Irish Art Damaged at IMMA

A document from 2003 details the storage crisis at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, listing 20 artworks that have been damaged due to inadequate facilities, writes Harry McGee of The Irish Times. The document dated September 1st 2003 - with its polite, almost old-fashioned title - seemed like it would make for relatively innocuous reading. The title page read: "Storage for Artwork at the Irish Museum of Modern Art: A Schedule of the Curatorial Concerns." But, flicking to the next page, it became clear the title was a bit of misdirection for the incendiary material that followed. The document, drawn up by Imma's head of collections Catherine Marshall, exposed the deep inadequacies of facilities to store the State's growing permanent collection of Irish contemporary art, worth many millions of euro. Imma's own on-site stores at its home at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK) were crammed with artworks, constituting a serious hazard as they could not be evacuated in the event of a fire and had no proper environmental controls to protect fragile works of art. With well over 1,000 works in its permanent collection by then, the vast bulk was being housed in "temporary" and "interim" warehouses and stores sourced off-site by the Office of Public Works (OPW), none of which were really suitable for storing art. So critical had the storage situation become that Imma was forced to store works in a shipping container in the car park. The use of the shipping container was described as an emergency solution. But the "emergency" lasted four years. In September 2007, Imma's director Enrique Juncosa wrote to Sean Benton, the chair of the OPW, again highlighting its storage problems. The most explosive part of the 2003 document was its "schedule of the curatorial concerns". It listed 20 artworks that had been damaged as a "direct result of inappropriate environmental conditions in the storage facilities" at Imma. They included works by renowned artists from Ireland and abroad (see panel) including Louis le Brocquy, Dorothy Cross, Georges Braque, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Shane Cullen, Terry Atkinson and Stephan Balkenhol. Significantly, five of the 20 works listed as damaged belonged to the substantial private collection donated by businessman Gordon Lambert and on loan to the museum. Marshall also noted that Imma was not in a position to take donations into its collection due to lack of storage. The Department says that plans are at an advanced stage to provide on-site storage for Imma as well as increased storage off-site. "The OPW has acquired off-site storage which is being provided exclusively for Imma. This will be somewhere in the region of 20,000sq ft [1,858sq m]," says a departmental spokesman. For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art