Museums reveal the mysteries of their warehouses

There's a scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark in which the box containing this mythical relic is placed in a warehouse with hundreds of rows filled with other wooden boxes, immeasurable treasures, never-before-seen wonders. It's easy to imagine museum warehouses like this, where objects, paintings, and sculptures lie, not displayed in exhibition halls. The reality is much less fantastical in the sense of fanciful, and more sterile and professional: museums have their works perfectly documented and stored in the best possible way to ensure their preservation, a task that the digitization of archives has greatly facilitated.

Thousands upon thousands of pieces make up these collections, which are rarely visible to visitors—up to 95 percent are not normally exhibited—and the question arises of what to do with them. The current trend is to facilitate public access to all these works, in many cases through hybrid centers that combine storage and exhibition.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London gave a revolutionary response to these questions on May 31st when it opened the V&A East Storehouse and converted a large part of its undisplayed collections into a kind of cabinet of curiosities or museum of wonders open to the public, in every sense, because it not only shows what is not usually seen because there is no space for it, but also the backroom of the collections, the restoration workshops of different types.

The Order an Object service even allows visitors to experience a Balenciaga or Elton John suit, a guitar from a rock legend, or a collection of spoons. Simply search for the item in the online collection and add it to their wish list, up to a maximum of five. Within a fortnight, a technician will accompany visitors and even allow them to touch and feel the pieces with their own hands, something that until now has been available to very few.

London's newly opened East Storehouse is a hybrid of warehouse and museum, allowing visitors to browse through 250,000 objects and works of art.

At its opening , Cultura/s visited the new “museum of absolutely everything,” as The Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright enthusiastically called it. No fewer than 250,000 objects, of the 2.8 million in the Victoria and Albert, never before displayed, are randomly distributed by weight and size, creating relationships that one would never imagine and that once again shatter the museum discourse as we know it.

The space, called East Storehouse, is located in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and covers 16,000 square meters. It also boasts innovative interior architecture, designed by the studio Diller, Socifidio+Renfro. It is structured over three floors reaching over twenty meters, around an open atrium-like space with a glass floor that allows views of the lower floor, with its Agra Colonnade, built in the 1630s by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (creator of the Taj Mahal) for his hammam.

Each level has public walkways with wire mesh that allow you to explore more of the collection and see the museum in action (the center strongly recommends avoiding high-heeled shoes, and from experience, this is worth listening to). There is such an abundance of everything that visitors can feel overwhelmed: furniture, columns, statues, musical instruments, an Islamic astrolabe, Donatello's Virgin Mary, toys, including a huge Georgian dollhouse, samurai swords... some of them are on or in their boxes; this, along with the apparent but false clutter, makes visitors think of an antiques warehouse.

But the impression quickly dissipates: the museum's Wi-Fi allows you to follow the tour on your mobile phone and find perfectly documented objects. The world's largest Picasso is particularly striking: two colossal, fleshy women run along the beach holding hands, their hair flowing wild. It is a monumental curtain, 10.4 by 11.7 meters, designed by Picasso in 1924 for the Ballets Russes' 1924 production of The Blue Train , and inspired by his painting Two Women Running on the Beach .

Open Storage consists of showing the public the non-exhibited funds in showcases full of objects.

Also on display are a fragment of Robin Hood Gardens—the social housing designed by Alison and Peter Smithson that was demolished by vote of its residents—and one of the extraordinary coffered domes of the 16th-century Toledo palace of Torrijos, which was dismantled, alas, at the beginning of the 20th century.

“Neither a warehouse nor a museum,” the architects of the new art center defined. “We wanted people to breathe the same air as the objects, so we eliminated barriers.” All those responsible agree on the museum's “hybrid” nature and its transparency, which gives it the feel of a backroom filled with unknown treasures that visitors can enjoy, and in fact do, encounter workers transporting the works on wheelbarrows. The center houses 350,000 books.

