From Casa Quinta to Museum. Preventive Conservation Plan for a Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Blanes Museum

Abstract

The Juan Manuel Blanes Museum (or Blanes Museum) is located in the city of Montevideo, houses a collection of modern and contemporary art of a three-dimensional nature that required preventive conservation measures for the storage and conservation of their works of art, pieces that were housed in common spaces, corridors, etc. The headquarters of the museum is an old historicist house of the nineteenth century, expanded in 1930 with two large exhibition galleries. As every museum located in a historical heritage building, it lacks of spaces that respond to contemporary conservation needs. These building conditions and the three-dimensional collection increase, determined the need to draft and execute a project that involves the analysis of the museum’s needs and its shortcomings for the conservation of this type of work. This project arises from the obligation to build an art storage in the existing space located in the museum.

This opened the possibility of reorganizing the work and carrying out the previous conservation diagnosis. In this way, it has been possible to intervene in the space and build a new art storage, whose structuring was managed by an organization system based on the RE-ORG method, developed by ICCROM.