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Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries

Malcolm Rogers

7 - 10 May 2012
University of Oxford

Malcolm Rogers is Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was appointed as the second Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries & Libraries for 2011-12.

Professor Rogers’ inaugural lecture was on the subject of ‘The Art Museum in the 21st Century’. Drawing on his long and eminent career at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as on his extensive experience as an art historian, Professor Rogers set out his reflections on the ideal of accessibility; both its importance in a democratic age but also the challenges, pragmatic and philosophical, which the concept encounters. He made a trenchant case against the excesses of an academic-theoretical approach to the public presentation of works of art, and championed instead the more inclusive ways in which a museum might display its treasures to the widest possible audience.

The second event, ‘Malcolm Rogers in Conversation with Christopher Brown’, saw these two museum Directors focus on their shared experiences of the renovation and expansion of the museums under their direction.  This was geared to a more specialist audience, mostly individuals with a professional and academic interest in the future of museology, who listened to a dialogue between two giants of the modern museum world, which was both entertaining and reflective.

The symposium on 'Portraiture: Pasts and Futures'- a joint event with Humanitas Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art Shirin Neshat - was chaired by Sandy Nairne, Director  of the National Portrait Gallery, who began by describing the curious power of portraits to evoke an individual, rather than a mere ‘figure’. He spoke compellingly about the fact that part of the power of a great portrait is its acknowledgment that it is always going to be simpler than the person it portrays. Professor Rogers’ remarks then picked up on the idea of the representation of individuality in a highly suggestive way. Shirin Neshat spoke about her own photographic series Women of Allah and The Book of Kings, and then novelist Dame Antonia Byatt gave an impressive account of portraits in nineteenth century French fiction, relating them to her own work. Finally, famous photographer William Ewing gave a presentation on the development of the photographic portrait, combining a talk and visual anthology, and offering provocative thoughts about the future of the medium. 

View photos on ISD's Flickr Channel.

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries & Libraries has been developed in close collaboration with and made possible by the generous support of Foster + Partners.