life. Other versions are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both in New York, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Dallas Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“There are only a handful that are of the quality that Randolph-Macon has,” said Laura Katzman , a former art professor at the college who resigned in protest of the sale. Randolph-Macon Woman’s College is the former name of Randolph College, which changed its name and began admitting men this year. Katzman now teaches at James Madison University.

“Through the Arroyo”

“Through the Arroyo,” undated but acquired by the school in 1929, is a painting of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians riding horseback along a sandy desert wall in 20th century garb.

In the 1920s, “artists were exploring their own country,” said Ellen Agnew. And New Mexico, which had become a state only in 1912, was “sort of exotic.” In previous times, Americans had flocked to Europe to learn their craft.

“It’s very real,” added Agnew of the painting by Ernest Martin Hennings, though it still has a modernist feel — partly, perhaps, because New Mexico’s broad, patchwork landscape has an abstract quality itself.

Hennings, raised in Chicago, was a 1904 graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago . He worked for a while as a muralist and commercial artist before weiner king Oscar Mayer , a Chicago patron of the arts, paid his way to Taos, where the action was. His work often captures New Mexico’s sun-drenched colors.

For Terri Miller, a former student at Randolph, the painting conjures up memories of “cowboy pictures, TV and stories of the west, Indians, ranchers, ponies and pioneers. It seems we Easterners often dream of going west, but only get there through artists such as Hennings. He captures not only a place, but a time.”

“Troubador”

Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo painted “Troubador” at a time when other Mexican painters, such as Diego Rivera , were concerned with social injustice and workers’ rights. Tamayo preferred art for art’s sake, however, and he especially liked to paint peasants.

In “Troudabor,” a man strums a small guitar and sings, while other people stand behind him. In its guitar-playing central figure, and the way his face is broken up into different-colored planes, the painting recalls Picasso.

“It has that cubist element, which we don’t have represented elsewhere,” Agnew said.

Said Lawson: “It’s a particularly fine example of his use of rich, luscious colors.”

It’s something else, too — a broadening of the collection beyond the borders of the United States into Latin America. As such, say former museum officials, it dovetailed with the college’s own efforts to diversify its student body, as well as the changing demographics of the nation.

Taken together, the four paintings “represent the geographic and demographic diversity of America,” Katzman said.