National service
Christopher Brown hopes the redevelopment of the Ashmolean will give the UK's oldest public museum the recognition it deserves. Simon Stephens meets him.
"I enjoyed the National Gallery very much indeed and could have stayed and seen my time out there very happily. But 50 is a funny age and I had seen Neil [MacGregor] manage the gallery very successfully and I sort of wanted to run my own show."
The show Christopher Brown is running is Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which is in the middle of a £61m redevelopment. Brown became the director of the Ashmolean in 1998, after 27 years at the National Gallery, and a senior figure in the museum sector says his long stay at Trafalgar Square is the key to the way he operates:
"Christopher Brown is a national museum person and in his heart he wants to be in a national museum. He really feels the Ashmolean belongs in the national museum sector as well, on the strength of its collection."
The redevelopment is a huge project that will take many areas of the Ashmolean's work to a new level when it is completed in 2009. As well as the reinterpretation and redisplay of its collection, there will be improved storage, conservation and visitor facilities. There are also plans for the museum to become part of the major international touring exhibition circuit.
In a sense, the redeveloped Ashmolean will probably reflect Brown's personality. It is likely to be scholarly, tasteful and maybe even a bit understated, but perhaps this is appropriate for one of the UK's oldest museums that is owned by the UK's oldest university. Brown has chosen two safe pairs of hands to lead the redevelopment:
the exhibition designer Metaphor and Rick Mather Architects. Metaphor is well-known for its work with the British Museum on exhibitions such as last year's Michelangelo show, and the current First Emperor. Rick Mather has numerous museums to its name, including the redeveloped Dulwich Picture Gallery, of which Brown is a former trustee.
"I'd describe the architecture for the redevelopment as simple, classic modernism," Brown says. "It is not unlike what [Yoshio] Taniguchi did at the Museum of Modern of Art in New York."
The way the objects will be displayed and interpreted will also be fairly traditional, and Brown certainly does not claim the revamped Ashmolean will be a radical departure from mainstream museum practice.
"In a sense, we are not reinventing the wheel," he says. "We are just taking these extremely important collections and presenting then in a modern manner, which is not unlike the way the British Museum and others are renewing themselves."
But this is not to say that visitors won't see a vast improvement on the old Ashmolean. While the original Grade I-listed Cockerell building at the front will remain, the many piecemeal additions that made it such a confusing building to navigate have gone. They are being replaced by a building that will double the display space as well as creating an education centre, conservation facilities, temporary exhibition galleries and a rooftop restaurant.
As for the objects, they will be far more integrated across the museum's different collections. This has been one of Brown's major challenges at the Ashmolean: to change the culture of what was a strongly departmental institution that was more like a series of individual fiefdoms than an integrated museum.
"A story, which I think is quite a nice one, is that when we started thinking about this, we planned the building then started looking at how the collection would be displayed," Brown says. "I created a curatorial group to look at this issue and they basically came back after having discussed this for quite a long time and said we have five departments and we have five floors, therefore we should put antiquities on this floor, western art on this, and so on.
I said that actually wasn't the point, what I want to do is to get these collections to speak to each other and get people to understand ideas about transmissions of style and cultural connections."
The plans for displays have now moved on, and are being arranged under the theme of Crossing Cultures - Crossing Time, although subject areas and chronology will not be completely abandoned.
"If you arrive at the front door at the end of 2009 and want to see the Japanese collections, you will be pointed to two galleries that contain the Japanese collection. On the other hand, there will be Japanese material elsewhere in the museum that will be making various cultural points."
The Ashmolean certainly has a collection that deserves to be displayed well. Brown says it has the "greatest collection of art and archaeology in this country outside London". It might not compare with the depth of the British Museum's collection, but not many places do.
It certainly ranks alongside other nationally funded museums and it's probably only the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge that comes close to the Ashmolean in the university museum sector. Among the Ashmolean's highlights are its Egyptian pre-Dynastic material, Anglo-Saxon treasures, Minoan antiquities and its Raphael drawings.
Brown says the redevelopment of the Ashmolean takes up nearly all his working hours. But he does have time to be a trustee and board member of various museums in the UK and overseas, and he also sits on the committee of the University Museums Group.
The organisation, which speaks for university museums, is currently concerned with changes to the way university museums are funded. Previously money from Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) was ringfenced for museums and given to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) to administer.
