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The end of laconic history of art
Museum Management
and Curatorship
(1990), 9,368-372
The End of Laconic History of Art PROFESSORCARLOBERTELLI
I shall make every effort to be as laconic as my title. I must add that my intention was to put a question mark at the end of the title, but put that way it sounds a bit too pessimistic. Contrary to what our President said, I hope that the lunch will make you so energetic as to support my English, and to be indulgent with it. What museums are, have been or should be, are not easy questions nowadays, at least in some countries. One would think that, when repentent marxists rediscovered the virtues of a free market, the museum as an institution which keeps objects outside the reach of the market, comes out of focus. The museums of contemporary art, as is well known, are not entirely apart from the market. Every artist and every gallery can tell the difference between a museum artist and one who is not represented in a museum. Even artists’ widows know the rule. They are eager to make donations of the work of their late husband, no matter who his last love was. Even the more prosperous museums of contemporary art are seldom concerned with the encouragement of research. In Italy the one exception has been the National Gallery of Modern Art-the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome -the sole institution devoted to modern art and contemporary art belonging to the State. For very many years the library and fototeca has existed, and it is a very valuable tool for the study of modern and contemporary art in Italy and abroad. However, the museum faces the problems of all the state museums in Italy, which is that in the administration of the Ministry of Culture there is not a distinctive role for museum curators. Museums have no identity. So a numismatic expert can be parachuted to no matter what town, without any reference to the existence of any collection of coins in the prospective place of work. The same happens to mediaevalists or to experts in contemporary art, and so on. The continuous flow of curators who leave the administration for other jobs, mostly but not only to universities-and I am a case in point-is a clear sign of frustration. Apparently, the Italian State is not aware of the investment of energy and money in making a young man or girl into a museum curator, and does not regret his or her loss. The monopoly of the Galleria in Rome has stimulated other enterprises, in particular the birth of more or less private museums of contemporary art. But if you look at the choice of directors made by the Trustees of these museums you are astonished to find that not one had any previous museum training. For instance, the Director of the Museo di Arte Contemporanea in Prato is a former correspondent of the television network in Tel Aviv, and became acquainted with the peculiar machinery of a museum only when he became the director of one. All these museums are flourishing, to be sure, but until now they have made no effort to fill the serious gap of Italian museum officers expert in the fieid of contemporary art. The consequence is that the proper research in the quicksands
0260-4779/90/04 0368-0501990 Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd
CARLO BERTELLI
369
of contemporary art is left to dealers and politicians. Dealers do the research. Politicians take the decisions. Once the museum curator has been deprived of his scientific responsibility, he must leave the field to the political authority. This weakness is apparent also when the museum turns to the help of a sponsor. It should be understood that the participation of the archaeologist or the art historian in the proceedings of a restoration-and especially in the case of major ones-is an essential part of the scientific value of the same restoration. I say that not only for the results but for the amount of knowledge which is acquired by the art historian or by the archaeologist in the course of cleaning and repairing, which is a way of undoing the object and going back to the time it was conceived and made. Decisions must be taken step by step, and they are bound to the intimate understanding of every aspect of the work concerned and of its period. That does not always happen, and you have a list of restorations going on without the authorities who should be concerned. The difference on the professional side of museum life is such that almost every morning someone tells us what the museum, or museums in general, should do and be. At the regional Council of Lombardy, some members twice presented a draft which would have allowed private people to apply for the loan of objects, belonging to museums, which were not on public display. Far from getting the cool reception it deserved, the proposal encountered support, even among university professors. Last August the General Procurer-I do not know the title in English-of the court which checks state expenditures said in an official report that Italian museums could become self-sufficient only if they sold what they did not have on display. In previous years enormous sums had been expended on a huge operation called ‘11 Catalog0 e la Documentazione’. The idea was that in Italy there are a number of works of art and sites of historic interest which are not classified. They are like coal deposits awaiting exploitation. On this occasion