Babel’S Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum 9780231878722

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BABEL'S

TOWER

3MBE

JJS

TOWER

THE

DILEMMA

OF T H E

MODERN

MUSEUM

By F R A N C I S H E N R Y T A Y L O R

19 4 5 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

PRESS

: NEW

YORK

C O P Y R I G H T 1 9 4 5 BY COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y

PRESS

F o r e i g n a g e n t : OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S , H u m p h r e y M i l f o r d , A m e n H o u s e , L o n d o n , E . C . 4, E n g l a n d , a n d B . I . B u i l d i n g , N i c o l R o a d , B o m b a y , M A N U F A C T U R E D IN THE UNITED S T A T E S OF AMERICA

India

T H E M A T E R I A L IN THIS L I T T L E BOOK IS NOT

new. It has been gathered together from articles published in magazines and public addresses made during the past five years. Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the University of Pennsylvania Press for allowing me to use a revised version of an address, "Archaeology in the Present Day," published in Studies in Arts and Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Bicentennial, 1941); to the Atlantic Monthly for "Museums in a Changing World," 1940; and to the New York Herald Tribune Forum, October, 1940, for permission to use part of an address entitled "Art and Obligation." Gratitude is also expressed to certain of my colleagues in the museum field who have argued with me long into the night on many of these points, of course without result, and particularly to Mr. Charles Sterling for an amusing observation. F. H. T.

LET

US B U I L D

US A C I T Y A N D A T O W E R ,

WHOSE

T O P M A Y R E A C H U N T O H E A V E N ; A N D L E T US

MAKE

US A N A M E , L E S T W E BE S C A T T E R E D A B R O A D

THE

FACE OF THE W H O L E

Woodcut by Jost Amman,

EARTH.

from the Bible,

ON

Genesis XI: 4

Frankjurt-am-Main,

1366

BABEL'S

S I N C E T H E DAYS

TOWER

when the Book of Genesis was written

the story of the tower of Babel has never ceased to fascinate the children of men. They have been forever seeking a synopsis of the vast, sprawling body of knowledge and experience with which each succeeding generation has endowed its sons and its sons' sons. Thus, the pyramidal tower, first encountered at Gizeh and in the Ziggurats of Sumer and Babylon, offered a place where by progressive stages the accumulated wisdom of man might be revealed to the pure in heart. The modifications of the theme are legion and have become familiar through the ages. Some persons have found in it the explanation of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, with its winding spiral of arcaded galleries so reminiscent of the towers in the early illustrated manuscripts of the Old Testament. Others have sought in it the prototype for the Pharos of Alexandria, the great lighthouse at the mouth of the Nile which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This lighthouse had been described by classical authors and travelers whose works were being made public for [

i

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the first time on the printing presses of the Renaissance. The contemporaries of Pieter Breughel the Elder in Antwerp, who painted and engraved the legend of Babel must have known of the Pharos and its decorations portraying the history of the world, and it is not difficult to understand that these painters, whose very existence had been transformed by the consequences of the Hundred Years War, saw in their subject matter an opportunity for a synthetic expression of human knowledge. The contemplative Buddhists were no less familiar than the Christians with the architecture and legends of the ancient East. Like the Incas and Mayas in Peru and Mexico, they made a different use of the pyramid. In the Javanese temple at Barabudur the stepped pyramid was used to express a spiritual totalitarianism quite foreign to Western thought. Starting at the bottom in the lower spheres, the pilgrim gradually continued his spiral ascension to the summit of the pyramid and to the zenith of life in which all men could attain Buddhahood. This physical climb magically symbolized the escape from the materialism and change of the world of the flesh to the final absorption in the Void or Absolute. Each floor of Barabudur could be said to represent a separate world or plane of life. Thus we see that both in East and West the theme [

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of the tower reaching high unto heaven has been a manifestation of the need of bringing order and unity into the welter of chaotic and unrelated fields of knowledge. Each age has felt the necessity for simplification and breadth of common understanding. The European has turned to a rational explanation of the works of man; the Asiatic to the inward recesses of spiritual existence. But the Lord did not look kindly on the children of men. He did not wish them to have one language, "for nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down, saith the Lord, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth." From that day to this, when a later Moses is leading the bemused institutions of his city out of the wilderness, the Lord has curiously confounded man's attempts to encompass the world's knowledge into a single palatable confection. Only recently has it been tried again. As the cities of Europe were blacked out one by one in the late thirties, a noble plan lay on the drawing board of a great architect. It was the projection of a "Mundaneum"—a universal museum, library and headquarters of the intellect to be built in Geneva in [ 3 1

the park adjacent to the Palace of the League of N a tions. T h e idea was conceived by Paul Otelet and the plan was brilliantly developed by Le Corbusier b u t the project was never realized; it suffered the same fate as the League itself. I t remains on paper the expression of the high purposes and even higher hopes of a generation which went down in the defeat of its own intellectuality. N o t since the days of the Ptolemies has there been so wide or so ambitious a proposal for the inclusion of art, religion, science, philosophy, and history into an organic synthesis of h u m a n knowledge. Distributed in the park on the borders of the Lake of Geneva was to be a group of buildings held together by connecting passageways and the brittle threads of idealism. T h e several parts of the M u n d a n e u m included an administrative building for international learned societies, a library, a center for research as well as higher teaching to be participated in by the universities of the world, zoological and botanical gardens, gymnasia and stadia for the Olympic games, scientific laboratories, and pavilions for international fairs and expositions. N o aspect of the intellectual life was to be neglected, for it was hoped that in the rarified air of this N o M a n ' s Land it would at last be possible to visualize within a limited compass the full stature of man himself, and what he had done to justify his ex[ 4 1

istence during the millions of years in which he has esteemed himself different from the other animals of the earth. I t was the purpose of the Mundaneum to show by every available technical device the triumph of Mind over Matter, of the Spiritual over the Material, and how the ideals of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, of Faith, Hope and Charity, of Justice and Perfection, and of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity should finally dominate the earth. The World Museum was the focal point of this idea. Built in the form of a stepped pyramid like the ancient Ziggurat towers of Babylon, it was to provide a convenient way of displaying in parallel galleries the evolution of those objects which were the products of human genius, their geographical and political environment and the historical traditions which produced them. According to Le Corbusier's scheme, the visitor was to be lifted rapidly to the apex of the pyramid from whence he might descend through the ever-widening spiral of the civilizations of the past. As archaeology and history accumulated more and more documents, the diorama would become larger and larger and at the same time more and more precise. The spiral would expand as it drew into its orbit the constant pressures and conflicts of human activity through the ages. The [ 5 1

