People go to museums for refreshment

When art historian Nicholas Penny was appointed director of the National Gallery in London the profession responded with universal approval. Penny began working at the gallery in 1990 and became noted in broad professional circles the following year when he attributed a painting thought to be a copy as certainly an original Raphael. He applied for the post of director unsuccessfully in 2002, but he got the job in 2007. Although the number of visitors to the National Gallery has steadily increased every year since his appointment Penny strongly criticises measuring a museum’s success by visitor numbers, as well as by the popularity of so-called blockbuster exhibitions. As he has remarked, he has “no problem with popular exhibitions, merely with exhibitions designed primarily to be popular”. At the end of last October Nicholas Penny came to Budapest for the opening of the Cézanne exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. Neither the city nor the museum were unknown to him, and he seems rather knowledgeable about events concerning museums in Hungary. Moreover, he has a definite opinion about what is happening here and the parallels in Britain give him cause to reflect.

– I remember that you mentioned three things in connection with the Cézanne exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest yesterday in your opening speech about its importance. What do you think about it in an international context?

There have been many exhibitions of Cézanne but there has not been an exhibtion of any size that has explored his own relationship with the past. It is a very rich subject, because more than any of his contemporaries did he reconsider the past as an important artist of the avantgarde, of the end of the 19th century. I do not think any of his contemporaries had such a continuous relationship with previous art. Degas, for example, who clearly was in some ways trained with the classical tradition, and the way he collected paintings by earlier French painters, but I do not think he actually continues for us his life to return to models of earlier centuries. It turns out to be more important thing than people realize. The constant effort Cézanne made to draw strength from previous masters can be felt. You feel you really get inside his mind in this exhibition. It is very ambitious, because of its scope and its comprehensive character. You will find it really enthralling, it is extremely unusual. It is a kind of exhibition proposal that most museums would turn down, well, it is not for the public with so many drawings. Cézanne’s drawings, some of them could be said to be obviously affected, especially the watercolour still lives for example. But most of them are not alluring drawings in themselves, they are not in any way finished works of art, they are a sort of experimental approaches to something, and yet I think it will be a very popular exhibition because it is just so intriguing, it absorbs you so much, and it is punctuated with really major paintings. It has some extraordinary loans.

– Do you feel anything that is missing from the exhibitions?

You can always try to imagine what else might have been, but no, it has not occured to me. That is a surprise question, because when you see an exhibition which is quite large and very absorbing – well, I think it is a good exhibition and you never think what is not there, even there are some who put the exhibition on of course and there is something they ask for. Here there are many things Iam surprised to see, magnificent loans. Maybe if I can go back again I think that there is something that is not there, but no, I have not. I did ask myself sometimes how Cézanne worked seeing these drawings in the museum, it is a purely practical question. I just wondered what type of drawing pad he had and what materials he used, was he standing up, was he sitting down, things like that. There was nothing I thought missing, they were a very great many things I was surprised to find.

– What is your opinion about the Museum of Fine Arts/Szépművészeti Múzeum, about its collections, its quality, its place?

I have known it for a long time, it has got very many great works of art in it. That has always impressed me as a little mysterious, because it is such a grand classical building with quite a complicated plan, and it has so many huge rooms, which are now not filled in the way that they were meant to be filled. It is in fact a bit of a mystery what happenned in all these rooms, and I know that a part of the museum, a large part was devoted to plastic art, including plastic arts of architecture, and even so it is quite hard to imagine how it was used. I have always wanted to ask for an old photograph of the museum, when it was filled with plastic arts. And I am sure you have one. It was 1906, when it was opened, and I would like to see old photographs with the original installation. But I think probably even if you disregard the change in function it must have been a bigger building than its own collections.

So in other words, it was built in an absolute boom period for Budapest, when you were certain, that the huge collection woud fill the museum. And of course you do have many great works of art, some of the greatest are quite small and so I often think to myself when I think of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest I think of huge halls and tiny paintings, like the Esterházy Madonna. I always feel it is a museum which is bound to change, because it is always very difficult to find the right way of filling these great spaces. In the temporary exhibition rooms it is quite fortunate, because what has happenned is someone has deisgned the architecture for the exhibition room. It is not associated closely with the architecture of the whole you are in. This means that it can be very ingeniously planned with these angled walls, which take you from one part of the exhibition to the next without ever feeling that you are a kind of lost. You do not feel you are in a labyrinth, you feel you have a free choice to go to the left or right. But there is some order all the same, which I think is quite important, because the way the exhibition is broken up into separate units is like an exhibition which is really thirty small exhibitions.