proceedings went on over the heads of the professional staff. Producers of such programmes were asked to submit projects for approval or rejection by a central commission. Museum people-and one knows the need for computerization in a large part of museum activity-were not consulted. Nor were the results supposed to be handed over to the museums; they remained the property of the firms carrying out the projects. ‘Coal beds’ to be exploited go to be evaluated. But what for? The revenue of the ‘coal beds’ will have come from tourism. But tourism has nothing to do with the scientific research in a museum. We can only admit that a museum with sound research in its background can manage to cope with the demands of tourism. But that means turning the tables upside down. Mass tourism is not without cost, particularly now that the country is facing a new kind of tourist-the visitors from Eastern Europe, who bring with them a great curiosity but nothing else. Tourism has made visiting certain museums and places practically impossible. There are many works of art which you cannot see because of the crowds; they are just kept in store. Tourism is the monster that destroys the commander’s managerial efforts. Tourism has broken the relationship between the citizens and their museums. When it is not mass tourism it is that other pest, which is unregulated school tourism. The pressure on certain museums has become unbearable. At the same time entire museums, whole towns, completely lack the affluence born of tourism. Perhaps this discrepancy might be taken as a challenge to more study in such places, to make them more popular. But it is not so. On the contrary, the particular structure of museums in Italy, which dilutes them into the general territorial organization, has encouraged a good deal of viable local studies and research. The larger part of what has been produced is
370
Scholarship in Museums
‘candlelight’ work. In fact museum curators do not enjoy sabbatical years and do not get leave for study. There are only two towns in Italy-Rome and Florence-with the right libraries for studying the history of art and archaeology. There is no computerized system for bibliographic information and photographic research, nor is it on view. The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, which is comparable to the Max Planck Institute, of which we heard this morning, gives financial support to excavations, but nothing for work in museum collections. So when an object from the excavation has arrived in a museum it is no longer a matter for research funds. Research, as we know, has its price. So we may ask, is the sort of research which museums have conducted in the past, and which they can offer today still-rewarding? grow by acquisitions, donations, discoveries and reCertainly it is. Museums examination of their riches, so they need competent people, and loyal competent people. They cannot rely on dealers, outside experts, politicians. The museum is often the producer of books, reviews, TV programmes, video-cassettes and films. To keep a high standard in such activities you need high professional competence. Of course the museum is not the only place where research is done. There are universities. Universities cannot live without the museums. At the same time their attitude towards research is not the same as that of museums. Interdisciplinary teams are, in the humanistic departments of the university, a choice. In the museum they are a daily necessity. Often museum items are objects which have been spared the pollution of the last century, and they become material for previously unforeseen research. Think, in this instance, of the present studies on the surface of part of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus which had not been treated by restorers in the past, here in the British Museum. Part of the chemical and physical research on museum objects is derivative, but a good deal is not, as the knowledge of lost technologies, of the traces left by the environment on the surfaces of objects, poses problems for very refined research and not for routine. But too often museums are taken as clearing stations for exhibitions. Now a museum does not exist as an exhibition, and exhibitions do not compensate for the closing of parts of the museum. Of course museums can arrange their own exhibitions, as is the case with many excellent presentations, but it must be kept in mind that the logic, the system and the style of exhibitions are different from those of museums. Primarily an exhibition is a choice made with more or less liberty at a time, and it lasts for a certain time, while a museum is the result of long accumulation and is intended to last. An exhibition is unequivocal while, if you like it, a museum is not. If museums were like exhibitions, it would be like imagining towns made all in one style or by a single architect and offering nothing but groceries. The multifarious fragmentary presence in a museum calls for a personal approach, to mobilize the visitor’s fantasy; while the exhibition has its own goals and imposes directions. To write the catalogue of an exhibition is not the same as writing the catalogue of a museum, for the latter is a piece of history, the history of the collections and of the life of single objects. There is a long tradition in museum cataloguing, from Martin Davies to the present time. So it is alarming that the conditions of work of museum curators are such that they become unable to contribute to the catalogues of their own museums. This happens, for instance, with the catalogues which are now being produced of the Brera. As a parody of industrial production in the post industrial age one example of Beaubourg has been particularly infectious. The Wall in Berlin had not yet come down entirely, but already one could read in Liberation, as well as in Allgemeine Zeitung, the proposal for a new Centre Pompidou at the Brandenburger Tor. According to Andrea the centre should be the Deutsches und Gluchsmann who made the proposal,