implications of history would thus be revealed by a kind of super-slow-motion film. The concept was one in which the script might be the work of Victor Hugo executed by Darryl Zanuck or Cecil B. De Mille. Now the dilemma of the modern museum is a dilemma produced by this eternal conflict we have seen so well expressed in Genesis between the forces of synthesis and the forces of dissipation. We in the art museums of America have reached a point where we must make a choice of becoming either temples of learning and understanding in the Geneva sense, or of remaining merely hanging gardens for the perpetuation of the Babylonian pleasures of aestheticism and the secret sins of private archaeology. T h e issue is a burning one, for m a n y of the major institutions of this country are contemplating gigantic physical changes at the close of the war. While it will be impossible, praise the Lord, for us to start fresh to build towers of Babel which would eventually fall prey to the gradual, and perhaps inevitable, confusion of tongues, we can at least start at the other end by clarifying the tongues of our responsibility, thus confounding the confusion rather than the poor mute towers which past generations have already so generously provided us. T h e whole point of this little parable is really very [ 6 ]

simple and can be briefly stated. Any building is essentially less important than the idea behind it. We have all heard the constant clamor for more space. But space means money. To be sure, many of our museums are desperately overcrowded and they need to be overhauled and reorganized. But this overhauling, if it is to be effective, must be intellectual as well as physical. Otherwise we shall simply produce a new set of alibis at so many dollars a cubic foot. Something intangible has been destroyed in Europe in the past five years and we cannot yet fully realize what it is. Many of the works of art have been preserved, but civilization itself has very nearly perished. A new obligation of mental therapy has been thrust upon us. Human needs are inextricably bound up in human values and we now know that there can be no humanism without humanity. The other alternative is the spiritual bankruptcy of barbarism. If we must have museums at all in the postwar world, the only possible excuse for their existence is to reconcile the two points of view of the layman and the scholar so that together we may face the "long dark age which lies before us and through which we have to pass before a recovery of tolerance becomes again a possible adventure."

[ 7 1

MUSEUMS IN A CHANGING

WORLD

strikes terror to the heart of the average layman, it is as nothing compared with the sense of panic which its sound produces in the poor innocents who spend their lives rationalizing its very existence. Going back into the far reaches of time, the word "museum" has succeeded in meaning nothing vital to anyone in particular, yet at the same time it has strangely meant all things to all men. Through a metamorphosis lasting many centuries it has emerged from the simple designation of a temple of the Muse to be the encompassing catch basin for all those disparate elements of hereditary culture which are not yet woven into the general educational fabric of modern society. And, since education has been defined as "the art of casting artificial pearls before real swine," it is only natural that museum workers should have concerned themselves with the elaborate furnishing of the trough at the expense of the digestive capacity of the feeders. I F THE TERM " M U S E U M "

Museums came into being at a very early date. There are records of Egyptian kings who formed col[ 8 ]

lections of votive offerings to placate the gods. Rameses I I was the proprietor of a large library of papyri at Thebes, above the entrance of which was carved the hieroglyphic inscription, " A Place of Healing for the Soul." Centuries later, at the lower end of the Nile, Ptolemy Soter founded the Great Museum of Alexandria, the fountainhead of later humanistic study. This was not the museum of sterile objects we know today, nor yet a temple, but rather a Platonic grove or academy in which were gathered about the famous library the leading intellects of the day. The role of the collector in the ancient world is steeped in legendary speculation and colored with political oratory. The idea of a public collection, or in fact any collection at all, was unknown to the early Greeks, whose creative impulses were so well balanced, and whose spiritual contentment and harmony so complete, that they were never conscious of the intellectual processes involved in the creation of a work of art itself. Beauty, to the Greek of classic times, was an accepted fact, and, paradoxically, he despised the factors that produced it. Socrates, originally a sculptor, gave up the calling as low and ignoble, and in Plato's Republic

the artist was looked upon as the

lowest order of citizen. He was considered a common laborer or decorator. Since the Greeks, therefore, had [ 9 1

few opinions of art and even fewer theories, they obviously could not become collectors in the sense in which we use the word today. For the collector is first and last a theorist of taste upon whose acceptance or rejection of fashionable judgments the art market fluctuates, up or down, with startling inconstancy. T h e work of art remained, then, until the time of Alexander, either an oblation to the gods or part of the public wealth to be guarded in the treasury of the temple and reckoned in terms of its monetary or material value. So little, in fact, were the productions of the artist estimated for their own worth that when the citadel of Athens was destroyed in 480 B.C. b y the Persians, the Greeks used the fallen statues to fill in the soil for rebuilding the temples. A s the overexpanded empire of Alexander the Great crumbled of its own weight and succumbed to oriental influences, there developed a nostalgia for the purity of Athenian civilization. T h e Hellenistic monarchs of the N e a r East began to collect systematically and reverently the ruins and fragments of the classic age, and one m a y well say that the true fathers of European collecting were A t t a l u s and Eumenes I I , kings of Pergamum who were outrivaled only b y the reigning houses of Antioch and Alexandria.

[ 10 ]

Collecting, both public and private, came into its own with the prosperity of the Roman Empire. It was incumbent upon every citizen of rank to be a collector. An entire quarter of Rome was devoted to art dealers and galleries, much like Fifty-seventh Street. Latin literature is filled with the exploits of art dealers, of their forgeries and swindles, of their ennoblement and of the fantastic auctions of Caligula, who forced his retinue to bid against each other for the fruits of his military plunder. Cicero fulminated against the rapaciousness of Caesar and Sulla in stripping the colonies of their artistic wealth, and in his famous prosecution of Verres, the Proconsul of Sicily, there are passages that would do credit to a United States Senatorial Committee. The Middle Ages open another vista in the retrospect of the "magpiety" of mankind. Collecting continued, but for another purpose. As the lamp of classic learning flickered out in the dark night of barbarism, the Church became at once the symbol and repository for our intellectual heritage. Yet the number of objects preserved in the collections of the mediaeval palace or cathedral treasury are negligible. They were the occasional gifts of visiting sovereigns, or conscience tributes paid to patron saints in expiation of accomplished or anticipated sin. It was in the monastery alone that [ n ]

the work of art was estimated for its own sake. Whether in regard to the illumination of a sacred text or the intricacy of a gold-enameled reliquary, such prelates as the Abbé Suger of Saint-Denis or Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim displayed a connoisseurship that might humble the most impeccable curator of the present day. To understand the formation of the great Renaissance collections and their implications for those of us who have to show them and dust them off, it is necessary to digress into the distinction between the humanism of Italy and that of the graver nations of the North. For in this distinction lie the differences of viewpoint that in later centuries were to segregate the museums of art from similar institutions of history and science. Whereas in western and northern Europe the Dark Ages had pretty well overwhelmed the earlier GraecoRoman civilization with a pall of ignorance, in Italy the constant survival of antiquity in ruins, language, and daily traditions reflected itself in an almost unbroken stream of memories. The persistence of pagan customs, particularly as applied to the classical conception of glory, was manifested in the cities where monuments to ancient poets were erected, such as that to Vergil in Mantua, the Pliny monument in Como, or that to Ovid in Sulmona. Again, in the lovely fountain, [

