Description

Museums presuppose collecting, an activity that is a universal phenomenon as old as mankind itself. As a particular kind of collection, the museum is a compilation of natural objects or art objects – the latter term understood in the widest sense – that have been taken out of economic circulation, either temporarily or permanently, are carefully protected and exhibited in a self-contained place specially furnished for that purpose.[1]

The term ‘museum’ – from the Greek for “place of the muses; place and dance floor of the muses and their mother Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory” – was initially used in the ancient world to designate the schools of poetry and philosophy that came to be attached to the shrines of the muses. Later the term came to refer to the research facilities that were attached to collections such as the museum in Alexandria,[2] the most famous example which was equipped with a great library. Until the early eighteenth century, the term ‘museum’ referred primarily to an academy of scholars and only secondarily to a place that housed a collection. Only since the nineteenth century has ‘museum’ meant a building for the safekeeping and presentation of actual collections as well as the research facility attached to it.[3]

Treasure Chamber, Workplace, Collection Room

At the beginning of museum development we find the Greek treasure chambers, the Thesauroi (fig. 1), in which were exhibited statues of the victors of battles, booty, weapons and other gifts of all sorts dedicated to the gods,[4] objects whose iconic value was more important than their material or artistic value. However, the Romans were already filling their villas with statues and paintings which they esteemed primarily for their artistic value.[5]

The mediaeval collections held in secular treasure chambers and above all the valuable ecclesiastical collections held in church treasuries[6] were compiled similarly to the temple treasures of the ancient world: head-shaped reliquaries, jewellery, curiosities of nature, and exotica. One of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, whose accompanying text speaks of “Silver, gold and precious stones, of little pearls” as well as of “costly robing” (fig. 2), shows a treasure chamber like those found not only north of the Alps, but also at the court of Mantua, for example. There, immediately above this room described as a grotta was located what was called a studiolo – a type of room verifiably existing since the fourteenth century, more typical for Italy and France, which not only served as a place of safekeeping for collections of objects, but was also and above all a place for studying, a room to which one could withdraw into secluded creativity (fig. 3).[7] In the course of the cinquecento, the studiolo gradually lost the character of a workplace and developed into a room exclusively for a collection, in particular at the courts of the Humanist princes. Eventually, in the studiolo of Francesco I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the ambition manifest by the collection room was elevated to the point where the aim was to attain universality (fig. 4): that studiolo’s picture program, which served more or less as a painted inventory of the objects in the collection (which were kept in cabinets), integrates the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of mankind into a complex system which in the end becomes a metaphor for the duke and the splendour of the state he reigns over as well.[8]

The desire to grasp – or capture – the world scientifically and the interest in history were the prerequisites for the development of the museum. Its real history begins in Italy in the fifteenth century. In addition to contemporary art, relics of classical antiquity were also collected, and a new meaning was conferred on these objects when they were removed from their original context.[9] The new context – legitimated essentially by the concept of art – of these collections, which for the most part belonged to royalty, also implied the question as to whether classical and contemporary art could be equivalent in value. It thereby established not least that principle of the comparative regard which is still the key characteristic of art museums today. In the age of Humanism it was with no less enthusiasm that people dedicated themselves to the exploration of nature, surrounding themselves with minerals, plants, animalia and curiosities of all kinds. In the sixteenth century, the interest in both art works and the peculiarities of nature led – in Germany above all – to the emergence of those chambers of wonders and art whose combination of artificialia and naturalia was to form the core of many subsequent museum collections.[10] In addition to the royal chambers of artworks and rarities, the most famous of which were probably those of Archduke Ferdinand II in Ambras Castle in the Tyrol and Emperor Rudolf II in Prague,[11] there were also the encyclopaedically-conceived collections of nobles and scholars, arranged as theatrum mundi. Their intention was not to satisfy the lust for sensation but to educate and cultivate their observers – in whatever special sense. A well-known example of this is the Museum Kircherianum in Rome, which was founded by the German Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher, and whose catalogue, published in Amsterdam in 1678, included objects from almost all subject areas, from optics through physiology to philology, from musical instruments to geography.[12] In the collection of the Bolognese nobleman Fernando Cospi (fig. 5), a clear distinction was made between specimens of natural history and artificialia[13] – a trend toward increasingly methodologically-determined collecting, which eventually led to collections being separated out into collections of antiquities, picture galleries, cabinets of coins, natural history museums, etc.