CARLO BERTELLI
371
Europaisches Museum, devoted to stressing European unity. The same article said that the ‘Centre Pompidou was created as a field of experiment for the art of today; let us make the history of the time become contemporary’. History is always being rewritten under the eyes of the present, but here we have the answer before the question. The view of such a museum would be exactly the opposite of museum fieldwork. Fieldwork is necessarily open to revision, to checking standard assumptions, surely in search of truth, but it is a truth which comes from factual evidence; while one can achieve positive results, but logically and in accordance with undisputed propositions. I think you are right when you protest. One should convince the others, the honest people who know the museum’s work, of how fieldwork is necessary as a living part of our common culture; not to leave it out of touch with reality and not to put our efforts into the hands of people who seem to know our destiny. Ivan Penovski paid great homage to museum labels, calling them laconic history of art. He knew too well the work which was behind the simple, austere, laconic statements of a museum label, and great freedom as is plainly the tradition in that sense. So has Gombrich, in one of his most recent reviews, declared that history in Great Britain was really written between commerce and the museums, where one found first-rate specialists who had studied the field rather than at university. It is exactly that field subject in the study-fieldwork-the subject of pride for what has never been called the British School of Art History. Please leave the others to write about the “end of art history”. Maybe a certain history of art has come to an end for excess of verbosity, but the need to give names to facts, the need for what has been called the laconic history of art, cannot disappear. Politicians will understand that, when speaking of research in museums, we speak about the role of Europe in a new context. The early 1980s saw the reversal of the trend of emigration towards the United States. Some art historians came back to Europe, bringing new life and experience. Konrad Oberhuber is perhaps the most distinguished among them. But what will happen with the new Europeans if they do not find in European institutions the support comparable to that offered by American museums? And by whom and when will new catalogues be written of the united museums of Berlin? Who will fill the gap caused by the lack of communication, which lasted for 50 years, with the museums of Eastern Europe? The questions at stake are not trivial and they cannot be limited to a small group of professional people. Thank you.
Questions
CHAIRMAN: I presume that the translation of ‘laconic’ is ‘laid back’. I think that this was far from a laid-back view of the history of art, and I am sure that many people would like to make comments or ask questions. Even the art historians can do quite well here. I see we have seven minutes in which do deal with this particular matter. Any questions? NATALIE ROTHSTEIN [Victoria and Albert Museum, London]: It was a timely reminder to mention telling the truth, because to my mind this is what scholarship is about. It is not communicating. That
372
Scholarship
in Museums
is the next stage on. It is actually telling the truth about an object. know, you cannot tell-to the schoolchild or to the professor-the brought this point up. I am, like you Sir David, demob happy!
Unless you have the people who truth. I am very glad that you
CHAIRMAN: I think that was a statement rather than a question. May we leave further questions for Professor Bertelli until later, and move on to Michel Laclotte. He is well known, of course, for producing two pyramids and an entrance to the Louvre. It is actually quite interesting that, at the three largest museums which are represented here today-the museum in Berlin, the museum of the Louvre and the British Museum-enormous developments are taking place. The museum in Paris is taking over a whole new wing of the Louvre, redeveloping the whole of the courtyard and putting in a car park. The museum in Berlin is developing a new relationship with its erstwhile member, which will be one of the most frightening things anyone could do, and we are all very sympathetic to Wolf-Dieter Dube for what he is trying to do in Berlin. The British Museum is, thank God, losing the British Library; and we also have a very large amount of space to be dealt with in the next 10 years. Nobody, therefore, is more competent to say how scientific research stands up against major development than Michel Laclotte, and both Wolf-Dieter Dube and I will listen with great interest to what he has to say, as he is talking today on ‘Mu&e du Louvre-Programmes scientifiques et programmes culturels’.
