LEADERSHIP - Building the New Museum (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb)
Snježana Pintarić - Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia - gives a short history of the institution and introduces it's new leading-edge building which is due to open in autumn 2007.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb was founded in 1954 under the name of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art with the purpose of following, documenting and promoting currents, styles and events in contemporary art.
From the beginning the Museum saw its work as being to document and promote events, styles and occurrences in contemporary art, and to collect, keep and exhibit artworks created in Croatian and abroad after 1950. This original concept has not essentially changed. The Museum also collects audiovisual material and documents that show the way contemporary art is developing.
From the very foundation of the Gallery of Contemporary Art down until today works were exhibited by artists which at the time when they were created spoke a new and different art language. Thus exhibitions were organised at the Museum that showed the beginnings and logical development of particular art tendencies, and also their direct or indirect influence on the production that followed. In some periods the exhibitions also encouraged current Croatian art in relation to concurrent flows in the development of European and world art.
In keeping with its exhibition policy, in the fifties and the sixties the Museum exhibited the work of the artists of constructivism (members of the Exat 51 group) and of other forms of abstract art (geometrical, lyrical, expressionistic, informel), and of members of the pre-conceptualistic Gorgona Group. In those years began a series of international exhibitions called New Tendencies that made Zagreb an important international art centre in the sixties. Besides presenting the work of individual artists, many problematic or retrospective exhibitions were organised at the Museum.
Thanks to the exceptional professional level of directors, curators and museum associates, the Gallery was very early confirmed as a contemporary museum, evidence of which is the fact that only ten years after its foundation it was invited to show a selection of works from its holdings at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964, as part of the exhibition Arte d'oggi nei musei, together with seventeen most important museums in the world. In 1966, at the 2emme Salon international des Galeries pilotes in Lausanne, it kept company with fifteen of the most renowned galleries of Europe, America and Japan.
In its rich holdings the Museum of Contemporary Art has collections that cover more than 6,000 works by Croatian and foreign artists made after 1950. A smaller part of the collection are works from the first half of the 20th century whose presence is indispensable for the reception of modern and contemporary art. With this material the collection indicates the beginnings and development of some art tendencies, as well as their direct and indirect effect on the art that followed.
The Museum has several collections: contemporary art collection (works from the second half of the 20th century), modern art collection (works from the first half of the 20th century), foreign art collection, marginal art collection, posters and design collection, and photographs, films and videos collection.
The Museum also incorporates donations such as the complex and heterogeneous collection of Benko Horvat, the rounded surrealistic work of the painter Josip Seissel (the Silvana Seissel Donation), and the special collection of architect Vjenceslav Richter and Nada Kareš Richter in their family house on Vrhovac.
Since its foundation the Museum has been situated in the Upper Town, today at two addresses: Katarinin trg 2, in the baroque town mansion of Court Kulmer, where the exhibition premises are, and in Habdelićeva ulica 2, which houses the library, documents, archives and management, of a total area of 1,129 m², while the collections are stored in several more locations in the city.
As early as the 1960s intense talks began with representatives of the Zagreb city administration about the need to find alternative premises for the Museum. In spite of the fact that the idea of building a new Museum dates from the sixties, the first official initiative about the need to build a new museum building was given by the Museum Council of Croatia in 1979.
At the end of 1983 discussion began on the proposal for a Museum Network on the Territory of the City of Zagreb and its Inclusion in an Overall System of Museum Organisation in the Republic of Croatia. This system provided for the Museum of Contemporary Art as the central museum for all museums and galleries of contemporary art in Croatia.
Opting for new location the Museum took the courageous step of crossing the Sava, which makes it the first major cultural institution that moved its seat to the part of the city previously known only as the “city bedroom”. However, by keeping to the north-south axis it is at the same time continuing and extending the idea of the great planner of Zagreb Lenuci, who placed important cultural and scholarly institutions along this axis from Trg bana Jelačića to the Main Railway Station. In the second half of the twentieth century the builders of the Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall and the National and University Library continued this line.
