The MAT (El Tigre Art Museum) was born with the idea of materializing into a museum of figurative Argentine art, which would bring together works from the late 19th and 20th centuries, with an arm extended to contemporary times and a space dedicated to Tigre. The feat of its collection began in 2004, thanks to the thinking and management of the Municipal Mayor, Ricardo Ubieto. After the restoration and enhancement of the building, and already with the projection of a museum of fine arts, the Municipality was acquiring work with the advice of a group of experts. The initial curatorial script contemplated The Precursors and Dawns of the 20th Century, The Nexus Group, The Landscape, The Figure, The Composition, The Riachuelo, Towards Modernity and El Tigre in Argentine Art. Finally, the MAT opened its doors in 2006 with a heritage of 160 works. As the years passed, its collection gradually increased, until, in 2019, the collector Carlos Franck approached to offer an extraordinary donation, with an unusual number of works, and the decision to think of the Tigre Art Museum as the chosen place. for safekeeping and display.
We could ask ourselves: What does the gesture of a collector mean, who takes his private collection shaped by personal choices, and decides to make a donation of such magnitude to a public museum? His legacy concentrates the generous gesture and the contributory vocation aimed at enriching the institutional heritage. Act that entails a material and symbolic expansion of the collection, its organization and research to a public entity, which will guarantee access and appreciation of the works to the community.
For decades, through my work as a restorer, I have been in dialogue with private collections. I understand well what a private collection means and a collector's relationship with it. Walls full of works, paintings, sculptures, all kinds of pieces, not necessarily with a significant economic value. I have my particular vision and opinion on the matter based on my experience. The collectors I work with and have met have taught me a lot. They are the first to preserve heritage, almost professional amateur researchers, sometimes without knowing it. Basically curious people.
The Carlos Franck Donation can be read as a replica of 19th century collecting. In Argentina of that century, important collections began to take shape in the private sphere. The works of art did not always correspond to aesthetic consumption, but many of them were paintings of religious images. But those private collections that began a broader collection of pictorial genres referred to personal delight and social distinction through exclusivity and private exhibition. Its collections were fundamental as a basis for the subsequent creation of art museums in the country, the first of them, the National Museum of Fine Arts (1895).
A transfer of such magnitude as the Carlos Franck Donation reminds us how the importance of fine arts is established in our nation, the achievement of the first museums and the action of those collectors who transferred their private heritage to public institutions. A decision that progressively stimulated the increase in art viewers and that gives us the current commitment to a public museum accessible to all. The works are part of a network of images that correspond to a collective and local memory. In this sense and in the words of Marcelo Pacheco:
“The discursive qualities of the works of art and the system of meanings of a collection are central in their consideration to keep competencies active in the territory. A collection is not the gathering of a given number of pieces, but the construction of a body of relationships with multiple dimensions, which put in motion, in friction and opposition, different visual and conceptual stories exhibited by the works in action. Without that vital and expressive component, which is structural, the groups remain static, silent. They do not draw their own profiles or manage to display their intentions. Signatures act when they are marks in the territory, when they are names inscribed in the fabric, not when they are illusions that draw the contours of an authorship.” (1)
Adrián Gualdoni and Sonia Decker working in Carlos Franck's home. Photography: Courtesy MAT.
Faced with the confirmation of the entry into our heritage of the Carlos Franck Donation, it was necessary to form a work team and also talk with the engineer Franck, to explain to him that his collection should be submitted to the expert gaze of Sonia Decker and Adrián Gualdoni to deliberate what would be accepted and what would not. A private collection can be very suitable for a person, wonderful for their home, works that anyone would like to have, but not in accordance with the MAT collection. Carlos Franck not only agreed, but he himself, inversely, had visited several museums that did not conform to his wishes. His arrival at our institution was through the Association of Friends of the Tigre Art Museum (AAMAT) at the suggestion of its then president, Juan Pedro Edward.
At the end of 2019 we began the survey, inventory and photographic record, but in 2020, due to the pandemic, our tasks were affected. We had to interrupt in-person presence for a year, something that made us very creative to continue with the work; and a few months later, with the precautions of the case, which unfortunately deprived me of the team of collaborators, I was able to return to his house to advance the plan outlined. Throughout this process we confirmed that the numerous works and their artistic excellence were extremely appropriate to our heritage. This magnificent donation, which brings together the Spartacus, Nexus, Paris groups and so many other links between artists, strengthens our collection today and presents us with the challenge of continuing to investigate new stories and territories.
The Carlos Franck Donation was formalized in the Municipality of Tigre together with Mayor Julio Cesar Zamora, who supported this initiative from the first moment. In June 2021, and for almost a year, a total of 181 works were exhibited in the largest room on the ground floor of the Museum. The works - which appeared in my memory in the work processes and on the walls of his house - were grouped by genre, creating a composition for each wall. It was a tribute to the donation and a way to show the community everything that the museum had received.
In 2023 we decided to make an exhibition where the integration of the donation to the MAT Collection is appreciated. Its title is Meta Romances: between the sublime and the mundane curated by Anabella Monteleone, and it can currently be visited. In parallel, the production of a book from the Carlos Franck Donation was planned on which, together with the characteristic effort and enthusiasm of the AAMAT, we have been working on for two years and whose publication is planned for 2024.
The generosity, commitment, kind treatment, and predisposition of the person who undertook the mission of collecting the works, Collector Carlos Franck, were essential to carry out all the tasks with perfection and enthusiasm.
Note:
1. Marcelo Pacheco, Art collecting in Buenos Aires 1924-1942, 1° Buenos Aires, El Ateneo, 2013, p. 259.
* Special for Hilario Arts, Letters & Crafts.