A trend toward bringing museum collections to light began in the 1960s and 1970s in North America, when some museums began incorporating "open storage" in an effort to "democratize" their access to works. Open storage consists of displaying their undisplayed collections to the public in display cases filled with objects, but without a narrative, sometimes with little or no information. One of the pioneering museums to incorporate this approach was the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, which owns some two million objects, 200,000 of which are on display in galleries. The Henry R. Luce Center displays 12,000 North American objects of all kinds in display cases.

Also the Brooklyn Museum, whose then-director, Arnold L. Lehman, told The New York Times that "what's stored has always been one of those many secrets museums keep. This will give people a sense of what storage is like and what's there." This is an idea for the public and a respite for museums, given the high cost of maintaining storage facilities, which in the United States are oversaturated with private bequests, not always of sufficient value.

Beyond the overcrowded display cases, the way in which this exit from storage is now conceived has references in the Netherlands and Great Britain, where it began when the government decided in 2015 to put up for sale several buildings, Blythe House, which housed works from the British Museum, the V&A and the Science Museum. This gave rise to a debate on how to manage and increase public access to collections made up of valuable works that are essential for the functioning of museums even if they are not in their exhibition halls.

From there, the East Storehouse emerged, while the Science Group Museum built a kind of hangar of 33,000 square meters in a former RAF barn, into which they moved more than 300,000 objects from what they call "reserve" collections, from a 19th-century tram to a Blue Steel nuclear missile from the 1960s, without a warhead, of course, and which can now be visited by school groups and the general public on guided tours.

Neither the Prado Museum nor the MNAC have plans to open their warehouses to the general public, like other centers

The British Museum has a more complicated situation, with its collections containing some eight million objects, of which around 80,000 are on public display at its Bloomsbury headquarters at any given time—only 1 percent, although a considerable portion cannot be shown due to their fragility. In addition to the storage facilities beneath the museum, the evacuation of Blythe House led to the construction of state-of-the-art facilities to house the British Museum's Archaeological Research Collection (BM_ARC); 1.3 million objects are stored and studied there, and are also prepared for loan, one of the ways of, so to speak, disposing of many of the pieces. Public access is by appointment and subject to restrictions.

Opportunities sometimes arise as solutions to problems. The 2021 opening of what is considered the first open-access museum storage facility in history, the Depot Boijmans in Rotterdam, coincided with the temporary closure of its parent museum , the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, which is undergoing renovations until 2028. On its website, the Depot announces that "visitors can admire the result of more than 175 years of collecting," the "world's first art repository offering access to a museum's entire collection."

The 150,000 works that make up the Boijmans collection have been gathered here, in a building as extraordinary in its form—like a flowerpot or bowl with its mirrored facade—as it is in its interior. The collection is arranged according to its size and climatic requirements; objects or paintings hang from a shelf or are displayed on shelves in the fourteen storage compartments, or are exhibited in one of the thirteen large floating glass display cases in the atrium, a repository that "opens like an accessible visual archive," according to the museum.

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (National Museum of Art of Catalonia) has approximately 350,000 works in its collection, the largest of which are photography (109,000), posters, drawings, and prints (113,000), and coins (160,000). The warehouses for undisplayed works are located beneath the museum in various rooms. According to Sílvia Tena, head of the Department of Art Registration and Collection Management, "they have been at capacity for some time now. And the arrival of new works, although always great news for the museum, is increasing demand for space due to their sometimes oversized formats."

Visits are restricted to specialists, but the works rotate according to the curators' renovation projects; there is also a loan policy, "quite demanding," Tena points out. The storage space will increase with the MNAC's expansion, "but we are still studying which locations and spaces we can expand into, preparing those spaces to meet the humidity and temperature requirements," Tena explains. When asked about the possibility of opening a space to display these collections to the public, she replies that "it is being studied."

An approximate estimate of the works on display on a more or less permanent basis would be around 2,500-3,000, "we always strive for a balance between the visibility and contextualization of the collections (loans, deposits, exhibitions...) and the presentation of the objects that comprise them due to their fragility or significance."