and Curatorship
(1990), 9,368-372
The End of Laconic History of Art PROFESSORCARLOBERTELLI
I shall make every effort to be as laconic as my title. I must add that my intention was to put a question mark at the end of the title, but put that way it sounds a bit too pessimistic. Contrary to what our President said, I hope that the lunch will make you so energetic as to support my English, and to be indulgent with it. What museums are, have been or should be, are not easy questions nowadays, at least in some countries. One would think that, when repentent marxists rediscovered the virtues of a free market, the museum as an institution which keeps objects outside the reach of the market, comes out of focus. The museums of contemporary art, as is well known, are not entirely apart from the market. Every artist and every gallery can tell the difference between a museum artist and one who is not represented in a museum. Even artists’ widows know the rule. They are eager to make donations of the work of their late husband, no matter who his last love was. Even the more prosperous museums of contemporary art are seldom concerned with the encouragement of research. In Italy the one exception has been the National Gallery of Modern Art-the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome -the sole institution devoted to modern art and contemporary art belonging to the State. For very many years the library and fototeca has existed, and it is a very valuable tool for the study of modern and contemporary art in Italy and abroad. However, the museum faces the problems of all the state museums in Italy, which is that in the administration of the Ministry of Culture there is not a distinctive role for museum curators. Museums have no identity. So a numismatic expert can be parachuted to no matter what town, without any reference to the existence of any collection of coins in the prospective place of work. The same happens to mediaevalists or to experts in contemporary art, and so on. The continuous flow of curators who leave the administration for other jobs, mostly but not only to universities-and I am a case in point-is a clear sign of frustration. Apparently, the Italian State is not aware of the investment of energy and money in making a young man or girl into a museum curator, and does not regret his or her loss. The monopoly of the Galleria in Rome has stimulated other enterprises, in particular the birth of more or less private museums of contemporary art. But if you look at the choice of directors made by the Trustees of these museums you are astonished to find that not one had any previous museum training. For instance, the Director of the Museo di Arte Contemporanea in Prato is a former correspondent of the television network in Tel Aviv, and became acquainted with the peculiar machinery of a museum only when he became the director of one. All these museums are flourishing, to be sure, but until now they have made no effort to fill the serious gap of Italian museum officers expert in the fieid of contemporary art. The consequence is that the proper research in the quicksands
0260-4779/90/04 0368-0501990 Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd
CARLO BERTELLI
369
of contemporary art is left to dealers and politicians. Dealers do the research. Politicians take the decisions. Once the museum curator has been deprived of his scientific responsibility, he must leave the field to the political authority. This weakness is apparent also when the museum turns to the help of a sponsor. It should be understood that the participation of the archaeologist or the art historian in the proceedings of a restoration-and especially in the case of major ones-is an essential part of the scientific value of the same restoration. I say that not only for the results but for the amount of knowledge which is acquired by the art historian or by the archaeologist in the course of cleaning and repairing, which is a way of undoing the object and going back to the time it was conceived and made. Decisions must be taken step by step, and they are bound to the intimate understanding of every aspect of the work concerned and of its period. That does not always happen, and you have a list of restorations going on without the authorities who should be concerned. The difference on the professional side of museum life is such that almost every morning someone tells us what the museum, or museums in general, should do and be. At the regional Council of Lombardy, some members twice presented a draft which would have allowed private people to apply for the loan of objects, belonging to museums, which were not on public display. Far from getting the cool reception it deserved, the proposal encountered support, even among university professors. Last August the General Procurer-I do not know the title in English-of the court which checks state expenditures said in an official report that Italian museums could become self-sufficient only if they sold what they did not have on display. In previous years enormous sums had been expended on a huge operation called ‘11 Catalog0 e la Documentazione’. The idea was that in Italy there are a number of works of art and sites of historic interest which are not classified. They are like coal deposits awaiting exploitation. On this occasion proceedings went on over the heads of the professional staff. Producers