There is no more archetypal museum exercise than reflecting on the necessity and survival of the very concept of the museum. Ever since the beginning of the last century, countless art theorists have wracked their brains trying to divine whether Europe’s great pictorial shrines could transcend the white cube syndrome to become places of encounter, participation, and – as fashion now dictates – even existential healing. I must confess that all of this wearies me somewhat, because I still believe there is no experience more pleasurable than drifting aimlessly among obscure paintings or whiling away an afternoon before a favourite masterpiece (read Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister and you will see why it remains one of my favourite books). Yet I understand why museums, especially heritage institutions, fight to stay afloat in a world blunted by a culture where visual oversaturation coexists with an increasingly shallow gaze.
The director of the MNAC, my dear Pepe Serra, belongs to Barcelona’s Noucentista circle and understands, as do I, that our foremost arts institution must be a civic establishment – porous and open to citizen participation – yet one that, when transforming and looking to the immediate future, must take its cues from leading institutions and their shrewdest directors. Now that the MNAC is poised to expand, with the imminent acquisition of the Victoria Eugenia Pavilion and the creation of new multipurpose spaces, Serra has sought to surround himself with distinguished colleagues to help him look beyond the horizon. Last Saturday, I attended the star-studded opening of this process: the conversation series Thinking the Museum, Imagining Futures, the opening gambit of the MNAC en transformació project. That its famous Sala Oval was packed to the rafters proves that, far from being confined to an insular art clique, the future of the museum genuinely engages and excites our fellow citizens.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the contributions of Adriano Pedrosa (artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, renowned for Lina Bo Bardi’s crystal easels that leave the backs of paintings exposed, allowing visitors to inspect works from every vantage point); Caroline Campbell (director of the National Gallery of Ireland, an institution that has embraced its country’s recent fraught history without complex, breathing fresh life into a collection devoid of high-profile blockbusters); Marc-Olivier Wahler (director of Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire and a man who seamlessly marries European heritage sensibility with that American knack for turning emotions into revenue); and the eminent art historian Francesca Cappelletti (Galleria Borghese, Rome) who, as keeper of Titians to die for, has every reason to move through the world walking on air.
Having steeped ourselves in cosmopolitanism and the wisdom of others, we gathered that museums can still tap far more deeply into the issues that preoccupy the world, and that the curatorial framework of the great picture galleries must step into the realm of deconstruction – focusing more on experiential journeys than rigid doctrinal theses. Listening to the speakers lay all this out, I found myself nodding along wholeheartedly, mind you, while also remembering that – with all due respect to their respective houses – our MNAC boasts a collection that is finer still, spanning the entire arc traced from Romanesque masterpieces down to the greatest jewels of the 20th century (Serra himself rightly invoked the priceless stature of totems such as Picasso, Miró, Dalí, and Tàpies… and we might well add Barceló: all members of the tribe!), alongside an array of Modernista painters and figures from the second avant-gardes whom the museum has long championed.
Whenever someone without sensibilities (or a Spaniard, which generally amounts to the same thing) balks at granting Catalonia the status of a nation, my first impulse is to deal them a swift blow; my second is to urge them to do themselves the courtesy of climbing the steps of Montjuïc to see what lies within the walls of the Palau Nacional. In this respect, and qualifying the views of the experts at this distinguished gathering, this must and can only be an explicitly political museum, given that its survival anchors us directly to the cultural bedrock of the country. We all hope that, with the promised redevelopment, discovering the treasures of the MNAC will prove even more effortless and, through initiatives such as this, that our museum will shed its dusty encumbrance to keep stride with its international peers. Yet we must bear the essential truth in mind: what matters above all is that it continues to assert itself as the backbone of the Catalan nation.
The MNAC in Transformation series will convene once again on 19 November to hear from Tristram Hunt of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. At home, nothing delights us quite like Anglophilia in all its forms, so we will be there… and we shall keep you posted.