Why the distance to the fire service relates to a museum borrowing works of art
MúzeumCafé 39.
Today it is commonplace for museums planning a temporary exhibition, in addition to displaying items held in their own collections, to borrow material from other museums or private collections. In most cases this involves works of special quality, which are generally rarely seen – or in the case of private collections, perhaps works which have never been exhibited publicly. In every case the arrangement of such lending is accompanied by a contract stipulating the conditions. One such document (shown here) is in the possession of a private collector in Hungary, who received it when a museum in Germany approached him with a view to borrowing a number of paintings for a major international exhibition. The first step in the resulting ‘negotiations’, which happened immediately contact was established, was that the collector received documentation relating to the security of the works to be borrowed, so that in the course of examining these he could decide whether to accept the conditions and lend the works requested by the museum. The first page (of 18) contains the museum’s data – name, address, website, names and positions of the relevant contact persons (in this case the museum’s director and the exhibition’s curator), postal address, telephone and fax numbers, as well as email address. The two last sections of this part refer to the title of the exhibition and the period of its opening, for which loan of the works was requested. So, after becoming acquainted with all the details of the conditions, a lender is able to decide on the basis of some certainty whether to hand over items in his possession for an exhibition. True, a couple of years earlier the Hungarian collector in question lent a painting to one of the country’s leading museums on the basis of conditions specified in a contract of just one and a half pages.