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the Fonte Gaia, facing the Palazzo Publico in Siena, there was incorporated a statue traditionally attributed to Lysippus. Throughout the cinquecento,

col-

lections of antiquities were gathered together either to furnish formal academies of art, as in the case of the Medici Gardens, or as the properties of artists' studios. The ateliers of Bertoldo, the master of Michelangelo, and the Squarcione in Padua were rich in fragments of the past. Donatello made constant studies from the antique, while Lodovico Gonzaga, Bishop of Mantua, formed a collection of plaster casts probably no better than those which are gathering grime in the basements of our museums. And as early, even, as the reign of Pope Leo X , temporary exhibitions of works of art were frequently held in Rome. This activity, far more enlightened in many ways than the frenzied exhibitionism of our own day, must find its explanation in the character of Italian humanism. For, as Professor Hulme has said so well, this movement "devoted itself to the study of classical records and imitated classical modes of thought for the purposes of recapturing and developing the scientific method of observation and experiment, of obtaining a more complete and accurate knowledge of the world of nature and of men, of perfecting literary style and of increasing the appreciation of beauty. All of these [ 13

]

things were to help the individual to think, to act and to will for himself, in opposition, if need be, to any external tradition, authority, or precedent. T h e y were to help him to love the world as his home; to regard it no longer as a place of exile to be despised in anticipation of a life to come, but daily to win it anew by means of the recently aroused personal faculties. T h e y were not intended to produce a general social or religious regeneration. Culture, it was believed, would relieve the individual from the pressure of external authority, would result in intellectual emancipation, and give free rein to the pursuit of individual inclinations and desires." T h e Italian, then, very much like ourselves, was living for the pleasures of this world, having only a slight concern for religion or ethics. He admired art for its own sake, and more than that, he accepted it as part of his daily life. J u s t as Italian aristocracy has never been able to divorce itself from its origins and surroundings, the art of that country has ever sought to reconcile the human with the humanistic. Were it not for the advances in this regard, the aesthetic progress of Europe during the past four centuries would scarcely have been possible. For from this point of view the art gallery of today was born — even to the extent of bringing into common use the Italian word galleria designate its purpose. [

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to

T h e scientific museum, on the other hand, is the product of a curiosity and literalness that are purely Teutonic, and it grew out of the hereditary accumulations of the petty German rulers. These collections, like the humanism of the north, were more concerned with the dawn of science and social regeneration than with beauty. The intellectual movements here were essentially religious; they developed a rational spirit of inquiry which helped, in many ways, to bring about the Reformation. The collections themselves comprised gifts of all sorts, sea shells, fossils, stuffed alligators, minerals, works of gold, silver, and glass, as well as a hodgepodge of painting and statuary. The Archduke Albrecht of B a v a r i a possessed, for example, 3,407 objects which included, in addition to 780 paintings, " a n egg which an abbott had found within another egg; manna which fell from Heaven in a famine; a stuffed elephant, a hydra and a basilisk." The Elector of Saxony, Augustus I , was possibly more fortunate, for his collection included " a series of portraits of Roman Emperors from Caesar to Domitian, said to be copies of originals done b y Titian from the life." T o this very remarkable array were added in 1 6 1 1 a unicorn and a phoenix which were presented to him b y the Bishop of Bamberg. Even as late as our own times Mark Twain records that it was possible to see in the

r is j

sacristy of Cologne Cathedral an elaborate reliquary containing the skull of a child, labeled "Head of Saint John the Baptist at the age of twelve years." These objects were gathered together into what was known as the Wunderkammer. Julius von Schlosser has shown that the differences in temperament between the north and south are inherent in the conflicting meanings of these two words,

Wunderkammer

(wonder chamber) and galleria (the formal gallery). Moreover, the German passion for classification and spinning a priori theories from artificially established premises had already begun to assert itself at a very early date. It set a standard for unintelligibility which has remained in vogue until the present day, and which has done more to keep the public out of our museums than any regulations issued by trustees or governmental bureaucracies have ever succeeded in doing. T o be sure, later scholarship has examined the validity of the claims made in the early inventories of these cabinets. The ponderous Jahrbücher of the various German academies for art and science contain polemics for and against these extravagances of princely accretion. Among their number aspiring doctors have found an inexhaustible mine from which to draw in order to practice the art of learning more and more about less and less. There is a strange irony in the fact that the

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art galleries in this country, filled with works of art originally collected by the brilliant open-minded humanists of the Italian Renaissance, are being made a battleground for conflicting attributions of iconography and authorship by scholars trained in the Germanic tradition of knowing everything about a work of art except its essential significance. By the end of the sixteenth century the future pathway of museum development was clearly marked. Political factors, furthermore, were to determine the successive steps by which this path was to be followed. For, as the economic crises of the seventeenth century made it necessary for the High Renaissance collectors — princes, dukes, merchants, and cardinals — to dispose of their treasures, nationalism and the conception of absolute monarchy brought about another use to which these collections could be put. The Hapsburgs in Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain found themselves in open competition with the English Stuarts and the Bourbons. It was obligatory for the Roi Soleil not only to shine in his own brilliance, but also to cast the reflection of his authority upon the accumulations of the wonders of the past. This was the philosophy of collecting until the French Revolution, when the idea of the public institution—virtually the only one we know t o d a y — c a m e into being. [ 17 ]

THE AMERICAN

PHENOMENON

T H E AMERICAN MUSEUM is the child of nineteenth-

century liberal thought, a fact which should never be forgotten. For even the very idea of the public museum was in its infancy when the colonies rebelled. The British Museum was barely twenty years old; the Louvre was opened only to academicians and a favored few, until the first Napoleon. The National Gallery in London, looked upon b y most Americans as the promised land of all art galleries, was formed only in 1824, although there had been agitation in the House of Commons nearly half a century earlier. The Prado was of approximately the same period. Curiously enough, the Vatican opened its collections to the populace before any of the more liberal states of Europe had done so. Throughout the nineteenth century the movement grew in favor of the great public institution. It was good politics as well as good economy to convert empty palaces into places of education and recreation, thereby not only permitting the public to become proud of their history but acquainting them with their national wealth. The tourist trade, which probably had learned

