“The MNAC is already the third museum in the State and with the expansion it will be even more so,” says Josep Serra during the presentation of the program for 2025. Serra is the director of this institution, created in 1990 with the union of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Museu d’Art Romànic de Catalunya, but which began operating with its current format in 2005 thanks to a consortium formed by parts equal by the Generalitat, Barcelona City Council and the Ministry of Culture.
The MNAC, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, to which its top leader attributes “a very eventful history”, was born in the wake of the project conceived by the historian and museum expert Joaquim Foch i Torres in the 1930s. Its mission has been, until now, both to host the work of Catalan artists of all eras and to locate donations made from private collections, in order to create a compendium of the artistic heritage of Catalonia, whether or not the creator had origins in this community. .
But Serra is clear that the MNAC is facing a new time that requires a total rethinking of the museum – “turning it upside down,” he says – and adding it to the current international conversation of rereading and reviewing both the collections held by museums and their function as cultural and social institutions.
In search of a new museum
With a torrent of words that relentlessly chain one idea after another, Serra emphasizes again and again that “the MNAC after the expansion will not be an expanded museum, but a new museum,” completely different in its approaches. “It is about rereading all the collections, including the Romanesque and Gothic ones.” [una de las más importantes del mundo]because Romanesque and Gothic art have influenced numerous modern artists,” he emphasizes.
He then clarifies that “surely today’s revisions will not be valid for a few years, so we have to create a system of continuous revisions”, an idea that is reminiscent of the “permanent revolution” that Trotsky preached. To support this demand, he reveals that “the museum conversation has changed more in the last 25 years than in the preceding two centuries.” “The 19th century and illustrated museum, the conventional one, has not been worth it for a long time,” he emphasizes.
So, according to its director, the MNAC wants to take advantage of the ambitious expansion in the making, which will allow it to have more than double the exhibition area it has now, to reorganize the museum’s preferences and functions. There will be more than 8,000 square meters for permanent collections and another more than 3,000 meters for temporary exhibitions. These exhibitions will cease to be the classic archive collection exhibition to, in Serra’s words, “apply a logical revision of gender and race, but also a bourgeois one.” “Because much of the art housed in the MNAC has bourgeois origins,” he adds.
“The post-expansion MNAC will not be an expanded museum, but a new museum”
Pepe Serra, director of the museum
He also clarifies that, despite the necessary increase in surface area that the expansion will provide – a good part of the MNAC collections do not currently have space to be displayed – “the idea is that the works do not necessarily have fixed rooms, but rather that they be exhibited according to the convenience of the expository argument. In other words, the content of the rooms, especially in the new space, will vary according to needs.
120 million and the doubt of the connection
On the other hand, according to Serra’s team, the current headquarters of the Palau Nacional will be used almost exclusively for the collections of Romanesque, Gothic and other relevant works, while Catalan painting from the turn of the century and the avant-garde (modernism, Renaissance, etc.) will move to the new space of the Palau Victoria Eugenia, which is 50 meters from the MNAC.
The calculated budget is 120 million, of which 69 will go to the restoration and conditioning of the Palau Victoria Eugenia, 12.7 to the transformations and rearrangement of the current headquarters; Another 13 million will be for the payment of taxes, fees and other settlements and another 11 million must be added for the museography of the two spaces that will make up the MNAC after the expansion.
The museum conversation has changed more in the last 25 years than in the previous 200
Pepe Serra, director of the MNAC
Finally, there are 12 million more allocated to the connection of both spaces, between which there are fifty meters and a certain unevenness. “Both the Palau Nacional and the Victoria Eugenia, as well as the space that separates them, were built for the 1929 Barcelona Universal Exhibition and are declared heritage, so the City Council will hardly allow them to be altered,” explains Serra. It is therefore thought of either an underground tunnel that connects them or perhaps some type of elevated walkway.
To solve this connection, as well as to condition the palaces, more than 60 architecture firms from around the world have made proposals in a competition that a little over a month ago was reduced to five projects. From now on, the five will receive a remuneration of 30,000 euros for their development, with an eye toward March 2025, when the jury decides the winner. It will be then that a reform will begin that is expected to finish in 2029, to take advantage of the centenary of the 1929 Universal Exhibition.
More intense collaboration with other museums
Serra also makes it clear that the expansion will not in principle involve a large acquisition plan to fill the new rooms, but it will help to finalize the transfer of funds from some private and family foundations that, according to him, “are going through very difficult financial times.” . For the director, the new museum must be able to house all these collections.
Regarding the collection of Catalan paintings that Baroness Thyssen gave to the museum in 2005 and which it is rumored that she now wants to withdraw for her private museum in Passeig de Gràcia, or for her museum in Sant Felíu de Guixols, Serra claims not to feel at all concerned: “The baroness’s collection provides us with a crucial work for the museum such as The cathedral of the poor [de Joaquim Mir]but the MNAC does not need all of it at all to be the museum that it is.”
The MNAC does not at all need all the works donated by Baroness Thyssen to be the museum it is.
Pepe Serra, director of the museum
Finally, in Serra’s new vision, the MNAC must also stop being an art concentrator and become a space for transfer to other museums in Catalonia that are smaller in size but that for him “are no less important.” It speaks both of transferring works for temporary exhibitions, whether in Sitges, Girona, Lleida, La Junquera – as will happen this year with an exhibition on Francesc Galí – or Tortosa, as well as lending the curators and curators of the MNAC to these institutions to to advise them. In this way, the function of the new MNAC extends to all areas of the Catalan territory.
2025, an ambitious program
Regarding the program presented, Serra highlights that it wants to be a program for the new museum even before the expansion. Gives the example of the exhibition Zurbarán (on) naturalwhich will be released on March 20 and will bring together for the first time the three versions of Saint Francis according to the vision of Pope Nicholas Vone of them owned by the MNAC and the other two by the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Various pictorial and photographic works will revolve around these three paintings, some made expressly for the exhibition and which reflect the influence that the brilliant painter of the Golden Age has had on other artists such as Alfons Borrell, Toni Catany, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Josep Guinovart, Antoni Llena, Aurèlia Muñoz, Marta Povo or Antoni Tàpies.
Additionally, from May to September you can see the videographic work in the museum’s dome. From the centerby the pioneering artist of this type of installations Eugènia Balcells. It is a work of twelve panels with videos arranged in a circular manner, evoking the megalithic monuments of antiquity, such as Stonehenge.
Regarding the program presented, Serra highlights that it wants to be a program for the new museum even before the expansion
Also Marcel·lí Antúnez, better known for his role as leader of The Fura dels Bauswill present a collaborative mural in the same dome starting in December 2025. And, in the words of Serra, “to place ourselves in the current context of war,” the MNAC will dedicate an exhibition to the cartoonist Mario Armengol, who satirized Hitler with his drawings during the great war in the service of the United Kingdom. It will bear the title of Ink against Hitler. The pacifist theme will be completed with a sample of the drawings that the Andalusian poster artist José Luis Rey Vila, Sim, made about the vicissitudes of the Civil War in Catalonia.
Finally, it should be noted that the MNAC will also dedicate an exhibition next fall to the Francoist deposits of the SDPANthe National Heritage Defense Service, created in 1938 in all museums in Spain with works of art seized from the republican Government after its defeat. The intention is to show the 128 artistic pieces whose owners have not yet claimed them and reflect on artistic plunder in war situations.
#turn #museum #upside #MNACs #reflection #gender #race #class