Art Galleries and the Public

The interest in classical antiquity that had arisen since the early Renaissance led to the development of collections of ancient works of art, at first in Italy, but soon in other European countries as well,[14] not least in England. There, in about 1615, Lord Arundel had a gallery constructed in his London residence (fig. 6)[15] especially for his collection of classical sculptures, which at the time was considered the most important one outside Italy. A complement to the duke’s picture gallery, the sculpture gallery was placed opposite it (fig. 7). Picture galleries came into being in many courts at the same time; in them, monuments were established to taste and patronage and to satisfy the princes’ need for representation.[16] A prominent example is the collection of paintings that belonged to the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Hapsburg governor of the Netherlands. The collection he built up still forms the basis of the picture gallery in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, and it was recorded at his request several times by his court painter and gallery director, David Teniers the Younger (fig. 8).[17]

In the eighteenth century, as collections of antiquities (promoted by systematic excavations and the first scientific studies)[18] had become established in most European countries,[19] and art galleries in many seats of royal power (fig. 9) had replaced the old ideal of the chamber of art by limiting the area of collecting, a heightened historical consciousness combined with normative thinking began to prevail. It was this consciousness that created a new context legitimated by the conception of art,[20] and upon which the modern museum is based.

The replacement of representation by connoisseurship, which also found expression in the publication of systematic collection catalogues, led not least to the demand, associated with the emancipation of the bourgeoisie, for the royal collections to be generally accessible. In 1750, at the Palais Luxembourg in Paris, an exhibition of paintings selected from the royal possessions was mounted especially for the purpose of opening to the general public two days a week. When the Luxembourg gallery was closed again in 1779, there were already plans in the works for a larger museum in the Louvre that was to be publicly accessible. In 1759, the British Museum in London was opened. At first it contained only a library and natural history collections.[21] It was not until the nineteenth century that art collections were added, among them the Parthenon sculptures acquired by Lord Elgin.[22] Although complicated regulations regarding visitors made the British Museum accessible only with difficulty at first, the decisive point was that what was at issue in this testamentary endowment was the foundation of a museum decreed by an Act of Parliament and thereby declared an issue of public interest.

Now, according to Johann Georg Sulzer’s influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, first published in 1771, the word ‘museum’ – significantly – referred exclusively to art collections. They were supposed to be “permanently open for study to artists and connoisseurs,” because they served the purpose of the “development of taste.” It was with this argument so typical of the Enlightenment that the opening of the royal art collections was pursued, and in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it led eventually to the royal art collection, which had previously been nationalized, being installed in the Musée Français in the Louvre in 1793 and made accessible to all (fig. 10).[23] Since 1802, this museum has had the administrative structure which is still typical today: a chairman, three curators for painting, antiques, and prints and drawings, as well as administrative staff and guards. It was open to the public free of charge three days out of ten, and for the rest of the time reserved for artists for the purposes of studying and copying. Inexpensive catalogues, labels for the pictures – which were hung in a chronological system – and guided tours underlined the character of the museum as a state educational institution that had established the idea that art works were the property of the nation, to be protected by the institution of the museum and at the same time, to be presented. Another event crucial for the idea of the museum was the simultaneous establishment of the Musée des Monuments Français in a former monastery in Paris, where the painter Alexandre Lenoir catalogued confiscated ecclesiastical art works that were initially supposed to be destroyed, and in the end, exhibited them. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was deeply impressed by this museum that showed mediaeval art works for the first time, recognized that Lenoir had only been able to save the objects entrusted to him from the revolutionary iconoclasm by converting what had formerly been historic monuments and objects of religious veneration into works of art.[24] For the development of the concept of the museum[25] in the nineteenth century, this occurrence was of no lesser consequence than the multitude of architectural designs by French revolutionary architects was for the development of museum architecture.