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its most unpleasant habits in gouging the pilgrims along the mediaeval trade routes, thrived with this new field for exploitation. But, taken by and large, the sudden interest which the nineteenth century had awakened in the new scientific approach to history was a factor more responsible than any other. It was a movement which grew too rapidly to be thought out. Literally tons of works of art, nationalized by gift, purchase, excavation, sequestration, and other forms of governmental expediency, flooded into the cities and palaces of Europe in a never-ending stream. Not until nearly 1900 did the Germans, again producing the national rabbit out of the international hat, point the way to the classification and digestion of this errvbarras de richesses. The earliest collections on this continent were of the most modest order: family portraits, furniture, and silver which had emigrated from abroad with the more substantial families. As the colonists prospered in the eighteenth century, the gentleman's "curio cabinet" became more fashionable and reflected the leisured indifference to any professional interest in art so characteristic of the upper middle class in England. About 1800, however, after the dispersal of the Orléans collection in London, America became a new world for the merchant to conquer. Shipload after shipload of [ 19 1

works of art arrived in N e w Y o r k , Philadelphia, and Boston and were sold to the more prosperous gentry. M a n y of these pictures were from the collections of French aristocrats who were beginning to return to France to salvage what was left from the Revolution. Curiously, too, in the financial panic of Andrew J a c k son's administration many of these works of art, now in the leading galleries of Europe, were taken back across the sea. The forties and fifties were rather barren years. I t is prophetic, perhaps, that the foundations of American museums in general and of the American Museum of Natural History in particular, were laid by Charles Willson Peale (who in the early part of the century had opened his museum in Independence Hall) and by the late P. T . Barnum of circus fame. Barnum's dictum, "There's a sucker born every minute," has been one of the mottoes of our profession ever since. Institutions for cultural progress had been founded in every city, and there were numerous exhibition societies for contemporary art, at which voices like those of Thomas J . Bryan (who gave his collection to the New Y o r k Historical Society in 1867) and J a m e s Jackson J a r v e s of the Y a l e "primitives" were crying in the wilderness; nevertheless, it was not until after the Civil War that America became conscious of her manifest destiny and

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demanded a share of the artistic treasures of history. Much has been written for and against the American craving for sweetness and light. But had not the people of our country three generations ago implicitly believed that " m a n , being essentially a rational creature capable of continuous improvement, needed only education and political equality to make him virtuous and happy," there would probably be no Museum Association, no museums, and none of us connected with the museums would have any jobs. And some of our foreign colleagues would be spared the pain of telling us, in the words of Laurence Sterne, that "they order this matter better in France." The American museum is, after all, neither an abandoned European palace, nor a solution for storing and classifying the accumulated national wealth of the past. It is an American phenomenon, developed by the people, for the people, and of the people. This is not Fascism—it is simple American history; and our most important contributions during the past seventyfive years have been made when we have recalled this fact to our consciousness. I t is significant that in the original program of the organizing committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated J a n u a r y 4, 1870, it was stated that the purpose of the association was to afford "to our whole people free and ample means

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for innocent and refined enjoyment, and also supplying the best facilities for practical instruction and for the cultivation of pure taste in all matters connected with the arts." Quaint as these words m a y sound to our jaded ears, the fundamental philosophy of American art museums has never been better expressed. How far have we lived up to it? Looking back over the growth of the public institution, as briefly outlined in these pages, does it not appear to us t h a t we, of all the peoples of history, have had a better, more natural, and less prejudiced opportunity to make the museum mean something to the general public? I think we have, and t h a t we have thrown this opportunity away. We have placed art, for which there is a ravenous appetite in this country, both literally and figuratively, on pedestals beyond the reach of the man in the street. He believes in the museum, yes, but with the same "I'm from Missouri" acquiescence with which he believes in the Constitution or the Republican Party. He votes appropriations for its support. He m a y even visit the museum on occasion, but he certainly takes from it little or nothing of what it might potentially offer him. This is nobody's fault but our own. Instead of trying to interpret our collections, we have deliberately high-hatted him and called it scholarship. We have established a jargon of [

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pure and arbitrary definition, making esoteric use of common words like "form," "color," "design," so t h a t he has no idea what we are talking about. We tell him t h a t understanding must come from experience, and t h a t the nude really is descending the staircase whether he sees it or not. We have wrapped him up in a cocoon of verbiage and cut-rate aestheticism that is insulting to reasonable intelligence, and we curse him for a barbarian when he says that "he knows what he likes." We have reached a critical period in American m u seums, as anyone confronted with a budget can tell too plainly. I t is impossible for us to continue as we have done in the past. The public are no longer impressed and are frankly bored with museums and their inability to render adequate service. T h e y have had their bellyful of prestige and pink Tennessee marble. Furthermore, they resent the spending of vast sums of tax-levied or tax-exempted funds for the interest and pleasure of an initiated few. We must stop imitating the Louvre and the Kaiser Friedrich and solve this purely American problem in a purely American way. The constant pressure of social service has so complicated our future that we must put an end to charlatanry and come to grips with the real problems of our profession. W h a t are museums? W h a t shall they be? How do they differ from the university? W h a t func[

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tions shall they perform? What relationship should they bear to the public library? Shall museums continue to accept without question all the various secularized activities which a generation ago were lodged in the parish house? What shall be their role in the steadily increasing movement of leisure time?

[

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THE

POTENTIAL MUSEUM

ROLE OF

IN

THE

SOCIETY

THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES s t a t e s m a n s h i p a n d sci-

ence have gone hand in hand. Art, the silent partner, is the only one which has survived in its original form. T h e statesmen lie buried; their forms of government, their treaties, their petty fears and their oblique falsehoods have become part of the accumulated treasure of the mind. Although the lengthening shadows of p a s t events m a y influence the men of action of today, they cannot share this knowledge with their constituents who have not been schooled in the same classroom and know little of dialectic and obscurantism. So it is with science, where nothing but the burning desire for the truth lives on, as each new day the discoveries and inventions of the previous year are cast into oblivion. B u t in art there is a mute stability and permanence which time and tide cannot change, for art is the intimate record of the creative vision. T h e artist is both humble and direct. He sees what he sees with a devastating clarity and puts it down on canvas or on stone. It bears the authentic s t a m p of the moment and of his personality. It is in the final analysis

