The online collections of Romania’s National Art Museum

The National Art Museum in Bucharest has given visitors the chance of admiring its exquisite collections online

Corina Sabău, 14.05.2020, 23:57

The
National Art Museum of Romania has had a rich online activity in the
past month. Virtual thematic tours, courses and workshops for
children, free online catalogues, all these activities have brought
together over 350 thousand online visitors. Gabriela Tofan,
communication officer with the aforementioned museum has shared with
us a couple of things about the strategy adopted by the museum during
the state of emergency imposed in Romania.

Gabriela
Tofan:We
are looking at the figures every now and again and we are simply
amazed. Besides the big efforts that we’ve made we see that people
have increasingly opted for the online environment after so many days
of home confinement. Since the museum closed its doors, its activity
has significantly changed and together with our experts we have been
trying to move some of these activities online so that the public,
our visitors and even our expert colleagues may not feel its absence
in their life. We are glad that people started to communicate on our
pages as that wasn’t very common before. We used the channels and
means made available for us and capitalized on our webpage as well as
the social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram. Of course there
are other methods employed, we managed to stage a small creative
workshop and looked for platforms that can host the publications that
we made available for our visitors. Now we are working to make
available our publications in eBook and pdf format. We have been
testing these educational episodes so that we may see how they will
develop in the future and these virtual tours that we stage on a
weekly basis gained an extraordinary momentum, something that we
didn’t expect.

A
virtual theme tour with a selection of works from the museum’s
patrimony is being posted on the institution’s Facebook page on
Wednesdays. Two tours, which enjoyed a tremendous success with the
visitors, were ‘Works with Pets’ and ‘200 years since the
discovery of the Venus de Milo sculpture’.

Here
is again at the microphone Gabriela Tofan.

Gabriela
Tofan:
Our
museum has so far displayed two types of online tours. The permanent
ones are describing the permanent galleries and exhibitions of four
museums; besides Romania’s National Art Museum, we have on view
collections from the Museum of Art Collections, the KH Zambaccian
Museum and the Theodor Pallady Museum. But we also have short online
tours carried by our Facebook page on a weekly basis. The permanent
online tours are available on the Discovery section of our webpage
where all the galleries are described. The description is
accompanied by this online tour where visitors can surf through every
hall and admire these works. These tours had also been available long
before the pandemic, but we are glad that they are now enjoying such
a tremendous success with our visitors. Like I said, we tried to
depict the relation between people and their pets and we found a lot
of works from the past centuries that could illustrate this relation.
Then we got inspiration from this home confinement and in our attempt
to illustrate this idea we found lots of works by Theodor Paladdy and
other artists, which suited very well to this theme. All these were
some of our attempts to whet the appetite of museum goers. We were
also inspired by other house activities, such as reading, the
presence of books in our lives. Our museum boasts an enormous depot
of works of art but unfortunately these works cannot be displayed
with the frequency that we want, so we resorted to this method to
show them to the public. This is the positive aspect and we are glad
that people appreciated our pages. However, the present circumstances
made us to postpone some exhibitions that we planned last year.

One
of the events, which was supposed to be launched in this period, was
a publication entitled Corneliu Baba and his disciples, curated
by Maria
Albani. Until the event gets rescheduled, the museum has posted on
its page a selection of the aforementioned publication.

(translated
by bill)