WHEN BRIAN Kennedy was a young student, he stayed in a building workers’ hostel in Kilburn, to help eke out his meagre resources and extend a study visit to London’s galleries.
He still remembers one exchange in particular with a longer-term expatriate. “Another lodger, a lovely big man from Sligo, thought it was wonderful that Ireland had produced someone who wanted to go to art museums.”
Kennedy never persuaded this man to join him on an exhibition visit, but he has spent much of his professional life since then, rather more successfully, trying to engage wider circles of the general public with the arts. He has done so – always energetically, and occasionally controversially – from senior positions at art institutions across three continents. At the age of 26 he was appointed assistant director of the Irish National Gallery. Six years later he became director of the National Gallery of Australia. He then moved to the small but highly influential Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire.
Nearly two years ago he moved again, to become director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the home of a world-class collection, magnificently housed, and an institute with a strong tradition of community education.
Kennedy’s first encounter with visual art was worlds apart from his current position.
“At the age of 13, my aunt sent me an art postcard, and promised to continue sending them to me at the rate of one a month. I then started to collect them vigorously myself. At 18, I had 5,000 of them, 40 Rembrandts organised in chronological order and so on; I found my subject very early.”
Finding his profession as a gallery director took a little longer, following civil service jobs and a stint at the Chester Beatty Library. It was here that he became fascinated by the interface between culture and politics, writing his first book on Beatty’s decision to donate his collection to Ireland.
He soon learned just how tricky this relationship could be, following his move to the National Gallery. The Arts Council commissioned him to write a history of the State and the arts in Ireland. The result was Dreams and Responsibilities, published in 1990. The book is a serious, scholarly work, but Kennedy’s unfettered access to the council’s archives and personnel yielded sensational material. He wrote carefully, but revealingly, about apparent interference by the then taoiseach, Charles J Haughey, in the council’s affairs.
The book was at first avidly promoted by the council’s then director, Adrian Munnelly. But Haughey’s cultural advisor, the poet Anthony Cronin, challenged Kennedy’s account of these events in print. Munnelly told his staff that he had assured Cronin he would lower the book’s profile.
Cronin has always denied seeking such an assurance. Nevertheless, Munnelly shredded some 200 copies of the book without informing the author. He rejected allegations that he did so under political pressure. But he never republished it.
Kennedy was politic in declining to comment on these events at the time. Today he looks back on them as “just so bizarre. But they did teach me a lot about how things were being done in government circles.”
He is delighted that the book was reprinted by a subsequent Arts Council director, Patricia Quinn, and now features prominently, without any changes, on the council's website (see artscouncil.ie).
His job at the National Gallery was already taking him abroad a great deal, where he was energetically promoting its touring exhibitions. This led to an invitation to the directorship of the National Gallery of Australia, where again he found himself at the sharp end of the relationship between art and politics for the next seven years.
“It’s a very transparent culture,” he says. “Quite the opposite of Ireland. The scrutiny was intense.”
His brief was to “remake the museum”, which involved the shedding of many jobs. The press was often hostile, especially over his cancellation of the controversial Sensation exhibition in 1999. His critics called it censorship, a charge he strongly denies, though he concedes that the circumstances were “painful”.
However, he was also widely praised for extending the gallery’s reach to small towns across the continent through multiple touring shows. He also quickly developed a remarkably empathetic engagement with contemporary Aboriginal art.
His move to the much smaller, though dynamic, Hood Museum at Dartmouth College gave him time to curate shows, and to pursue his writing interests, producing monographs on Seán Scully and Frank Stella.
The opportunities for engagement with academics, students and the broader community offered by Dartmouth was “idyllic”, he says. “If you can provide opportunities for people to be excited, astounded, sometimes shocked, the whole community can grow by the experience.”
He gives a remarkable instance of where such a culture of engagement can lead. He invited Will Owen and Harvey Wagner to exhibit their collection of recent Aboriginal art at the Hood. They were so impressed by the way in which the community engaged with the works “not as ethnographic evidence but as contemporary art”, that they donated the whole collection to the museum.
Kennedy’s current position as director of Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio offers him a different range of opportunities and challenges. Toledo is a boom-bust industrial city, constantly reinventing itself, repeatedly ravaged by unemployment and urban blight.
The museum was founded as an act of community philanthropy in 1901 by the founder of Libby Glass, still one of Toledo’s major businesses. Kennedy points out that it is unusual among such private museums in that it was “built on a fortune, not a collection”.
The Libbys gave free rein to its directors to build up its collection from scratch. Kennedy says without false modesty that “they went out and bought the best that could be found. When you see a work of art from Toledo in an exhibition, you know it is going to be a humdinger.”
The museum boasts representative works from Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Turner, Hopper and Remington, a medieval Christian cloister and a serpent deity from Angkor Wat. Throw in a stunning collection of glass art in an award-winning glass pavilion, 10,000 works on paper still largely untapped for exhibition, a Frank Gehry building, and a massively imposing Greek revival central complex, and you have a remarkable institution.
For Kennedy, though, the centrepiece of any museum is its visitors, and increasingly those who access its collections online. He likes to remember that when Edward Drummond Libby offered to give Toledo a museum, he invited the citizens, and especially the children, to show him whether they really wanted one. Children brought in their pennies until they had collected $50,000, a huge sum at the end of the 19th century. Libby matched it many times over and building began.
Today Kennedy wonders whether the role of the director is to collect more art, or to do everything possible to ensure that citizens can engage in multiple ways with the collections the museum already has.
But above all, he says, we need to “rethink the nature of art museums and how they present themselves to the public. In Toledo we need to rethink the nature of how we present what is an extraordinary art collection not just to public locally, but to the world.”
KENNEDY ON...
His decision not to seek the position as director of the National Gallery or the Irish Museum of Modern Art last year
While Kennedy believes he was treated shabbily when he applied for the Imma position in 2002, he denies that this influenced his decision not to seek either post this time. “The idea of being able to engage the experiences I have been fortunate to have internationally by directing an Irish institution is of course attractive,” he says. “But the timing came too soon after moving to Toledo.”
Last year, this newspapers art critic, Aidan Dunne, name checked Kennedy as a suitable candidate for both the directorships of the National Gallery, and of Imma, when they were vacant last year.
The Government’s proposal to amalgamate the National Gallery, IMMA and the Crawford Gallery
Kennedy is wary, not wanting to be seen as “pontificating from abroad”, but then says: “In principle, it is difficult to blend the purposes of such institutions without diminishing the individual responsibilities of each one.”
Government cuts to the arts sector
Again, he is cautious about sounding off from afar, but there is still a message: “The current financial situation is obviously difficult, but investment in the arts will keep people in jobs, sustain creativity and promote tourism.”
