Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology 3110338874, 9783110338874

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Images of the Art Museum

Contact Zones

Editors Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem

Volume 3

Images of the Art Museum

Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology Editors Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino

Publication was financed by

ISBN 978-3-11-033887-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034136-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038434-5 ISSN 2196-3746 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover photograph: film still from Alfred Hitchcock: Blackmail (1929), picture number bfi-00n-egt, CANAL + IMAGE UK. Typesetting: LVD GmbH, Berlin Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Eva-Maria Troelenberg Images of the Art Museum. Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology: An Introduction   1

Museum Icons, Iconic Museums: (De-)Constructing the Body of Art Martin Gaier The Art of Civilization: Museum Enemies in the Nineteenth Century 

 31

Lynn Catterson Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style: From the Gallery of a Dealer to the Institutional Canon   41 Kathryn M. Floyd The Museum Exhibited: documenta and the Museum Fridericianum 

 65

Word and Image, Institution and Audience Andrea Meyer Museums in Print: The Interplay of Texts and Images in the Journal Museumskunde   93 Melania Savino Creating the Idea of the Museum through the Pages of the Journal Mouseion  Alison Boyd The Visible and Invisible: Circulating Images of the Barnes Foundation Collection   133 Julia Kleinbeck Double Reflections: Art Museums and the Image of the Beholder 

 155

Politics of the “Museal Complex” Irina Koshoridze From a Colonial Approach to National Branding: The Evolution of the Concept of the Art Museum in Georgia   173

 111

VI 

 Contents

Qanita Lilla Classical Impressions, Modernist Aspirations: Shaping a Field of Contention at the South African National Gallery (1895–1947)   191 Deepti Mulgund Imaginaries of the Art Museum: Banaras and Aundh in Colonial India 

 215

Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi When El Greco (Re)Became Theotocopoulos: Policies and Political Discourse of the National Gallery of Athens   239 Naomi Stead, Deborah van der Plaat, John Macarthur Building Flagships: Regionalism, Place Branding, and Architecture as Image in the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane   261

Intermedialities, Shifting Images Norbert M. Schmitz Scottie Sees Beauty: Representations of the Museum in Classic Cinema 

 289

Walter Grasskamp The Museum in Print: André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire and André Vigneau’s Photographic Encyclopaedia of Art   301 Hubertus Kohle The Museum Goes Collaborative: On the Digital Escapades of an Analogue Medium   317 Zehra Tonbul, Koen Van Synghel Museum as Textum: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence  Authors 

 353

Picture Credits  Plates 

 363

 359

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Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Images of the Art Museum. Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology: An Introduction1 Speaking about Museums, Speaking in Images The language we use when speaking about museums is in itself full of images. The most ubiquitous ones might be the notions of the museum as a temple or as a forum. These images are used so often that they almost go unnoticed in many contexts, or risk losing their significance. However, upon closer examination, they reveal an inter‑ esting basic constellation of museum discourse, potentially slicing through different historical layers. Both designations bear a literally classicist notion, yet they conjure up fundamentally different concepts and also very different images of the actual space, inner structure, and architectural iconography of the institution.2 At the time of writing, one of the most debated museum projects in Germany is, for instance, the so‑called Humboldtforum, which is to take shape in Berlin-Mitte, on the site of the reconstructed Prussian castle. The Humboldtforum deliberately seeks to work with the notion of the “forum” in the sense of an open space of cross-cultural and social exchange and public engagement, a move that might also be considered

1 This collection of essays grew out of a conference entitled “Images of the Art Museum – Connect‑ ing Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology,” held at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in September 2013. It was the first international conference organized by the MaxPlanck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things.” We thank the KHI Florence and its directors as well as all conference participants who provided valuable input. Important aspects have also been discussed before and after the conference especially with Irene Campolmi, Alison Boyd, and Felicity Bodenstein, who were or are fellows focusing on museum stud‑ ies within the research group. Emily Neumeier and Theodore van Loan have assisted in the last and most crucial stages of proofreading and editing. Melania Savino and I also wish to thank Katja Richter and Verena Bestle from De Gruyter as well as the series editors of the “Contact Zone – Studies in Global Art” series for accepting our conference proceedings – they could not have been placed more aptly. This introductory text has been discussed with current members of the research group. Janna Vert‑ hein has helped with editorial tasks and image research. 2 See e.g. Carol Duncan, Civilizing rituals. Inside public art museums, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 178; Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, The Universal Survey Museum, Art history 3 (1980), pp. 448–469; David Carrier, Museum skepticism. A history of the display of art in public galleries, Durham, NC: Duke Uni‑ versity Press, 2006.

