Editor’s Letter
After the fast, the feast. Announcements of the opening dates for revamped museums and, in some cases, entirely new museums or buildings, have begun to drop into my inbox with the regularity of text messages from David Cameron lobbying his old chums in the government. Unlike the former prime minister, museums don’t yet sign off their missives with kisses.
Regular readers will have noticed that over the past year, features in Apollo about redisplays and new museums have of necessity been thin on the ground: last summer, we covered the MFA Boston’s 150th anniversary, somewhat wistfully and from a distance; between lockdowns in the autumn, we were able to send a writer to the reimagined Musée Cernuschi in Paris. Nevertheless, we have enjoyed the challenge of thinking creatively about how the magazine might still, from the confines of our home offices, live up to the ‘International’ billing in its tagline – and we hope that you, its readers, have taken pleasure from that too.
Now we face the opposite problem. Here, off the top of my head, are some of the museums that have recently unveiled capital developments, or are scheduled to open them to the public in coming months: the Humboldt Forum and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Munchmuseet (‘MUNCH’) and the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Spanish Gallery at the Auckland Project in County Durham, the Musée Carnavalet and the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, the Casa Balla in Rome. And that’s just a few pins dropped across Europe.
It’s not a bad challenge to have. I do wonder, though, whether this spate of realised projects – as well as those too far down the path to turn back – will be followed by another drought. In the museum sector, the straitened circumstances engendered by the pandemic are not about to ease, given that in most countries restrictions on visitor numbers, large events and other revenue-driving activities remain in place. For many museums, commercial revenues are likely to take years to build back, and those institutions that were considering capital projects may have to postpone their plans. Someone once told a cautionary tale about the risks of building on sand.
In the years ahead, will museums even need more new spaces that have been signed and delivered by starchitects? In the first instance, any new museums or displays that have pushed through the crisis will primarily be for a local audience. It feels appropriate, then, that one successful redevelopment has been the Museum of the Home in East London, a museum in which the local, national and global have always coexisted in imaginative tension (see Food, p. 105).
Although international travel regulations increasingly look like a Choose Your Own Adventure book – you can get from London to New York via Mexico, apparently – it seems likely that most cultural travel will be muted until the autumn, if not beyond. From some international venues, such as the Uffizi and the National Gallery, I sense greater endeavour to loan works from their collections to regional venues. It did not need a global pandemic to make this a priority, perhaps, but more such activity from other big players would be welcome. With regards to exhibitions, a show such as ‘Epic Iran’ at the V&A, drawn together from UK collections and with an impressive number of loans from a UK-based private collection, offers an encouraging model for how ambitious projects might still be possible with fewer international loans than we might once have hoped for (see Review, pp. 88–89).
Writing in this issue, the anthropologist Paul Basu describes how collections gathered during the colonial era are ‘good to think with’. Any attempt to address the legacy of colonialism in museums, he writes, should begin by bringing such objects out of storage, and researching, displaying and discussing them (see Diary, pp. 28–29). It is not only ethnographic collections that might be good to think with. In different contexts, other types of museum should be doing the same with their collections; it might help them build a vision of the future.