The Apollo Awards have been celebrated since 1992 with splendid ceremonies. It’s now as important as ever to independently fete outstanding achievements in the museum worlds. Yet senior museum commentators warned that museum culture may not endure with its current sense of purpose; funding for both national and regional institutions being squeezed still further. Within these difficult contexts, the awards proclaim the museums that have set the standards to which others should aspire.
Hôtel Colbert de Villacerf
recreated at the Carnavalet museum
Each year, in selecting Museum Opening of the Year, Apollo Magazine judges created a shortlist of six museums. In 2021, the following museums were shortlisted.
1. Casa Balla Rome, opened June 2021
From 1929 until his death in 1958, Giacomo Balla lived in this Roman flat Via Oslavia. Having been left to his daughters, the flat was a living laboratory for the Futurist’s work, its walls, furniture and utensils one big canvas. Casa Balla was opened to the public for the first time.
2. Denver Art Museum, re-opened Oct 2021
DAM’s encyclopaedic collections gained more display space with the refurbishment and expansion of Gio Ponti’s fortress-like building, first opened 50 years ago. It gained a Welcome Centre and new conservation studios. And its galleries have been rehung to reflect distinct aspects of DAM’s holdings, from Latin American art to works from Alaska.
3. Humboldt Forum Berlin, opened July 2021
After long delays and a cost of c€644m, this reconstruction of the C18th Berlin Palace, damaged by the Soviets after WW2, finally opened. Now there is a permanent display of the collections of the former Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst.
4. Kunsthaus Zürich, re-opened Oct 2021
After 12 years of planning, construction and expenditure (£163m), David Chipperfield’s extension to Kunsthaus Zürich has doubled its space for displaying art made since 1960. And note the works by Monet, Degas and Van Gogh from the collection of Emil Georg Bührle. It’s now the largest art museum in Switzerland!
5. Musée Carnavalet Paris, re-opened May 2021
At Baron Haussmann's urging, this hôtel particulier in the Marais has housed a museum (1880) dedicated to Paris’ history. After a big, expensive (€50m) five-year redesign, Carnavalet reopened with a more coherent chronology and displaying more of its collection, which ranges from C18th interiors to photos of a burning Notre-Dame in 2019.
The ceiling, Salons La Riviere by Charles Le Brun,
Carnavalet
This West Coast museum approached its 80th birthday with the 6-year $50m renovation completed. The 1912 building was updated to better meet the needs of a modern museum, and the project has provided new gallery spaces for its permanent collection, from Roman antiquities to contemporary art.
The Museum Opening of the Year winner in 2021 was announced 11th Nov 2021. Carnavalet Museum was always an impressive Parisian museum, full of antiquarian clutter. Its atmosphere is inseparable from its history, as the unexpected by-product of Baron Haussmann’s tough levelling of swathes of the city. Out of that destruction arose the desire to conserve, albeit somewhat haphazardly.
Carnavalet’s collections were always shaped by its donors’ eccentricities, whose relics of French history took many forms. Since it opened to the public in 1880, the museum’s holdings have rapidly grown, albeit unsystematically. Every Carnavalet fan has a favourite corner of the museum eg the miniature ivory Guillotines, crammed into the Revolutionary Memorabilia annex.
Carnavalet gallery
The reopened museum created a more accessible visitor experience without sacrificing the sense of discovery. Enter via a hall full of shop signs from over the centuries, a vibrant record of historic Parisian trades. The chronological scope of the museum has been expanded, so that a visit that used to begin in the C16th now goes into a basement with relics of Neolithic Paris. And the museum pushes into the contemporary, with exhibits linked to the recent terrorist attacks and the fire of Notre-Dame.
Wendel Ballroom
Carnavalet
The comprehensive renovation allows a larger portion of the collections to be visible and not stored away. So the curators worked hard to make the whole museum more logical through new exhibition rooms, streamlined displays, an easier circulation through the galleries and elegant access points with spiral staircases. Old favourites are among the exhibits eg Proust’s bed. The period rooms have never looked more opulent, a monument to the style and grace of former resident Madame de Sévigné. Carnavalet is Paris’ ultimate palimpsest, an enthralling city museum.
Thanks to the Lonely Planet for the photos.
.jpg)
2 comments:
Hello Hels, It seems that now more than ever museums are in peril, with acquisition policies tending toward turnstile counts and famous-name-only acquisitions, and art scholarship and the art itself often being put in mothballs in order to create a Disney-like experience in the most august museums. So these awards are timely indeed. I think that I would really love the Carnavalet museum, with its mixture of real art, Parisian history, and the oddities that accumulate over time.
--Jim
p.s. My spell checker tried to change the Carnavalet museum to the Carnality museum--I'll bet that one would get a lot of gawkers.
Hello, Helen! It's great that new museums open at the present time!
Post a Comment