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Museums need a good clear out The river scene painted in 1947 by L S Lowry (illustrated on page 6), which had hung in Bury Art Gallery since they bought it for £175 in 1951, has been sold at Christie's for £1.4 million by the local authority. The estimate had been £500,000, the sum needed by the Council to help fill a £10 million hole in their annual accounts. According to the Council's website any amount realised beyond £500,000 would be used to meet the cost of a large projected overspend in building a new library in Ramsbottom. Lucky Ramsbottom. It is axiomatic in the museum industry that to sell works from a collection for short-term financial gain alone is not only rash and short-sighted but verges on the immoral. No temporarily elected official, however desperate the strait their own incompetence may have reduced them to, has the right to deprive living and unborn generations of experiencing the best art. Bury Art Gallery has no purchase grant so there is not the faintest whiff of a possibility that the picture will ever be replaced by anything of equivalent quality. The sale also disqualifies the museum from purchase grants available from those such as The Art Fund for future acquisitions. Additionally, no potential donor is now likely to look munificently upon a gallery which may sell the gift as soon as their backs are turned. In present circumstances the future of Bury Art Gallery looks grim. The Bury sale reinforces the poor precedent already set by other councils, most infamously in 1990 when Derbyshire Council Council denuded Buxton Art Gallery of a Lowry and two Rembrandt etchings to make up an accounts shortfall caused, they claimed, by ratecapping: it got £50,000 for the Lowry and £1,700 for the prints. Next year when confronted by further results of their self-inflicted fiscal mismanagement, Bury's 51 demonstrably unprincipled councillors will vote to sell the Landseer, then the Constable, then the Turner, following which the names 'Art Gallery' and 'Permanent Collection' will be reduced to ironic misnomers. At that point the council may with impunity dispose of all the remaining assets and close down the purpose-built late-Victorian premises, a solution Bury Council proposed without success five years ago in order to save the £65,000 annual running costs. Art and the pursuits of the imagination are, it would seem, negotiable inconveniences in the birthplace of the black pudding. It would perhaps be more appropriate if they had a Boudin to flog. Perhaps they have, perhaps they will. The more urgent topical issue raised by the Lowry sale is that old chestnut: should museums be allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to sell works for good reasons of internal natural selection and improving the collection? I must confess to a sea change in my own opinion on this subject. Convinced by my own research and by recent essays on the subject by Laura Gascoigne and Simon Jenkins, I am persuaded that museums should embrace cautious deaccessioning in order to develop their collections in specialist areas. Deaccessioning should no longer be immediately interpreted as evidence of cultural Luddism. As someone whose life has been altered for the better by free access to museums, especially those Lancashire ones mentioned below, I have always considered art galleries and museums sacrosanct, sanctuaries of sanity and intellectual succour providing shelter from the incomprehensible kaleidoscope outside. In the past I would have defended museums hoarding every scrap of paper in their charge with each trivial loss cause for a sit-in. But whether I like it or not, deaccessioning and the careful pruning of collections is the only viable future museums now have. It is true that the short-term advantages of such a policy of disposal may cause long-term mistakes to be made, but the only certain alternative to deaccessioning is slow death, with clear evidence of this moribundity already ubiquitously visible. A recent depressing visit to the Herbert Art Gallery, for example, suggested to me that Coventry has already slung in the towel. Successive governments and local politicians, aware that there is no electoral mileage in art, and cravenly fearful of accusations of élitism by t'grassroots, have ignored museums. From now on realism simply has to take precedence over hardened principle. Chances simply have to be taken. Chancellor Brown rarely misses an opportunity to snort out statistics about how rich we are. Britain, we are told, is the fifth largest economy in the world and, it is true, the overwhelming majority of our population enjoy a prosperity which could only have been dreamed of in my 1950s childhood - in Bury, as coincidence would have it. If, at such a moment of general affluence, regional museums are impoverished, threatened with closure and staff demoralisation and have no money to keep vivid the collecting habits which formed them, and when even rooms are closed daily at the British Museum (some, the basement architectural rooms for example, seem permanently shut), we must accept that museums and art galleries are never going to be better off than their current abysmal condition. Let's face it, if they can't make ends meet today in order to discharge anything resembling a worthwhile public function then the entire system requires rethinking in order to restore a semblance of purpose and self-belief. Our national system of museum organisation is absurd. The more I imagine a bird's eye view of it, the more easy it