The National Art Gallery – a museum and partner to contemporary art

The path of life of Mr. Boris Danailov, Director of the National Art Gallery, has many roundabouts and passes through many interesting occupations and places. We can say that by now he has walked it halfway.

Strangely enough, his professional biography starts thirty years ago, when he began working as a curator at the National Art Gallery. He did not quite like the job and rapidly moved to the Institute for Cultural Research with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where he spent several years conducting empirical and sociological researches in the field of culture. After that Danailov took up a position in the Information Department of the Ministry of Culture and then he became Director of the National Center for Museums and Galleries. During the term of office of the Ivan Kostov-led Cabinet, Borisov was Deputy Minister of Culture and at that time he specialized in Theory of Culture and International Cultural Relations in Belgium and France.

Three years ago, he cast anchor in the harbor of the National Art Gallery and this could be viewed as the end of his long journey. Since Boris Danailov assumed the post Director of the National Art Gallery, the institution has seen a different course of positive development. The Gallery has not only undergone refurbishment and modernization, but it has opened its doors for new artistic styles and genres. Now, it is more future-oriented.

The repair works on the building and the restoration of the Palace's interior restored also the atmosphere befitting a cultural-historical monument of such an importance and rank. Boris Danailov has managed to accommodate the interior of the King's Palace to the needs of the Gallery, turning it into a museum and monument of art.

In the meanwhile, he also finds time to be a curator and art critic and also to write features, especially on Contemporary Art.

This led to the organization of many exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad, some of which finding huge response: Contemporary French Art – Sofia; National Autumn Exhibitions – Plovdiv, Johannesburg 1995; Football Mania – Sofia; EuroArtTempo; The Europalia National Art Festival, including fourteen exhibitions among which were The Gold of the Thracians (250,000 visitors) and The Golden Kingdom of Orpheus, an exhibition opened from July 2004 to January 2005 in the Kunst- und Austellungshalle in Bonn, which attracted 220,000 visitors.

Danailov also lectures in Art History at the New Bulgarian University, but this is a different story…

Mr. Danailov, the Gallery is accommodated in the King's Palace in Sofia and this is a place, haunted by history…
The building of the King's Palace in Sofia is one hundred and fourteen years old. Before it was built, in this same place there was another building, which served as a Turkish Bey's konak (town hall). Before the Bulgarian Liberation, the konak hosted Turkish administration and a court.

It is said, although there is no sound evidence, that Vassil Levski, one of Bulgaria's most loved sons and strategist of the Bulgarian Liberation, was put in custody in one of the cells; and the trial against him may have been held in this same building. Not long ago, we went down to the basement and tried to determine the exact location of Levski's cell, but we could not. Expert knowledge is needed. Anyway, the building has a rich history.

For some time after the Liberation the building was desolate. The Bulgarian National Assembly decided that a palace should be built in this place – a state-owned building for the needs of the Royal Family. The reconstruction project had two stages. The first half of the building was reconstructed in 1880-1882, in the time of Prince Alexander Battenberg. Distinguished Viennese architect Viktor Rumpelmayer and architects Kolar, Lars and Mayerber managed to build in the old konak into the palace's foundation and that is why the walls of the present building are 1.2 m thick at some places. The representative part of the palace was build at that time – a ground floor, accommodating the offices of the administration, and an emphilade of ball-rooms above it. The third floor, which had been planned as an auxiliary one, also began to take shape.

The palace was inaugurated on December 26, 1882.

The construction of the eastern wing of the Palace was completed in the time of Prince Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, under the supervision of Austrian architect Friedrich Grunanger, who expanded it and incorporated elements of Renaissance Viennese Baroque. Nowadays, this part of the building is the home of the National Ethnographic Institute and its museum. The architecture of the eastern wing is more modest, because here were the apartments of the Royal Family, auxiliary premises, including even an elevator.

In 1946, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bulgaria decided the King's Palace to be turned into a National Gallery of Art and part of the building to be granted for the needs of the Ethnographic Museum. The practice of turning a palace into a museum had been known in Europe for quite some time, but in this case two cultural institutions were accommodated under one and the same roof.

