translated by Giorgina Arcuri

THE PARISIAN MUSEUM DROPS GOLDIN

Marco Goldin is well-known to be an actual strategist when it comes to organizing public exhibitions. The owner of the company Linea d’Ombra, native of Treviso, in a few years has succeeded in turning artistic events into a big business. His rise started in Treviso with the support of Gino De Poli, president of the Foundation Cassamarca: a union which seemed to be made of iron, the one financed and the other filled the city with tourists. But this solid partnership faded since De Poli sacked Goldin without notice accusing him of transforming culture into a village feast. Only three days later, the enfant prodige was already in Brescia, where in a very short time he managed to achieve excellent results with respect to economic effects on the territory of Brescia: a study carried out in 2006 by the IReR (Regional Institute of Lombardy) showed that the exhibition “Gauguin e Van Gogh”, for an investment of 7-8 million euros, had a total economic impact on the Lombard city equivalent to 75,746,760 euros.  But even the Goldin-Brescia sodality died out, when at the end of last year the creator of blockbuster exhibitions signed a new four-year contract with Verona, announcing the realization of the exhibition “Il Louvre. Capolavori a Verona”.
Nobody had ever seen it and many were already talking about it. Some people have even defamed it. Everyone will certainly remember Francesco Bonami’s attack to Goldin that was sued. The famous guest curator of the Chicago Museum of Modern Art defined the exhibition dedicated to the Louvre “a fraud” that costs 9 million euros. Besides the gossips and discussions between the prominent figures of the Italian system of curators, “Il Louvre. Capolavori a Verona” is an occasion that the Italian public will miss. Indeed, as the release of the company Linea d’Ombra announced, the exhibition in programme from the 19th September 2008 to the 15th February 2009 in the building of the Gran Guardia in Verona will not take place. At the current state, the time available is too short to organize this important exhibition, given all the work to be done and all the technical, administrative and legal conditions necessary to guarantee the arrival, the safety and the preservation of the masterpieces. The Louvre Museum, therefore, cannot grant the promised loans and regrets this situation, being aware of the quality of the collaborations between Marco Goldin and great international museums. Therefore, what was anticipated as one of the event-exhibitions of the next season has been called off. And who is to blame? The municipal bureaucracy, which has already stirred up in the city polemics of political nature. The democratic party has accused the municipal administration of giving a very bad impression at international level.
“In Verona” – claimed Goldin – unlike Brescia and Turin, there is not a Museum Foundation that allows to cut short the technical and legal times and guarantee the arrival, safety and required preservation of the masterpieces that should have arrived from Paris”. A condition that was already well-known. “But they had assured me – says Goldin – that the problems would have been solved. Instead nothing. It is the first time that I have met such a slow and inflexible bureaucracy”.
The losses are really burdensome: 350 thousand euros already invested in publicity, more than 40 thousand reservations in one and a half months, which anticipated a new record of visits that would have exceeded “Gauguin e Van Gogh” in Brescia.
Currently, whether this flop will have consequences of the relation Goldin-Verona is yet to be seen, as the curator from Treviso had predisposed a four-year programme of great exhibitions: “I will talk to the mayor when the dust has settled. We will evaluate together what to do”. Now there are rumours about the idea of replacing this exhibition with another one in autumn. However things turn out, for Verona and our country this remains a bad show that will be remembered for a long time, and a missed occasion to see 140 masterpieces from the Parisian museum, including the very famous  “La Belle Ferroniere”, painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, symbol of the exhibition. Besides Leonardo, the Veronese city was also waiting for works by Raffaello, Botticelli, Carracci, Tiziano and many more.