Maximo Gomez, chief curator of the Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA by its Spanish acronym) is a connoisseur of the museology or patrimonial science, one of the youngest disciplines in the called social sciences.
He has spent more than four decades working for the Museum that celebrated on April 28th its hundredth anniversary. Gomez, authoritative voice on the difficult and little known art of curating, talks withOnCuba about new challenges facing Fine Arts, as the most important Cuban institution in charge of safeguarding, exhibition and promotion of Cuban and universal art.
What would be missing to the MNBA according to the new museological concepts?
First we must define the concept of museum. A museum has several meanings. A museum is a collection. Its base, its backbone is a thesaurus and specialization comes from there.
On the other hand, it is a lifelong education center. It is a transmitter of ideas to the public. Nothing is more ideological than a museum.
Now let’s make some history . Originally the MNBA was a versatile museum, encyclopedic from 1913 until about the 1940s because it was the museology of that time.
The institution had about twenty collections: there were historical objects, death masks; ethnology and folklore were present, and also the decorative arts.
Since the 1960s the museum became into a specialized place in plastic arts and only the main collection remained there. The rest of the collections were moved to other museums in the country. Museums have that feature: they change over time.
The museum underwent a remodeling process in 2000, then the old Social Palace of the Asturian Center of Havana was chosen as universal art building. Previously only one room exhibited a small sample of the more than 47 000 pieces the institution had.
It’s not a secret we need another place to display contemporary art because this new museum is actually small.
When we made the two projects we always thought Fine Arts would end in the early 1950s, with the abstraction, and that is when contemporary art begins.
Then we proposed another building for the development of contemporary art lasting until the first decade of the 21st century. I can not predict if I will be still working when this idea becomes true.
Fine Arts room contains a selection of selections to exemplify the best of contemporary art, but it does not satisfy the possibility of exhibiting projects by new and young artists.
Wifredo Lam and Roberto Fabelo were emerging artists in their time and they also wanted to exhibit their work. That is a natural need.
Cuba requires a new contemporary art museum because right now we only have small galleries for that purpose.
What is the role of a curator?
The curator is a social scientist who conveys ideas from a thesaurus or collection. What is a nineteenth century French painting? It is an idea of an artist who painted, for example, the rising bourgeoisie, its pose, the fashion of the time, its social class.
His role in a museum is the epitome of curating, it is the highest accomplishment of each curator. There are curators for permanent and transient exhibitions. Curating is an act of knowing because a curator must research a lot on the subject. A curator has to be creative .
I was appointed, after years , chief curator of MNBA and had the opportunity, along with my team of curators, of designing the museology of the two buildings (Cuban Art Building and Universal Art Building). That is my masterpiece, also theirs and the one of architect Jose Linares, prestigious figure of Cuban museography.
We made the designs thinking in what must be exhibited and in which way the two museums should display their pieces. Linares was very important in that facet. It is always an ongoing dialogue between museology and museography.
If I had chosen to live in Paris and work at the Musée d’Orsay, because my collection is the French one, it would be very nice for me. But I did not design the Orsay and I feel very satisfied with my work because I have contributed, with my knowledge, to the prestige of Fine Arts.
