Influencer, politician, museum director: what Eike Schmidt did next – The Art Newspaper

Eike Schmidt has no regrets. For the previous decade, Schmidt, now 57, has been one of many world’s most conspicuous—and most unpredictable—museum administrators. After taking on and fully restructuring Florence’s Uffizi Galleries in 2015, he deliberate to go away in 2019 to take over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, altering his thoughts on the final minute to remain on on the Uffizi. Then in 2024, a matter of months after taking on the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, the German-born Schmidt determined to run for mayor of Florence, solely settling down into his new museum director submit after dropping.

Schmidt regards these controversies, which made headlines far past the rarefied world of Europe’s dynastic artwork collections, with exceptional aplomb, setting his sights as a substitute on the way forward for his new establishment, southern Italy’s premier Outdated Masters assortment, which sits atop a area in disaster.

Born into knowledgeable household in Freiburg im Breisgau in southwest Germany, Schmidt, who’s married to the Italian artwork historian Roberta Bartoli, has been residing in Italy on and off for the reason that mid-Nineties, lastly taking Italian citizenship within the interval main as much as his mayoral candidacy. He now regards his 2019 option to again out of the Vienna directorship, citing on the time his deep affinity with Florence, as “undoubtedly the fitting choice”. Because it labored out, he says, he would have began a couple of months earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic, imperilling the Kunsthistorisches Museum via his lack of insider expertise there, and leaving the Uffizi with out a educated director to deal with the disaster again in Florence. Matti Bunzl, the director of the Wien Museum since 2015, recollects the episode as “odd”, even when “scandal shouldn’t be fairly the fitting phrase”.

5 years later, when Schmidt determined to run for mayor—drafted, as he likes to say, by Florentines who would cease him on the road to reward his administration expertise—pals and colleagues have been baffled. “I used to be stunned,” says his long-time pal Tom Rassieur, a curator on the Minneapolis Institute of Artwork (MIA), the place Schmidt was a sculpture and ornamental arts curator and division head earlier than arriving on the Uffizi. Schmidt nominally ran as a centre-right unbiased, however with the backing of proper and far-right factions, together with Brothers of Italy, the prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s populist get together, and Lega, related to the Eurosceptic Matteo Salvini. He made it into the run-off however misplaced to the centre-left politician Sara Funaro. “I might not do something otherwise,” he now says, pleased with his better-than-expected efficiency.

Initially drawn to Renaissance sculpture, with a specific curiosity in works in ivory, he interrupted his scholarly and curatorial path with a year-long stint within the artwork market, serving because the director of European sculpture at Sotheby’s London simply earlier than arriving in Minneapolis in 2009. That his six years at MIA—a distinguished however regional museum—led to the directorship of the world-class Uffizi stays a confounding leap. Schmidt’s 2015 appointment, together with these of a number of different non-Italians to key directorships, was a part of a dramatic change in the way in which Italy’s nationwide museums have been administered because the then centre-left authorities tried to reform sclerotic cultural establishments.

Schmidt’s tenure on the Uffizi was marked early on by organisational prowess. Quickly after arriving, he mixed the unique Uffizi and its nice repository of Renaissance masterpieces with the huge Palazzo Pitti throughout the Arno, housing till then 9 separate collections. The newly configured Uffizi additionally got here to incorporate the Pitti’s adjoining Boboli Gardens and the Vasari Hall, connecting the Uffizi with the Pitti by snaking its method throughout the Ponte Vecchio.

Financially, Schmidt’s tenure was a dramatic success. “After I arrived, the Uffizi made half its working prices,” he says. “After I left, we made double.” To his credit score—and a few argue, his detriment—attendance figures soared. The Uffizi Galleries now has joint attendance of greater than 5.2 million guests—virtually double of what that they had in 2019. Between 2014 and 2024, attendance on the Uffizi correct elevated from slightly below two million to almost three million.

