Sale of A Riverbank. Lowry's painting up for auction. Photograph: PA.
Today a painting by LS Lowry goes under the hammer at Christie's and could fetch £800,000. The auction house's catalogue says that A Riverbank, "depicting an industrial townscape in the style for which Lowry is best recognised", is "one of the finest works by the artist ever to appear at auction".
The picture belongs to the residents of Bury in Greater Manchester and has hung in the town's art gallery since it was bought by the council from a London gallery for £175 in 1951. Council officers have decided to flog it to help plug a £10m hole in the council's budget.
Bury's chief executive says the proceeds will be invested in council services and adds that the painting "is not central to our collection, which centres entirely around Victoriana".
Two thoughts: one, this is the equivalent of the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam getting rid of a Vermeer or two because its collection centres around its Rembrandts; two, wouldn't it be a better idea to auction off the council's officers and/or councillors and buy/elect a new lot who can balance the books?
There has been quite a stink over Bury's philistinism and Simon Jenkins weighed in on the Guardian's Comment pages, having a go not just at the council but at keepers of London galleries who keep in their cellars thousands of works that could be distributed to regional galleries.
Bury's action is nothing new. Fifteen years ago, Derbyshire county council sold off 19 paintings - including two Lowrys and three Rembrandts - to plug a leaking budget. If memory proves true, the pictures were removed from the gallery via the back door and under cover of darkness.
You could say that Bury's move is curiously at odds with the public mood: just think of all the recent palaver when Sefton council's planning committee voted to get rid of Antony Gormley's 100 iron men on Crosby beach on Merseyside: the public wanted them and said so. Loudly. And it's not that long ago (1999) that the people of Bolton (next door to Bury) enthusiastically coughed up their pennies and pound coins to help buy Nearing Camp, Evening On The Upper Colorado River by Thomas Moran, a local lad who emigrated to the US and so loved the big country of the American west that they called him Yellowstone Moran.
Lowry's home was in Salford, not Bury. But the one is not far from the other. The gallery in Salford named after Lowry has done much to enable both critics and the person in the northern street to re-assess his work. But Bury's councillors are not interested in that sort of thing, only a quick-fix solution to a problem that has prompted panic. What a shame.