Art and Cultural History Museums

The Romantic reverence for art and the spirit of national identity allowed the existing collections of whatever sort to appear in a new light at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The constitution and development of the individual areas of knowledge ensured that the collections were held in high esteem and, at the same time, promoted the development of the different types of museums. Particular interest was devoted to the art museums, for which the first great independent museum buildings came into existence, initially in Germany. Their design, oriented on the baroque palace as well as on the architecture of the temples of classical times, underlined the status of the museum as a place of national representation and a shrine to art (fig. 11).

In addition to the great German art museums of the first half of the nineteenth century in Berlin, Munich, Dresden and Stuttgart – whose buildings commissioned by sovereigns could be interpreted as the monumental correspondence to the history of art– a series of regional museums came into being, particularly in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. These museums started ethnic and regional, historical and art-historical collections, but also collections of technology and libraries; they were supposed to awaken not least a consciousness of national identity:[26] in 1802, the Hungarian National Museum was established in Budapest,[27] in 1803, the Brukenthal National Museum for Transylvania, in 1811, the Joanneum in Graz was established as a “national museum … for everything which Nature, the changing times, human endeavour and perseverance had brought forth in Inner Austria,”[28] in 1817, the regional museum for Bohemia and Moravia in Brno, in 1818, a museum of the fatherland in Prague, in 1823, the Tyrolean regional museum, the Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck.[29] Even the Germanische Nationalmuseum founded in 1852 in Nuremberg[30] still understood the collecting of German works of art and consumer goods as a contribution to the cultural identity of the nation. Significantly, these museums of cultural history – in which the Romantic longing for the past, focused primarily on the people’s own mediaeval past, played an important role – were almost exclusively creations of the middle classes. Since the middle of the nineteenth century they had begun to erect art museums for their collections – funded mostly by private patrons – such as that of the canon of Cologne, Ferdinand Franz Wallraf,[31] modelled on the royal museum buildings.[32]

As the place in which the treasures of the past were conserved and protected, the museum of the nineteenth century had become the protector of traditional values and a facility for scholarly research – both elementary functions in an age that was convinced the knowledge of the past was indispensable for coping with a present characterized by constant change. The omnipresent significance of history in the culture of the nineteenth century endowed the art museum with the charge not only of preserving the artistic inheritance of the past, but also of making it fruitful for the present. On one hand, art was to serve for pleasure and edification, but on the other hand, for developing aesthetic taste and educating too. Out of this a distinction gradually developed between the intentions of a relatively small upper class interested in culture, which still strived for a classical aesthetic education, and a significantly larger group of all those who were ‘engaged in trade,’ so to speak, who were creative or who appreciated, bought and used the products of ‘applied art.’ The distinction between the supposedly functionless ‘fine arts’ (painting, sculpture, etc.) and the ‘applied arts’ – which resulted from the association of artistic production with technology – led to the establishment of museums of applied arts (arts and crafts), of which the first, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) occasioned by the first World Exposition in 1851,[33] was opened the following year in London.[34] In 1864, the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (today the Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art) was founded in Vienna, in order to render the aesthetic perception of the present a salutary experience through an exemplary collection of older works of art, and in order to promote the contemporary creation of works of applied art.[35] In the succeeding years, museums of arts and crafts were established in Berlin, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Hamburg and other German cities too,[36] but with the demise of historicism only a quarter of a century later, they lost their importance as collections of teaching aids for technology and aesthetics and went over to organizing their stocks chronologically and topographically on one hand and on the other, granting increasing attention to contemporary artistic creation and – this still holds true in many cases – continuing their collections up to the present day.

Strategies of Aesthetic Effect

Toward the end of the century, the assumption – self-evident in the early nineteenth century – that art needs to be seen historically, and that both moral instruction and civic virtues are to be derived from the history of art was increasingly thrown into question, as evidenced by the tension between historical consciousness and cultural creativity. This led to museums being increasingly seen as tired memories of the heavy weight of history burdening the present, even as mausoleums of art.[37] Moreover, the advancing ‘museumization’ of cultural assets had allowed the scale of museums to expand to such an extent that the normal museum visitor was hardly in a position any more “to find out what is important in the endless abundance and to concentrate on the individual work of art, undisturbed by that which hangs or stands next to it or above it,” in the words of a contemporary critic.[38] A way out of this dilemma was seen on one hand in a reunion of arts and crafts as in the aesthetic movement of Art Nouveau, and on the other hand, in new collection and exhibition strategies that were no longer oriented encyclopaedically, but instead, aesthetically: the intent was no longer to be to gather specimens of every school and every master artist, but instead to buy as many masterworks by the most highly regarded artists as possible – the standard of quality for which was the degree of individuality and originality they possessed.