Within the Uffizi Gallery itself, Schmidt oversaw the rehang—and selective however dramatic reframing—of a lot of the gathering. Michelangelo’s lone panel portray, the Doni Tondo (1505-06), and Botticelli’s La Primavera (round 1480), together with the Leonardos, at the moment are recessed inside partitions behind anti-reflective glass, and far of the everlasting assortment was grouped collectively in new methods.

Responses to those adjustments have been blended. The American artwork historian and critic Cammy Brothers thinks the impact has been to “draw extra consideration to sure marquee items”, leading to a “decontextualisation versus an understanding”. Against this, the Florence-based American artwork historian Bruce Edelstein—who, like Brothers, has been going to the Uffizi frequently for many years—appreciates the brand new association. “These shows have enormously improved the power of bigger crowds to view artworks,” he says.

As a method to win extra consideration and guests to the Uffizi, Schmidt expensively relaunched the web site, introduced in influencers, and even posed for some comical publicity photographs himself. Edelstein maintains that Schmidt “introduced the museum into the twenty first century”, whereas Brothers laments that the museum is overcrowded.

Considered one of Schmidt’s harshest critics, the Florentine artwork historian Tomaso Montanari, who was himself put forth within the press as a centre-left possibility for mayor, decries Schmidt’s use of influencers and a sure “franchising” of the “Uffizi model”—“one thing that might make sense within the US, not in Tuscany,” he says.

Montanari, now a professor and rector at Università per Stranieri di Siena, additionally bemoans Schmidt’s promotion of “blockbuster exhibitions”, which he believes got here on the expense of deeper analysis into the collections. Against this, the curator Carl Strehlke, one other American resident of Florence, effusively praises an typically undervalued side of Schmidt’s tenure: the amassing of recent works. “His acquisitions for the Uffizi have been crucial,” Strehlke says, citing works by the likes of the Trecento Florentine painter Giovanni da Milano and the Romantic Francesco Hayez.

Schmidt’s transfer to chaotic Naples—a brief practice experience, however a world away, from quaint, orderly Florence—is much less stunning than it appears. He had utilized for the job in 2015, together with the directorship of the Uffizi, and he regards his place there as “the fulfilment of a dream”. He has arrived at a tricky time for the town’s cultural scene, with many essential museums perennially leaderless.

The Capodimonte, just like the Uffizi, has a group that spans from the Center Ages to the current day. However not like the Uffizi, it looks like an undiscovered treasure. Although unquestionably one in every of Italy’s most essential museums—with key works by artists as numerous as Simone Martini, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Titian, Caravaggio and Andy Warhol—it has a fraction of the crowds. Final 12 months, it had slightly below 160,000 guests.

As soon as the grand searching residence of Naples’s Bourbon kings, the museum constructing is surrounded by a sprawling park standard with locals, making it appear extra like an architectural folly than an attraction in its personal proper. “This is among the biggest artwork collections of the world, however hardly anybody is aware of about it,” Schmidt says, including “Not even in Naples.”

On the museum itself, Schmidt has already left his mark. In an upgraded second-floor gallery, he has introduced collectively round 20 highlights of the gathering, together with Titian’s splendid portrait of Pope Paul III and Artemisia Gentileschi’s dramatic Judith Slaying Holofernes (round 1620). Provocatively, he has positioned them with Warhol’s Vesuvius (1985).

Bringing in additional guests is a part of Schmidt’s plan to extend income—now a paltry 5% of working prices, he says—however his presiding purpose is to reimagine the gathering. He’s bringing out of storage ignored works by ladies artists, planning new methods to attract consideration to below appreciated Neapolitan Baroque painters, buying new work and increasing outreach to high school kids in Naples and the encircling Campania area.

For now, he appears much less enthusiastic about attracting the town’s pizza-minded vacationers, who hardly ever make their method up the hill to the Capodimonte from the historic centre, or to find a brand new spherical of influencers to advertise the museum. Schmidt’s tenure in Naples might consequently be celebrity-shy in contrast with Florence, however he does have an exception in thoughts: Italy’s top-ranked tennis participant—and up to date Wimbledon winner—Jannik Sinner, who has a large youth following right here. “He resonates with the children,” Schmidt explains.