– Yesterday it was not mentioned, but we know that a new 20th century permanent exhibition opened, which is quite a novelty, as we have not had any of that kind till now in Szépművészeti.

Bur last year I saw the exhibition of The Eight.

– Yes, but it was a temporary exhibition.

Oh, it is a great difference.

– What do you think about the difference between permanent and temporary exhibitions?

Well, this is a very important question, because for museums now it is a great difficulty to establish the right relationship between the permanent collection and the temporary exhibitions.The problem is that although the temporary exhibition is not much more expensive, it attracts all the publicity and so when you have someone – whether they are the trustees of the musuem in my gallery deciding who will be the new director or whether it is the government deciding who is going to be the new director – the first thing they will say is who will be to put on exhibitions, because exhibitions mean the publicity. And this is going to become increasingly difficult and increasingly expensive to put on exhibitions. All the focus is always on exhibitions. What we try to do in London is never to have temporary exhibition, which does not have some relationship with the permanent collection. Even if people go to a temporary exhibition and leave afterwards, because they need their lunch, or they are exhausted, nevertheless what they have seen has some relationship with what they could have seen in the permanent collection. The other thing that of course happens – and you can see this happening a lot – is that the permanent collection is turned into a sort of temporary exhibition itself, either by new things being frequently added to, or its redisplay being the occassion for the publicity, because the only way now in which a permanent collection will attract publicity is if you say it is newly opened, or there is a new wing, so it is quite a good advantage in Budapest, that you can say this. It reminds one also the old joke they used to have in Florence, when not so many people used to go to the great sculpture museum, the Bargello, the national museum of sculpture in Italy, they said all you need to do is to put up a post saying new exhibition of Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Michelangelo – and everyone would go just because it was thought to be new. That is a real problem, I mean the permanent exhibition, the permanent collection by its nature is not news,and in fact there is a very important fact about it, it is a thing where people return to, not just go to. So it has to be defended and given special advantages. Space previously occupied by the permanent collection is being taken up by temporary exhibitions. It is happening even in great national collections, like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, they more often now use this display, and we do too in London. We use the galleries of the permanent collection for the Velazquez exhibition, we will do so again in two or three years time for Veronese, we occassionally do that. But it is only an occassional thing, it is part of the keeping the permanent collection alive. I think that one has to accept that even within a permanent collection there has to be change as well as some sort of reliability. A lot of people are very annoyed when they go back, and cannot find the work – they are the most important people, the greatest art lovers, who want to see the same again and again. But they do not mind if when they go back they see something that they have not seen before. So there is a delicate balance. I think that this change, that you mentioned, of having a 20th century installation is extremely important for the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, because there are some galleries in some cities where the collection ends in 1900 – that is the case with Musée d’Orsay and the National Gallery in London, and it is a great advantage to have one building for the later developments, we do it only by temporary exhibitions. But it is very important to do it to show that there is a continuous relationship of some kind. Once you decided it to do it then you have an additional difficulty because people have expectations of 20th century painting, which are determined by a canon of art which is basically since the middle of the 20th century associated with American painting. And when people go there they see what the have not got, and are disappointed because they really have a narrow canon. Of course for the first half of the 20th century it is easier to do, but then again you have to work out whether you are doing it internationally or nationally, so it is a big challenge for the development of the Museum of Fine Arts in the future. It is a very difficult thing to get right, but the Cézanne makes it very interesting.

– The collections ofthe Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery are united from now on. Should national and international art be displayed together or should they be placed in different exhibitions, buildings?

Well, you are asking the right person, because in Britain we have not quite decided, because one decision we have made, which I think is very important is that in the National Gallery we would have European art, and we would keep in it a small group, but significant group of British paintings to show them in European context, to show that they are not unworthy of being shown in that way. But of course there is a problem if you do that, because you then have to separate them in the great collection of Tate Britain for British art taking out many of the masterpieces, so I am very sympathetic to this problem. If you had to choose in one way or the other it is worth not have any Hungarian painting that seems to me the most unfortunate. You take an artist, like Munkácsy – I mean he exhibited in Paris, he was active in Vienna, his contemporaries sometimes they would have said, oh we must have one of his works because he is Hungarian, but on the whole they were looking at everything and if you move him from that context you do not understand him as well. Anyone outside Hungary will not realize this, because they will not see him in this relationship. It is not the only way of presenting him, but it is a pity not to have at least some of his works in that context, I mean you do damage to your local school of art if you do not show that it is actually quite a significant factor in European painting. It is necessary to present your local achievement in this broader way. On the other hand the difficulty is you will always want to show the native tradition, you will always be able to show it in greater depths. It is not a bad idea to show Hungarian art in two different ways, but I still do feel that it is important to at least have some works – it is not a problem that anyone can completely solve. The national collection should be shown in a very careful way. Even if you do not have lots of new buildings, once you have a unified organization then you can have some sense in the way things are shown, it is a good thing to coordinate things better. So without knowing anything about the political background of this decision, I can still see that it can help things to work.

