Should Jasmine be pruned?

Between the wars, curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum were encouraged to sell works that had been selected for its permanent collection at the Great Exhibition in 1851 by a committee that included Henry Cole and A.W.N. Pugin. Shortly after World War H, Ulster Museum sold its 19th-century paintings in order to create a fund for buying contemporary art. In 1959, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery sold its collection of South Asian and Far Eastern metalwork.

I would guess that most of this information comes as something of a surprise to anyone under 50 or so, who has been brought up on the assumption that museums and galleries in the UK do not dispose of works of art--or 'deaccess' them, to use museum-speak. In fact, this assumption dates back only to 1977, when the Museums Association first drew up its code of practice. Its belief that deaccessioning was A Bad Thing was adopted in 1988 by the predecessor of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) when it set up its museums accreditation scheme (accreditation confirms that a museum has met assessed criteria for its management). The MLA states that 'there is a strong presumption against disposal out of the public domain'.

Although the examples I have quoted make it plain that this presumption is relatively new, they also show why it has hardened into dogma. Birmingham in the 1950s could not have foreseen that its Asian collections would have acquired a new relevance with the growth of the city's Asian population; Belfast could not have anticipated that the rise in the value of works of art means that it can never acquire a collection of 19th-century works to replace what it sold, now that such paintings are of wide public interest again.

For such reasons, young museum directors, trustees and curators who know little or nothing about what happened in museums before the 1970s need to listen carefully to their senior or retired colleagues before making their minds up about deaccessioning, now that there are increasing pressures to loosen the presumption against it. As we discuss in the article on deaccessioning on pages 34-39, the MLA is revising its guidelines, some museum directors and trustees are openly saying that the UK should adopt America's relaxed attitudes to deaccessioning, and curators increasingly feel that they cannot adequately manage the collections with which they are entrusted unless they are allowed to dispose of works. Even so, it came as a surprise to me that APOLLO's telephone poll of UK curators revealed that over half favour deaccessioning, as long as strongly enforced safeguards are in place.

Plausible although some of the benefits of deaccessioning are, they must be considered in the wider context of what is happening to museums in the UK. There can be no doubt that inadequate acquisition funds, the attrition of curators, especially in museums outside London, and lack of money for storage and conservation are currently making the idea of selling works (as opposed to handing them over to another museum) unusually attractive. There is sympathy for the Watts Gallery in Surrey, which is in discussion with the MLA about selling two of its works by artists other than Watts, a Burne-Jones and Albert Moore's gorgeous Jasmine, to enable it to match an offer of 4.3m [pounds sterling] from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help secure the museum's future as a centre for the study of Victorian art--a role that I would have thought would be greatly assisted by the presence of the Burne-Jones and Moore. As this proposed sale suggests, like those embarrassing precedents from the 1950s, a museum's purpose is virtually never served by selling works.

MICHAEL HALL APOLLO'S SURVEY OF UK MUSEUM CURATORS REVEALS THAT OVER HALF ARE IN FAVOUR OF BEING ABLE TO DISPOSE OF WORKS OF ART IN THEIR COLLECTIONS--BUT ARE SALES EVER JUSTIFIED?

COPYRIGHT 2007 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
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