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his selection from the life of the present, which he has chosen to record for posterity. Unlike the historian or the pamphleteer, he is concerned neither with the past nor with the future. His one moment of creative intensity has been sufficient to give validity to his expression for all time. It is this universality of a work of art which gives it its wide audience. For here is a document of history which any man can understand. And here, too, is the justification of the museum as a public institution, since within its walls man may see a parade of history based not upon the opinions of those who lived long after the events, but upon the personal testimony of the eyewitness. The museum and the library have been called the two halves of the public's memory of the past. But the museum, because of its obligatory emphasis on quality, is indeed much more; in its disposition to preserve the fragments of the past, it can, with these same fragments, teach the truths of the ages which produced them and thus develop in the individual a capacity for improvement. An art museum is usually thought of as a gallery for the display of masterpieces. But possibly we should think of it rather as a visual reference collection of cultural history. Now, contrary to popular belief, the history of culture is not written about the isolated master[ 26 ]

piece, but is drawn from the study collections. Beautiful and important as it is, the masterpiece cannot stand alone. It is a prima donna which must have a supporting cast and chorus to speak authoritatively for the time and place of its creation. Cast and chorus are the vast chronological sweeps and type series from which the masterpiece springs, demonstrating by comparison its unique and superior qualities. For, as we have already shown, a great work of art is essentially the extension of the artist's personality—a communication of his vision to the beholder. There is a parallel in literature, wherein the poet is not judged by an individual utterance. His impact upon his generation, and ultimately upon posterity, is not confined to one work alone. Shakespeare, for example, would probably have been considered great if no more than a single play or sonnet had come down to us. But it is through the great body of his full creative production that he has exercised his enormous influence. The same may be said of the artist. The page of drawings from Michelangelo's notebook in the Metropolitan Museum, the only work by his hand in America, is in itself an object of inestimable beauty, but its value to the Museum and its public is in its relation to his other known works and to the various aspects of Renaissance civilization reflected in the tapestries, paint[ 27 ]

ings, and furniture of the Museum's galleries. The collections of prints, of ornament, all of the type series of decorative arts, help us to understand the real meaning and significance of the painting and the statue. This knowledge is an accumulation of facts and opinions which sharpen the visual perceptions. We have been absorbed in recent years with the problems of national defense, of the mobilization of the mind against the destruction of every instinct which we hold decent. Little, however, has been said about the mobilization of the eye, of the necessity of sharpening vision, of looking long and critically with the purpose of maturing one's own judgment and perspective on life and world affairs. We live herded together in large cities where a view of more than a few hundred yards from one's window is rare. The oculists and psychiatrists recognize the malady which comes from this condition, and know that the only cure for it is the rest which comes from green fields and open spaces. These are physical palliatives. But in the chaos of the world of 1945 we realize that history can give us long avenues and vistas from which to draw refreshment and orderly conclusions. If we think we have no time to read history in books, we can at least with little effort see it unroll in the already prodigious collections of this country. It is essential to remember that art is not remote [ 28 ]

from life, that it has a vital meaning in the defense of our spiritual life and liberty. That same liberty which we seek to derive from art must be given back, in turn, and guaranteed to the creative artists of our time. It is not for us to judge too hastily the aspects of moments of our life which they seek to record. Possibly with their sharper vision they may see things to which we have closed our eyes. They must find a sympathy and understanding which have been all too scarce in recent years. That they have freed themselves from the pre-war introspection of an hysterical and defeated Europe, and are looking for strength in the ample American landscape, is again an indication of the importance of art as a record of the emotions and realities of the times. Nor is art confined to museums and galleries. It abounds everywhere, and we are surprised to find how fundamentally it affects the most domestic and humdrum moments of our lives, from curtains to kitchen utensils. We become dependent upon patterns and designs not only in dress but in automobiles, electric iceboxes, and subway trains, and every day finds our sales resistance battered down by new applications of the psychology of color values, color values which have been known for centuries but which have only recently penetrated the sanctity of the advertising agency. It has been said that there are no longer seven arts but [ 29 ]

seventy, and that there is no aspect of our daily existence which is not inextricably bound by artistic laws and principles that reach back into the past. Obviously this tremendous diversification of our interests has brought with it inevitable dissipation of our energies. Thus weakened, we are only too apt to accept standards of beauty and of excellence that are merely the expedient of the moment and which would not stand the test of time. We become fascinated by the superficial brilliance of technical accomplishment and lose the inner significance of the forms and shapes which reflect our taste. But unlike mercy, the quality of taste is often strained; it transcends morality or even common sense. It is the subtle and delicate balance with which we weigh our feelings and reactions. Taste is innate and instinctive, a sixth sense which cannot be taught or even acquired from the outside. Every person is born with it, however, to a greater or lesser degree, but it must be developed properly. Like muscle, taste can be developed only through exercise. The art museum is nothing more than a gymnasium for the development of these muscles of the mind. Here, by coming again and again we gradually begin to realize the lessons which the works of art can teach us. The vaster the collections the greater the opportunity. Ob[

30

]

jects which at first appear to be mere curiosities emerge with new meaning, to explain the social and political progress of mankind and to assist us in forming our judgment and in refining our opinions and beliefs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New Y o r k is possibly the greatest reservoir of this material in the Western Hemisphere. Objects covering 5,000 years of civilization m a y be consulted, studied, and pondered over. In them the entire aspiration of man, his religion, his science and his sense of repose within himself—that is, the very thing which he calls b e a u t y — i s embodied. Scarcely a phase of his progress toward the democratic w a y of life is not illuminated by some carefully wrought creation of the artist or the craftsman. These collections are not limited, however, to N e w York. There is scarcely a city of this country without a museum or an art center which is already playing a vivid and indispensable role in its community. Since 1870 more than two thousand museums of art, science, and history have been established in the United States, representing an investment in land, buildings, endowments, and collections of between three and four billion dollars. Last year they were visited b y fifty million persons. The museum is no longer, then, the rich man's folly. It is the great free public institution to which the humblest citizen m a y turn for spiritual regeneration.

[ 31 ]

THE

M U S E U M AT T H E

CROSSROADS

in the present conduct of the American museum, we must remember t h a t it is not entirely to blame. Society, during the years, has used the museum as a convenient scrap basket not only for the rubbish which has accumulated in every rich man's attic as the sophistication of the country grew, but also for the preservation of ideas which he has been too sentimental to flush down the drain. In this he has been abetted by the pundit and the aesthete, those flattering High Priests of culture whose appetites are often larger t h a n their stomachs and who persist in saddling future generations with irresponsible commitments in the elusive hope of richer and more immediate rewards. As a class they stand together, seldom permitting a fresh review of the vested empires over which they wield the mighty weapon of defense which they call "scholarship." I F W E F I N D DISSATISFACTION