Established by Wilhelm von Bode and later named after him as well, the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, opened in 1904[39] was epoch-making for this museological striving toward reform, in which the exhibition rooms were no longer crammed with a plethora of objects, but instead, carefully composed arrangements of the different genres – painting, sculpture and crafts – were integrated into a joint production, wherein aesthetic effect was given priority over didactic intention. As a result, the exact stylistic reproduction of the milieu where the objects originated (as it was practised in the so-called basilica of the same museum or in general in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum[40] and recommended in the Handbuch der Architektur of 1906 as well) became outmoded.[41] The avant-garde of museum specialists, first and foremost the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark, eventually arrived at the idea that the art museum should evoke the neutral mood of an atelier.[42] Trusting in the aesthetic power of the art work, one reduced the museum staging to a minimum and hung the pictures on a white wall in a single row, with as much space as possible between them. This development could be particularly clearly followed in the installation of the Cologne Kunstgewerbemuseum: while in 1925 a Meissen porcelain cabinet was arranged in the style of a milieu reconstruction (fig. 12), it was only a few years later that a presentation which at the time won much acclaim (fig. 13) was organized in accordance with criteria such as material and workmanship, purpose and form, as well as colour and ornament, “so as to master the unlimited abundance of materials by organizing it, without reducing individual pieces to an illustrative purpose.”[43] Significantly, although this form of exhibition oriented on the principles of the Bauhaus and the artistic avant-garde was revised again soon after the Nazis seized power (fig. 14), the ideal of the ‘modern museum’ developed at the beginning of the twentieth century eventually prevailed worldwide in the end; it has dominated museum practice to a large extent until now, even if the ideological premises upon which the museum reformers used to base themselves have long since ceased to be accepted, or at most are accepted only in part.

Educational Institution or Theme Park?

Not only in those countries that only paid relatively little attention to museums in the years of reconstruction following the Second World War, erecting only limited quantities of new museum buildings, but also more or less worldwide, in the eyes of the public at the time, museums were considered to be boring or elite and were poorly visited. The accusation that the museums had cut themselves off from their own present time was coupled with the opposing assessments of museums as either temples to art or prisons thereof, but in both cases, the accusations targeted their exclusivity. The demand that was already being made by forward-looking museum experts at the end of the fifties, to transform museums and in particular, museums of modern art, into trading centres for new ideas and centres for the exchange of ideas[44] a decade later met the objectives aspired to by the protest movement triggered off by the student revolts beginning in 1968, which sought to transform the ivory towers of scholarly work into places of social discourse and to convert the museums from temples of the muses into places of learning.[45] The result is well known: the “museum for tomorrow’s society,”[46] without which museum pedagogy is unimaginable,[47] and whose future in 1970 generated reflections oscillating between scepticism and optimism,[48] experienced a ‘Gründerzeit’[49] whose end is not in view, despite disappearing financial resources. The paucity of public funds led to financing shifting into the private sphere in Europe, following the American model. This entails both opportunity and risk at one and the same time, allowing museums more autonomy and flexibility, but forcing them to submit to the laws of commercial efficiency. In the context of the tourist industry, it threatens to make them into art fairs[50] which will be judged on the extent to which they turn out to be successful in drawing in the public, and, moreover, this success is evaluated as evidence of the democratisation of culture. The public role of the museum is thus changing, and not insignificantly so. In the end, it raises the question as to whether the museum is a “theme park or [an] educational institution.”[51]

