Upwardly mobile
International loans have become the lifeblood for many museums, but there are still lots of barriers that make lending extremely difficult. Jane Morris looks at what is being done to improve the mobility of collections.
Visitors to Tate Modern in London can currently see the first major exhibition in this country of the work of Bauhaus pioneers Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. Of the 300 works on display, only a small number belong to the Tate; the rest will be seen for the first time by the majority of the Tate's visitors.
The exhibition's curator, Achim Borchardt-Hume, estimates that a whacking 99 per cent of the works were borrowed, most of the pieces from abroad. He admits it was a tricky process.
'The Albers Foundation and the Moholy-Nagy Foundation were instrumental in the realisation of the show: they helped contact private lenders and convince people to lend their support,' Borchardt-Hume says. 'It meant a lot of travel to the US, Switzerland and Germany, and a lot of research, given a surprising number of museums abroad don't have their collections online.'
And a lot of administration: 'Loan negotiations always vary, but when they are difficult it is not generally because of a lack of goodwill.'
According to Borchardt-Hume, it would help if institutions could agree international standards including financial issues such as per diems for couriers, and if there was more trust in professional standards across the board.
Most curators, registrars, conservators and finance officers agree: lending is plagued with tales of works inexpertly unpacked by customs officers, couriers arriving at unsuitable venues and attempts by lenders to charge exorbitant loan fees.
Major shows of loaned work are nothing new to the Tate. But it is often forgotten that it is only in the past 25 years or so that major London galleries such as the National Gallery, let alone museums in the regions, have mounted serious loan exhibitions on a regular basis.
Now, almost certainly as a result of pressure from governments of both political hues, big museums in the UK rely on these high-profile exhibitions to generate excitement and bring in visitors. The rest of western Europe, for similar reasons, has followed suit.
The Art Newspaper's annual attendance survey, published in March, showed that all the top performing European shows were made up principally of international loans, not items from the permanent collection: Turner Whistler Monet in London and Paris (daily attendances of 4,024 and 6,043 respectively); Pharaon at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (3,396 daily); Neo-Impressionism at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2,973 daily); and Goya at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2,806 daily).
Whether or not you think this is a good thing (and there are curators, academics and critics who wonder at what price all this effort comes), it looks set to continue as pressures increase to attract visitors - not just in western Europe but in the new European Union members in the east as well.
Traditionally, eastern European museums have been seen as a good source of material for richer western European museums to borrow. But museums in the east have usually been unable to afford the costs or meet the standards that western museums insist on when they come to lend their art and objects.
With ten new eastern member states joining in 2004, the European Commission decided to become actively involved: it has made increasing the mobility of collections (ie making it easier to lend and borrow) among European museums a priority.
At the end of last year it held an international conference in Manchester, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and organised by the UK Museums Association. This was followed by the Increasing the Mobility of Collections report.
These in turn built on a conference organised at the end of 2004 by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the first comprehensive report on European loans, Lending to Europe, which was published in April 2005.
Now discussions are continuing with the Austrian government, the current holder of the EU presidency, and will culminate in a conference in July in Helsinki under the Finnish presidency. Recommendations for actions by the EU will be presented to the commission in November.
The biggest concern, according to Harald Hartung, the head of the European Commission's culture unit, is to make it easier for museums of all types and sizes to lend across Europe. At the moment only 300 of Europe's estimated 30,000 museums regularly loan and borrow works, and the majority are large west European art museums.
'We want to see more museums sharing collections as a way of bridging different cultures and raising awareness of the common elements of our cultural heritage as a way of linking together people in an expanding Europe,' Hartung says. Museums in eastern Europe are keen to be seen as equal partners in this.
Ronald de Leeuw, the director general of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and chairman of the committee that published Lending to Europe, says there are a number of barriers that prevent museums lending to each other.
'The staggering increase in insurance costs is one of the main impediments, given that many states do not have government indemnity schemes, or ones that differ widely in their scope and effectiveness,' de Leeuw says.
Encouraging all EU states to introduce comprehensive indemnity schemes is an issue now being taken forward with the Austrian and Finnish presidencies, along with efforts to persuade countries such as Germany - which prefer commercial insurance - to accept them.
'And then there is the issue of museums behaving like Jekyll and Hyde characters - being much less generous when they are lending works than they wish to be as borrowers,' de Leeuw adds. 'That goes across the board, from charging loan fees to putting high values on works for insurance purposes.'