of such programmes were asked to submit projects for approval or rejection by a central commission. Museum people-and one knows the need for computerization in a large part of museum activity-were not consulted. Nor were the results supposed to be handed over to the museums; they remained the property of the firms carrying out the projects. ‘Coal beds’ to be exploited go to be evaluated. But what for? The revenue of the ‘coal beds’ will have come from tourism. But tourism has nothing to do with the scientific research in a museum. We can only admit that a museum with sound research in its background can manage to cope with the demands of tourism. But that means turning the tables upside down. Mass tourism is not without cost, particularly now that the country is facing a new kind of tourist-the visitors from Eastern Europe, who bring with them a great curiosity but nothing else. Tourism has made visiting certain museums and places practically impossible. There are many works of art which you cannot see because of the crowds; they are just kept in store. Tourism is the monster that destroys the commander’s managerial efforts. Tourism has broken the relationship between the citizens and their museums. When it is not mass tourism it is that other pest, which is unregulated school tourism. The pressure on certain museums has become unbearable. At the same time entire museums, whole towns, completely lack the affluence born of tourism. Perhaps this discrepancy might be taken as a challenge to more study in such places, to make them more popular. But it is not so. On the contrary, the particular structure of museums in Italy, which dilutes them into the general territorial organization, has encouraged a good deal of viable local studies and research. The larger part of what has been produced is
370
Scholarship in Museums
‘candlelight’ work. In fact museum curators do not enjoy sabbatical years and do not get leave for study. There are only two towns in Italy-Rome and Florence-with the right libraries for studying the history of art and archaeology. There is no computerized system for bibliographic information and photographic research, nor is it on view. The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, which is comparable to the Max Planck Institute, of which we heard this morning, gives financial support to excavations, but nothing for work in museum collections. So when an object from the excavation has arrived in a museum it is no longer a matter for research funds. Research, as we know, has its price. So we may ask, is the sort of research which museums have conducted in the past, and which they can offer today still-rewarding? grow by acquisitions, donations, discoveries and reCertainly it is. Museums examination of their riches, so they need competent people, and loyal competent people. They cannot rely on dealers, outside experts, politicians. The museum is often the producer of books, reviews, TV programmes, video-cassettes and films. To keep a high standard in such activities you need high professional competence. Of course the museum is not the only place where research is done. There are universities. Universities cannot live without the museums. At the same time their attitude towards research is not the same as that of museums. Interdisciplinary teams are, in the humanistic departments of the university, a choice. In the museum they are a daily necessity. Often museum items are objects which have been spared the pollution of the last century, and they become material for previously unforeseen research. Think, in this instance, of the present studies on the surface of part of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus which had not been treated by restorers in the past, here in the British Museum. Part of the chemical and physical research on museum objects is derivative, but a good deal is not, as the knowledge of lost technologies, of the traces left by the environment on the surfaces of objects, poses problems for very refined research and not for routine. But too often museums are taken as clearing stations for exhibitions. Now a museum does not exist as an exhibition, and exhibitions do not compensate for the closing of parts of the museum. Of course museums can arrange their own exhibitions, as is the case with many excellent presentations, but it must be kept in mind that the logic, the system and the style of exhibitions are different from those of museums. Primarily an exhibition is a choice made with more or less liberty at a time, and it lasts for a certain time, while a museum is the result of long accumulation and is intended to last. An exhibition is unequivocal while, if you like it, a museum is not. If museums were like exhibitions, it would be like imagining towns made all in one style or by a single architect and offering nothing but groceries. The multifarious fragmentary presence in a museum calls for a personal approach, to mobilize the visitor’s fantasy; while the exhibition has its own goals and imposes directions. To write the catalogue of an exhibition is not the same as writing the catalogue of a museum, for the latter is a piece of history, the history of the collections and of the life of single objects. There is a long tradition in museum cataloguing, from Martin Davies to the present time. So it is alarming that the conditions of work of museum curators are such that they become unable to contribute to the catalogues of their own museums. This happens, for instance, with the catalogues which are now being produced of the Brera. As a parody of industrial production in the post industrial age one example of Beaubourg has been particularly infectious. The Wall in Berlin had not yet come down entirely, but already one could read in Liberation, as well as in Allgemeine Zeitung, the proposal for a new Centre Pompidou at the Brandenburger Tor. According to Andrea the centre should be the Deutsches und Gluchsmann who made the proposal,
