TWO DISTURBING BUT contrasting examples of museums selling objects from their collections have occurred in recent weeks. One concerns the sale of a single painting from a British regional gallery; the other, the intended sale during the course of this year of a substantial group of works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, to support its future acquisitions policy. Both raise questions about the very different traditions that have evolved in Britain and in the United States with regard to the propriety of de-accessioning.

In Britain it is rare to find public museums and galleries looting their own collections. More common is the sale of objects by churches, educational institutions and charitable foundations which find themselves financially embarrassed or eager to boost a dwindling endowment; for this, the conditions of wills and bequests are often overturned. In the US by contrast, hardly a month goes by without the appearance in the saleroom of works sold from prestigious museums. In the last eighteen months alone, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago have all sent works to auction, mostly of considerable quality. The invariable justification for this is to improve the collection in other areas. Whether this is actively pursued is another matter; we shall probably wait in vain for an announcement from the County Museum, for example, as to how it has spent the millions of dollars raised at auction by one of its three fine Modiglianis. Gaining much less public attention is the steady flow into the salerooms, usually in London, of twentieth-century British art consigned by US museums. Paintings by, among others, Augustus John, Sickert, Bomberg, Stanley Spencer and Bacon have all gone under the hammer in the last decade or so. It is not hard to detect in some of these decisions an element of chauvinism in a period of cultural retrenchment.

The proposed sales from the Albright-Knox Gallery are not yet known in detail and comment can only be provisional until the complete catalogue of what is being de-accessioned is published later this month. But a press release from Sotheby’s, New York, indicates that the great majority of the lots consists of non-American works. These include Roman, Chinese, Indian and medieval European objects which can no longer be accommodated within the Gallery’s ‘recommitment to [its] core mission “to acquire, exhibit and preserve both modern and contemporary art”’. It is true that the Albright-Knox is famous for its modern collection – from Gauguin’s Yellow Christ to great examples of Abstract Expressionism. However, it might reasonably be thought that its not inconsiderable holdings of earlier art might play an important role in its educational and interpretative programmes, as well as giving pleasure to visitors. An idea of what might ‘replace’ the sold works can be gained by a sample of the Gallery’s recent acquisitions on its website, works about which even the most robust supporter of the dernier cri might well be sceptical.

The reputation of the Manchester-born painter L.S. Lowry (1887–1976) is very much a homegrown phenomenon and more or less confined to Britain where his paintings fetch handsome prices and where his life and work are celebrated in Salford’s Lowry museum. In 1951 the nearby Bury Art Gallery and Museum bought A river bank, a typical example of Lowry’s industrial landscapes, for £175, a purchase endorsed by the artist himself. The painting has long attracted great local affection alongside some of the outstanding nineteenth-century paintings in the founding Wrigley bequest for which the Gallery is renowned. Late last year, Bury Metropolitan Borough Council consigned the Lowry to Christie’s where on 17th November it fetched £1.4 million, almost double its top estimate. Protests in the months before the sale, including a warning to Bury Council from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, swelled to an outcry after it. Anger was expressed not only at the sale of the picture but, more particularly, at the Council’s reasons for selling it. The loss of the Lowry to Bury might have been borne more equably if the Council had made the sale to further the collection and prestige of the Art Gallery itself. In fact the money was raised to help resolve the Council’s £10 million budget deficit for public services in 2006–07. Local disapproval has been vociferous and comments on the website of the Manchester Evening News and elsewhere in the press have been damning – the sale was an example of ‘short-term thinking’, ‘a treacherous disposal’, ‘a theft of art belonging’ to the people of Bury. Other comments pointed out that if the Museums Association suspended Bury Art Gallery for breaching ethical conduct, the consequences for future help and funding would be grave. Bury pre-empted the Museums Association’s almost certain decision to suspend it by resigning its membership. Subsequently, the Association severely reprimanded the Gallery and, at a meeting of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, to take place shortly after we go to press, Bury’s accredited museum status is certain to be removed. This does indeed have serious consequences and Bury will find itself in the wilderness as far as such bodies as the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund are concerned.

The case of Lowry’s River bank is, fortunately, extremely rare. But this might not always be so. In a recent report on collecting, conducted by the Art Fund, it was revealed that, of the three hundred museums surveyed, about sixty per cent were unable to spend any money on purchases in 2005–06 and, more worryingly, eighty-four per cent supported the de-accessioning or disposal of objects in their care. In the prevailing wintry climate in which regional museums are struggling, and with the looming certainty of budget cuts in government aid, the temptation for local authority museums to ‘help themselves’ from their own collections is a very real one. A tightening of the regulations on de-accessioning is now an urgent priority.