Guided tours with appointments, hybrids between museums and depositories such as the Schaulager in Basel, or the Zentraldepot being built in Berlin's Friedrichshagen district to bring together conservation workshops and scattered depositories and facilitate their opening to the public. Even so, it will never be possible to see all the objects or paintings in a collection, but digitizing them and their information is another option. Depositories are making a comeback: not only masterpieces deserve our attention.

THE PRADO MUSEUM WAREHOUSE, WELL CATALOGED AND WITHOUT SECRET TREASURES

Hidden treasures in the Prado Museum's storage rooms? Isabel Bennasar, from the Museo Nacional del Prado's Art Registry and accompanying Cultura/s on the tour of the museum's collections, can't help but smile at a question that owes much to Hollywood. No, the treasures here are cataloged and documented; there are no secret pieces to be discovered; nothing escapes the control of these technicians, who record absolutely everything kept in these storage rooms, their comings and goings, entries and exits, and the temperature and humidity conditions, which are the same as those in the rooms where the more than three million people who visit the museum annually mill about.

Upstairs and downstairs, two different worlds, yet not alien, and closely related. The museum's storage rooms house more than 31,500 of the Prado's nearly 37,500 pieces: of this collection, some 23,887 are works on paper, photographs, prints, and other works that cannot be displayed for more than three months due to their fragility and must be preserved under special conditions. The rest—paintings, sculptures, and objects—have their moments of glory when they are lent for an exhibition or displayed in the gallery during one of its frequent renovations.

We walked through a completely sterile environment, through the various storage rooms, on either side of which were the storage compartments for the paintings. There was also a storage room for the statues and another for the objects, because although the Prado Museum is essentially considered an art gallery, everything from porcelain to armor, swords, coins, furniture, cases, and pietre dure pieces are preserved here, pieces that would be a collector's dream.

There are eight warehouses distributed between the Villanueva and Jerónimos buildings and connected by a network of corridors, about which further details are not disclosed for obvious security reasons. Also located in this area are the loading dock for the entry and exit of works, the packing rooms, a large picture lift, and everything necessary for moving the pieces. One of the warehouses is reserved for large paintings, as the museum has a fairly extensive collection of historical paintings.

Of the more than 37,500 works that the Prado has, more than 31,500 are in storage, especially the paper ones.

In addition, the museum has another external storage facility for the collection's frames. The frames are the foundation. The three painting storage facilities located in the Jerónimos building contain 212 double-sided frames supported on a self-supporting structure, with a standard height of 4 meters and containing frames of varying lengths: 2.5, 4, 5, and 8 meters to adapt to the different dimensions of the works.

They are attached to the ceiling with a bearing system to minimize shocks and vibrations, and have wheels for easy movement. Each rack contains a grid, which is where the pictures are hung using iron hangers, and both sides are used to take advantage of all the available space. Because if there's one word that comes up repeatedly, it's "space." There are many works, and they need to be made room for, and in good condition. This is essential because their main purpose is to ensure the safety of the works at all times.

The layout is different from that in the galleries. The initial idea was to organize the paintings by period and artist, but, alas, space, and the museum's collection continues to grow, which means every millimeter has to be utilized. Therefore, the paintings are arranged so that they fit together, leaving the necessary margin.

different characteristics, with 24 four-meter-high shelves and mobile modules. The decorative arts warehouse also adapts to the pieces it houses: instead of combs, there are drawers in which the objects can be arranged flat; in this warehouse we find, for example, some of the cases from the Dauphin's treasure, which is exhibited in the Villanueva building. Everything is carefully maintained.

With the Prado expansion, there will be more storage space. We mentioned the Victoria and Albert's commitment to its East Storehouse to give a new lease on life to its holdings. Bennasar explains, "We have a different way of doing things. These are restricted spaces, but researchers also come here. The stores are always open to them and to other cultural institutions. Visits can always be arranged for small groups to see the type of storage we have, and we're working on them. It's not as open as the V&A's."

The Prado Museum has its entire collection online, and videos showing the storage areas and explaining the center's organization are posted on Instagram. "It's another way to get closer," concludes Bennasar, who emphasizes that in the Prado's storage areas, between the rotation of paintings, restorations, and loan arrivals and departures, "there's a lot more going on than you might think."