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a political strategy that seeks to counterbalance the historically charged site of the Hohenzollern residence.3 At the same time, and often in sharp opposition, the “temple” image of the museum as a closed space deliberately detached from everyday life is equally present in current museum debates. One of many possible examples of this is the wording used as a headline for an interview with the State Hermitage director, Mikhail Boriso‑ vich Piotrovsky, in 2015. A press interview that was translated into English and posted on the museum’s blog spells out what he calls the predicament between preservation and accessibility, embodying these opposing qualities in the very provocative meta‑ phorical headline “A Temple or a Disneyland.”4 Apparently such a practice of speaking in images works in all directions as it shapes perceptions and self-conceptions alike.5 Of course these and uncounted other similar uses of such staple figures of museum speech are set against the background of a grand narrative rooted in the fundamental terms of cultural history. The classicist implication of both the temple and the forum metaphors already hints at the strong heritage of enlightenment humanism, and thus at the significance of the museum as an idealistically charged institution of modern Western civilization.6 This is to no small extent connected to the rising specialization and taxonomic rigor that lead to highly elaborated concepts of ideal and at the same time universally embracing museums – and entire museum “landscapes,” such as the Berlin Museum Island.7 As the museum’s institutional formation went on throughout the nineteenth century, it also consolidated its function as an instrument of national image-building.

3 Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (ed.), Das Humboldt-Forum im Berliner Schloss. Planungen, Pro­ zesse, Perspektiven, Munich: Hirmer, 2013. 4 Mikhail Piotrovsky, A Temple or a Disneyland? Piotrovsky on the museum, the rights of culture and the dictate of the street, https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/what‑s‑on/ director-blog/blog-post/4march15/?lng=​(accessed 30 January 2016). 5 From an academic perspective, Duncan Cameron has already discussed the dialectical relation be‑ tween the museum as a “temple” vs. “forum” in the early 1970s: Duncan F. Cameron, The Museum. A Temple or the Forum, in: The Museum Journal 14 (1971), pp. 11–24. For an interesting recent assess‑ ment including a collection of further references see also Linda Norris, The Museum as Forum – Does It Exist?, http://museumspoliticsandpower.org/2014/05/14/the-museum‑as-forum-does‑it-exist/(ac‑ cessed 30 January 2016). 6 For exemplary studies on the conceptual and concrete use of the “temple” metaphor in historical perspective see: Ingeborg Cleve, Der Louvre als Tempel des Geschmacks. Französische Museumspoli‑ tik um 1800 zwischen kultureller und ökonomischer Hegemonie, in: Gottfried Fliedl (ed.), Die Erfin­ dung des Museums. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Museumsidee in der Französischen Revolution, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1996, pp. 26–64; Theodore Ziolkowski, Das Amt der Poeten. Die deutsche Romantik und ihre Institutionen, Munich: dtv, 1994. For the perspective of feminist and Marxist critique, see Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual. An Iconographic Anal‑ ysis, in: Marxist Perspectives 1 (1978), pp. 28–51; Duncan, Wallach, 1980 (as in note 2), pp. 448–469. 7 Ellinoor Bergvelt, Debory J. Meijers, Lieske Tibbe, Elsa van Wezel (eds.), Napoleon’s Legacy. The Rise of National Museums in Europe. 1794–1830, Berlin: G & H Verlag, 2009; Nikolaus Bernau, Hans-Dieter



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 3

This development is often considered as originating in Europe, yet it is paralleled in other parts of the world, from the United States to the Ottoman Empire and beyond8 – and one might even argue that some recent or ongoing “iconic” museum projects, for instance in China or the Gulf Emirates, are a late or post-imperial echo to this history as well.9 It comes hardly as a surprise then that postmodern and postcolonial institutional critique have often approached established monolithic museum images with an atti‑ tude of discursive iconoclasm – a position that to a certain extent was borrowed from or developed in relation to the approaches of contemporary writers or artists who by themselves often resorted to figural language when staging their works in muse‑ ums.10 Jean Cocteau’s famous aphorism describing the Louvre as a “morgue, where one goes to identify one’s friends,”11 moves just slightly away from the idea of the

