Open to the world of art

Enrique Juncosa’s tenure at Imma has brought an international dimension to the gallery’s programming,says Alan O’Riordan

“I WAS a bit terrified,” Enrique Juncosa says of his first day as director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) in 2003. He had come from the Reina Sofía National Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, where the staff arrive every day to queues at the door waiting to see Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and other masterpieces from Spain’s modernist masters.

But on a humdrum Tuesday in Kilmainham, the Royal Hospital grounds were near-deserted. It was a sharp reminder that, whereas Spain had Picasso, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali as 20th-century artistic giants, Ireland had James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and WB Yeats — and thus accorded literature a higher status.

But Juncosa says his tenure has gone well as far as popularising Imma: footfall has increased dramatically, to 400,000 a year. The museum has become more central to the cultural life of the capital — even as it physically relocates downtown to Earlsfort Terrace next spring as refurbishment of the Royal Hospital continues.

But as Juncosa departs Imma after eight years, there are things that cause him to worry about the direction of the museum. The threat of amalgamation with the National Gallery, a move that could also threaten the independence of the Crawford gallery in Cork, has reared its ugly head again, and he is not happy about it.

“The idea is to save money, which I understand is necessary at this time, but I’m not sure if this is the way to do it. One has to be careful about whether it will save money and still allow the institutes to operate as they should. But it is not a good idea, we made that clear. Maybe we will collaborate and share services of some kind, but it is very important to remain independent. The nature of the two galleries is very different: we deal with a living community of artists, we are not a collection of historical art works,” he says.

Juncosa cites the experience of the director of Scotland’s National Gallery of Modern Art, which is combined with the country’s National Gallery and Portrait Gallery. “When they want to buy something, if, for example, a Rubens comes on the market and also a contemporary work, the Rubens always wins, so they have no money for the contemporary art,” he says.

A modern art gallery “is a different kind of collection” and requires a different type of activity in the art market, he says.

Perhaps most disturbing of all was how Juncosa learned the merger was back on the agenda: “I read it in the newspaper,” he says. “That is unusual — one would expect one would know.”

There has often been bumbling political interference in the arts in Ireland. Only a couple of years back, Imma was urged to be “more populist” by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. But as public purse strings tighten, it is less easy to laugh off such establishment condescension — and Imma has felt the brunt of cuts, with many curators having been let go. That so many of them got jobs in London galleries like the Barbican, Serpentine and Tata Modern shows the high esteem in which Imma is held. It is a result of the museum’s good track record of collaboration with bigger galleries and museums worldwide, something which has helped it punch above its weight in the delivery of international shows. But it’s a status that might be endangered. His successor, Juncosa says, will face immediate staff shortages. “It will be a headache,” he says.

Though he might fret about the future, Juncosa looks back fondly on his eight years in Dublin. Given its small size, he was quickly able to get a handle on the arts scene, both in the capital and nationally. He was struck by the seriousness of the community here, and “being quite honest, quite impressed” with the standard of art and the network of galleries that catered for contemporary work. With local artists so well-served, Juncosa felt confident he could branch out, and began putting what has been a distinctly international stamp on exhibitions at Imma.

Over the years, painters like Frieda Khalo, Alex Katz and Philip Taffe have featured, and Juncosa’s commitment to the other art forms (he is a published poet) was exemplified by an exhibition based on the composer Morton Feldman’s influence on the visual arts.

“I tried to do something dynamic,” he says, “to programme something every month: exhibitions, lectures, family events, concerts, things like that, to make people aware things are happening here.”

Building up Imma’s profile in this way has been about trust as much as anything, he says. “Even if the audience does not know the artist, they know the museum. Even if it’s a young artist from Mexico, or a collaboration with the Dublin dance festival, or something with writers and composers, they go because they know the museum.”

Imma is never going to be a Tate Modern or a Pompidou, with massive, long-running shows and retrospectives. But Juncosa has made a virtue of this, with frequently rotating, smaller shows that provide sufficient depth for a rewarding afternoon, without being exhaustive, or, as is often the case in Paris or London, exhausting.

Perhaps the one exception to this style of show was the culmination of Juncosa’s tenure: The Moderns, a survey of Irish art and design in the 20th-century that was made possible by Juncosa’s assiduous buying, which filled some gaps in the museum’s collection, allowing a show that amounted to an affirmation of the vibrancy of visual culture in Ireland. “After eight years, I felt I should do a whole-museum show,” says Juncosa, adding that Imma’s own 20th anniversary was a fitting time for it.

His ideal would be to have The Moderns on permanent display, something which might be possible in the refurbished building. Of course, the new director might have other ideas, but as he contemplates life as a freelance curator and writer, Juncosa is sure of, and proud of, one thing: “We have a good collection.”