Randolph College in Virginia sold Rufino Tamayo’s “Troubadour” in April for $7.2 million./CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD.

By JORI FINKEL


The director of the art-rich yet cashpoor National Academy Museum in New York expected a backlash when its board decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for around $15 million.

The director, Carmine Branagan, had already approached leaders of two groups to which the academy belonged about the prospect. She knew that both the American Association of Museums and Association of Art Museum Directors had firm policies against museums’selling off artworks because of financial hardship and were not going to make an exception.

Even so, she said, she was not prepared for the directors group’s“immediate and punitive” response to the sale. In an e-mail message on December 5 to its 190 members, it denounced the academy, founded in 1825, for“breaching one of the most basic and important of A.A.M.D.’s principles”and called on members“to suspend any loans of works of art to and any collaborations on exhibitions with the National Academy.”

Ms.Branagan, who had by that time withdrawn her membership from both groups, said she“was shocked by the tone of the letter, like we had committed some egregious crime.”

She called the withdrawal of loans“a death knell”for the museum, adding,“What the A.A.M.D. have done is basically shoot us while we’re wounded.”

Beyond shaping the fate of any one museum, this exchange has sparked larger questions over a principle that has long seemed sacred. Why, several experts ask, is it so wrong for a museum to sell art from its collection to raise badly needed funds?

Yet defenders of the prohibition warn that such sales can irreparably damage an institution.“Selling an object is a knee-jerk act, and it undermines core principles of a museum,”said Michael Conforti, president of the directors’association and director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.“There are always other options.’’

The sale of artwork from a museum’s permanent collection, known as deaccessioning, is not illegal in the United States, provided that any terms accompanying the original donation of artwork are respected. In Europe, by contrast, many museums are state-financed and prevented by national law from deaccessioning.

But under the code of ethics of the American Association of Museums, the proceeds should be “used only for the acquisition, preservation, protection or care of collections.”The code of the Association of Art Museum Directors is even stricter, specifying that funds should not be used“for purposes other than acquisitions of works of art for the collection.”

Graham Beal, another member of the directors’ group and the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said,“If it were suddenly legitimate to sell artworks and use the proceeds for anything other than acquisitions, there would be a wholesale cannibalization of many museums.”

Last year the president of Randolph College in Virginia oversaw the removal of four paintings, including George Bellows’s 1912 “Men of the Docks,’’from the campus art museum before dispatching them to Christie’s.

The museum’s director, Karol Lawson, who compared the experience to a mugging, promptly resigned and is now researching a book on deaccessioning.

Ms.Lawson suggests that deaccessioning controversies reflect nothing less than two competing visions of art: commodity versus educational tool. At Randolph, she said,“the people who wanted to sell the art were saying it’s the same thing as a truck or computer or a chair.”

Make that a very nice truck - Randolph’s 1945 Rufino Tamayo painting,“Troubadour,’’sold at Christie’s in April for $7.2 million. The Bellows is sitting in a Christie’s warehouse, pending a rebound in the art market.