National Gallery criticized over conservation
‘Significant deficiency’ in managing art
The Auditor General has alerted Parliament to a “significant deficiency” in how the National Gallery of Canada manages the conservation of its 78,000 artworks.
The National Gallery is a Crown corporation with annual expenses of about $70 million, and more than 300,000 annual visitors to its Ottawa location.
Conservation is a key part of the Gallery’s mission, both for the art it currently holds, and for the broader world of art, both Canadian and of importance to Canadians.
The failures identified by the Auditor General include “major” conservation work carried out without the approval of senior curators, and crucial research data — on artists’ techniques, materials and application, studies on conservation and deterioration — stored on paper files along with each artwork in a way that made it difficult to access.
Strategic priorities in caring for Canada’s national art collection were undocumented and unclear, the report found. Logs of service requests in the Conservation and Technical Research department were out of date, such that performance reviews amounted to little more than managers informally asking conservators to account for their work, making it hard to verify reported statistics.
“Moreover, we found instances where the movement of art in and out of the department was not properly recorded in the Corporation’s collection management system,” the report reads. “This significant deficiency matters because conservation work is vital to the Corporation’s mandate of maintaining an art collection and safeguarding its assets. Compliance with corporate policies and the implementation of well-defined procedures provide assurance that the work meets corporate expectations.”
The Auditor General’s “special examination” of the gallery’s operations in 2019 is just one the many reviews tabled in Parliament on Wednesday.
It did not specifically criticize the physical treatment of any particular work of art. Rather, it criticized the management of the conservation program, which “lacked well-defined processes to support art treatment activities and demonstrate that they were properly documented, approved, and reviewed — and that the activities were accurately tracked and reported.”
The report indicates the Gallery agreed that care and preservation of the national collection is “at the heart” of its work, and pledged to “take steps to ensure compliance with the requirements of its Conservation Policy.”
One key failure it identified is that many of the weaknesses it found in 2019 had been identified in a similar review a decade earlier.
For example, the 2009 review identified the need for a plan to conserve time-based and technology-dependent works of art, but 10 years later, there was no such plan.
“It was therefore unclear whether the related work performed by some employees was meeting corporate expectations, whether work was properly prioritized, and whether it was done on time,” the report found.
The Gallery was criticized two years ago for a controversial plan, never executed, to sell a Marc Chagall painting of the Eiffel Tower in order to buy, and thus preserve for the benefit of Canadians, Jacques-louis David’s 1779 Saint Jerome Hears the Trumpet of the Last Judgment, owned by the Cathedral-basilica of Notre-dame de Québec.
The province of Quebec eventually classified the painting as a heritage document, ensuring its protection against foreign sale.
The Gallery is reopening to the general public on July 18, with limited visitors and social distancing for its current displays including Beautiful Monsters in Early European Prints and Drawings, and the 35-metre animated frieze More Sweetly Play the Dance by South African artist William Kentridge.
The following week an international Indigenous art exhibition opens called Àbadakone, or Continuous Fire.