Between the lines – The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith is an art historian, author and curator whose career in the art world has been indisputably first-rate. His career began in 1982 at the Victoria & Albert Museum and in 1990, he was made Head of Research. In 1994, he became Director of the National Portrait Gallery and in 2002, he moved next door, becoming Director of the National Gallery. A further move in 2007, saw him becoming Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2018, he was knighted for his achievements in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Saumarez Smith’s new book The Art Museum in Modern Times is his latest accomplishment. Drawing on his experience at the epicentre of some of Britain’s leading art institutions, he looks at the key changes in the planning and design of museums over the past eighty years. His choice of museums is chronologically-structured and (at his own admission) “personally chosen”. There is an inevitable bias toward art museums in the UK, the US and in Europe.
Saumarez Smith’s tone and insight leaves the reader feeling they have booked a five-star museum guide, one who time travels you all the way from the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1939) to the West Bund Museum in Shanghai (2019).
For chair-bound travellers, frustrated by the pandemic, this book comes as a welcome tonic transporting readers to museums such as São Paulo Museum of Art (1969), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1977), Saatchi Gallery, London (1985), Benesse House Museum, Naoshima (1992), the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, (2011), Tate Modern, London (2000), the Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017) and the Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2019). The trip is accompanied by a range of pictures.
Samuarez Smith dedicates the latter part of the book to the overarching themes discovered on his journey. He says that, over the past century, the modern art museum has been continuously reinvented, but primarily there has been a paradigm shift in the way people now perceive these institutions. He concludes that museums have gone from being seen as a traditional, academic and schoolroom-like to spaces that revolve around self-discovery, individual exploration and private adventure.
On the day of publication, Reaction spoke to Sir Charles Saumarez-Smith in greater detail about the main changes to the modern art museum, the issues they face and their future.
You have been sitting at the helm of Britain’s art institutions for over four decades; looking back on your career, what is the most significant change you have seen?
When I started at the V&A back in 1982, everything was still very conservative. You had these material departments that were great centres of scholarly expertise, and there was a coherence of logic as to how it was set up. Writing the book, I realised a lot had changed since then, with most of the change coming just before the Tate Modern opening in 2000.
The Tate Modern was purely thematic and moved away from the idea that things were there to teach and explored the idea of the museum as a way to experience individually. This was also the case with Benesse House Museum, off the coast of Japan and then also with the MONA in Hogarth. The MONA is notably very different from conventional museums; there are no labels, no chronology; it’s now all about the experience.
Where do you stand on conversations about repatriating art and artefacts from European museums? Especially in light of the recent news that Aberdeen University will become the first UK cultural institution to return a Benin bronze to Nigeria.
All the art museums I’ve dealt with are from post-WW2 and so are not products of imperialism or colonialism the way big historical museums are. I am very in favour of what the British Museum has done in lockdown, labelling items to show how objects were acquired. Regarding the Benin bronze, the circumstances of this acquisition were as distasteful as possible for them to be. Again, I’m totally in favour of the British Museum working with the Nigerian Authorities on the new museum in Benin city.
Do you think we should care about the fact that many modern art museums are run off the back of private wealth? What are your views on donations and legacies to museums from people connected with what are now regarded as unacceptable practices?
Over the years, I became aware of the increased hostility because museums and galleries are run by and paid for by wealthy people. My view is that there is a long history of funding that goes back to the Medieval chantry chapels. This is also true of some 21st-century museums; look at the Frick Collection in New York. Henry Clay Frick was not a particularly admirable person regarding his business practices, but do I feel as a result of that I should enter the Frick collection with a sense of distaste? No, I don’t. I think it’s a wonderful museum that gives me the utmost pleasure. Then again, I belong to a generation that overlooks sources of wealth and how it was used. If it was done well, you would admire them.
What consequences do you think the pandemic has had on art museums?
The easy answer is that there are going to be big problems with museum funding. Understandably, if you’re shut for a year, and you’re not getting any tickets or visitors. You only need to look at what’s happening at the V&A to see the problem’s extent. I think the consequences of the pandemic will see a reduction in the scale and ambition of museums. People will probably be more likely to draw exhibits from their own collection, and there will likely be a reduction in big building projects. I reckon people will also have to be more inventive and creative in terms of display.
However, if you look back on the art museum’s history, it has changed quite significantly in the post-war period; I see no reason why they shouldn’t change again. I like to feel optimistic about it.
Do you think there’s a likelihood of people having a whole new appreciation for art?
It’s possible. I sense that when we go back into museums again, we may spend longer looking at the art. When the National Gallery was last open, I noticed people were going from picture-to-picture more traditionally, going around systematically. People may be excited to go back and see art in situ, but I don’t feel confident which way things will go; they may simultaneously go in both directions.
Museums have taken not only a huge financial hit as a result of the pandemic but a huge cultural one. How do art museums bounce back, and what habits should museums unlearn to stay relevant?
The book I read just before Christmas, put together by Andras Szanto, a Museum Director in New York, The Future of the Museum, is about how museums will face an uncertain future. But what the book showed is a version of what I had found; the next generation (the directors in-post at the moment) are much more pro-restitution and interested in the politics of museums, they like the idea of treating museums as civic spaces where you can have discussions about culture.
What I found interesting, if a bit strange, was that there was almost no reference from beginning to end about museums’ responsibilities with the collection. I think museums are centrally about collections, about physical objects, about retaining them and displaying them. My view is to reinforce that, go back to the central mission, rearticulate it. That would be my direction of travel, but it is not the direction of travel of the people running the museums now.
The billionaire Mark Cuban is setting up a digital art gallery where users can display NFTs in any form. Is this the future of the modern art museum?
I was a late convert to the digital world, and I haven’t yet grappled with NFTs; people want to see things, they want to go and stand in front of them and experience them physically. That sense of looking, communion and engagement are at the heart of what museums have always been. I don’t think that will be superseded.
Which is the best-run museum in the world?
I love the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). When I went to work there from the V&A, I was impressed at how orderly and straightforward it was, done in a very collegiate way. I felt vastly less friction than I did in other institutions. My wife says I idealise the NPG in retrospect, so it could also be that!
Which is the first museum you are going back to once lockdown is lifted?
When museums reopened for a bit, the first one we went back to was the National Gallery. The National Gallery hasn’t changed much and it’s possible, post-Covid, that what I feel about it will be felt by others; they may want to reassure themselves of the National Gallery’s continuity as an institution, rather than going for new exhibitions. Well, that’s how I feel anyway.
You can only invite three museum directors for dinner – dead or alive – who would it be?
My first guest would be Nick Serota, I am a great admirer of him and respect him hugely. I feel Tate Modern is the most significant museum in this country and, in some ways, the world. My second guest would be Mark Jones. He was underestimated for his success at the V&A. It’s not an easy place to run. Mark managed to revolutionise it successfully by being quite liberal and allowing each department to do its own thing. My last guest would be Michael Govan. He is the new director of the new LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) opening in 2023. The museum is a very obvious manifestation of many of the changes that the book describes; it’s very globalised, much more about the experience. I would quite like the chance to find out Govan’s ideas for what he thinks the LACMA will look like.
What were your main ambitions with this book? What do you want readers to leave thinking?
My main ambition was straightforward; to provide a coherent narrative of individual museums, treated individually, but assembled in such a way that you get a sense of what the changes have been as a whole.
The Art Museum in Modern Times (Thames & Hudson) is available to order here. RRP. £30.