The Integrated Art Collection

De toekomstige rol van de kunstcollectie in het communicatieve beleid
Symposiumverslag

María de Corral
Fundación "La Caixa", Barcelona Directeur Collección de Arte Contemporáneo

La Caixa is de grootste spaarbank van Spanje. De bank begon aan haar kunstcollectie in 1984, als artistieke steun aan de toen nog jonge democratie in Spanje. Door haar verschillende activiteiten speelt de Fundación la Caixa een belangrijke rol in het internationaal onder de aandacht brengen van hedendaagse Spaanse kunst. Daarnaast toont ze ook het beste van de buitenlandse kunst in Spanje zelf. María de Corral is sinds 1981 verbonden aan La Caixa. Na een onderbreking van vier jaar, waarin zij directeur was van het Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, is ze sinds 1995 directeur van de Fundación La Caixa. Bovendien treedt zij geregeld op als gastconservator voor internationale kunstmanifestaties en musea in het buitenland. Ze heeft zitting in diverse comités in Spanje en daarbuiten en is vicepresident van de internationale museum organisatie ICOM. Haar publicaties en bijdragen als spreker tijdens symposia over hele wereld zijn zeer talrijk en verscheiden.

The Foundation "La Caixa" is a non-profit institution, created at the beginning of the 1980s to give form to a social and cultural project which had been in progress ever since the creation of the Savings Bank at the beginning of the century. The Foundation "La Caixa" is financed by the banking entity "La Caixa" (Barcelona Savings and Pensions Bank). Its budget represents 50% of the banks profit after taxes, and varies every year according to the bank's performance. The budget of the Foundation "La Caixa" for 1998 will be a hundred million dollars spread over a variety of areas; science, music, visual arts, public libraries, a multimedia centre, the Arts Laboratory (educational programme for teachers, schools and families), social centres for the elderly, one research programme on Alzheimer's disease and another on AIDS, and a programme of cultural activities throughout Spain. In the scientific field, the Foundation has a Science Museum in Barcelona, which is currently being enlarged and, when completed, will be one of the largest in Europe with 27,000 m2. It also has another recently opened Science Museum in Madrid. In the visual arts field the Foundation has a cultural centre in Barcelona which organizes exhibitions, courses and film cycles, and it also contains the multimedia centre. We have an exhibition space in Madrid and a museum in Palma de Mallorca which is devoted to Anglada Camarasa, a Catalan artist from the turn of the century. Finally, the Foundation has the contemporary art collection. In the musical field the Foundation organizes several festivals every year, ranging from religious music to baroque to music from different parts of the world like India, Japan and Bali. As for libraries, the Foundation has 69 public libraries in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. The activities in the rest of Spain have only been recently introduced, because up to five or six years ago "La Caixa" was only authorised to operate within Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. The Foundation is now extremely active throughout the whole country and organizes every year over 2000 events devoted to science, photography and contemporary art- lectures, seminars, courses, concerts and exhibitions. Of all these activities, the exhibitions have been particularly important, especially in the area we want to discuss during this symposium; the use of cultural activities as a marketing product.

The Foundation has been programming exhibitions for 18 years now and these have had a key role not only in promoting and disseminating art in Spain, but also in drawing the attention of the international art world to Spain. The programme has been divided into four basic areas. First, exhibitions of twentieth century avant-garde artists such as Duchamp, Masson and Munch. Second, exhibitions of Spanish artists from the turn of the century like Anglada Camarasa, Regoyos, Beruete, Sunyol, etc. Third, important artists from the fifties and the sixties like Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Lucio Fontana, Arshile Gorky. And fourth, the individual or group exhibitions of contemporary artists such as Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Dokoupil, Art and Its Double, Other Figurations, In Three Dimensions, David Salle etc. La "Caixa", the banking entity, has never itself published these or any other Foundation activities, but as the Foundation uses its name there is no doubt that the results of these exhibitions have had an enormous impact on the bank's reputation.

