By Susannah Edelbaum, to Museum Spotlight Europe (February 2024)
With pandemic-era restrictions behind us, a slate of renovation projects across Europe’s museums is picking up steam. For visitors headed to the continent with an eye toward art-focused travel, the next few years hold a number of openings and closures to keep in mind.
The Centre Pompidou — Paris, France
You’ve likely already heard about some of them. First, the major ones — in Paris, the Centre Pompidou will begin closing parts of the building for a major renovation starting this fall. The entire building will then close down to the public from summer 2025, with an expected reopening in 2030. The goals of such an extensive project include physical improvements, like making the building more fire-safe and energy efficient, removing asbestos from the facade, and improving accessibility for visitors with reduced mobility. In addition, without adding new space or altering the building’s facade, the Pompidou is adding an experimental section for younger visitors and working to make the museum more welcoming overall to tourists and local Parisians alike. (By the way, if you’re looking to make a pit stop at the Atelier Brancusi right next door, do note the space is currently closed, part of the major Brancusi exhibit that will be on view at the Pompidou beginning this spring.)
The Pergamon Museum — Berlin, Germany
On a similar grand scale, Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, devoted to antiquities and Islamic art, is currently completely closed to the public, part of an ongoing, 14-year-long renovation. “Below part of Museum Island is an Ice Age river, and 32 meters below the Pergamon it’s solid rock. Above, it’s all sandy, muddy, it’s like Venice,” Dr. Stefan Weber, the museum’s director, tells us. In these conditions, the support beneath the museum is being reinforced, an incredibly difficult job that has to be done “while the antiquities are standing on top of it. So there’s no tolerance of movement,” Dr. Weber adds. Building an entirely new Pergamon from scratch would have been faster and cheaper than this painstaking renovation, but Museum Island, where the museum stands, is one of Berlin’s only World Heritage sites. So, a years-long renovation it is.
While the museum is closed to visitors, Dr. Weber reports the Pergamon staff is busy:
“When I say that we are closed, people often think we’re sitting there with nothing to do, and the opposite is the case. “Normally, we have time for research, because the visitor flow is not directly connected with the museum staff,” who can work on efforts like digitalization, provenance research, and scientific research while the doors are open. “But now that the museum is closed, what we do is intensively work with the objects in other ways — you have to move all of them, you have to write the texts about them.”
The museum’s staff is taking the opportunity to take inventory of the artifacts, since most of the collection must be moved in and out of storage. “We thought we had around 50,000 objects, but with the running numbers, we’re soon coming to 100,000,” the director says. “When they started to build this museum in 1904, it was a period of collecting, researching, and archaeological surveys. They did an enormous amount of work. What they didn’t do was record everything clearly. And they didn’t have the digital means we have today.”
Next, there’s the intensive detail work surrounding the collection. “What we’re doing is looking in a new way at the objects, trying to communicate and write in a way that people who are not in this field can make something of it,” Dr. Weber says. Rewriting the object descriptions is one part of a much larger endeavor, to reinvent how those objects are shown. “Our biggest effort, I would say, is planning very intensively how to present the collection. We made a survey of all museums of Islamic arts in the world. We have the good luck to be one of the largest of them,” the director notes. The Pergamon now has the opportunity to come up with an international exhibition of Islamic art which hasn’t previously existed and may deal with migration:
“One of the very important topics at the core is migration. We say that migration is the mother of all cultures. All knowledge is based on collectivity, on agency, on entanglement. So we will tell these stories, how people travel, adopt knowledge, take up ideas, and adopt them for their lives and develop them further. This is all in the objects.”
In addition, Dr. Weber’s staff is conceiving a new level of inclusivity and accessibility for the Pergamon, ranging from adding physical lines (which aren’t easy to add in a landmarked building) to follow for sight-impaired visitors, to more conceptual initiatives, such as challenging exclusive ideas of identity in new exhibitions.
Though the Pergamon’s closure sounds necessarily interminable, visitors will soon be welcomed back to the building’s northern wing, which will reopen in three years. New additions will increase the display from prior to last October, when the building closed entirely. In the meantime, there’s internal discussion about lending out items from the collection, which would also be a way to raise money, but German museums don’t have the infrastructure devoted to sending objects abroad, the way France’s art institutions do. However, until the full Pergamon reopens, the temporary Pergamon Panorama is on view just across the Spree river, featuring an artistic interpretation by Yadegar Asisi and about 80 objects from the museum’s permanent collection.
Current Closures
Across town, Berlin visitors should note that the Berggruen Museum’s Stüler building is completely closed for a total refurbishment as of September 5, 2022, and will reopen in 2025. Work from the collection is on a global tour, having been shown in Japan, China, and currently, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Likewise undergoing a major renovation until 2025 is part of Copenhagen’s national gallery, SMK Thy. Also in Scandinavia, Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum closed in 2021 for both a refurbishment and expansion, with their doors expected to reopen in 2025 or 2026. In Nice, the MAMAC just closed for a four-year renovation on January 7th. However, items from the collection will be shown at other institutions, like the Fernand Léger museum in Biot and the Matisse museum, also in Nice. And finally, if your travels are bringing you to Salzburg, expect the Salzburg Museum Neue Residenz to be closed until 2026, when the institution will return with an expanded museum space.
Re-openings
But not all ticket counters are currently dark. The Wien Museum in Vienna, after three years and 100 million euros, reopened its doors in December 2023 with a new entrance, plaza, and restaurant, as well as several new museum floors. Among the improvements, the institution now houses a completely free permanent exhibition chronicling Viennese history from the Roman era to the present. In Paris, the Cluny Museum reopened in May 2022 after a 20 month renovation, and a month later, in Copenhagen, the Design Museum Danmark returned after two years worth of work.
And in the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Museum is renovating their Burgerweeshuis, in the city’s historic center, until 2025. In the meantime, the staff has curated several exhibitions about the history of the city which are on view at the former Hermitage Amsterdam, now known as the H’ART Museum, and which the Amsterdam Museum refers to as the Amsterdam Museum at the Amstel for the period through 2025 during which they are occupying the space. Asked if there might be any wish to remain in such an elevated temporary location, Kim Koopman, a communications advisor for the museum, expresses no regrets. “We will do so until our main location opens after renovation,” she says, “and look very forward to returning to the Burgerweeshuis!” Even for a museum, it’s good to be home.
Cover photo: Moving image installation of the Pergamon Altar © asisi / Tom Schulze
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