– You have mentioned, or at least hinted to the plans of the new museum district in Heroes’ Square. Do yout think there is a reason in the beginning of the 21st century to build a new museum district in Hungary?

Well, I think on Heroes’ Square, when you go there, you think there is room for more. You also think it exists as a great public space and what is nice about it, it has a kind of recreational feel, but it could be more so – it is next to a park, I would like to see something revived, optimistic, and the spirit of Budapest when it was first built. But I do think it is very important, that you do not build something which is overwhelming. I think of the museum as a kind of expression of national importance, but the days of imperial architecture are over. You really need to think of art museums as places where people go for some kind of refreshment, spiritual refreshment, and they should not be overwhelmed, so if you have a huge plan it need not be for one huge building. Looking at art is quite an exhausting business, many people bring children to these intimidating places, so I hope it would be something that is developed in parts, smallish pavilions, where you have some sense of things related to each other, where you do not have to feel, that you have to look at everything. I will just give an example of this: I do think it was a pity when they built the great pyramide of the Louvre – everyone had to go in one entrance, then you felt, you are going to an airport. You felt, even if you really wanted to go just one thing, nevertheless you had to consider the possibility of flying to hundred over destinations before you got and there was a huge crowd. There is also a plan for the Museum Island in Berlin – it is a bit intimidating to have nothing, but museums. Zoological Garden, or like Kew Garden in London combined with museums – this will be a place where people went for a promenade and recreation generally. Some people think that museums should be right in the middle of the city, but I can tell you it is very inconvenient to have a Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I do not recommend it. There are many reasons of that. But I will not go into…There are some conveniences as well, it is quite easy to find – in theory, but actually if you have a recreation in the middle of the city you will find a lot of old people for example, who do not really want to go there, because they find it harassing, There are many advantages – the handling of school parties for example. Well, stay were you are, but do not make it too grand, that is all. It would be wiser to do it in small parts, because it is going to cost a lot.

– In Hungary people think about the National Gallery in London as a great and successful museum. What is the key of your success?

It has two huge advantages, and both accidental: one is the fact that when considered in relation to other great national collections of painting it is very late. That means that it was not founded on the taste of the king or on the limitations of a certain period. It was founded first of all by people who wanted to have a collection of masterpieces and then by directors who wanted to make it comprehensive, so it always tried to be a comprehensive European collection. The other advantage is quite small: it is actually extremely concentrated. There is also a third point: the British knew that their own school of painting was interesting, but they never thought, it was as great as other schools, so they were always trying to get very good examples, they never felt, well, we do not need that. So that encouraged people to look to Dutch, French and Spanish painting in a different way … It is actually not a perfectly balanced collection, but it seems more balanced and more comprehensive than most, but also concentrated. So this is why people think so highly about National Gallery.

– What is your favourite museum, exhibition in European context?

I have many favourite museums actually, I am just thinking, I tend to very much like small house museums – of course there are a lot of museums that I have not seen – I suppose ultimately my favourite museum is the Victoria and Albert Museum, because I have lived in London most of my life and I have never been there without finding something new, it is like a sort of endless treasure house and I just found it magical. But still one part of me always wants to have a little museum, I have chosen the biggest, Victoria And Albert Museum, so it is not so clever. There is a museum in Dijon, a small house, hotel in French, I loved this museum, because it was like a private collection, which had no longer any room for people to live in it. It is also full of surprises. I like the idea of discovering things in museums, that is important actually.

– What would you like to see in your museum from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest?

I have seen many many of the masterpieces of Hungarian museums in an exhibition of the Royal Academy in London a couple of years ago, but you know, I would most like to see some of the great 19th century paintings of Hungary in London, because I think our 19th century collection is very unbalanced, we do not have great works of 19th century Hungarian painting, actually the end of the 19th century.