Living Museums: Conversations with Leading Museum Directors

"Like several other museum related books which have appeared recently, this was written in parallel with my own. In a way, I wish they had been available as I was writing. Donatien Grau, a relatively young curator at the Musee d’Orsay , didn’t go around and interview the current generation of museum directors. He went out of his way to interview the retired generation of museum directors, who people are very apt to forget. Because of the way museums operate, many of us forget significant milestones from the past. Alan Bowness , for example, interviewed by Grau, did a huge amount of work at the Tate while he was director from 1980-1988, before Nicholas Serota took the helm. In the late 1980s, Serota became very well known, and in the public mind everything that’s happened at the Tate as we know it is the result of Serota’s initiative. Nick Serota’s views about art and the Tate are readily available in the public domain – I was able to write the chapter about the Tate Modern easily because everything about Tate Modern has been extensively discussed and debated. There are already three or four significant books about it. By contrast, his predecessor Alan Bowness has in a way been wiped from public memory. Bowness had been a teacher at the Courtauld Institute of Art and is the son-in-law of the artist Barbara Hepworth . When he came into the Tate, he was the person who introduced Tate Liverpool, and he was the person who first came up with the idea of doing Tate St Ives. He had different views of the priorities of the Tate but as an academic these were very intelligent. I was very intrigued that this book didn’t interview Serota, who would have been perfectly available, but instead went to Alan Bowness. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then there’s Tim Clifford , a very colourful figure in 80s Britain when he was director of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. If you talk to the current generation of museum curators, they would say that Tim did exciting and adventurous things in Edinburgh and Manchester before that, which he was appointed to when he was quite young. However, it’s not so much a matter of public record. Similarly, Mark Jones was an effective and successful director of the V&A from 2001 to 2011, but was not somebody who was given to talking about what he was doing. I know and admire him, and temperamentally he’s quite shy. You might say the same of Henri Loyrette , who took over at the Louvre between 2001 and 2013 after his time as director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and was instrumental in the creation the Louvre in Lens . I contacted him to get his input on my Louvre-Lens chapter, and he wrote back saying, ‘You know, my dear Charles, this is very accurate, thank you very much, Yours, Henri.’ Not exactly forthcoming! I was hoping for more from Henri than just a tick! He’s a very philosophical figure. Shortly after I handed in my book to the publishers, along comes this collection of interviews, and lo and behold! there’s Henri being very thoughtful and reflective. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are other examples of a prior generation of museum directors. Donatien Grau in this wonderful book remind us of museum leaders who set the stage for our time, documenting conversations that might otherwise be lost to us. Although my book is about architecture, it’s not really about architects. It’s more about the museum directors as clients. As I say in the conclusion, the role of the client comes before the role of the architect. If there’s an analytical aspect to The Museum in Modern Times , it would be to make people more aware of how museum directors determine the brief and shape the institution at least as much as the architect. There are two, very different from one another, which are favourites for similar reasons. Partly because it was the last one I’ve seen before lockdown, but also because I was incredibly impressed by it, MONA left an indelible impression. The other one which gave me a sense of long-distance pilgrimage was the Benesse Art Site Naoshima . When I was hosted by the Japan Foundation in 2008 I had already been to Tokyo several times, but I was very curious about other museums outside Tokyo which I very much wanted to see. Visiting Naoshima with my wife was memorable because I didn’t know what to expect. Spending time with the museum, so that you don’t just go for an hour’s visit, but linger, creates a lasting impression. You visit, but then maybe spend the night, then explore the village, go up the hill to the art site. The idea that museums benefit from spending time with them is one that has stayed with me. So if there is an exemplary museum within the text, Naoshima is probably the one, for that reason."