The Foundation's contemporary art collection started in 1985 and since then it has accumulated over 500 works. A small committee of specialists was formed to acquire art works in accordance with extremely rigorous criteria. In its early days the committee discussed and decided the direction of the collection, since this had to be absolutely clear. It is on this basis of this precisely plotted direction that the museum has forged its own identity and the collection has taken on its distinctive character. The first acquisitions of the committee were aimed at the creation of the collection which would be, at one and the same time, Catalan, Spanish and international. It has continued along these lines ever since, although we have slightly modified our criteria since the opening of the MACBA (Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum). The Catalan-Spanish collection started with the acquisition of a group of works by the Catalan movement Dau al Set, whose work has become a universally recognised milestone in contemporary Catalan art since its formation in 1948. Almost a decade later, in 1957, a group called El Paso emerged in Madrid. It was shortliving, it broke up in 1960, but it was intensely creative. El Paso was founded by painters Canogar, Feito, Millares and Saura and the sculptor Martin Chirino, who were all characterised by a demystifying desire for rupture which led them to cultivate and disseminate informalist, materialistic and gestural tendencies in the Spanish artistic landscape, at a time when the international art scene was dominated by informalism, American action painting and French tachisme. El Paso's influence on Spanish art in the sixties is well known, but the group also significantly raised Spain's international profile. The pioneering work of Dau al Set and El Paso in revitalising Spanish art was not, however, an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, these groups' activities encouraged the creation of completely personal worlds, which in many cases synchronized not only with the preoccupations of their contemporaries abroad, but also with the most important prevailing trends in visual arts. The sixties also witnessed the birth of Pop Art, kinetic art and the conceptual movements, which would reach maturity in the seventies. The main concern of visual artists at the beginning of the eighties was the vindication of painting as a medium to express feelings. This generation, interested in recovering pictorial discourses as a means for the artist to communicate with the public, no longer based its inquiries on sociological or semiological problems but rather turned to emotions coming from their own subjective experience. And they expressed these emotions by exploiting the whole range of technical and stylistic resources that the history of painting itself had offered them. The artists from this period in the collection are: García Sevilla, Broto, Grau, Delgado, Suárez, Tovar, Hernández
Pijuan, Sicilia, Barceló, Uslé etc. etc. The eclecticism of the mid-eighties sometimes resulted in a real ceremony of confusion, but for the artist it represented the definitive assertion of his or her own expressive freedom, an advantage which, in contrast with the restrictions of earlier programmatical positi-ons, enhances the artist's creative potential. Sculpture and installations became the language of the second half of the eighties, as we can see from the work of Txomin Badiola, Cristina
Iglesias, Pello Irazu, Susana Solano, Juan Muñoz, ana Laura Alaéz or Rogelio López Cuenca. The collection of Spanish artists consists of approximately 400 works created by some 150 artists.

The collection of foreign artists has followed a completely different pattern. The first acquisitions were installations or groups of work by key artists from the sixties and seventies, whose work in the eighties was still completely valid. In other words, a work from the eighties was bought in order to set up a dialogue with much younger generati-ons. The first of such acquisitions was an installation by Joseph Beuys made in 1984 for the Conrad Fischer Gallery, entitled 'Behind the bone the space of pain is counted'. What we know today, or rather recognise, as being Minimal Art is in fact a feeling underlying painting since the beginning of the century, which came to the surface conceptually towards the end of the fifties in reaction to the romantic, autobiographical style of abstract expressionism. The main theoretical champions of what we now refer to as Minimalism were sculptors, something difficult to understand if we still have the traditional idea of a sculpture in our mind. Donald Judd and Carl Andre are the two artists who represent this movement in the collection. Richard Serra's main concern is what sculpture properties can achieve. We have two works by him. Bruce Nauman's work deals with that romantic tendency to place visual art in time, to perceive the viewer's presence by using his or her own self. Nauman's main theme is the relationship between space and body. At the end of the sixties landscape reappeared as an inspiration for many of the most significant artists of the time. This art was known as Earth-Work or Land-Art. It is represented in the collection by three works of Richard Long and two light pieces of James Turell. The most important European movement to react against Pop Art and Minimalism was the Arte Povera, leaded by the Italian art critic Germano Celant. Its representatives in the collection are Merz, Kounellis and Anselmo.

