January 2009

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The sale last year by Bury Council of L.S. Lowry’s A Riverbank from its museum provoked widespread anger. The painting (Fig. 1), consigned to auction to help offset the council’s budget deficit, fetched £1.25m, nearly double the price anticipated. The sale prompted alarm that it could set a dangerous example and propelled the emotive issue of deaccessioning – the sale or disposal of works from a museum’s permanent collection – into the headlines.

In the UK there is a strong presumption against deaccessioning. National institutions are restricted by the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act; other museums take their cue from the Museum Association’s Code of Ethics. Following a period of conusltation and research, the ma will present suggestions for revisions to the code at its agm in October. It proposes to make it easier for museums to undertake ‘responsible disposal’; if approved, the changes will come into effect in early 2008. A change has already been made to the statutory restrictions on deaccessioning to enable the return of human remains, and it is expected that a further amendment, to cover ‘spoliated’ items – Nazi loot – will follow.

To gauge current feeling, apollo conducted an anonymous telephone survey of 50 museum and gallery curators across the UK. They were asked: ‘Should British museums be allowed to deaccession works of art, providing that appropriate safeguards are in place?’ We found that 57% were in favour, as long as – and this point was emphatic – specific safeguards were imposed.

The first argument in favour of deaccessioning points to the severe difficulties that museums currently face in properly managing their collections. Limited display space, costly storage and already stretched staff resources mean that collections are not being used to their best effect. It is argued that disposal is therefore an essential tool because it allows a collection to evolve, and for a museum to best carry out its function it must take decisions about disposals in the same way that it exercises judgement over acquisitions. Those both for and against disposal worry that curators may make mistakes and items of importance may be lost forever. But if curators can make mistakes with disposal it is also logical that mistakes have been made with acquisitions in terms of their quality or relevance. Objects that fall into this category are obvious candidates for evaluation.

The National Maritime Museum’s Collective Reform Project best exemplifies effective disposal. Over the past eight years the museum has undertaken a systematic, open-ended project of re-evaluating the objects in its store-rooms by assessing their relevance to the collection, their condition and whether or not they are duplicates. All items selected for disposal are offered to other maritime museums and only if unwanted will they be put up for sale. For example, in 2001 the museum decided that the 1907 steam-paddle tug Reliant (Figs. 2 and 3) was too costly to preserve and store in relation to its historical importance. It was broken up and its components dispersed to various maritime museums (the nmm retained some elements), freeing nearly 1000 square metres of storage space and saving £200,000 a year on storage costs, money that was put back into the project. In the museum’s opinion, this rationalisation process has benefitted it in several ways: it has produced a digitised inventory, resolved severe storage issues, improved public access by the dispersal of objects to more appropriate museums, and has generated income to help finance the project. Margarette Lincoln, director of collections and research at the National Maritime Museum, told apollo: ‘We are very fortunate that we can shape our collections in this way. A totally illogical situation can build up where you keep things that are not worth keeping but we feel that safeguards are essential and with an agreed process it is fine to deaccess.’ These sentiments echo the Museum Association’s 2005 report Collections for the Future, which states ‘responsible museums cannot keep spending public resources caring for objects that will never be enjoyed or used’.

A second argument that was made to apollo is that contemporary art collections would benefit from being able to exchange lesser works by a living artist for pieces that improve the representation of the artist. The idea is currently causing friction between Tate and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (mla), the government’s lead strategic agency for museums. The Tate’s trustees are reluctant to accept the mla guidelines, which require a work be first offered to other museums, because disposal in this instance would involve a direct exchange with the artist. In response, the mla has only ‘provisionally’ listed Tate on its register. This has potentially serious consequences for Tate, since the mla has proposed that unregistered museums should not be eligible to acquire works accepted by the government in lieu of tax. The mla reasons that it is difficult to get local museums to conform to deaccessioning guidelines – Bury Council being a case in point – if national museums are exempt. This suggests a need for guidelines that allow condemnation of an outright failure of stewardship, as at Bury, while allowing the quality of collections to be improved, as Tate proposes. That different institutions need to deaccess for different reasons was a key point made by the curators who talked to apollo. The relaxation of the rules proposed by Tate is very different from suggestions that world-class study collections should be thinned out to make space and ease resources. Safeguards need to differentiate between the priorities of different types of collection.