It is also noteworthy that at present they are under the jurisdiction of different state institutions – the National Art Gallery is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and the Ethnographic Institute and its museum – under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

By the 1980s, the western wing of the King's Palace hosted the National Art Gallery. Over these years the building and the art collection underwent many changes, but two of them were the most crucial – the attitude of the then political class to architecture as a cultural heritage of the past and the very manner of arrangement of the art collection, as well as its contents. The Palace paid a dear price because of the ideological extremities of the ruling Communist regime and especially because of the barbaric attitude towards its interior. One of the halls, for example, was suited for a short period of time for an office of Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov and for the purpose the wainscot was brutally torn away and destroyed; what was left was covered with paint. When the building was transformed into a National Art Gallery, this process affected almost all premises. The gallery itself was designed in a very primitive way. The Royal interior was hidden from the eye with planks, plywood and the all-covering paint. But despite all vicissitudes, the fund of the National Art Gallery now grosses 50,000 exhibits of all kinds of plastic arts, including applied arts.

How have these pieces of art been collected? What does the Gallery's fund contain?
The first attempts to form an art collection of national importance started with the establishment of Bulgaria's oldest museum institution – the National Archeological Museum, in which a department of fine arts was founded in 1892. This department started gathering works of contemporary Bulgarian artists.Of course we should not forget the Palace itself, which the Kings of the Third Bulgarian State richly decorated with pieces of art, some of which were created by foreign authors. If we assume that the Fine Arts Department of the National Archeological Museum registered its first exhibits in 1892 and in 1909 it was registered under the National Museums Act, the National Art Gallery, as an institution, began to function in 1921. Then, it started collecting works of the New Bulgarian Art, covering a period from the 18th century to nowadays.

In 1934, the gallery was transformed into a State Gallery of Art and was moved in a special building. The scope of its activities also expanded: in addition to works of contemporary art (obtained mainly through direct purchasing from exhibitions), now it was also allowed to collect works of the great masters of the Bulgarian Revival, officially recognized as cultural heritage, as well as paintings by the first generations of artists, who worked in the period immediately following the Liberation.

The building of the Art Gallery was destroyed by air-raids over Sofia in WW II. Fortunately, the works of art somehow managed to survive the calamities of war, and along with the paintings from the Royal Collections, served as the fund of the National Art Gallery.

The Medieval Art Department was established in 1965, in the Crypt of the Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. In 1985, the pieces of foreign art were gathered and moved in a home of their own – The National Gallery for Foreign Art.

The paintings of the National Art Gallery cover a vast period of time. It has works not only by the great masters of the Revival and their successors, but also has the largest collection of Medieval icons – more than four thousand in number. The importance of this unique collection is great and it is compared only with the one exhibited in the Benaki Museum in Athens. The collection of icons found its home in the Crypt and for the past twenty years it has undergone only minor changes. The latest repair works gave the Crypt the air of nobility and respect, which a collection of this rank and an institution of such a national importance should have. This also predetermines the huge interest it arouses among the general public.

You organize many and different exhibitions. Could you please tell us on what principle is this done?
Basically, we leave nothing to chance. The program, on which we are working and which we are trying to implement, is for the coming year. And this is not an easy thing to do. I regularly summon the Gallery's Management Board, at which we propose and discuss the organization of various exhibitions and events. The interest in the gallery is growing and we are receiving more and more proposals and requests. The more they are, the harder to manage. We try not to overload the schedule, but to find a balance between the different exhibitions. We also try to offer our public a variety of events and to avoid repetition.

One of our goals is to support the contemporary artists. An artist, who has been approved to show his works in the Gallery, receives a full media coverage; we also offer to print posters and invitations and to organize a cocktail party for him. And the Gallery covers all expenses on the organization.

We have seven different halls, in which our guest-artists may exhibit their paintings. We also organize presentations of the works of Bulgarian and foreign artists. The Gallery organizes six or eight major events a year; these are big exhibitions, requiring a lot of space and perfect organizations and they usually gather the artistic elite of the country. I can say we maintain a high professional level.

There is a very interesting place on the Gallery's ground floor – the Chapel – where exhibitions are also organized. But these are a different type of exhibitions. If the ones organized upstairs are representative, more serious events, down here we guarantee liberty and diversity of the presented authors – some of them are budding young artists, others offer an alternative form of art and there are also artists who want to show something new. We are after a more dynamic rhythm, trying to keep our fingers on the pulse of today's life. What is happening in the public space is also happening here. Thus, the Gallery appears as an active partner to the art of today.

Among our activities, there is also a little strange one, namely we organize book launches, recitals, cocktail parties and other happenings, thus supporting our budget.