Book Review: The Art Museum in Modern Times
The Art Museum in Modern Times (2021) by Charles Saumarez Smith, published by Thames & Hudson.
Author Saumerez Smith was the Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1994 to 2002, Director of the National Gallery from 2002 to 2007 and Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy from 2007 to 2018. He has a wealth of experience to be writing this book and has written extensively about the history of museums and architecture before.
This book is a combination of both history of museums and architecture. The majority of the book is two to three pages on different museums that were created or had major upgrades done since the the 1930s. It goes through each museum chronologically, from “The Modern Museum” (e.g. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City or Centre Pompidou in Paris) to “Museums for the New Millennium” (e.g. Turner Contemporary in Margate or Neues Museum in Berlin) and finishing with “The Museum Reinvented” (e.g. Louvre Abu Dhabi and MONA in Hobart).
Most of the time each museum follows the same narrative formula of some backstory, a little about the Director and their history, the architectures who submitted their proposals, who won the competition and why and then how the design works or doesn’t work. Obviously each museum has a different story so it didn’t feel the same all the time, but I found the parts where he listed who had submitted to the architecture competition and what else they had worked on before tiring and repetitive. I felt myself skimming over those parts and skipping to who had actually ended up winning. Perhaps others will feel the same reading this, or perhaps it’s because I’m less interested in architecture than I am of the history of museums. I loved reading about the Directors and their previous works, so perhaps it’s more about my personal interests.
My favourite parts were actually the introduction, where he outlines the ideas of a “traditional museum'“ and the last two sections - “Key Issues” and the conclusion. These chapters are where Saumerez Smith expresses his own opinions about the modern museum and what he believes the future will and should hold for them. I felt that with all of his experience I was looking for more of his own opinions and thoughts throughout the book, instead of short encyclopaedia-like entries for each museum in chronological order, which I felt like could have been written by anyone.
The museums that Saumerez Smith chose to write about are also Euro and US-centric, with only a couple from Asia, one from Australia and none in Africa. Whilst he acknowledges this in a line in the introduction, I don’t believe this gets him off the hook as it becomes more apparent throughout the book that he hasn’t really given the issue any real thought. Throughout the book there is hardly a mention of race, the lack of diversity in the higher levels of management (read: the people who make the decisions) in museums, or clear understanding that the future of museums will be shaped by how they respond to the Black Lives Matter movement and the issue of repatriations. He does mention that the issues brought up from the BLM movement will need to be thought of by future generations, but doesn’t acknowledge what that actually means (that this will take decades of work), or discuss how he himself, in a position of great power in cultural institutions in the UK, has done anything to help.
Have you read this book? Let me know what you thought in the comments below.