Their favorite whipping boys are, of course, the trustees upon whom are heaped all the calumnies of which " t h e trained mind" is capable. Too often, alas, their judgments are founded upon experience but, on the [ 32 ]

whole, persecution b y trustees is isolated, if spectacular, and sooner or later is solved b y the mortality tables. B u t if trustees appear apathetic and remote it is because the professional staff, like the average college professor, are seldom willing to meet them on their own ground as intellectual equals; men who have at some time or other been reasonably successful in their private businesses. Trustees are, however, gladly suffered as highly ornamental, and occasionally useful, sacred cows to be milked on sight. B u t God forbid that they should have ideas on art beyond their station, for if they ever really got the upper hand the public, whose cross section they represent, might question the omniscience of the expert. No sensible person, of course, will quarrel with the aims and purposes of scholarship and scientific research. B u t , j u s t as in a university a balance must be kept between the graduate seminar and undergraduate teaching, so in a public museum it is necessary to equalize the pressure between the specific and the general. I t is a curious fact t h a t in the museum, where b y a nice arrangement of works of art it is possible to create this harmony far more easily and succinctly than in the classroom, the existing breach between the scholar and the layman has spread wider and wider. The scholar with his insistence upon minutiae has ere[ 33 ]

ated a forest in which it is impossible to see the woods for the trees. Such a situation is of course absurd. It calls to mind the classic definition of a highbrow: a person educated beyond his intelligence who looks down from his Olympian world of make-believe upon the common man. We recognize him easily for he lurks in the corridors and offices of nearly every museum of the country. He is a highly polished introvert who exists only for himself and his own intellectual pretensions. He is lacking any real sense of public service, and does great harm not only to the institution whose prestige he hides behind but to the cause of true scholarship, in which his more genuine colleagues are busily engaged. Basically the differences between the professional and the trustee, in the isolated areas where they exist, arise out of circumstances which are at once corporate and historic. T h e layman trustee, be he businessman, banker, or lawyer, has a larger experience in the world of affairs and correspondingly a wider understanding and patience in dealing with restrictions which city charters, testaments, and deeds of gift impose upon the institutions which he governs. And more keenly aware of public opinion than the cloistered scholar, he instinctively thinks in terms of stewardship rather than in terms of academic needs. T h u s for a very long time [ 34 1

museum staffs, in order to get around the prejudices of trustees, have developed a habit of mind of not letting the right hand know what the left hand is spending. Research in the history of art, archaeological expeditions, and scientific publication—all eminently worthy enterprises in themselves—are often served up and packaged in pious wrappers and charged by some form of legal casuistry to funds given for the growth of the collections or other specified purposes. Conversely, university professors who wish to devote themselves to a life of quiet contemplation, freed from the drudgery of college teaching, are from time to time appointed to municipal museums for positions which clearly were intended by the appropriations committees to fulfill a more useful public function. A wall of mutual suspicion has therefore been built up over the years which is nothing more than the result of not calling things by their right names, and the trustee, in his belief that an academic rose by any other name would smell as sweet, looks quite naturally with a jaundiced eye upon any proposition that is put before him. While it must be assumed that the propriety of actions taken in the past was carefully considered by the trustees both from their moral and legal aspects, the future integrity of museums as learned institutions now demands that we clarify the situation and avoid [ 35 ]

the subterfuges of recent years. There should be a separation of responsibilities; curators, as the name implies, persons dealing primarily with the acquisition, care, and exposition of objects of art, should at the same time be distinguished connoisseurs and scholars in their own right. But they should never forget that they are, first and last, public servants and not private collectors spending public funds for objects about which they wish to write learned and obscure treatises. If, on the other hand, by terms of trusts and bequests it is found proper for the museum to compete with the university in research at the graduate level, then the m a t t e r should be presented to the museum's supporters on its own merits. If the facts are correctly stated and the arguments convincing, the trustees will be the very first to encourage the work and find the means for its support. But it should become a separate and sanctioned activity with its own staff, functioning like a research institute within a university and devoting itself to study and writing independent of the curatorial and educational requirements of the institution. Properly considered, every activity of an art gallery is essentially educational. Therefore, the role of the museum educator is neither unique nor particularly difficult. Every acquisition, if its quality is high, is a valuable document of factual history. And, since the

[ 36 ]

quality of greatness lies in simplicity, the importance of a collection is measured not by the multiplicity of its contents, but rather by the telling qualities of its finest pieces. The rest, unless the most careful selection and emphasis is maintained, soon falls into the category of reference material. Thus, the curator who is conscious of his responsibility to the public can by inference teach as much as the docent or the lecturer. But for years we have made little segregation of the best from the second best that is comprehensible to the layman. We have shown him the two side by side and lectured to him, telling him arbitrarily what is good and what is bad. We have developed a cult of "quality for quality's sake" which we preach in the same romantic phrases with which our grandfathers advocated "art for art's sake." We ask our public to accept the sample of an art — a single statue, let us say, of the Gothic period—with the ready understanding of a Frenchman who was born beneath the shadow of a great cathedral. And we make little or no effort to furnish him a synthetic world view. If he feels art is important he seldom knows the reason why. The science museums, on the other hand, have already begun to remedy this state of affairs and have, in fact, indicated the role of the museum of the future. They have been aided in this respect by the depression [ 37 ]

and the war. For, while we in the art galleries have been squeezing every penny to buy the treasures of European collections in a distress market, the scientific and industrial institutions have put their money into reinstallation and interpretative exposition. They have not been above employing all of the mechanical aids to learning which are at hand, and have pursued the possibilities of new techniques with tireless energy. In brief, they have at last come to a willingness to contemplate their resources in the light of their potential usefulness to society. The art museums of the United States are so incredibly rich in works of art that their opportunities for the future are infinite. They not only receive a type of public support unknown anywhere else in the world but they enjoy, as well, a freedom of action which will permit them to take any leadership of which they are capable. That the public will follow is clear from the steadily growing attendance. Ten thousand people coming Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, is proof that art is filling some gap in the life of the community. Much of the interest which a generation ago was centered in the parish house has been transferred to the museum, and possibly our greatest civic problem is how best to canalize this latent power and curiosity of the American people. [ 38 ]

We have seen that public institutions of the type we represent are not an artificial creation but the product of a long organic growth. Each generation has been obliged to interpret this vague word "museum" according to the social requirements of the day. There are no rules which apply and no restrictions which limit our field of activity beyond common sense and intellectual integrity. It is no longer necessary for us to do lip service to the institutions of a worn-out and defeated Europe. Trustees, curators, and public alike must recognize that we have emerged from the pre-war frenzy of acquisition for acquisition's sake and must digest what we already have. The emphasis for our generation must be expositive and explanatory. And, above all, the museum must offer a rewarding career for men and women with vocational conviction rather than a refuge from reality for the poetaster and the bluestocking. We must consider our responsibilities in terms of twentieth century America. Perhaps in doing so we may develop a totally new type of public institution, bearing little or no relation to the nationalized palaces of Europe. If we can do so without breaking faith with the generous founders whose foresight and bounty provided us with our present infinite and varied wealth, so much the better.