Nägelke, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), Museumsvisionen. Der Wettbewerb zur Erweiterung der Berliner Museumsinsel 1883/84, Kiel: Ludwig, 2015. 8 Particularly Ottoman museum history has received growing attention in recent years. See for in‑ stance Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed. Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Edhem Eldem, From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern. Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869, in: Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem (eds.), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul: SALT, 2011, pp. 281–330. Comprehensive and critical his‑ toriographic literature on the foundation of American art museums remains, in comparison, rela‑ tively scarce. See for example Charles J. Robertson (ed.), Temple of Invention. History of a National Landmark, Washington, DC: Scala Publishers, 2006; Katharine Baetjer, Buying Pictures for New York. The Founding Purchase of 1871, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004), pp. 161–195; Alan Wal‑ lach, The Birth of the American Art Museum, in: Sven Beckert, Julia Rosenbaum (eds.), The American Bourgeoisie. Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, pp. 247–256. 9 This recent turn in “global” museum history largely still awaits its assessment by critical schol‑ arship. For an overview see Simon J. Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Bugge Amundsen (eds.), National museums. New studies from around the world, New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 484. For the so far char‑ acteristic rather celebratory approach to such museums, see for example Laurence Des Cars, Louvre Abu Dhabi. Naissance d’un Musée, Paris: Skira Flammarion et. al., 2013; Di’an Fan, Cultural Identity of the National Museum of China, Beijing, in: Francesco Buranelli (ed.), L’Idea del Museo. Identità, Ruoli, Prospettive. Atti del Convegno Internazionale in Occasione del Quinto Centenario dei Musei Vaticani (1506–2006), Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013, pp. 81–83. 10 An interesting collection of such positions was gathered by Walter Grasskamp: Walter Grass‑ kamp, Sonderbare Museumsbesuche. Von Goethe bis Gernhardt, Munich: Beck, 2006. Important case studies of museum images particularly in the German literary mindset have been collected by Peter M. McIsaac, Museums of the Mind. German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. 11 Jean Cocteau, Poésie Critique I, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, p. 22. For an academic version of this notion see also Édouard Pommier, Der Louvre als Ruhestätte der Kunst der Welt, in: Gottfried Fliedl (ed.), Die Erfindung des Museums. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Museumsidee in der Französischen Revolution, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1996, pp. 7–25.

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“temple” towards a more sinister sphere, while the double sense of the French term “morgue,” designating a mortuary but potentially also alluding to an attitude of arro‑ gance, hauteur, and self-containment, seems to open an ironic and at the same time nightmarish play with the image of the museum as well as with the attitude of its existentialist beholder. Several discourse-laden decades later and in another part of the world, artist Fred Wilson looks at the museum as a “mine.” This image interestingly begins with the notion of a place where things are buried, hidden in the ground, and static like prehis‑ torical sediment – but only to discover them, bring them to light, make use of them, literally “work” them in unforeseen and critical ways: Wilson’s exhibition concept of Mining the Museum (fig. 1) started in 1992/93 as an intervention at the Maryland Historical Society, coinciding with an annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, which certainly amplified its striking impact. Wilson radically subverted traditional museum categories through new juxtapositions of objects that revealed narratives on African and Native Americans that were already present in the historical collections but that had been largely neglected and made invisible by the institution’s traditional narratives and modes of presentation. Thus this intervention introduced new voices and agencies, and rather than opening a new gaze onto only this one par‑ ticular museum, it aimed to contest and deconstruct the self-image of the institution as such.12 It seems almost redundant at this point to hint at the congruence of this artistic position with the functional model of the so‑called New Museology, a many-voiced branch of scholarship and practical museology emerging around the same time. Deeply informed by structuralist and postcolonial philosophy, the scope of “New Museology” has been a critical reassessment of individual institutions but also of the phenomenon of the museum as such, particularly by highlighting hitherto hidden or neglected agencies and social implications. Accordingly, the multifaceted litera‑ ture of and on “New Museology” is by far too vast to be revisited here in detail.13 However, some of its main perspectives become very tangible even if we take just a random selection of “New Museology’s” own figures of speech. Daniel Sherman

12 Fred Wilson, Howard Halle, Mining the Museum, in: Grand Street 44 (1993), pp. 151–172; Anne Ring Petersen, Mining the Museum in an Age of Migration, in: Iain Chambers, Alessandra De Angelis, et al. (eds.), The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 125–137. See also the short documentary , Fred Wilson: Mining the Museum, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=​csFP2YldIoQ (accessed 1 February 2016) and a comparative perspective on museum interventions by Ken Yellis, http://www.artesmagazine.com/2011/11/examining-the-so‑ cial-responsibility‑of-museums‑in‑a-changing-world/(accessed 22 February 2016). 13 An important early collection of essays is the eponymous volume edited by Peter Vergo, The New Museology, London: Reaktion Books, 1989. A recent perspective looking back on over two decades of “New Museology” is to be found in: May Ross, Interpreting the New Museology, in: Museum and Society 2 (2004), pp. 84–103.