In June 1999 the Ministry of Culture and the City Government, in cooperation with the Society of Architects of the City of Zagreb, called a national, general, project competition for the basic architectural and urban development plans for the Museum of Contemporary Art. Eighty-five projects were submitted, and the project of Igor Franić, an architect from Zagreb awarded first prize.
Igor Franić’s project places it among those museum buildings that immediately, in appearance, unlike closed, simple volumes, show a composition of architectural masses based on a clear division of function. From the basic design to the completed main project of the building, the Museum’s experts, with the special consultant Professor Ivo Maroević, cooperated with architect Franić on the improvement and introducing changes in the distribution of inside rooms, but the changes were minimal because the project was already well museologically based in the conceptual stage – the underground floor has auxiliary rooms and restoration workshops; the ground floor is completely given over to various requirements of visitors – from the museum shop, children’s workshop, reading room and café, to a restaurant and multimedia hall.
All the areas are very functionally designed (e.g. the hall has its own entrance from the north, the restaurant stretches through all the floors so that it can also be used for opening exhibitions on the upper floors, etc.) and with the purpose of enabling pleasant rooms for people to spend longer periods of time in. On the upper floors, which create the recognisable silhouette of a meander, are the exhibition halls. Igor Franić has created neutral areas in a system of small, medium sized and large halls that can be used individually, parallel and combined, i.e. which make it possible to increase, decrease or intermix the permanent exhibition and occasional exhibitions, and which offer the most diverse possibilities for exhibiting material of various kinds (small rooms without daylight for video presentations, high rooms for large and heavy sculptures, and the like).
Franić’s controlled architectural expression offers an ideal frame for the art of today while his open and undogmatic approach leaves sufficient freedom to meet any foreseeable new technology or museum needs.
The shiny transparent covering that the Museum will soon get will become a recognisable emblem at the city entrance.
Franić’s idea was to design a museum that will first and foremost serve its exhibits, the storage, study and exhibition of the works of contemporary art. The project thus places the exhibit and the event in the first place, and its form can be changed and shaped until its real meaning is found in the concept of a museum of contemporary art. For this reason the architect found the distribution of volumes that make it possible for art to happen in the outside and inside areas more important than the concept of a meander.
The ground floor where visitors will enter and various programmes be held is accessible from several sides. The main entrance is on the south above broad paved steps that slowly rise to the building and create a large open space for visitors. The covered open approach from the south and west leads to the central place from which visitors continue towards the museum exhibitions, but where they can also stop and use the restaurant and Museum Shop without buying a ticket. To the north of the Museum is a large, very fine open space for various art interventions. The mixing of outside and inside areas, the play of the full and the empty, the entwining of vertical and horizontal lines of force, already experienced in the ground floor, continue in the upper floors of the Museum. The horizontal lines of the floors are cut by vertical hollows, and the opening of the exhibition areas to the terrace and roof changes exhibition perspectives. The magnificent transparent casing that the Museum should be getting any day now underlines the architect’s concept of a building-section, a meander that contains within it the idea of spreading along both axes.
The limited possibilities of the old town, where the Museum was until now, restricted its activities and ability to collect new works. The new Museum will not only offer possibilities for exhibiting and storage but also for the everyday presentation of very varied programmes from reading room to educational areas, film showings and theatre productions, which will be a great professional and personal challenge. We want the museum to be a place where all kinds of people come, the widest possible public, not a place for a small restricted circle of art lovers. We want our New Museum in New Zagreb to be a centre where people congregate, a space for the presentation of a wide spectrum of high quality cultural programmes – we want it to find a place on the tourist and cultural map of Central Europe. Contemporary art covers a whole range of achievements and research, not only in the province of art in the narrower sense but in many other fields – music and sound, movement and dance. The range of subjects treated by contemporary projects is very broad – from the purely visual sphere to topical public and social problems. This view of the mission of a museum of contemporary art provides us with very great possibilities for developing programmes and cooperating with other institutions worldwide.
We also hope that this part of the city, to which we are coming, will develop into a new cultural meeting place and that our “museum at the end of the city” will become a museum in the centre of a city that is planning its urban development equally on both sides of its river.