[ 39 ]

PROBLEMS

OF T H E

DEMOCRATIC

FUTURE SOME DOZEN YEARS AGO, M r s . D o r o t h y Canfield F i s h e r

drew attention to the analogy between adult education and the jellyfish. " W e are attempting to adjust ourselves," she explained, " t o a new phase of life as strange as t h a t which confronted the primitive sea creatures who first, aeons ago, in obedience to some mysterious life urge, climbed out of the good old dense sustaining element of water and found themselves overwhelmed b y the immediate necessity of breathing and moving in the dauntingly impalpable, almost metaphysical spaciousness that we call air." A few years later, President Lowell, who was then basking in the brilliant afterglow of his retirement, cautioned against the pitfalls of administering large institutions. Conversation touched upon mass education and the undergraduate mind. On this point he was very firm. " I have never considered it possible," he said, " t o pick up a jellyfish b y one corner. If you wish to elevate it you must put something quite solid underneath it and lift it all at once."

[ 40

]

Now the tragedy of American education is simply this. Faced with a postwar job of demobilizing and readjusting to society between thirty-two and thirtythree million veterans of the fighting and industrial war services, the educators of the country have not yet decided what kind of jellyfish we have to deal with or what kind of "quite solid something" we must place beneath it. This is the conclusion one reaches in reviewing the internal conflicts of the learned world. Our national genius for mass production gives us a belief in any new system as a safety valve against the peril of the moment. No matter what the nature of the problem, we incline to think that salvation can be secured by discovery of the proper gadgets, whether they be international business card machines, assembly belts, iconology, or "the Hundred Books." The idea that mass reflection offers itself as a possible way of life is entirely foreign to our understanding. Blindly and obediently we succumb to the superiority of accumulative knowledge, and bend the knee to the godless images of other people's research, in the hope that by collecting suitable assortments of cultural talismans we may pass as experts in our respective fields of study. Possibly our only hope of restoring the liberal arts to their rightful place in American education is through the collaboration of the informal public museum with [ 41

]

the college and the university. Neither branch of the educational system seems capable of doing it alone. Yet it is only through such collaboration that a balance can be achieved in this constant pressure of the social and applied sciences upon the humanities. For, as President Conant has recently pointed out, "civilized judgments on all those matters of value which are involved in so many vital human decisions can be illumined often by our knowledge of the past experiences of the race, but they are largely determined by emotional reactions and channels of thought whose pattern by necessity varies from age to age. It is thus the poetry and philosophy of the present, rather than accumulative knowledge, which play the significant role in outlining the next act in the drama of world history. . . . New disciples will flock to those masters who sit not in an ivory tower with their vision fixed on a bygone day, but who endeavor to understand and interpret the scene that unfolds year by year before their eyes; or to those who, alive to the significance of the present, seek to bring nourishment and enlightenment from the wisdom of the past." As a profession, how ready are we to make the sacrifices and adjustments of our time and interests to meet these needs? How willing are we to put aside the battle of the books in order to face realities and present the [ 42 ]

arts in a way which a war-torn generation will demand of us? Certainly nothing in our recent past inspires us with confidence. There is a passage in Homer where the ghosts will not speak to Odysseus until he has given them blood to drink. A parallel situation exists today. While the artist and the spectator are starving for the blood of humanism, the archaeologists and art historians have been concerning themselves primarily with the character and identity of the ghosts. In our mad desire to become exact scientists in the fashion of the day, we have been losing touch with the humanities, and have reduced the study of previous cultures to exhaustive classifications of empty vessels. The locust has flown away while we have been debating the morphology and iconography of his discarded shell. Anyone who will walk through the galleries of our great museums or thumb the pages of our archaeological journals may see this for himself. The important literature of art and archaeology published during the past century numbers somewhere between one hundred and two hundred thousand volumes. Yet it is possible to count on the fingers of both hands the works which, like Burkhardt's Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, have passed into the orbit of general classic literature. More and more the specialist has withdrawn [ 43 ]

into a world of his own, writing learned and pseudoscientific dissertations addressed to a few colleagues. He has convinced himself t h a t through his industry and zeal archaeology and art history have become an end in themselves. He refuses to admit that, like the works of art, t h e y are merely instruments in the broader disciplines of the humanities. He feels little or no responsibility to the public for interpreting a work of art in its broadest meaning. I t s content is thus reserved for the scholar, and the artist or the museum visitor is welcome to what is left of it. This remnant which the archaeologist barely touches with a pair of tongs he calls the "aesthetic appeal." Now it is a curious paradox that, simultaneously with this ingrowing attitude of the scholar, there has developed both in Europe and this country a great taste for amateur archaeology. T h e fascination of exploration and discovery of unknown lands brought to the capitals of the world strange new images, whose forms and uses were revolutionary. In addition to archaeological expeditions sent to the four corners of the globe, accidental e x c a v a t i o n — s u c h as the opening up of lost cities in the ancient E a s t b y the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway—poured tons of archaeological fragments into the museums of the West. Immediately they became the fashionable models for the

[ 44 ]

artists to imitate. It made very little difference whether or not these civilizations were understood so long as they were exploited. A shallow, meaningless eclecticism has been, then, to a large extent the fashion of the past three generations. Any pilfering of ancient motifs was allowable, provided, of course, that what you stole was archaeologically correct. And the archaeologist, in his pleasure at the amount of attention drawn to his own private field of investigation, did what he could to compound the felony. The world's fairs of London, Paris, and Vienna in the fifties, sixties and seventies, with their emphasis upon historic ornament, were funerary monuments commemorating the styles of civilizations long forgotten. Yet out of these fairs developed the museums and schools of industrial art all over the world, from whose death grip the creative artists and architects have been struggling to emancipate themselves in the past ten years. This, in brief, is the recent history of the events leading to that revolt in the arts whose consequences seem to many so sinister. "Human values," it has been said, "cannot exist for irresponsible human beings." But there is a question of the degree of the artist's irresponsibility. For the artist is no more irresponsible than the society in which he finds himself. Events are always greater than the individual, and it is seldom that genius [ 45 1

rises above the limitations of his subject matter and makes the event or circumstance live forever.There are exceptions which prove the rule. But what we cannot forgive is the banality of overstatement, or the projection of irrelevancies into the foreground with the stamp of creative originality. T h e romantically Victorian mural of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica

by Picasso, is a

case in point. Sitting before it, one seems to hear a faint refrain of Tennyson's Balaklava: "Forward the Light Brigade"; "Rode the Six Hundred." A contemporary said of the poem, "Glorious. But is it war?" Brilliant as the painting may be, Picasso, too, has failed to evoke the heroism of Guernica itself. He has only substituted Gertrude Stein for Florence Nightingale. The men who lie dead in foreign graves are not amused by the handclapping of the art world. Much less would they be impressed by the sublime unreality of the superrealists whose tender disembowelings, wrought with such Herculean cleverness, are so revolting in the face of the blood and guts of the daily war communiqués. The horror of actuality surpasses even the dream world of the little Neros who fiddle with themselves while Rome burns. But the problem of modern art is not merely that of distinguishing between genius and charlatan. For, during the past seventy-five years many of our best