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Fig. 1: Mining the Museum, exhibition at Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson, installation view: pedestals, globe, and busts, 1992–1993.

and Irit Rogoff coin a neutral yet inherently analytic position by calling the museum an “intricate amalgam of historical structures and narratives” in the introduction to their volume on Museum Culture.14 A similar notion of density, yet expressed in a much more overtly critical metaphor, can be found in Moira G. Simpson’s Making Representations. Dealing particularly with museum discourse in the postcolonial world, she draws the militaristic image of the museum as a “bastion (of western mil‑ itary and imperial sovereignty).”15 This nexus between knowledge, representation, and power, which has often been diagnosed, is in fact an immediate prerequisite to the ensuing claim for the museum to be a “differencing machine,” as Tony Bennett opens it for discussion: “… [D]oes the conception of the museum as a ‘machine’ aspire

14 Daniel J. Sherman, Irit Rogoff (eds.), Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. ix. 15 Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations. Museums in the Post-Colonial Era, New York: Rout‑ ledge, 1996, p. 1.

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to new forms of dialogism that place earlier notions of exhibition into question?”16 The recent popularity of the seemingly all-embracing “forum” image for the nomen‑ clature of art museums and cultural venues is certainly related to just this claim, as it appears to offer a more open, engaged, and process-oriented institutional image – even though it ultimately remains carefully inside the demarcation lines of classical narratives.17 In spite of all the groundbreaking more recent critical work on museums in the so‑called global art world from both historical and contemporary perspectives,18 many questions are yet to be raised. We only need think about very basic questions of nomenclature and compare the images that are evoked in our minds, or even that are subconsciously implied when speaking about museums not even in a metaphor‑ ical but in the plain etymological sense: the Latin term museum, originating in the Greek mouseion as a designation for the seat of the muses and then first reappropri‑ ated in fifteenth-century Florence for Lorenzo de’ Medici’s collections,19 has become a seemingly universal label for institutions worldwide. Yet, it is deeply rooted in a particular Western history of humanistic thinking and its idealistic implications for late modernity. This becomes most obvious when we look at how it is translated into other languages, and thus cultural idioms. For instance, the Arabic-speaking world has been using the term mathaf approximately since the nineteenth century for differ‑ ent types of collections. In Beirut, the entire city district where the National Museum is located is called “Mathaf,” thus linking modern urbanism and institutional histo‑ ry.20 Today the term’s most prominent bearer is a museum of contemporary art with

16 Tony Bennett, Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture, in: Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (eds.), Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 46. 17 Also beyond the above-quoted “Humboldtforum,” many examples can be found for the use of this term, interestingly particularly often in the German-speaking world. 18 To name only a few perspectives on a vast field: Kavita Singh, The Museum is National, in: India International Centre Quarterly 29 (2002), pp. 176–196; Hans Belting, Contemporary Art and the Mu‑ seum in the Global Age, in: Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspective, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007, pp. 16–38; Isabelle Hölscher, Musealization. Global Tendencies, Munich: Lehrstuhl für Städtebau und Regionalplanung, Technische Universität München, 2009; Bärbel Küster, French Art for All! Museum Projects in Africa 1912–1931 between Avantgarde and Colonialism, in: Andrea Meyer, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), The Museum Is Open. Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014; or the various contributions in Jennifer W. Dickey, Samir El Azhar, Catherine Lewis (eds.): Museums in a Global Context. National Identity, International Understanding, Washington, DC: AAM Press, 2013. 19 Donatella Pegazzano, Giorgio Vasari, Rome and Early Forms of Display of the Medici Collections in Florence. Models and Afterlife, in: Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 131–150, esp. p.  140. 20 Lamia Joreige, Under-Writing Beirut. Mathaf, Beirut: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2013.



