The sale of art by famous names including Picasso, Renoir, Modigliani and Chagall worth millions of US dollars has reignited a controversy this week over the practice by American museums of auctioning off unwanted parts of their collections.

Starting today institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum and the New York Public Library will begin the "deaccession" of dozens of unwanted works from their collections.

On the auction stand over the next few months in New York will be Picasso's "Femme Assise," Renoir's "Portrait de Jeanne Samary," Modigliani's "Buste de Manuel Humbert" and Chagall's "Le Jongleur," as well as rare photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston.

The museum sales will provide works by famous artists to an art market that is starved of masterpieces.

But critics complain the museums are neglecting their role as cultural custodians in favour of chasing the latest hot property.

Robert Rosenblum, an art history professor at New York University and curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said: "American museums treat their collections as if they were the stock market. European museums do not sell things and everything's fine."

The New York Public Library provoked an outcry when it sold Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits, a classic of the Hudson River School, to a Wal-Mart heiress for a reported US$35 million in May in a bid to shore up its endowment fund.

But the criticism has not deterred the library from going ahead with the sale of two portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart including one that was once owned by Alexander Hamilton, the American founding father and 16 other paintings next month.

Reasons for "deaccessioning" vary from museum to museum. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art intends to sell 43 works worth a total of between US$10 million and US$15 million, including Modigliani's portrait of Manuel Humbert, in preparation for the expansion and reorganization of its collection in 2007.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, however, is disposing of duplicates that it obtained in March when it acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection of 8,500 photographs, which contained many images that the museum already owned.

MoMA has come under fire particularly for selling off Port de Cette, les tartanes, by Theo van Rysselberghe, a Neo-Impressionist, which was valued at up to US$2 million, to help to cover the costs of Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus, which it bought for about US$30 million in June with help from Ronald Lauder, its former chairman.

"It's just unconscionable for a museum like MoMA to sell works saying, 'We would never want to show that,'" Rosenblum said. "They know that's not true. What they have in their storeroom may look very good and be exhibited in 10 years."

But John Elderfield, MoMA's British chief curator, said the museum's permanent collection was always intended to move with the times.

"The collection is not only what is put into it. It's also what is taken out of it," he said. "Right from the time that the museum was founded it was understood that this would be an ongoing collection that has an identity, but that the works that formed that identity would change."

He pointed out that the first two waves of "deaccessioning," in 1939 and 1941, allowed MoMA to purchase Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Van Gogh's The Starry Night two of the most prized works in its collection.

Thomas Messer, a former director of the Guggenheim, said that it was important for museums to ensure that money raised by selling off works goes back into the collection in the form of new acquisitions.

"It's risky to sell classics to buy contemporary art to sell Picassos and Braques in order to buy new talent," he said. "I do not rule it out, but I have never particularly agreed with reckless deaccessioning."

Source: China Daily