The Museum in Media Society: Responsibilities and Opportunities

Even if today people sometimes flirt with the idea of throwing the museum into question[52] following the tradition of avant-garde front-liners like the Futurists,[53] as institutions, they are more successful than ever before. Never before have more people visited museums,[54] and never before have so many museum buildings been erected in such a short time. Never before has there been such a variety of museums; they range from museums of art and architecture to science and technology museums, from museums of natural history of all sorts to the most varied of historical, cultural history or ethnological museums. The “‘museumization’ of our cultural environment,”[55] which has reached an unprecedented extent in the meantime,[56] carries with it the danger of using history to compensate for the rapid developments of the present time and in so doing, obstructing the view of our own time.[57] On the other hand, that is precisely where the museum’s opportunity lies, as an “island in time” to be a place for those things “that remain after time’s flight in pursuit of progress, in which they are not replaced by something new.”[58] As a living form of memory, the museum should not simply content itself with just archiving these things, however; it must instead address the question as to how the experiences contained in them can be made useable for us, and even more, how the present can be measured against that which is timeless. In these formulations of the museum’s functions, two different conceptions of the museum can be detected: a more recent one, currently in vogue, in which the museum is an archive for objects, and an older one in which it is the Mouseion, the place of the muses.[59] By contrasting a collection of things once wakened to life, then abandoned by it, subsequently selected from a meaningless quantity of similar objects, and thereby elevated to lastingness – the selection assigning meaning by the very act of being included in a collection – the museum acquires a social authority that fundamentally distinguishes it from the mass media’s ephemeral and often arbitrary-seeming plethora of information. However, because people approach the museum from the perspective of consumers, seeking sensory experiences and amusement and with the need to stroll, saunter or windowshop instilled by the experiences of everyday life – attitudes cultivated by the mass media – the museum is obliged to combine knowledge value, entertainment value and consumer value.[60] This is a dilemma that must be solved not least by the museum’s architecture – or which leads to there being two types of museum in future: one, “the place, where inheritance and history have to be conserved and the [other, the] place that one seeks out in order to stroll about, to entertain oneself, to play, to enjoy oneself.”[61]

A further consequence of the changed situation of the museum in the media and consumer world is the blurring of the boundary-line that used to be located between the profane market where art was traded and the temple dedicated to art. The museum is unavoidably tied to the art market – and in consequence to the rapid rhythm of event culture – by contemporary art, which, as it finds its stage there, is increasingly produced directly for the museum. It is therefore menaced with losing its status precisely as a space outside of the present. Transformed thus into a medium, the museum can only legitimate itself as the antithesis of the mass media, the instance that invites one to remember time and to experience space and things.

62

Hans Belting, “Das Museum als Medium,” in: Die Zukunft der alten Meister. Perspektiven und Konzepte für das Kunstmuseum von heute, ed. Ekkehard Mai, Cologne/Vienna/Weimar, 2001, 31-43.

This applies in particular when one takes into account the ‘imaginary museum’ that has long been available in databases, which the French writer André Malraux once described as the boundless and spatially unbounded collection of the art works of all epochs and cultures.

63

André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire, Geneva 1947.

The real museum is distinguished from that not only by its unique collection, to be found in no other place in this combination, but above all by the fact that it is originals that are at issue. In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s fear, expressed in 1936, that the work of art’s technical reproducibility would steal its aura from it

64

Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfort on Main, 1963 (first published in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1/1936). (English edition, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” included in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, 1968 and 1969.)

we are now finding out that precisely the reverse is true: the omnipresence of reproduction underlines the uniqueness of the original and thereby actually lends it an aesthetic cult value. In a world “in which the surrogate appears to be everything in the meantime, the real strength of the museum emanates from the original; for in the original, people encounter the unique.”

65

Hugo Borger, Die Kölner Museen, Cologne, 1990, 11.

If its aura stimulates the imagination and promotes the development of a visual culture

66

Helmut Börsch-Supan, Kunstmuseen in der Krise. Chancen, Gefährdungen, Aufgaben in mageren Jahren, Munich, 1993, 97.

that can at least oppose the transformation of our built environment into wasteland, and if critical reflection can be stimulated by the presentation of these originals, then the museum can now contribute more than ever to the conservation of the humane by fulfilling its classical responsibility of “collecting, conserving, and exhibiting” in a manner adapted to the changed conditions.

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.