Coronavirus: Pandemic jeopardises gallery blockbuster art exhibitions
The days of big-ticket exhibitions may well be over as curators weigh the costs of sending artworks abroad in a post-COVID-19 world.
Art museums around the world are counting the days when they can reopen safely. They also are estimating the cost. Behind the scenes, directors and their colleagues are working hard to overcome problems that few could have anticipated before COVID-19.
The future is uncertain and financially perilous, prompting urgent questions about the fate of touring blockbusters and other key drivers of attendance.
Some museums across Europe have reopened, most recently in Switzerland and Germany. In Spain, which has been hit hard by the pandemic, the Centro Botin in Santander welcomed back visitors on May 12. The Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney will reopen on June 1, and in Adelaide the Art Gallery of South Australia hopes to make its comeback on June 8.
But special measures required for reopening in a pandemic — from protective equipment for front-of-house staff to deep cleans and limiting visitor numbers — come at a cost. Gallery directors are wondering how to manage pinch points such as toilets, lifts and doorways.
Few museums and cultural organisations will be able to remain vibrant without significant injections from public funds and private philanthropy.
“There will be great pressure on private philanthropy and I don’t know that it will be able to fill that gap,” says veteran arts patron John Kaldor. “There is a movement in Australia to keep philanthropy going, but I think the government has to take the lead.”
Blockbuster shows, those big-ticket items involving years of complex negotiations to secure star loans, are particularly vulnerable. Hundreds of high-profile loan exhibitions have been postponed or cancelled around the world. Shows that had just opened — including once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions of Raphael, at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale, and van Eyck, at Belgium’s Museum of Ghent — closed early. Raphael is due to reopen on June 2 but van Eyck will not. The Belgium gallery is trying to recoup around €3.5m ($5.8m) from its insurers to cover the cost of ticket refunds, according to The Art Newspaper.
This winter in Melbourne was going to be all about Pierre Bonnard. But in response to the pandemic, the National Gallery of Victoria has postponed that blockbuster until 2023. The NGV and the Musee d’Orsay agreed it was prudent that 150 works by the French artist remained at home in Paris, as well several other cities, including London, New York and Washington.
The AGNSW is scheduled to present a major Henri Matisse show this summer. But more than 100 loans from the Centre Pompidou in Paris have been delayed as both institutions work out if a November launch date is still realistic.
In Canberra, the National Gallery of Australia is still advertising its November opening of Botticelli to van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London. About 60 of those works, including van Gogh’s Sunflowers, are in lockdown in Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art. Another early victim of the pandemic, the travelling show did not open in Japan as planned on March 3 and looks set to remain closed through to next month at the earliest.
A spokesman for London’s National Gallery says it is consulting with partner institutions about new touring dates. The NGA declined to comment.
But some fear the blockbuster exhibition as we know it is over, at least in the short term.
Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofia, Madrid’s museum of modern and contemporary art, has voiced doubts about their future. “Will we be able to continue developing large exhibitions that are anti-ecological?” he wrote recently in Artnet News, an industry publication. “Maybe blockbuster exhibitions are over. Maybe we should think more about process and research.”
Travelling masterworks are typically chaperoned by a curator or conservator from each lending institution. On top of the increased cost of shipping, there is also the added risk to staff if they travel.
The director of London’s National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, knows from experience how nasty the coronavirus can be. He contracted COVID-19 in March, soon after the opening of the gallery’s Titian exhibition, which closed three days later when the gallery went into lockdown. The exhibition had reunited six paintings by the Renaissance artist for the first time in 400 years.
Fellow director Xavier Bray, whose Wallace Collection had agreed to an unprecedented Titian loan to the show, also caught the virus that month.
Both directors are now back at work. Bray hopes Titian loans from Madrid and Boston will be extended to allow the historic show to reopen. But he says international loans generally will be curtailed for the next two to three years. He suspects institutions will focus on their own collections, as they did after the 2008 recession, possibly with the addition of one or two guest stars.
Directors will not want to give up on loan exhibitions entirely, and neither will visitors.
NGV director Tony Ellwood remains committed to major drawcards at the gallery, come what may. Recent blockbusters at the NGV include Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Terracotta Warriors, Museum of Modern Art masterpieces and Degas.
“The NGV is now synonymous for delivering highly ambitious and unique exhibitions, which are a beacon for our local audience but also attract significant national and international cultural tourists,” Ellwood says, adding they have played a large part in building attendance to three million people a year. They also boost the local economy, he points out.
All museums will have to rethink their business plans. The director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Tristram Hunt, is anticipating only 15 per cent of visitors to return when the V&A comes out of lockdown in early July at the earliest. The Tower of London is working on a similar projection, hit by a double whammy of no international tourists and fewer domestic ones.
As visitor numbers drop, some big-ticket projects now seem unrealistic. Galleries around the world, including in Australia, have embarked on expansion plans, some of which have progressed further than others.
Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, weathered the post-2008 recession while at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he says no museum board “in its right mind” would embark on an expansion unless it had the funds in hand and a “very compelling” need to build quickly. “There is too much in flux, too many competing needs for philanthropic dollars,” he says.
In Sydney, the AGNSW had already secured private and public funding for its Sydney Modern expansion, which is due for completion in 2022. Construction has continued on the project during the lockdown.
AGNSW director Michael Brand, who calls the new space a “beacon of hope”, says art museums and cultural institutions are a vital part of civic society. “They should always be ready to offer hope, beauty, respite and inspiration during difficult times especially,” he says.
It is a sentiment shared by his international peers. The V&A is forging ahead with a new exhibition space and store in East London, which has a combined £100m ($185.6m) plus price tag.
Wim Pijbes, former director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, oversaw the Dutch museum’s long-delayed but ultimately triumphant modernisation during the post-2008 recession.
He knows what it takes when the going gets tough. “The museums that will be hit hard are the ones with no or few friends,” he says. “You have to make friends before you need them.”
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