THE CONFERENCE on 'Scholarship in Museums' held last month at the Royal Society of Arts* performed at least two useful functions. First, it gave a British audience the chance to hear the views of major museum directors or senior curators from France, Germany, Italy and the United States in addition to those of the Directors of most of the London-based National Museums. Secondly, science museums were brought into the forefront of the discussion at a critical moment: the Natural History Museum is now undertaking the same kind of restructuring with concomitant redundancies as was pushed through by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1989, but on an even larger scale.
A breath of the European experience was particularly healthy in a debate which in the UK has largely been conducted in Anglo-American terms. British listeners could not but feel envious as Wolf-Dieter Dube, Director General of the Berlin Museums, and Michel Laclotte, the Director of the Louvre, spoke of the unchallenged position of object- based research, publication and cataloguing in their institutions - and this at a time of enormous physical
changes in Paris and momentous political events in Berlin. The German State Museums are members of the Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft (the German Research Association)
and receive federal funding for scholarly projects. As Dube briskly put it: 'Where there is no research, there is no museum'. The primacy of scholarship at the Louvre is demonstrated not only by its publications and inventories, but by the participation of scholars at every level of its activities- even in the stocking of the excellent bookshop under the Pyramid. The Louvre is divided into seven curatorial departments, whose heads meet as a 'college'
chaired by the Director (strikingly similar to the V & A before restructuring). Although this arrangement inevitably involves anomalies and inter-departmental feuds, it was
felt essential to retain it to provide stability during the upheavals ofle Grand Louvre - unlike the V & A, where the demolition of the power of 'baronial' keepers was considered
a necessary prerequisite of reform.
Although it was claimed at one point during the conference that there was a 'broad consensus of agreement' among the speakers, it was in fact evident that in London
a deep gulf has opened up between restructured South Kensington and unregenerate Trafalgar Square and Bloomsbury. The case against the scholar curator was presented in chilling fashion by the Director of the Science Museum, Neil Cossons, who subtitled his talk 'Scholarship or self-indulgence?' He blamed the crisis in the UK National Museums not on cuts in funding but on the unregulated growth ofstaffin the 1970s, resulting in inevitable paralysis. Oddly, however, this growth was, as he himself pointed out, largely in non-curatorial staff. In the 1980s various government agencies reported that collections were badly neglected. As a result the competence of the curators was called into question. The flaw in this analysis will be evident.
One of the stated aims of restructuring has been better research. But the notion of scholarship as something for which curators need to be 'freed' has a curious whiff of the
research presented at the conference by Neil MacGregor, the Director of the National Gallery - a research not 'pure', but essentially related to the enjoyment of the public. The Trecento exhibition 'Art in the Making' held last winter proved that point: the public were presented with the very latest art-historical and scientific work on a notoriously remote and inaccessible part of the collection, and came back for more. The unexpected success of the exhibition at the Louvre of Greek vases by the Euphronios painter (noted by Michel Laclotte) again proves it is patronising to underestimate public thirst for knowledge.

Lurking behind the attacks on scholar curators in artmuseums has been a feeling that object-based research is old-fashioned and out of touch with the direction of art history in the universities. Here there turns out to be an instructive parallel with the natural sciences. Michael Novacek of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, warned against the vogue for 'bio-diversity' centres such as the one planned for the Natural HistoryMuseum, as against taxonomy, a field in which many posts are being lost in South Kensington. The Director of the Natural History Museum, Neil Chalmers, explained the decision to sack scientists there as one of priorities - the concentration on a few relevant areas of research. But, as Novacek pointed out, a museum may be less well equipped in terms of collections and expertise to do the latest kind of fashionable research. In art museums too, as Simon Jervis, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum stated, scholar- ship is and should be different from academic research in universities. Not only does it have responsibilities to a different public (as all were agreed), but it is duty bound to be based on collections. Jervis compared museum objects to batteries, containing human creativity and skill; curatorial knowledge provides the charge which can bring them alive for the public. This power to animate the object has been a great strength of British museums, and Carlo Bertelli, former Soprintendente and Director of the Brera Museum in Milan, paid tribute to it in his paean to 'laconic art history', the knowledge that lies behind the few dry words on the gallery wall.

But while the most essential element in museum training must remain a hard-won familiarity with the collections, collaboration between museums and art history departments is not ipsofacto impossible or undesirable. The posts funded by the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques at the Louvre are a striking example of the positive benefits to museums of academic input. Similarly, university posts held by museum curators (as in Germany, and in New York, between the Institute of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum) can provide a useful object-based element in an increasingly theoretical subject. Short-term 'internships for postgraduates in UK museums and galleries would be a welcome introduction. In the present climate such things are likely to come about, if at all, by private sponsorship or individual treaty. But those responsible for future policy should consider a system of effective funding for the humanities, in which museum research must have its part.