Lending to Europe highlighted other problems too, including differences in customs procedures, immunity from seizure legislation, and the fact that in many European countries the role of the registrar, arguably the most crucial role in the lending process, is poorly understood.
But Freda Matassa, a museum consultant and art collection manager, says: 'The single biggest problem is the lack of shared standards on everything from loan agreements, to facilities and conservation reports, which make the loans process so onerous.'
Matassa, formerly the head of collections management at the Tate, has been working on this particular EU strand of work since the beginning, and was involved in high-profile shows such as Matisse Picasso at Tate Modern in 2002.
'People sometimes get confused about government indemnity; they think it is the answer to all the problems, but they miss the point that it is the shared standards that underpin the indemnity schemes in countries like the UK that are important. Good standards reduce risk and they build trust, which is another major issue for museums across Europe.'
In Manchester, the meeting focused on indemnity, standards and trust, and the subsequent Increasing the Mobility of Collections report makes a number of recommendations at professional, national and EU level.
The Network of European Museum Organisations (Nemo) has started to take some of the recommendations forward. For example, it is currently working on producing a standard, modular loan form for inter-Europe loans.
Mechtild Kronenberg, the chairwoman of Nemo, is based in Germany. She says: 'We want to try to remove one administrative barrier, which is the difference in forms and the language problems that creates. The idea is to create something that can be used by all European museums by the end of the year.' Nemo's recommendations will be discussed at Helsinki in July.
This may all seem like something devised to benefit just the big museums, traditionally large enough to devote staff and money to these time-consuming processes. But Antoinette Caruana, the chief executive officer at the modestly-resourced Heritage Malta, serving a total population of fewer than 400,000, argues that working across Europe is beneficial for many types of museums.
It has received a number of long-terms loans from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and is working as an equal partner on a series of staff secondments and joint training.
'Building trust is important for creating greater awareness of our collections, our histories and appreciation of what each other has to offer,' says Caruana. 'The relationship with the National Maritime Museum has been building over the past ten years and it is allowing us to share people, policies and procedures in a way that is of real benefit to us.'
Some people will always see working in Europe as either a frivolous perk or too difficult and expensive to contemplate. But if a number of culture ministries, the UK's included, are to be believed, governments view this as an area of growing importance.
If political and financial progress is made at both national and EU level in November, when recommendations on the mobility of collections are to be presented to the European Commission, then perhaps overcoming the professional barriers of standards and trust may get collections moving.
www.culture.gov.uk/mobility for details of Dutch and British conferences and reports
The exhibition's curator, Achim Borchardt-Hume, estimates that a whacking 99 per cent of the works were borrowed, most of the pieces from abroad. He admits it was a tricky process.
'The Albers Foundation and the Moholy-Nagy Foundation were instrumental in the realisation of the show: they helped contact private lenders and convince people to lend their support,' Borchardt-Hume says. 'It meant a lot of travel to the US, Switzerland and Germany, and a lot of research, given a surprising number of museums abroad don't have their collections online.'
And a lot of administration: 'Loan negotiations always vary, but when they are difficult it is not generally because of a lack of goodwill.'
According to Borchardt-Hume, it would help if institutions could agree international standards including financial issues such as per diems for couriers, and if there was more trust in professional standards across the board.
Most curators, registrars, conservators and finance officers agree: lending is plagued with tales of works inexpertly unpacked by customs officers, couriers arriving at unsuitable venues and attempts by lenders to charge exorbitant loan fees.
Major shows of loaned work are nothing new to the Tate. But it is often forgotten that it is only in the past 25 years or so that major London galleries such as the National Gallery, let alone museums in the regions, have mounted serious loan exhibitions on a regular basis.
Now, almost certainly as a result of pressure from governments of both political hues, big museums in the UK rely on these high-profile exhibitions to generate excitement and bring in visitors. The rest of western Europe, for similar reasons, has followed suit.
The Art Newspaper's annual attendance survey, published in March, showed that all the top performing European shows were made up principally of international loans, not items from the permanent collection: Turner Whistler Monet in London and Paris (daily attendances of 4,024 and 6,043 respectively); Pharaon at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (3,396 daily); Neo-Impressionism at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2,973 daily); and Goya at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2,806 daily).
Whether or not you think this is a good thing (and there are curators, academics and critics who wonder at what price all this effort comes), it looks set to continue as pressures increase to attract visitors - not just in western Europe but in the new European Union members in the east as well.
Traditionally, eastern European museums have been seen as a good source of material for richer western European museums to borrow. But museums in the east have usually been unable to afford the costs or meet the standards that western museums insist on when they come to lend their art and objects.