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worldwide outreach situated in Doha, the capital of the emirate of Qatar.21 In all these instances of its modern use, the word mathaf is largely translated as synonymous with “museum.” However, looking at its etymology, it becomes clear that the word derives from terms such as “gift” or “treasure”; it is thus aptly connected to this kind of institution, but it certainly conjures up rather different images than the classi‑ cal “seat of the muses.” In the end what is lost in translation does reflect different institutional histories, as the genesis of institutions for the display of art in the Arab world was certainly related to but not parallel to or purely imitative of the history of museums in the Western world. This is just one example of the heteroglossia and polysemy of our museum world, which in fact already represents a status after the “global turn.”22 It only highlights the inevitable need for a continuous differentiation in museum discourse, particularly considering its increasingly polycentric perspec‑ tive – yet, without losing common ground for conversation.

Looking at the Museum – Connecting Gaze and Discourse Bearing this in mind, it cannot be the purpose of this volume to tell any kind of linear, empirical history of visual representations of art museums. Rather, we are taking into account various agencies between institutions, objects, cultural entities, or individ‑ uals that reveal themselves through images of the art museum. As Margaret Olin has shown in her definition of gaze and vision as art historical agency, “[t]he term ‘gaze’ […] leaves no room to comprehend the visual without reference to someone whose vision is under discussion.”23 While Olin refers generally to the gaze of all possible kinds of beholders, viewers, or spectators, she also stresses: “While most discourse about the gaze concerns pleasure and knowledge, however, it generally places both of

21 For a contextualized perspective on museums within evolving processes of cultural identity build‑ ing in the Arabian Gulf, see Karen Exell, Trinidad Rico (eds.), Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula. Debates, Discourses and Practices, Farnham: Ashgate 2014. For the Mathaf’s self-representation on Google art project see: Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, https://www.google.com/culturalin‑ stitute/collection/mathaf-arab-museum‑of-modern-art?projectId=​ art-project (accessed 22  February 2016). 22 Questions of art historical or historiographic discourse that may take us beyond the somewhat used notion of the “global turn” have been discussed in a symposium organized by Sria Chatterjee and Eva-Maria Troelenberg at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in June 2014: “After the Global. Constructions of Historiography in Visual and Material Spaces”. 23 Margaret Olin, Gaze, in: Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, Sec‑ ond Edition, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 318.

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these in the service of issues of power, manipulation, and desire.”24 Connecting both of these aspects to our questions of representation, we consider the gaze towards the museum as a productive instrument of knowledge production, but also as a mode of institutional critique. Norman Bryson has argued that the relation between vision and the gaze also spells out a relation between a centralized viewpoint and a larger “expanded” field. Interestingly, he develops this argument by interrelating Western and Japanese phi‑ losophy. Even the thinking of seminal critical theorists of vision such as Sartre or Lacan, he claims, “remains held within a conceptual enclosure, where vision is still theorized from the standpoint of a subject placed at the center of a world.”25 In con‑ trast to this, the work of Japanese philosophers like Nishida and Nishitani open up a different notion of the gaze, which “cuts across the field of vision, and invades it from the outside,” so as to address “the otherness of the rest of the universe, a surround‑ ing field that decenters the subject and the subject’s vision completely.”26 Taking up such a notion of visuality and gaze offers a conceptual fulcrum for a more systematic critical reading of museum history in cross-cultural, polycentric, and relational per‑ spective.27 However, it also remains unavoidably tangible in this volume how powerful and long-lived a tradition of the directed, centered gaze is in museum history – and how entangled it is with the story of actual image-making: the museum as an object to be literally regarded, pictured, and visually represented is an omnipresent topos par‑ ticularly in the Western history of art and in media history as well. This concerns pictures created from within, which shape not only the institution’s own identity but also images created by “outsiders” that can be understood as statements, comments, reactions, sometimes even collateral documents. And it is a phenomenon particularly virulent during the modern age, which not only became the age of the museum but also brought visual representation in general to a new dimension, both technically and in terms of the impact of images on intellectual discourse. The formation of the first modern art museums (or their immediate predecessors) already went hand in hand with their systematic visual representation: the variegated

24 Ibid., p. 319. 25 Norman Bryson, The Gaze in the Expanded Field, in: Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 87–108, p. 87. 26 Ibid., p. 104. 27 Another possible source for an “alternative gaze” could be feminist interventions on museum vi‑ sion such as: Griselda Pollock, The Missing Future. MoMA and Modern Women, in: Cornelia Butler (ed.), Modern Women. Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, pp. 38–39; Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Time, Space and the Archive, London: Routledge, 2007; Helen Molesworth, How to Install Art as a Feminist, in: Butler, 2010, pp. 498–510.



