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Intramural Discord on Display at a Museum in Dublin

January 9, 2002

By BRIAN LAVERY




DUBLIN, Jan. 8 - The 10-year-old Irish Museum of Modern Art
here has occasionally struggled in its short history. But
these days, even seasoned members of Ireland's small art
world blanch at the boardroom turmoil and infighting at the
museum.

The trouble started a year ago when an ambitious
chairwoman, Marie Donnelly, discharged the revered director
who had run the museum since it opened in 1991. After a
lengthy court battle, the director, Declan McGonagle, won
$520,000 in compensation and held on to his job until
April. Then last month the difficult selection of a new
director prompted the resignation of Ms. Donnelly and three
other board members. The museum, known as IMMA, is still
without a permanent director.

The drawn-out affair has put the museum onto the front
pages - a series of vitriolic resignation letters were
circulated to the press - and people who have never set
foot in the place are talking about the fall of Ms.
Donnelly.

Now that the dust has started to settle, the problems seem
self-evident: a director who overstayed his welcome, a
voice for change that rubbed people the wrong way and an
institution still struggling to create a relevant role for
itself and to forge links with Irish artists.

In November 2000 Ms. Donnelly told Mr. McGonagle that the
board would advertise for a new director once his contract
expired. He was nearing the end of his second five- year
contract and expected that it would be renewed. The dispute
became public on the well-read letters page of The Irish
Times, where loyal museum staff members and friends argued
Mr. McGonagle's side and attacked Ms. Donnelly.

Last summer the search for a new director led to Brian
Kennedy, an Irishman who is director of the National
Gallery of Australia and a former assistant director of the
National Gallery of Ireland. After two interviews, three of
the five members of the selection panel recommended him for
the position at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Despite
earlier pledges that unanimous approval was necessary, Ms.
Donnelly brought his appointment to a vote of the board,
which offered Mr. Kennedy the job.

Two board members immediately resigned because they thought
Ms. Donnelly had overruled the dissenters on the selection
panel to usher in her own choice; a third soon followed.
Then, when Mr. Kennedy said he would not leave his job in
Australia, Ms. Donnelly resigned.

The Irish like to see the mighty laid low - they even call
"begrudgery" a national trait - and Ms. Donnelly has
suffered the harsh glare of the media spotlight here.
(Repeated efforts to reach her for this article were
unsuccessful.) Newspaper articles were critical of her
personally, even criticizing her haute couture fashion
sense and the modern design of her new home, painstakingly
designed to house her art collection. An unsigned article
in The Sunday Times said she "wreaked havoc" at the museum.


Other reports said part of the conflict was Mr. Kennedy's
confrontational encounter with Ireland's powerful arts
minister, Sile de Valera, when the Book of Kells, an
ancient Irish manuscript, traveled to Australia last year.
Ms. de Valera denied those allegations in a widely
published response to Ms. Donnelly's resignation, and a
spokesman for the Department of Arts and Heritage pointed
out that the arts minister has no formal influence over the
appointment of museum director.

Meanwhile the museum's management is headed by Philomena
Byrne, formerly director of public affairs. "The whole work
of the museum has been progressing quite smoothly in spite
of all this," she said. The museum had 300,000 visitors in
2001, the highest number since 1997. Recent exhibitions
included bright, geometric wall paintings by Sol LeWitt and
short films by the Iranian director Shirin Neshat.

But on a recent Saturday afternoon the museum drew such
meager crowds that it came as a surprise to encounter
another visitor in any given room. The museum occupies a
17th-century military hospital, a sort of mini-chateau that
tourists could easily mistake for an official government
residence.

The building itself is one of the museum's problems,
artists here say. It has a tremendous amount of space and
impressive decorative gardens, but its majestic character
and its location seem at odds with an institution that
should be at the heart of modern Irish culture. It takes 45
minutes to walk to the museum from the center of Dublin,
and no stores or restaurants are nearby. The closest bus
stop is at a train station, a 10- minute walk away; no
signs offer directions through the crooked streets.

Works are displayed in a string of rooms off long corridors
around the central courtyard. While the cobblestone
courtyard was initially considered a prime asset for
staging events and outdoor exhibitions, it is almost always
empty.

"I always found that a pity, that the building itself is
sacrosanct," said Peter Fitzgerald, editor of the Irish art
magazine Circa. "It was quite hard to feel comfortable in
IMMA." The cold, forbidding courtyard could easily be
filled with outdoor sculpture, trees and benches, he added.


Still, many say that Mr. McGonagle did leave a positive
legacy. At the 10th-anniversary dinner in May, Ms. Byrne
described him as "the most important person in the history
of the museum." His community outreach and educational
programs have earned unanimous praise.

"He stamped it with his identity completely," said Aidan
Dunne, art critic for The Irish Times.

But Mr. McGonagle's detractors say that the first and only
exhibition to be significantly noticed by the wider Irish
public was an Andy Warhol retrospective in 1997, well into
his second five-year term. And the museum rarely engages
with contemporary artists living and working in Ireland,
Mr. Fitzgerald said.

A recent management forum pointed out oversights of his
administration, like the lack of posters and books by Irish
artists in the museum's gift shop. And with an annual
budget of less than $3.5 million, the museum does almost no
marketing, while other Irish art institutions publicize
their exhibitions with splashy posters.

Mr. Dunne, the critic, said that although Ms. Donnelly's
decision to replace Mr. McGonagle may have been crudely
handled, it also could have been necessary to keep the
inspired visions of the museum's early days from
stagnating. "There was a widespread feeling in the art
world that a fundamental shift was needed at IMMA," he
said. "The museum has to establish itself as a presence in
the city and the country."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/09/arts/design/09ARTS.html?ex=1011587235&ei=1&en=4c83d9739c067e39



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