This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). 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