SAN DIEGO—After the Orange County Museum of Art quietly sold 18 of its 20 California Impressionist paintings to an undisclosed private collector in March, two California museum directors publicly criticized the move. Now they’ve been joined by another. Hugh Davies, director of San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, faults the OCMA’s decision to sell the paintings to a private buyer rather than trying to ensure that they remained in a collection open to the public.

Davies says the OCMA should have donated the works to or struck a deal with the nearby Laguna Art Museum, and if that didn't work out, the OCMA should have offered the works to the Irvine Museum. The directors at the Laguna and Irvine museums say the transaction’s secrecy violated the public interest by preventing them from bidding to keep the works in collections accessible to the public. Meanwhile, Bolton Colburn, director of the Laguna museum, is trying to figure out who the collector is so he can attempt to buy the paintings or convince him to donate the works to the museum. And the chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento also wants to acquire the works if the buyer decides to donate or resell them. For his part, OCMA director Dennis Szakacs defends his action, saying the abundance of other California Impressionist works in local museums played into the decision to sell to a private collector.

Read more at Bloomberg.