But from 2009, this money will no longer to go through the AHRB, and HEFCE is considering how it should be distributed. Museums are concerned it will no longer be ringfenced if it just goes into a general pot of university funding. The details of how it will be distributed should become clearer now the comprehensive spending review has been announced.
"It is a matter of very considerable concern," Brown says. "I am very nervous and so are the other directors of university museums."
Like other UMG members, Brown thinks university museums don't always get the recognition they deserve in the sector. This includes the Ashmolean's own redevelopment programme, which is currently one of the biggest museum projects in the UK. This feeling among UMG members led the organisation to commission the 2004 report, University Museums in the United Kingdom: a National Resource for the 21st Century.
"The report grew out of a strong sense among university museums that they were not as visible as they should be and their contribution was not particularly appreciated," Brown says. But he acknowledges that it is a two-way process and university museums have not always engaged as much as they could with the rest of the sector.
"It may be that in the past, but not for some time, that university museums have been a little stand-offish from the wider museum community, but no longer," he says.
Nevertheless, Brown still feels that his museum has to work very hard to get enough money to fulfil its aims.
"When I was at the National Gallery I thought we were underfunded, but it was only when I came here that I realised what real underfunding was. We are significantly underfunded for an institution with the aims we have. We have raised a lot of money, not only for this particular capital project, but for running costs. We have great ambitions, and why shouldn't we?"
Brown has just been given permission by the university to raise the fundraising for the redeveloped Ashmolean to £61m. This should further help his efforts to raise the status of his and the museum's ambition to that of a national museum. But it is only when the redeveloped Ashmolean is completed in 2009 that we will be able to judge whether Brown has achieved this aim.
Christopher Brown at a Glance
Christopher Brown's career has been spent at two museums - London's National Gallery and the Ashmolean in Oxford. He joined the National Gallery in 1971 as an assistant keeper and even though he says he had no particular expertise in the subjects, was given responsibility for 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting.
He has since published many books on these topics and also speaks Dutch. He became the National Gallery's chief curator in 1989 before leaving to join the Ashmolean in 1998. At the Ashmolean he has overseen the museum's £61m redevelopment, which is expected to be completed in 2009.
Brown was born in 1946 and educated at an independent school in Middlesex and St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is a trustee of the River and Rowing Museum in Henley on Thames and the vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies. He is married and lives in Dulwich in south London.
The show Christopher Brown is running is Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which is in the middle of a £61m redevelopment. Brown became the director of the Ashmolean in 1998, after 27 years at the National Gallery, and a senior figure in the museum sector says his long stay at Trafalgar Square is the key to the way he operates:
"Christopher Brown is a national museum person and in his heart he wants to be in a national museum. He really feels the Ashmolean belongs in the national museum sector as well, on the strength of its collection."
The redevelopment is a huge project that will take many areas of the Ashmolean's work to a new level when it is completed in 2009. As well as the reinterpretation and redisplay of its collection, there will be improved storage, conservation and visitor facilities. There are also plans for the museum to become part of the major international touring exhibition circuit.
In a sense, the redeveloped Ashmolean will probably reflect Brown's personality. It is likely to be scholarly, tasteful and maybe even a bit understated, but perhaps this is appropriate for one of the UK's oldest museums that is owned by the UK's oldest university. Brown has chosen two safe pairs of hands to lead the redevelopment:
the exhibition designer Metaphor and Rick Mather Architects. Metaphor is well-known for its work with the British Museum on exhibitions such as last year's Michelangelo show, and the current First Emperor. Rick Mather has numerous museums to its name, including the redeveloped Dulwich Picture Gallery, of which Brown is a former trustee.
"I'd describe the architecture for the redevelopment as simple, classic modernism," Brown says. "It is not unlike what [Yoshio] Taniguchi did at the Museum of Modern of Art in New York."
The way the objects will be displayed and interpreted will also be fairly traditional, and Brown certainly does not claim the revamped Ashmolean will be a radical departure from mainstream museum practice.
"In a sense, we are not reinventing the wheel," he says. "We are just taking these extremely important collections and presenting then in a modern manner, which is not unlike the way the British Museum and others are renewing themselves."
But this is not to say that visitors won't see a vast improvement on the old Ashmolean. While the original Grade I-listed Cockerell building at the front will remain, the many piecemeal additions that made it such a confusing building to navigate have gone. They are being replaced by a building that will double the display space as well as creating an education centre, conservation facilities, temporary exhibition galleries and a rooftop restaurant.
