Open to the world of art
“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.