What safeguards do curators propose? It was suggested that as a starting point a work should only be considered for disposal if it did not fit in its current collection, and only after museums had first refusal could it go to auction. It should not be allowed to leave the UK. Everyone agreed that deaccessioning should never be seen solely as a revenue-generating tool. A particular concern was raised about university museums, as it is feared that they are vulnerable to demands for sales to raise funds for the university. Between 1993 and 1995, for example, a college of the University of London, Royal Holloway, sold from its collection works by Gainsborough, Constable and Turner (Fig. 5) , in order to pay for building maintenance. This was contrary to the express wish of the college’s founder that the art collection he created for it be kept intact.

The example is pertinent because donors can be deterred from making gifts to institutions that deaccess. For example, the John Rylands Library in Manchester lost an important loan collection (from the Earl of Crawford) as a result of selling books in 1988 and has since had difficulty attracting donors.

Art Fund findings in 2005 revealed that nearly 75% of museums said that the most common method of acquiring had been through gifts. But despite despondency over acquisitions funding, coupled with a rising art market, all curators were insistent that a formula needs to be found to enable curatorial-driven disposals where appropriate. The question remaining is whether the museum sector can define a robust working policy that will allow this to happen.

Directors and trustees should be wary of deaccessioning, says John Mallet. They are responsible for collections they may not fully understand, and need courage to resist pressures from government.

O nly a fool would argue that absolutely nothing added to a museum’s collection must ever leave it. Objects that have decayed beyond hope of repair are obvious candidates for deaccessioning. Fakes, on the other hand, should nearly always be retained, because they are an essential tool for identifying related forgeries. Objects that no longer serve a museum’s current objectives are a doubtful case. One feels increasingly wary about the ability of museum trustees and directors to take long-term views, now that they constantly draw up new ‘mission statements’.

As keeper of ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum during the 1980s I do, however, recall our giving to the British Museum a quantity of Greek, Roman and Egyptian material judged in excess of our remit to display examples of ancient design (we retained enough for that); we received no money, and there was an understanding that the British Museum would pass on to other public collections such pieces as it did not wish to acquire. This seems to me an acceptable form of deaccessioning, to use that ugly but unavoidable neologism.

Pressures from political masters are an ever-present threat. During the high noon of Thatcherism I recall a deputy chairman of the V&A’s trustees calling us keepers together to discuss deaccessioning. Here, it must have seemed to him, was a handy way of raising money to offset the steady decrease in government funding. When I asked why we were now being asked to consider this, I was told ‘It’s government policy to discuss it.’ I had naïvely supposed the function of trustees was to hold governmental pressure at arm’s length, but for their part the trustees knew only too well that, under a new act of parliament, they had been appointed by the Prime Minister. Fortunately, the British Museum and a few other national museums escaped rule by trustees appointed solely by government; but even for those boards, pressure can be considerable.

As governments have become increasingly interested in museums, they have imposed on them ‘performance indicators’ of the crudest kinds, making no allowance for those comparatively rare visitors, such as designers and engineers, who may take away from a museum visit an idea that might transform an industry, or scholars who may prompt us to revise our whole conception of an historical society. Creative or scholarly visitors do not want collections thinned, nor to be told what deserves attention, nor to have displays laid out in accordance with prescriptive ‘themes’. The pressure to make museums ‘accessible’ by suchlike populism is having the paradoxical effect of pushing an increasing proportion of the collections into storage inaccessible to the public.

Once objects are stored, the pressure to dispose of them increases. If visitors cannot see objects, why not sell them and spend the money on a single masterpiece of greater interest to the public? Or why not send them on loan to some less fortunate museum, where the public could enjoy them? The second of these proposals, which is in theory reversible, has a superficial attraction, assuming the borrowing museum to be adequately staffed and competently administered (quite an assumption now that local authorities are hunting for economies); however, both proposals create serious impediments to gaining understanding of whole categories of art. The British Museum and the V&A were formed as study collections and would be greatly diminished by such dismemberment.