[ 46 ]

minds have been attracted not by art but by science. The inventive genius, once in the atelier, has gone into the machine shop and the laboratory, leaving to art, for the greater part, second-rate minds who are groping too often with scientific phenomena which they do not understand, in plastic terms which they are seldom equipped to handle competently. They are not charlatans but obviously victims of circumstances beyond their control. The sculptor or the painter must be indeed a superman to exist at all at the present time. The history of the Renaissance, however, gives us the courage to believe that from this state of suspended animation something new and important will emerge. For after the quattrocento had spent itself there was a period both in Italy and in Flanders where art was practiced with little conviction or content. This was the period of the mannerists, of Bosch and Massys and of some of the more fantastic minor painters of north Italy. Their program seemed to be no program at all, and they were obsessed by the same interests and introspections of the Surrealists of today. The similarities are, however, not limited to artistic form, for the first quarter of the sixteenth century had in its economic, political, and religious conflicts a certain analogy to our own times—wars, imperial expansion, the decay of institutions which for centuries had controlled the des-

[ 47 ]

tinies of Europe—and yet from it emerged the gigantic figures of Michelangelo and Rubens. Possibly the artistic confusion of the present day lies partially in the fact that democracy has never had a recognized iconography of its own. The mediaeval patterns, broken through in the philosophical revolution of the Renaissance, fell back upon the forms and allegories of classical antiquity. Except for the processes of thought which altered existing artistic formulae, the invention of new patterns was rare indeed. Even the efforts of the Church after the Council of Trent to repair the damage of the Reformation imposed merely a new emotional restlessness upon formal designs already established for many centuries. The rapid political, military, and economic expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the pressure of constant change and the Calvinistic assurance of righteousness in the individual's rise to capitalism— nourished the soil for the emergence of great artistic personalities but, by the same token, has militated against the growth of any artistic unity. It should be pointed out here that modern democracy, which was conceived philosophically and politically in the agrarian economy of the last half of the eighteenth century, was plunged into the problem of mass production barely fifty years after the fall of the [ 48 ]

Bastille by the invention of the steam engine. This was followed almost immediately by the invention of the camera and the discovery of the principles of steel construction. In the century that followed, the production of ideas has been more rapid than the production of artistic symbols to designate them. There have not been sufficient opportunities for these breathless ideas to "jell" and there has been no unifying conviction to bring them together. I would not, therefore, condemn the artists but rather the society in which they operate, for they will be the very first to symbolize the new order when the chaos of the present time has ended. Let us first save our democratic civilization before quarreling over the form in which we intend to hand it down to posterity. After all, the archaeologists of the future will be far more concerned with whether or not we have saved it at all than with the question of our liking or disliking its present manifestations. Never before have the arts faced so challenging an opportunity, that of interpreting the past so that the present can make use of the judgments of antiquity as guideposts for the democratic way of life. Twelve million soldiers and sailors will be returning to civilian life; twenty odd million industrial workers will be absorbed with them into a peacetime economy. They will want some means of recapturing the years of [ 49 1

schooling from which they were so abruptly taken. More than ever before the American museum will be called upon to fulfill a social function. The museum must become the free and informal liberal arts college for a whole generation of men and women who are now, and for some time to come will be, devoting themselves to the arts of destruction. The reaction will set in. Our soldiers and sailors, who have learned the lesson of world geography so bitterly, will be the first to demand a return once more to the humanities. When they come home, too old for the classroom, we must be prepared to give them, in a form they can comprehend and enjoy, the fruits of a civilization for which they have risked their lives. Unless, of course, we want to see these veterans peddling the golden apples of Hesperides on the street corners of Chicago and New York, we must give them something more rewarding than iconology. Our job is to deal straightforwardly in human values. Had our German colleagues been more concerned with these in teaching their Nazi pupils, they might not now find themselves in their present situation. The veteran will want something more than empty vessels. Like Odysseus he will not be content with the ghosts of past civilizations but will want their flesh and blood. To give him this will require a better and more fundamental teaching, a teaching concerned with hu[ So ]

man values rather than with the accumulation of statistical knowledge. There must be less emphasis upon attribution to a given hand and greater emphasis upon what an individual work of art can mean in relation to the time and place of its creation. To place an object within twenty-five years and twenty-five miles will do far more for the student than to ascribe it with finality to an Amico di Sandro who probably never existed. These things, after all, are of value only in the salesroom or the seminar. Let us first ask our students what they know of Michelangelo or of Daumier from their documented works before conjuring out of thin air the Master of the Fogg Pietà. There must also be a more generous attitude on the part of the scholar towards the public. We are on the verge of great technical advances; within a decade, television will be a commonplace and one of our principal functions will be broadcasting exhibitions just as today the symphonies and opera are being carried to every American home. Unless we, as scholars, are prepared to meet these irresistible forces halfway, they will pass us by and turn to popular demagoguery instead. We are the people who are supposed to know, and, as public servants, society has a right to expect us to be articulate without being intentionally obscure. American scholarship, which has so conveniently for[ 5i ]

gotten that the Renaissance humanists at first despised the printing press, has yet to learn that what the French intend by the term ouvrage

de

vulgariza-

tion does not imply vulgarity. It simply means that you write in phrases which the layman can understand. Democracy has been defined as " t h e form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of m a n . " N o w nothing can convey the dignity of m a n so wonderfully as a great work of art; no lesson in citizenship can teach so well the inherent nobility of the human being. T h e content is always there, immutable, and is communicable to the beholder in a greater or lesser degree according to his capacity to understand the circumstances which produced it. Here then is the final and basic justification for the museum and for the pursuit of archaeology—to be the midwife of democracy. T o study man himself through those creative expressions of his which have survived him, and to recognize those elements which have contributed not so much to the history of mere patterns or designs, but to the general welfare of the human race. T h e purpose of democracy, T h o m a s M a n n says, is " t o elevate mankind, to teach it to think, to set it free." This we cannot accomplish by sitting in our studies fooling with the bones of our ancestors. Such [ 52 ]

academic luxuries m a y appropriately belong to times of peace and comparative world stability. But today all the processes of the mind are under the pressure of fear and the fierce glamour of brute force. We must look for larger designs than those on a Greek vase or the sculptured frieze of a Gothic church if we would preserve democracy. We must look to the study of man himself, and we must recognize that education is no longer the prerogative of an initiated few, but the vital concern of the community at large. Unless we reaffirm our faith in the study of the human individual, all of the objects in all of the museums of the world shall have been excavated, catalogued, and classified in vain. For it is only in the knowledge of man that we can aspire to those ideals of Greek culture without which democracy could never have captured our imaginations.

[ 53 ]