ART-COLOMBIA: Exhibition (Nearly) Impossible

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, Aug 6 2002 (IPS) - The travelling exhibition of 106 paintings from the Rau Collection arrived for the first time in the Americas at the Colombian capital’s Casa de Moneda representing six centuries of universal art and a complicated paper trail.

The French ambassador in Colombia, Daniel Parfait, referred to the Rau Collection as “exposition impossible” late last year when efforts that had begun a year and a half earlier by the National Museum of Colombia to bring the art here were called off after the Sep 11 terror attacks in the United States.

“Since then, the policies to insure the collection against terrorist acts became indispensable, but also impossible to obtain,” explained the director of the Colombian museum, Elvira Cuervo.

To embark numerous pieces of irreplaceable art on a trip through several countries, as is planned for the Germany-based Rau Collection, will be increasingly difficult, “not only for Colombia, but for any country,” she said.

The “priceless” collection includes Italian, Flemish, English, German and Spanish paintings, and some of the world’s most noted painters are represented, such as El Greco, Degas, Canaletto, Cassat, Renoir and Monet.

But insurance was not the only obstacle that the travelling exhibition encountered en route to the Casa de Moneda, located in Bogotá’s colonial district, La Candelaria.

Another blow to the project came Jan 2 with the death of German philanthropist Gustav Rau, who had already agreed that Colombia would be the first country in the Americas to receive the collection, which had previously only visited Tokyo, the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Italy’s Bergamo, and the German cities of Cologne and Munich.

The exposition’s promoters had to convince officials at UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) in Germany, which inherited the collection, that the art works in Colombia would face “no greater risk there than anywhere else.”

However, the February breakdown of peace talks between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and a wave of violent incidents that resulted in “the cancellation of the exhibition on seven different occasions,” said Cuervo.

Once those stumbling blocks were overcome, the collection had to wait for Colombia’s Central Bank to commit to paying the insurance policies for the paintings.

The costs of the exhibition in Bogotá — approximately one million dollars — covered by state enterprises (22 percent) and by private companies (78 percent).

After overcoming all of those obstacles, three Colombian police chiefs received the collection in early June in Bergamo to accompany it to Paris in a heavily guarded land transport operation, an endeavour that would be worthy of a screenplay for a crime film.

The Rau Collection was shipped from the French capital to Bogotá on three different aircraft, always in the custody of the police officials. Meanwhile, at the Casa de Moneda, owned by the Bank of the Republic, several technical teams worked overtime to prepare the site and finalise paperwork.

The organisers had to convince the authorities to declare the Casa de Moneda a customs free zone. The building is adjacent to the Botero Museum, which holds a collection of international paintings from the 20th century donated by Colombian painter Fernando Botero, and to the Luis Angel Arango Library.

In this context, the insurance adjusters worked side-by-side with fiscal agents and administrators, and with curators hired by the Luxemburg Museum of Paris and the National Museum of Bogotá to ensure that all stumbling blocks were out of the way so that the Colombian people could enjoy 106 works of art.

Other problems included the Rau demands that the funds brought in by the exposition must be given to institutions that support children, and the Colombian law that requires the National Museum to hand over its income to the national treasury.

The two requirements were resolved by an agreement between the Museum and UNICEF, that a group of private companies would donate a sum equal to that earned by the exhibition to the Integral Rehabilitation Centre, which treats child victims of landmines.

Admission to the six-month exposition is equivalent to 1.7 dollars, with special discounts for students and the elderly. In the first week of the show, more than 12,800 people visited the museum.

A team of 30 students of sociology, history and art received six months of training to serve as docents for the exhibition of paintings.

The idea is “to provide visitors with lectures from different points of view, not only about practical problems, but also about the relationships of each work with literary and social aspects,” Amada Pérez, of the museum’s education department, told IPS.

The enthusiasm surrounding the Rau Collection in the capital of a nation that is stigmatised by political and social violence “indicates that people want to prove that life is much more than war,” said Pérez.