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Fig. 2: Joseph Arnold, Die Kunstkammer der Regensburger Großeisenhändler- und Gewerkenfamilie Dimpfel, 1668, 14.9 × 19.1 cm, Ulmer Museum, Inv.Nr: 1952.2611.

genre of the interior view of a princely or amateur art collection arose with the Early Modern Kunstkammerbild (fig. 2) and reached its climax with the spread and profes‑ sionalization of print culture in the eighteenth century.28 Some of these images can

28 One of the most famous examples is the Roman painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini, who combines very tangible object-portraits with an idealizing and imaginary concept: David Ryley Marshall, The Ideal and Theatrical Gallery. Paolo Pannini’s Paintings of Imaginary Galleries, in: Christina Strunck, Elisabeth Kieven (eds.), Europäische Galeriebauten, Munich: Hirmer, 2010, pp. 401–415. On the value of interior views of art collections as historical source, see, for instance, Alden Gordon’s plea and pre‑ liminary work for what he calls a “census” of engraved images of collections in the enlightenment era: Alden R. Gordon, Depictions of Display. Towards a Census of Engraved Images of Interiors, in: Susan Bracken, Andrea Gáldy, Adriana Turpin (eds.), Collecting and the Princely Apartment, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011, pp. 97–114. Similar aspects have already been raised by Elisa‑ beth Oy‑Marra, Der Sammlungsraum als Wissensraum und seine Repräsentation im Bild, in: Katha‑ rina Bahlmann, Elisabeth Oy‑Marra, Cornelia Schneider (eds.), Gewusst wo. Wissen schafft Räume. Die Verortung des Denkens im Spiegel der Druckgraphik, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2008, pp. 75–90. More detailed case studies which link the picturing of galleries explicitly to the birth of the modern museum are to be found in Tristan Weddigen’s considerations of three princely collections in eigh‑

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be considered means of documentation and thus are a prime source for art historical research today, but in many cases they function also as historical instruments of ide‑ alization, declaring a normative, often central perspectival direction for the gaze of the beholder. They embody the fundamental nexus between the order of space and things  – the very issue that was to become a quintessential bone of contention for modern poststructuralist critical discourse. While these early observations are thus an important prehistory for our queries, our main interest is in the period since the rise of modern image technology starting with the advent of photography – a medium that was very quickly perceived, used, and circulated throughout the world, and that had a crucial impact on museum practice and museum history from the outset.29 As early as 1853, the trustees of the British Museum came up with the idea of installing a photographic studio directly in the museum, which had just been moving to its new building in Bloomsbury. The photographer to be assigned with this task was Roger Fenton. Parallel to his docu‑ mentary expedition to the site of the Crimean War, Fenton thus prepared for a first photographic campaign in the museum to produce images that were to be sold to the audience.30 Among the results of his work is a series of stereoscopic images of the new classicist museum building and its galleries – prominently among them the Assyrian and Egyptian sculpture galleries (fig. 3). Fenton quite paradigmatically translated the universalist imperial gaze immanent to the collection into an image medium, seizing the “creative affinities between sculpture and stereoscopy, vision and touch.”31 The stereoscopic effect with its suggestion of three-dimensionality highlights even more clearly how the notion of “indexical realism”32 ascribed to photography corresponds to the representational claim of the museum. Not all, but many of the essays in this volume indeed speak explicitly about the use of photographs or consider them as sources, sometimes both. Parts of this book thus certainly also can be read as a parallel thread to the history of photography – but its

teenth-century Germany: Tristan Weddigen, The Picture Galleries of Dresden, Düsseldorf and Kassel. Princely Collections in Eighteenth-Century Germany, in: Carole Paul, The First Modern Museums of Art. The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and early-19th-Century Europe, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012, pp. 145–166. 29 Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Photographs, Museums, Collections. Between Art and Information, Lon‑ don: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 30 However, this photo studio only existed for a few years, as in the end it was considered not eco‑ nomically successful enough. Valerie Lloyd, Introduction, in: Lynne Green, Muriel Walker (eds.), Roger Fenton. Photographer of the 1850s, London: South Bank Board, 1988, pp. 10–13. 31 John Plunkett, “Feeling Seeing”: Touch, Vision, and the Stereoscope, History of Photography 37 (2013), pp. 389–396, p. 389. 32 Ibid., p. 389.



