The celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum is serving these days in Bilbao to do a retrospective exercise and rediscover the gray and inhospitable industrial town that it once was. The story about the miracle of the urban, economic and social transformation of the city returns, and it does so with a general consensus about the role of the museum as an emblematic project and catalyst of this metamorphosis. This story, however, often forgets a parallel transformation at the cultural level that is impossible to understand without that milestone.
The experience of the Carreras-Múgica Gallery, located on the outskirts of the museum, is eloquent of the “radical change” that the arrival of the Guggenheim brought about. “We opened three years before the museum and we always support the project, but we didn't open for the Guggenheim. We saw it as something distant and, honestly, we didn't even remotely imagine that it was going to be what it has been. Before the inauguration, when someone visited our stand, for example, in Cologne, Bilbao was linked to industry or terrorism. In no case did it sound familiar to them because of art. Suddenly, after the inauguration, you went to Paris and saw that someone who had not already been to Bilbao was about to come. it was a before and an after. Today it is still a very attractive destination and continues to bring together the professionals we meet at fairs around the world”, says Ignacio Múgica, co-founder of the gallery.
The success of the Frank Gehry-designed museum was immediate. It took just three years to recover the initial public investment and the number of visitors quadrupled the most optimistic forecasts. Its opening was the culmination of an approach to rehabilitating the city that led to a frenetic inauguration of projects for two decades. Culture was one more instrument to achieve the metamorphosis of a city depressed by the industrial crisis and the scourge of terrorism, but its contribution would end up being capital. Since it was inaugurated, it has received 24 million visitors (65% foreigners), a resounding success for a city that was outside the international art circuit.
Miguel Zugaza experienced the arrival of the Guggenheim in Bilbao at the end of the 90s, being, as today, director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, before directing the Prado Museum between 2002 and 2017. He vindicates the cultural contribution of the museum and the impact in the artistic context as a whole: “Above the resounding success of the socioeconomic experiment that it has meant, I think it is time to also recognize the unique cultural and art project that sustains it at the Guggenheim. Oriented mainly towards external projection and towards the creation of a new imaginary of the city in the future, after its first 25 years of existence we can also assess its beneficial impact on the closest cultural and artistic context”.
The director of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, which is now facing an ambitious expansion at the hands of Norman Foster, claims "the educational role that the ambitious and open program of exhibitions and public activities has had" or "the creation, together with the brilliant building that contains it, of its own art heritage, through its incipient collection, which roots the identity of the museum in the history of art and in its community”.
Zugaza also considers that the museum has acted as a "true lighthouse", offering "unprecedented international visibility to one of the most dynamic state art scenes and to the wealth of institutional and private platforms that complete the map of art in the region" . A point on which Ignacio Múgica agrees: “It has allowed what was in the shadows to come to light. It is not just the building, those who visit us can learn about the history of Basque art, with Chillida and Oteiza at the forefront, and open the door to other incredible artists”.
Before the Guggenheim opened its doors, Eduardo Chillida had already outlined his great dream: a space where his sculptures could rest and in which people "would walk among them as if through a forest". The Chillida Leku Museum in Hernani, however, , would open its doors for the first time three years later.Reopened in 2019 after several years of hiatus, its director, Mireia Massagué, underlines the contribution of the Guggenheim in order to "position the Cornisa Cantábrica, previously known for its gastronomy, as a benchmark within contemporary art and a high-quality cultural destination". Massagué vindicates the network that makes up the Bilbao museum together with the center dedicated to Eduardo Chillida, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and its "very important renovation", the "reconfiguration" of the Artium of Vitoria-Gasteiz or the Botín Center of Santander.
The opening of the Guggenheim Museum was accompanied by a lot of skepticism, not only politically but also artistically. The sculptor Pello Irazu lived from New York, where he was based during the 90s, the arrival of the Guggenheim to that Bilbao in transformation. He recalls the debates that the project aroused and links them to the contrast that it represented for the Basque art scene: “The model that the Guggenheim brought was a bit Martian with respect to the magma that existed around the context of Basque art and artists. It represented a model of cultural institution that did not exist here. In its expansion project, the Guggenheim was looking for a place to settle in Europe and the Basque administrations saw the opportunity to transform Bilbao and Euskadi through an economic-cultural tractor”.
Irazu believes that the Guggenheim "has found its place as a museum in a society that has left behind its industrial past, gradually transforming itself into a service society." “Over time, moreover, Basque society has turned it into a symbol of its own, not only because of its identification with Gehry's building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture, but also because it has offered it a priceless platform of cultural consumption. With regard to the artistic context, it has cost him to be porous, but his current relationship with Basque artists is. Through the exhibition program and multiple initiatives, it is in a much closer and more permeable position, although there will always be criticism of the curatorial model it represents”, he adds.
Irazu himself was the protagonist in 2017 of his own exhibition that allowed his work to enjoy “unparalleled visibility”: “Exhibiting at the Guggenheim Bilbao, whether you like it or not, validates you and positions you in a more institutionalized place. Symbolically it has its importance. It was an exhibition project with all the capacity of the museum in your favor. My experience, at the hands of the curator Lucía Agirre, could not have been better. I also have to point out that the Guggenheim requires you. It is not an easy task to respond to the challenge that it entails”.
A quarter of a century after the inauguration, Kirmen Uribe attends as a writer-in-residence at New York University the retrospective exercise that the anniversary of the Guggenheim is demanding.
“We grew up with this museum, the museum made us. As people and as a country,” she indicates. Uribe vindicates the story of that transformation and, above all, values the change that it has meant for a society previously known for the stigmas of violence and that today seeks to project itself through its museums, the San Sebastián International Film Festival or of creators with a universal vocation: “We have to convince ourselves that culture makes us visible in the world”.