With ten new eastern member states joining in 2004, the European Commission decided to become actively involved: it has made increasing the mobility of collections (ie making it easier to lend and borrow) among European museums a priority.
At the end of last year it held an international conference in Manchester, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and organised by the UK Museums Association. This was followed by the Increasing the Mobility of Collections report.
These in turn built on a conference organised at the end of 2004 by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the first comprehensive report on European loans, Lending to Europe, which was published in April 2005.
Now discussions are continuing with the Austrian government, the current holder of the EU presidency, and will culminate in a conference in July in Helsinki under the Finnish presidency. Recommendations for actions by the EU will be presented to the commission in November.
The biggest concern, according to Harald Hartung, the head of the European Commission's culture unit, is to make it easier for museums of all types and sizes to lend across Europe. At the moment only 300 of Europe's estimated 30,000 museums regularly loan and borrow works, and the majority are large west European art museums.
'We want to see more museums sharing collections as a way of bridging different cultures and raising awareness of the common elements of our cultural heritage as a way of linking together people in an expanding Europe,' Hartung says. Museums in eastern Europe are keen to be seen as equal partners in this.
Ronald de Leeuw, the director general of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and chairman of the committee that published Lending to Europe, says there are a number of barriers that prevent museums lending to each other.
'The staggering increase in insurance costs is one of the main impediments, given that many states do not have government indemnity schemes, or ones that differ widely in their scope and effectiveness,' de Leeuw says.
Encouraging all EU states to introduce comprehensive indemnity schemes is an issue now being taken forward with the Austrian and Finnish presidencies, along with efforts to persuade countries such as Germany - which prefer commercial insurance - to accept them.
'And then there is the issue of museums behaving like Jekyll and Hyde characters - being much less generous when they are lending works than they wish to be as borrowers,' de Leeuw adds. 'That goes across the board, from charging loan fees to putting high values on works for insurance purposes.'
Lending to Europe highlighted other problems too, including differences in customs procedures, immunity from seizure legislation, and the fact that in many European countries the role of the registrar, arguably the most crucial role in the lending process, is poorly understood.
But Freda Matassa, a museum consultant and art collection manager, says: 'The single biggest problem is the lack of shared standards on everything from loan agreements, to facilities and conservation reports, which make the loans process so onerous.'
Matassa, formerly the head of collections management at the Tate, has been working on this particular EU strand of work since the beginning, and was involved in high-profile shows such as Matisse Picasso at Tate Modern in 2002.
'People sometimes get confused about government indemnity; they think it is the answer to all the problems, but they miss the point that it is the shared standards that underpin the indemnity schemes in countries like the UK that are important. Good standards reduce risk and they build trust, which is another major issue for museums across Europe.'
In Manchester, the meeting focused on indemnity, standards and trust, and the subsequent Increasing the Mobility of Collections report makes a number of recommendations at professional, national and EU level.
The Network of European Museum Organisations (Nemo) has started to take some of the recommendations forward. For example, it is currently working on producing a standard, modular loan form for inter-Europe loans.
Mechtild Kronenberg, the chairwoman of Nemo, is based in Germany. She says: 'We want to try to remove one administrative barrier, which is the difference in forms and the language problems that creates. The idea is to create something that can be used by all European museums by the end of the year.' Nemo's recommendations will be discussed at Helsinki in July.
This may all seem like something devised to benefit just the big museums, traditionally large enough to devote staff and money to these time-consuming processes. But Antoinette Caruana, the chief executive officer at the modestly-resourced Heritage Malta, serving a total population of fewer than 400,000, argues that working across Europe is beneficial for many types of museums.
It has received a number of long-terms loans from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and is working as an equal partner on a series of staff secondments and joint training.
'Building trust is important for creating greater awareness of our collections, our histories and appreciation of what each other has to offer,' says Caruana. 'The relationship with the National Maritime Museum has been building over the past ten years and it is allowing us to share people, policies and procedures in a way that is of real benefit to us.'
Some people will always see working in Europe as either a frivolous perk or too difficult and expensive to contemplate. But if a number of culture ministries, the UK's included, are to be believed, governments view this as an area of growing importance.
If political and financial progress is made at both national and EU level in November, when recommendations on the mobility of collections are to be presented to the European Commission, then perhaps overcoming the professional barriers of standards and trust may get collections moving.
www.culture.gov.uk/mobility for details of Dutch and British conferences and reports