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Fig. 3: Roger Fenton, stereoscopic view of the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, ca 1857, UK.

prime purpose is to speak about the museum’s position within the visual and scopic regimes of multiple interrelated modernities up to the present day.33 The acceleration, spread, and popularization of visual media since the mid-nine‑ teenth century brought about a large array of representational modes that not only enhance but also comment on or question the political message of the museum  – and, to an increasing extent, also its contaminated or interrupted heritage. After all, museums are resilient sites of longue durée, but at the same time they are anything but detached from the consequences of local and global history. If we stay with the medium of photography for a moment to look only at some of the numerous pictures that the photographer Max Ittenbach34 took on Berlin’s Museum Island between the 1930s and 1950s (figs. 4–6), we can see how in formal terms the universal image of

33 This idea was developed against the background of a number of classical theories that have be‑ come too prominent to be spelled out here in detail again: see Martin Jay, The Scopic Regimes of Mo‑ dernity, in: Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 3–23; Timothy Mitchell, The World as Exhibition, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), pp. 217–236; Tony Bennett, The Exhibitionary Complex, in: New Formation. 4 (1988), pp. 73–102. For the concept of mul‑ tiple modernities, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 34 Max Ittenbach seems a largely forgotten figure in the history of photography, though a large num‑ ber of his photographs are available in digitized form through the database of bpk images, and a corpus of his work is archived in the Berlinische Galerie: http://www.berlinischegalerie.de/en/collec‑ tion/photography/the-collection/complexes‑of-work/(accessed 1 March 2016).

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Fig. 4: Max Ittenbach, Neues Museum: war damage in the Egyptian Courtyard, 1950, Berlin.

Fig. 5: Max Ittenbach, restoration work on the Ishtar processional gateway, Pergamonmuseum, ca 1950, Berlin.

Fig. 6: Max Ittenbach, students in front of two lions from Sam’al (Sendschirli) in the Vorderasia­ti­ sches Museum, 1951, Berlin.

the museum becomes a subject of a new, modern gaze – and how this analytical and at the same time aestheticizing gaze is used several years later to capture the most dramatic rupture in the material history of these museums when they were severely damaged during the Second World War. Shortly thereafter, the image of the museum as a postwar ruin became a topos in its own right, illustrating the final consequences of the downfall of civilization in Germany. And finally, the same photographer docu‑ mented – and apparently actively staged – the restoration work and the beginning of a new age of museum work as part of the cultural image-building of East Germany.35 Examples like these picture the dynamics of an institution’s life between the grand narrative and its processual deconstruction or reappropriation in particular moments of history. While this example still belongs more to the realm of the documentary, we also see many images in which the aesthetic or visual dimension of the museum as such is utilized or negotiated through an artistic meta-discourse and becomes part of a semiotic system of references within a larger narrative. Interestingly, in the last decades it seems like photography inscribed the image of the art museum into the history of canonical fine arts again  – if one likes to think along these categorical lines of demarcation. Probably the most famous cases are photographers Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. Both of them created iconic images of art museums that

35 On this aspect, for the example of the Pergamon Museum and particularly its Islamic Department, see also: Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Mschatta in Berlin. Grundsteine Islamischer Kunst, Dortmund: Kett­ ler, 2014, pp. 175–209.



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 13

Fig. 7: Thomas Struth, Audience 07, Florence 2004, Cat. 8781, Chromogenic print, 179.5 × 289.5 cm, EXHIBITED: KHZ, MSP, © Thomas Struth.

became prominent pieces of contemporary art in themselves. In Höfer’s work, reflect‑ ing the intellectual gaze of the “spatial turn” debates emerging since the 1990s, images of museums appear alongside libraries or theaters. Her contemporary gaze into deserted, seemingly timeless galleries or storage rooms seems most interested in the institution’s image as such, typically applying a strict linear perspective almost in the sense of a formal revenant that coolly points at the historically informed rigor of the museum’s order of things.36 In Thomas Struth’s oeuvre, the characteristic setting of canonical and famous museums is equally important – but his emphasis is on the relation between the setting and its contemporary visitors – to the point where the visitor’s perception as a message about the artwork takes center stage (fig. 7/pl. I).37 Museums for their part embrace the attention that comes along with this kind of artistic representation and with the underlying intellectual meta-discourse – a reac‑ tion that creates its own images in turn: we might for instance see the increasing pop‑

