We must save the Toulouse-Lautrec museum
“The goal is to ensure the sustainability of the establishment. And I hope that our successors will celebrate its 200th anniversary”, underlines Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, the mayor of Albi. The Toulouse-Lautrec museum, today a public establishment, will be transferred to municipal management with an independent budget. The decision will be presented to City Council on March 21. For several years now, the subject has been raised by the board of directors of the Albigensian museum. The statutes dating from 1923 are now “obsolete”. There is also the question of the status of a certain number of works which poses a problem. So we had to see them again.
Different statuses have been selected in consultation with the regional directorate for cultural affairs (DRAC). “It seems that the most flexible is municipalization” underlines Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, who is also the president of the CA.
This decision comes at a time when the museum is experiencing a bad financial patch linked to the Covid epidemic. Apart from an envelope of €450,000 for its operation, the establishment lives on its receipts from ticketing and the shop.
However, attendance figures have fallen from 176,079 in 2019 to 72,782 in 2020 and 85,411 in 2021. That is 100,000 fewer visitors. Revenues increased from 1.6 million euros in 2019 to 730,000 in 2020. It was necessary to continue to pay employees, who according to their status as territorial agents could not be laid off (some worked at the vaccination centre) and all the expenses inherent in a museum. Result, the establishment was difficult in financial terms. “The city, on two occasions (in 2020 and 2021), had to vote an additional envelope of €150,000 to support it and “partially compensate for the impact of the Covid”.
The goal today is to breathe new life into the museum. “He needs to regain financial leeway. “The city will be able to get even more involved in the support function. This will free up time for museum staff. Freed from these constraints, they will have the means to develop their scientific and cultural policy”, explains Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil. Through this change, the goal of the city and the board of directors is to really give a “future to the museum”. And clearly, “this requires more skills than what we had before,” insists the mayor.
“In France, 90% of museums are managed by municipalities or communities,” she recalls.