'Bin bag' art thrown into crusher by Tate cleaner

An eminent German artist has had a prized work thrown out with the rubbish by staff at Tate Britain.

Organisers of the gallery's Art And The Sixties show today confessed that a bag of rubbish - part of a piece by Gustav Metzger - was placed in a crusher by a cleaner who had not realised it was art.

A Tate source said: "A cleaner doing her rounds saw the bag of rubbish on the floor and threw it out with the rest of the trash. It wasn't roped off, how was she to know?"

The gaffe happened on 30 June, immediately before Art and The Sixties opened to the public.

It is understood the Millbank gallery has offered to compensate the 78-year-old artist for damage to his work. The bag was retrieved from the compactor, but Metzger is understood to have decided his work had been so badly damaged that he created a new bag of rubbish as a replacement.

The substitute is now chained up in a box at night. Metzger invented autodestructive art in 1959. It is defined as "constructions having a finite existence".