As for the objects, they will be far more integrated across the museum's different collections. This has been one of Brown's major challenges at the Ashmolean: to change the culture of what was a strongly departmental institution that was more like a series of individual fiefdoms than an integrated museum.
"A story, which I think is quite a nice one, is that when we started thinking about this, we planned the building then started looking at how the collection would be displayed," Brown says. "I created a curatorial group to look at this issue and they basically came back after having discussed this for quite a long time and said we have five departments and we have five floors, therefore we should put antiquities on this floor, western art on this, and so on.
I said that actually wasn't the point, what I want to do is to get these collections to speak to each other and get people to understand ideas about transmissions of style and cultural connections."
The plans for displays have now moved on, and are being arranged under the theme of Crossing Cultures - Crossing Time, although subject areas and chronology will not be completely abandoned.
"If you arrive at the front door at the end of 2009 and want to see the Japanese collections, you will be pointed to two galleries that contain the Japanese collection. On the other hand, there will be Japanese material elsewhere in the museum that will be making various cultural points."
The Ashmolean certainly has a collection that deserves to be displayed well. Brown says it has the "greatest collection of art and archaeology in this country outside London". It might not compare with the depth of the British Museum's collection, but not many places do.
It certainly ranks alongside other nationally funded museums and it's probably only the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge that comes close to the Ashmolean in the university museum sector. Among the Ashmolean's highlights are its Egyptian pre-Dynastic material, Anglo-Saxon treasures, Minoan antiquities and its Raphael drawings.
Brown says the redevelopment of the Ashmolean takes up nearly all his working hours. But he does have time to be a trustee and board member of various museums in the UK and overseas, and he also sits on the committee of the University Museums Group.
The organisation, which speaks for university museums, is currently concerned with changes to the way university museums are funded. Previously money from Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) was ringfenced for museums and given to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) to administer.
But from 2009, this money will no longer to go through the AHRB, and HEFCE is considering how it should be distributed. Museums are concerned it will no longer be ringfenced if it just goes into a general pot of university funding. The details of how it will be distributed should become clearer now the comprehensive spending review has been announced.
"It is a matter of very considerable concern," Brown says. "I am very nervous and so are the other directors of university museums."
Like other UMG members, Brown thinks university museums don't always get the recognition they deserve in the sector. This includes the Ashmolean's own redevelopment programme, which is currently one of the biggest museum projects in the UK. This feeling among UMG members led the organisation to commission the 2004 report, University Museums in the United Kingdom: a National Resource for the 21st Century.
"The report grew out of a strong sense among university museums that they were not as visible as they should be and their contribution was not particularly appreciated," Brown says. But he acknowledges that it is a two-way process and university museums have not always engaged as much as they could with the rest of the sector.
"It may be that in the past, but not for some time, that university museums have been a little stand-offish from the wider museum community, but no longer," he says.
Nevertheless, Brown still feels that his museum has to work very hard to get enough money to fulfil its aims.
"When I was at the National Gallery I thought we were underfunded, but it was only when I came here that I realised what real underfunding was. We are significantly underfunded for an institution with the aims we have. We have raised a lot of money, not only for this particular capital project, but for running costs. We have great ambitions, and why shouldn't we?"
Brown has just been given permission by the university to raise the fundraising for the redeveloped Ashmolean to £61m. This should further help his efforts to raise the status of his and the museum's ambition to that of a national museum. But it is only when the redeveloped Ashmolean is completed in 2009 that we will be able to judge whether Brown has achieved this aim.
Christopher Brown at a Glance
Christopher Brown's career has been spent at two museums - London's National Gallery and the Ashmolean in Oxford. He joined the National Gallery in 1971 as an assistant keeper and even though he says he had no particular expertise in the subjects, was given responsibility for 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting.
He has since published many books on these topics and also speaks Dutch. He became the National Gallery's chief curator in 1989 before leaving to join the Ashmolean in 1998. At the Ashmolean he has overseen the museum's £61m redevelopment, which is expected to be completed in 2009.
Brown was born in 1946 and educated at an independent school in Middlesex and St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is a trustee of the River and Rowing Museum in Henley on Thames and the vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies. He is married and lives in Dulwich in south London.