One must here draw an important distinction between different kinds of museum collections. It is easier to justify deaccessioning from many museums in the usa than it is from older museums in the uk. The museums of North America have relied far more than those in the uk on gifts from rich but not always well advised collectors, and the system of offsetting such gifts against tax has encouraged some donations of uneven quality, or that seriously duplicate what the receiving institutions already hold. Many such donors or their heirs are only too happy, once they have received their tax benefit, to countenance sales, provided the funds raised are applied to purchases.

This has seldom been the case in the national museums of the uk, where the role of the curator in forming collections has usually been larger, and where gifts and bequests have often been turned down or accepted selectively. This has permitted over a period of time the assembling of objects, not all masterpieces but which, taken together, allow appreciation and study in depth of design, techniques or makers. Even curators do not always share the priorities, knowledge and tastes of their predecessors, whose collections they can ignorantly mar through deaccessioning.

Display of the V&A’s encyclopaedic collections has in the past enabled it to act as a study collection for the entire world. One now waits anxiously to see whether that museum’s fine displays of silver and gold are to be more fully complemented than at present by displays of complete series of objects in copper, brass and pewter, or by display of its important holdings of arms and armour. What, too, about displaying more of its great collections from the Indian sub-continent?

The V&A holds the world’s most comprehensive collection of ceramics; is this to be reduced to being just another collection of masterpieces? If such a policy had been pursued in the recent past the identification of products from such 18th-century porcelain factories as Limehouse, Vauxhall and Isleworth might have been indefinitely postponed, and the porcelain of these factories, wrongly identified, sold off as surplus to requirements.

It is therefore peculiarly worrying that Mark Jones, the director of the V&A, of all museums, should recently have been putting himself forward, to a parliamentary select committee, to readers of the journal of the National and Decorative Fine Arts Societies and at a debate in front of students at the Courtauld Institute, as favouring disposal of undisplayed objects. Many such objects in his care are languishing, at least temporarily, in an obscurity to which he himself has banished them. The remedy for this self-inflicted problem is not deaccessioning but provision, on site, of visitable storage. There is precedent for this in the way light-sensitive objects such as drawings and textiles are already treated.

It goes without saying that objects are usually sold at the moment when interest in them has declined, and with it their monetary value, so that relatively small sums are raised by the sale of objects that will later be sorely missed. One remembers how, just after World War ii, Pre-Raphaelite paintings were sold off for scandalously low prices by the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight.

What can be done to safeguard against such mistakes? Trustees who reflect only too well the views of the cheese-paring governments that appoint them are evidently an unreliable brake on directors with short contracts, desperate to raise money for some eye-catching project. Internal boards set up to review individual proposals for deaccessioning can experience pressure to carry out the wishes of the power that appoints them. Even where given or bequeathed under stringent conditions, objects may not be adequately protected by the Charity Commission, which has recently been proving a weak defender of terms of gift. Put like this, the situation sounds desperate. However, before dealers cross the oceans bid for paintings in the National Gallery, we in the uk can console ourselves that a free press still affords us some protection from ill-considered sales, provided that we, the public, remain vigilant.

John Mallet was guest curator of ‘Xanto’ at the Wallace Collection, London, earlier this year

From an American perspective, the hostility aroused in the uk by deaccessioning is odd, as the principle is taken for granted by us museums. But are disposals there always uncontentious, asks Samson Spanier?

When disposing of works in their collections, American art museums take as their guide the 2001 statement of professional practice by the Association of Art Museum Directors. This insists that income from deaccessions must be used only for new acquisitions. Museums with historic collections other than art are guided by the code of the American Association of Museums, which is very similar to that of the aamd, although it offers some scope for spending the proceeds on conservation. These statements are clear, but in practice there are many shades and hues of deaccession in America, which can be organised into three categories.

First, sales do occur to raise income that is not used for new purchases. A museum can function successfully outside aamd or aam membership, and their guidelines are not legally binding. All American museums (with the arguable exception of those in Washington) are private or partly private institutions and – unlike national museums in the uk – their deaccession policies are not controlled by government. For example, in December 2005 the Providence Athenaeum, Rhode Island – technically a library, not a museum – sold a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America to enlarge its endowment, not to buy new works. However, in order to do so it had to win a lawsuit brought by some of its members attempting to block the sale.