I have tried to highlight, broadly speaking, the strongest and most resonant personalities present in all the works I have mentioned so far. I have never wanted to illustrate the history of art. I wanted to buy some of the most significant artists who give an idea of the "revolutions" which have taken place in contempora-ry art. Moving on from the paradigmatic artists, the collection tries to assemble the trends and movements which marked the eighties and nineties in the Western art world. However, we have never wanted to do this exhaustively but we have followed rigorous selection criteria.

From the German neo-expressionist movement we collected Kiefer, Baselitz, Polke, Richter and Penck. From the Italian transavant-garde Cucchi and Clemente and from New York Julian Schnabel. The German postminima-lism movement, where we can see the key concepts for current artistic reflection- autonomy, ornament, simulation, subjective experience- is represented in the collection by Mucha, Forg, Klingelholler and the Belgian Vercruysse. At the same time in the mid-eighties a phenomenon occurred in New York known as Neo Geo, commodity sculpture, new abstraction, appropriation, simulation etc. Peter Halley, Robert Gober, Keith Haring, Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach are some of the most important artists of this phenomenon. In the eighties photography became an important medium of expression and experimentation and completely turned inside out our normal reading codes for photographers. The artists we have selected are Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Geneviève Cadieux. Other media which are currently extremely important are video and video installati-ons. Up until now the Foundation has selected Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Judith Barry, José Antonio Hernández Diez and Bruce Nauman.

Having the responsibility of 95% of the acquisitions I have always borne in mind that I was purchasing for a small institution with a small budget, for a private organisation. But, as there was no public collecting when I began, I had the responsibility to create some kind of model, to build up a collection of names, but primarily one of works. Because at the end of the day the viewer is alone, confronted by a work, and although he or she may not completely glean its meaning, we must help that viewer experience its intensity, its power of persuasion, of seduction. I had to create an international collection without neglecting the Spanish input, which has little significance in art history, but, nevertheless, has great value. I have wanted at all times to look at Spanish art from an international point of view, and at international art from a Spanish point of view. Finally, I have always wanted the works I was trying to buy, to have the utmost attraction for me.

The contemporary art collection belongs to the Foundation "La Caixa" which means that the bank cannot make use of it for its offices or for any other kind of marketing or publicity. At this moment it is stored in five different spaces in Barcelona. But the fact that it does not have a permanent home does not mean that it is never exhibited to the public. Our department organises eight or nine different exhibitions every year, which we sometimes mount in our own centres and sometimes in public spaces belonging to local councils or regional governments. By exhibiting these various selections from the collection, both in Spain and in Europe the Foundation "La Caixa" aims to bring the art of our time closer to the public and give rise to new perspectives on contemporary creations. Our loaning policy is the same as any other museum with our status. That is, we loan, but we always take into account the conditions of the spaces and the galleries, whether the show is a retrospective or an important selective exhibition of the artist, or whether it is a group exhibition in which the presence of our work is justified. We require the packing crates to satisfy certain conditions and we expect our works to be insured with our own insurance company.

The future of the collection, until very recently uncertain, was clarified a few months ago. The Foundation soon will begin to renovate a textiles factory built in 1912, in order to convert it into its new Cultural Centre and a permanent gallery for its collection. We hope that this project will be finished by the end of the year 2000.

Maake een keuze uit de volgende sprekers:

Erik Hermida, Onderneming & Kunst
Dirk Noordman, Organisatieadviseur
Sacha Tanja, ING Groep
Rosemary Harris, NatWest Group
Grazia Quaroni, Fondation Cartier
Maria de Corral, Fundación "La Caixa"
Paul Mertz, Communicatieadviseur