is to conclude that if a new nation state were organising national and regional museums they would look at our own disconnected method as a blueprint of how not to do it. It is quite mad, indefensibly so, and we are now at a critical point. Let us consider Bury's Lowry (above). The sale is regrettable, yes, at least in part because if local residents were asked who their favourite artist is, it is likely that Lowry, as a local eccentric old buffer and sympathetic painter of the immediate industrial landscape, would be high up the list. (The mob is predictably maudlin in its artistic proclivities - it has, after all, recently declared that cackling ass Rolf Harris the greatest ever British artist.) But is the loss of a single Lowry from this planner-blighted corner of Lancashire - the Luftwaffe inflicted less damage than the council - as significant as it is being made to seem by the museums' lobby? The answer is an emphatic no. I telephoned all the larger regional galleries proximal to Bury to find out which owned works by Lowry and whether they had them on display. The results surprised me. Bolton Art Gallery owns two Lowrys neither of which is on display. A gallery assistant informed me that if I wrote in a month's time when the curator had returned from long-term sick leave, a request to see the pictures would be considered. So very kind. Oldham Art Gallery has a Lowry which is not on display, a surprising omission given that the town's chimney-and-mill skyline more than any other fed Lowry's limited vocabulary of form. Harris Art Gallery in Preston, the best small art gallery in the region, has one Lowry which it has up. Astonishingly, the Keeper of Art at Blackburn Art Gallery didn't know if she had any Lowrys but would check the database if and when I emailed my request. Burnley Art Gallery has none. The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester has 13, amongst which are some of the painter's most important pieces, but none of which is currently on display. Manchester City Art Gallery owns 21 works, also including significant items, two of which are currently hung. Salford Art Gallery, whose building actually features in paintings and drawings by Lowry and to which at various times the artist gave a total of 350 works, now owns nothing by him; indeed, no picture by Lowry has been exhibited here for seven years. This is scandalous when the Lowry Centre, so hideously established in the old Manchester docks, is in possession of those same 350 works given to Salford by the artist but has only 80 of them on display at any one time. Why isn't Salford Art Gallery used as a reserve collection for the Lowry Centre? The Lowrys never looked better than when hung all those years ago in the gallery from whose windows could be seen the archetypal Lowry panorama. To stand in that cavernous high room with its view up the Irwell Valley was the simplest demonstration possible of how art has nothing whatsoever to do with making accurate records and everything to do with personal vision. There is no shortage of works by Lowry in Lancashire, or indeed in collections beyond the county, it is simply that the overwhelming majority of those the public do own are not on display. Within ten miles of Bury Art Gallery there are currently 305 works by Lowry racked undisplayed in art gallery storerooms. This places in perspective Bury Council's silly pre-sale promise that they would endeavour to find a public collection to buy the painting so it wouldn't be lost to collective ownership. In this context of unhung surfeit the loss to Bury of its sole Lowry is hardly of mortifying significance - it might easily be substituted by a benevolent loan from any of the nearby galleries sitting on hidden stashes. Before bleating about 'losses', the museums lobby might consider answering this question: precisely how many unseen Lowrys do we need in public ownership? A line needs to be drawn under the existing daft ad hoc policy of collecting. We should instead consider establishing a national archive upon which all art galleries can draw. The current system whereby hundreds of different galleries are run by their curators like so many Great Dictators - “Don't worry sonny, we'll let you see the work you own when you're a scholar with a serious interest” - is wasteful, restrictive and unnecessarily duplicating. How many regional galleries have been awarded grants to buy prints, when examples from the same edition are already stored unseen in half a dozen other collections? There are at least two national collections of photography, at the V&A and in Bradford. The Tate, the British Museum and the V &A all have national collections of prints and watercolours. I can't think of a convincing argument to defend retaining duplicate prints held in national collections, especially when these same institutions are perennially protesting their poverty. Contrary to the myth circulated by State Art's tubthumpers and canrattlers, there is no shortage of modern and contemporary art owned by the public. The problem is its distribution. There is little willingness on the part of holding institutions to share and circulate what they have in order that those struggling museums might be reinvigorated. It seems that the wit of the collective museum establishment - throttled as it is by the Torquemadas and fiats of State Art - is stopped dead in its tracks by the difficulty of organising transport from the Lowry Centre's basement to Bury, Salford or wherever. Sir Nicholas Serota and his self-serving chums should spend less time