Such outcries help to make it difficult for museums to commit such a straightforward flouting of the guidelines. In 2005, for example, the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, reversed a decision to sell its best painting, Georg Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun (Fig. 9), after public protests. There seems to have been no significant deaccession outside aamd guidelines by a major art museum in the past generation.

The second type of deaccession involves the entire holdings of a department being sold to improve or create a different one. This is entirely within aamd guidelines, which state that museums must deaccess in the spirit of the their ‘mission’, for missions can be reinterpreted and changed. This type of deaccession can

be profoundly transforming, and is often criticised for allowing the disposal of objects that do not conform to present-day taste. In 1995, for example, the New York Historical Society, as part of a change in its mission, sold most of its Italian and north European paintings with no intention of collecting in the area again (some European pictures were retained, usually because they have a significant American provenance). Very recently, the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, has changed its mission from a largely encyclopaedic art museum to one solely of contemporary art. Masterpieces of European, Indian and Chinese art have been sold (Figs. 4 and 7).

Most American museums, and all the major ones, deaccess in the third manner: in order to acquire other works of art that strengthen the collection without changing the museum’s mission. This practice encompasses different methods and policies, which range from the almost irreproachable to the reasonable but contentious. First, there is the sale of poor or damaged works that cost money to store yet would never be displayed. The Getty Trust recently sold 22 paintings fitting this description (Fig. 6; although some outsiders have argued that these paintings would be better described as middling rather than poor, so were not evidently prime deaccession material).

The next sort of disposal is the sale of an inferior work to acquire a superior one of the same type. This often happens in print rooms, where a better version of a print is easy to identify. This initiative can be applied much more broadly. An average work by an individual artist can be sold for a finer work. Or the holdings of a particular period can be improved by the sale of one of several works by one artist in order to fund the acquisition of an artist who is not represented in the collection.

More contentious is the question whether a museum should sell a work from one department in order to fund acquisitions by another. Some curators see such an initiative as entirely in keeping with the aspirations of an encyclopaedic museum; critics see it as the first step towards the second type of deaccession, discussed above, where an entire department might be disposed of, as has happened at the Albright-Knox.

Some museums have sold all works of a particular medium. The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, sold all its Old Master drawings in 1987 on the grounds that since the holding was small it was not sufficiently useful, and that the proceeds could be used to improve the strong paintings collection.When it reopened the last of its Greek and Roman Galleries earlier this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, had to borrow ancient coins for the displays from the American Numismatic Association, as the museum had disposed of its coin room, partly to raise funds to acquire the Euphronios vase.

Two other factors have a bearing on whether a disposal is reasonable. The first is geographical: an institution that provides a community with its only museum-quality art is more likely to be criticised for closing a department, as the Albright-Knox has discovered. The second factor is respect for the wishes of donors. Some curators fear that disregard for donors’ wishes when a gift is sold may deter possible future benefactors. One solution is to ensure that the name of a donor whose work has been sold is attached to a new object acquired with the proceeds.

The manner in which a museum makes decisions and policies on deaccessioning is largely a matter of procedure, about which the aamd is not prescriptive.

It does not, for instance, advocate third-party advice about a proposed sale, nor does it insist on a public and transparent process. All museums are free to sell works through dealers, under which circumstances a price might never be known, and methods of consultation might be extremely secretive. Many museum sales do take place at auction, including those of the Kimbell’s drawings, the Getty’s 22 paintings and the Albright-Knox’s historic works.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York, however, prefers private sales.

The major museums voluntarily appear to have organised significant checks and balances in their procedures. For instance, the Metropolitan Museum always seeks a third-party valuation. But all the curators who spoke to apollo said that deaccession, even with the best of intentions and the most rigorous procedures, is always a subjective and imperfect practice. George Goldner of the Metropolitan Museum recalled his time at the Getty: he is happy that he sold a Cézanne in order to acquire in 1990 Van Gogh’s Irises (Fig. 8) – generally considered a master-piece – but regrets selling a Canaletto, not realising how difficult it would be to find a better work by him.

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