The situation with regard to museums in Argentina is therefore the same as in many other countries—lack of resources resulting from the apathy of the authorities or the need to attend to more pressing problems. However, apart from the customary shortage of funds, other defects seriously handicap Argentina’s museums. The first of these concerns the training of specialized staff. Although schools of museology exist in Buenos Aires9 and La Plata, they both function somewhat in a vacuum because the graduates rarely obtain posts in museums, the profession not being covered by regulations. Museums have taken to building up their staff on an ad hoc basis, usually without any formal training in museology. This is particularly true in the case of curators of official museums, who are hardly ever museologists. This responsible post is usually reached by other avenues: experience in related disciplines (for example historians, art critics, architects), experience in a museum or simply great enthusiasm—when it is not a question of influence. A feeling for the profession of the museologist is generally lacking, and this has very negative effects on museums. The second defect—the great defect, bound up with the first one—is the almost total lack of communication between Argentine museologists, who do not know how many colleagues they have and who and where those colleagues are. Scattered, without any contacts, very often isolated, they suffer from the lack of mutually stimulating relationships and frequently become discouraged and apathetic. There is no exchanging of experiences, no organizing of meetings, symposia or conferences of any sort. They lack esprit de corps; disunited, they cannot negotiate and petition the authorities as a block. Furthermore most of them have no authority or power of decision within their own museums. Argentina may well have the most museums of any country in Latin America; for more than two decades, however, it has been going through a tremendous economic crisis, which has inevitably affected the budgets of museums and, as a result, their condition. Apart from all this, a well-trained, competent and responsible body of museologists is essential. In the few cases where a museum manages to get a suitable staff together, it forges ahead, even with the most limited means. • 9
Bolivia10 Teresa Gisbert de Mesa
10 See page 203, Appendix 6, ‘Table of Museums in Bolivia’.
Translated from Spanish
See: ‘The Argentine Institute of Museology’, Museum, Vol. XXII, No. 1, 1969, p. 61-8.
Bolivia, situated in the centre of the South American continent, a land with a rich archaeological and artistic heritage, has fourteen museums, the majority of which are devoted to art, archaeology and folk art. Four of these museums are under direct State supervision through the Ministry of Education and Culture, the remainder belong to universities, municipalities and cultural institutions. Three of these fourteen museums house mixed collections of art, archaeology, folk art and history, five are exclusively art museums, three are archaeological museums and one a historical museum. Ten of them are installed in old buildings, generally eighteenth-century mansions, in some cases of such architectural importance that they form an integral part of the museum they house. However, in most cases the presentation is poor because of the lack of museological knowledge. The material at the disposal of Bolivian museums is generally excellent in regard to art of the viceregal period, and archaeology. The Museum of the Potosi Mint, the National Art Museum in La Paz and the Charcas Museum in Chuquisaca possess some European items, almost all sixteenth-century Flemish paintings which arrived in the country in the years following the Spanish conquest. Examples of local seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings are numerous and representative and it can be said that in Bolivia the greater part of paintings of the viceregal period are in museums, except those in the La Paz and Lake Titicaca region where they remain in situ in the local Baroque churches. There are also many examples of Cuzco paintings in Bolivian museums, since during the colonial period Cuzco exported a great many canvases to Alto Peru (now Bolivia) which were sold by muleteers in the towns of the high plateau and the mining towns of Potosi and Oruro. Some of the artists most important for an understanding of artistic development are extremely well represented and practically none of their works remain in private hands. This is the case of Bernardo Bitti (1548-1610), the Italian Jesuit who brought painting to the Andean zone and introduced mannerism to Lima and Chuquisaca, whose complete works are assembled in the Sucre Cathedral Museum. The same also applies to Melchor Perez Holguin (1660(?)1724), a seventeenth-century Potosi painter, who is one of the most important figures in American Baroque painting. Nearly a hundred of his works have been identified, of which over sixty are in the possession of Bolivian museums. Nineteenth-century painting, of little interest from the artistic point of view but extremely important for the history of iconography, is represented in the Charcas Museum (attached to the University) in Sucre and in the Museum of the Potosi Mint. It is interesting to note that
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