CARLO BERTELLI
371
Europaisches Museum, devoted to stressing European unity. The same article said that the ‘Centre Pompidou was created as a field of experiment for the art of today; let us make the history of the time become contemporary’. History is always being rewritten under the eyes of the present, but here we have the answer before the question. The view of such a museum would be exactly the opposite of museum fieldwork. Fieldwork is necessarily open to revision, to checking standard assumptions, surely in search of truth, but it is a truth which comes from factual evidence; while one can achieve positive results, but logically and in accordance with undisputed propositions. I think you are right when you protest. One should convince the others, the honest people who know the museum’s work, of how fieldwork is necessary as a living part of our common culture; not to leave it out of touch with reality and not to put our efforts into the hands of people who seem to know our destiny. Ivan Penovski paid great homage to museum labels, calling them laconic history of art. He knew too well the work which was behind the simple, austere, laconic statements of a museum label, and great freedom as is plainly the tradition in that sense. So has Gombrich, in one of his most recent reviews, declared that history in Great Britain was really written between commerce and the museums, where one found first-rate specialists who had studied the field rather than at university. It is exactly that field subject in the study-fieldwork-the subject of pride for what has never been called the British School of Art History. Please leave the others to write about the “end of art history”. Maybe a certain history of art has come to an end for excess of verbosity, but the need to give names to facts, the need for what has been called the laconic history of art, cannot disappear. Politicians will understand that, when speaking of research in museums, we speak about the role of Europe in a new context. The early 1980s saw the reversal of the trend of emigration towards the United States. Some art historians came back to Europe, bringing new life and experience. Konrad Oberhuber is perhaps the most distinguished among them. But what will happen with the new Europeans if they do not find in European institutions the support comparable to that offered by American museums? And by whom and when will new catalogues be written of the united museums of Berlin? Who will fill the gap caused by the lack of communication, which lasted for 50 years, with the museums of Eastern Europe? The questions at stake are not trivial and they cannot be limited to a small group of professional people. Thank you.
Questions
CHAIRMAN: I presume that the translation of ‘laconic’ is ‘laid back’. I think that this was far from a laid-back view of the history of art, and I am sure that many people would like to make comments or ask questions. Even the art historians can do quite well here. I see we have seven minutes in which do deal with this particular matter. Any questions? NATALIE ROTHSTEIN [Victoria and Albert Museum, London]: It was a timely reminder to mention telling the truth, because to my mind this is what scholarship is about. It is not communicating. That
372
Scholarship
in Museums
is the next stage on. It is actually telling the truth about an object. know, you cannot tell-to the schoolchild or to the professor-the brought this point up. I am, like you Sir David, demob happy!
Unless you have the people who truth. I am very glad that you
CHAIRMAN: I think that was a statement rather than a question. May we leave further questions for Professor Bertelli until later, and move on to Michel Laclotte. He is well known, of course, for producing two pyramids and an entrance to the Louvre. It is actually quite interesting that, at the three largest museums which are represented here today-the museum in Berlin, the museum of the Louvre and the British Museum-enormous developments are taking place. The museum in Paris is taking over a whole new wing of the Louvre, redeveloping the whole of the courtyard and putting in a car park. The museum in Berlin is developing a new relationship with its erstwhile member, which will be one of the most frightening things anyone could do, and we are all very sympathetic to Wolf-Dieter Dube for what he is trying to do in Berlin. The British Museum is, thank God, losing the British Library; and we also have a very large amount of space to be dealt with in the next 10 years. Nobody, therefore, is more competent to say how scientific research stands up against major development than Michel Laclotte, and both Wolf-Dieter Dube and I will listen with great interest to what he has to say, as he is talking today on ‘Mu&e du Louvre-Programmes scientifiques et programmes culturels’.