lobbying the Treasury to give himself and his fellow spendthrifts more money in order that regional museums can be supplied with the latest fashionable brand-name artists' works. Instead, he might allocate more effort to sharing out the surfeit by those same artists which the Tate holds copiously in store. We should stop pretending that there isn't already plenty to go around. In ancient Rome starving plebs frequently stormed the Emperor's bulging granaries. There's a thought. The figures of surplus are truly staggering. The Tate alone has bought 500 works in the last two years. These have been added to the 70,000-odd works in its collection which aren't on show. The Turner Bequest alone runs to 35,000 watercolours and drawings. Additionally, the Tate is currently negotiating the joint purchase with the Scottish National Gallery of Anthony d'Offay's dealer collection of predominantly minimal and conceptual clobber which, if all of it were shown at the same time, would fill, we are informed, 65 large galleries - or in the Tate's case 65 lock-ups in Lambeth. The Arts Council has 7,000 paintings which are hardly ever seen and if they are it's only the same few dozen by the same few familiar names. The storerooms particularly of our national museums are groaning. The Imperial War Museum has 1,700 paintings and many thousands of graphics than it can never exhibit. And I wonder how many visitors even to the Museum of London realise what a numerically impressive collection of paintings they own despite the fact that these rarely surface in displays. It has been estimated that there are currently 150,000 paintings which the public owns and which are never on show. Deaccessioning is also becoming an increasingly urgent necessity as a result of the sheer volume of new work now being speculatively acquired, especially in the contemporary sphere. Imagine the bewilderment which must envelop those collecting contemporary art. How do you buy the best work for posterity in an open field where there are no published or accepted criteria of evaluation? The only expedient is to buy one of virtually everything half-decent so that in the long term, that is after the dust has settled on reputations, you haven't missed out. You may think that you could look to the Tate for guidance but they are just as confused as everyone else. They show and buy quantities of recent material which is not discernably different in quality to the indifferent clutter exhibited in scores of minor dealerships. In the past one could always guarantee that the Tate would own a fine example even of lesser-known artists. Nowadays there's no way of knowing what's good, bad or indifferent. In future, as Brian Sewell so wisely pointed out recently in the Evening Standard, this need to second guess the future and the market must result in the weeding out of inevitable mistakes. Deaccessioning is also necessary because prices have risen beyond the ability of our museums to collect at the highest level. The result of this is increasingly visible in the National Gallery where lesser examples of artists' works are settled for or accepted as gifts. In future these pieces, which in truth shouldn't really have been there in the first place, might be traded up for better examples. The relocation to that spirit-sapping basement - doesn't your will to live just plummet as you descend those Sainsbury Wing stairs? - of the 19th French paintings to make way for Velasquez has allowed us to see this collection with fresher eyes, as if it were a loan from abroad. It is disappointingly thin with few masterpieces. It was never the greatest of collections but one now notices how it is eked out with recent purchases undeserving of National Gallery status. In the more enlightened era of deaccessioning to come, the Gallery's trustees might consider selling at least four lifeless potboilers by Monet in order to buy a single picture worthy of the Gallery's reputation. (And this four doesn't include the same artist's Water Lilies, a wince-inducing daub by someone who plainly couldn't see a thing.) Other works by Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Van Rysselberge, Bonnard, Signac, a perfectly vile unfinished Manet, and a lamentably inept (probably unfinished) pastel by Degas (the gift of an American junk food corporation which should have been rejected out of hand as unworthy and which was also painted when the great man's sight was cruelly blunted), could also be hawked off. And this isn't to mention the other low-level dealer material in the reserve collection. Monticelli is an interesting artist but we don't need all those pedestrian works by him; ditto all those dodgy looking Corots. And the madness never seems to stop. As we go to press a lobby is gathering momentum to “save” an earlyish Constable painting of Flatford Mill which has apparently only just come to light. It would be instructive to know the expert reasoning behind the decision to block temporarily its export in order that a British museum might find £3 million to acquire it. Admittedly it's a pretty enough signature work but if it's better than some of the dozens of pictures by the artist in store at the Victoria and Albert Museum then why not sell a few in order to buy it? A collection really ought to be something more than merely a hoard. Museums must find their own way of circumventing the indifference of politicians to their plight and determine their own future. Controlled deaccessioning is a good place to start. | |||||
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