36 See Henri Loyrette, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Candida Höfer. Louvre, Munich: Schirmer + Mosel, 2006; on the spatial turn, see, for instance, Julia Burbulla, Eine Kunstgeschichte nach dem Spatial Turn. Eine Wiederentdeckung mit Kant, Panofsky und Dorner, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. For some posi­tions on the museum in light of the spatial turn see for example Kali Tzortzi, Museum Space. Where Architecture Meets Museology, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015; Friedrich von Bose et al. (eds.), ­Museum X. Zur Neuvermessung eines mehrdimensionalen Raumes, Berlin: Panama Verlag, 2012. 37 Thomas Struth, Museum Photographs, Munich: Schirmer + Mosel, 2005; Federico Luisetti, Ritratti nel Museo. Le Museum Photographs di Thomas Struth, in: Federico Luisetti, Giorgio Maragliano (eds.), Dopo il Museo, Turin: Trauben, 2006, pp. 163–185.

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ularity of visible storage as another repercussion of the museum’s own growing sen‑ sitivity to issues of transparency and visual engagement reaching beyond the mere classical display of artworks.38 In a similar spirit, in the last years a number of (semi‑)documentaries have revealed behind-the-scenes insight and increased the awareness of the “biographies,” social lives, and inner mechanics of museums – ranging from Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (2012), a poetic, fictional, and yet veristic portrait of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, to Frederick Wiseman’s feature-film documentary National Gallery: Inside the Museum (2014), which, quite tellingly, he made after filming movies about other institutions such as hospitals and universities.39 But also fictional cinema has been particularly prone to work with images of art museums throughout its history. The examples one could quote are legion, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 murder mystery, Blackmail, which provided the cover image for this book. Shot for both silent and sound film theatres, this film’s dramatic climax is introduced by a chase that begins in front of the British Museum’s monu‑ mental classicist portico, then takes the protagonists through the Egyptian Galleries, through the reading room, and eventually ends fatally for the villain as he falls to his death through the glass roof in the center of the museum’s famous rotunda. This scene, in fact created with the help of a small-scale model of the actual building,40 became a predecessor to a number of museum scenes in different genres of cinema history: from the famous run through the Grande Galerie in Godard’s Bande à part in 1964 (which presents an image of the Louvre quite opposed to Cocteau’s “morgue”) to the ferocious shooting set in the Guggenheim Museum in New York (or rather a high-end replica of it) for the showdown of Tom Tykwer’s political thriller The International in 2009.41 Just these three examples place the museum in very different types of films – yet what they seem to have in common is the disruption of the museum’s static state, the contestation or even violent transgression of decorum and order, and

38 The (visible) storage in general remains an understudied subject but has begun to raise academic attention lately, see Michael Fehr et al. (eds.), Das Schaudepot. Zwischen offenem Magazin und Inszenierung, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 39 Jem Cohen, Museum Hours, Austria, USA 2012: http://www.museumhoursfilm.com/castco‑ hen_E.‌htm (accessed 1 March 2016); on Frederick Wiseman, see http://www.zipporah.com/wiseman (accessed 1 March 2016). 40 Steven Jacobs, Dial A for Architecture. Fünf Gründe, die Gebäude in Hitchcock-Filmen zu unter‑ suchen, in: Henry Keazor (ed.), Hitchcock und die Künste, Marburg: Schüren-Verlag, 2013, pp. 104–116; on the Schüfftan-Effect used in this case to create the image of the museum, p. 105. See also Matthew Cock, Hitchcock’s Blackmail and the British Museum: film, technology and magic, http://blog.brit‑ ishmuseum.org/2011/08/25/hitchcock%E2%80%99s-blackmail-and-the-british-museum-film-tech‑ nology-and-magic/(accessed 2 March 2016). 41 Alain Bielik, Re‑Constructing the Guggenheim for ‘The International’, http://www.awn.com/vfx‑ world/re-constructing-guggenheim-international (accessed 2 March 2016).



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Fig. 8: Google Art Project: screenshot from the page of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. Google Cultural Institute – Screenshot. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.

the notion of the museum as a kind of maze or trap, a place to be drawn into and to run from at the same time. Maybe this dialectical relationship to the museum is rooted in cinema’s own origins between the lines of popular and high art.42 If, after photography, cinema may have been a second paradigmatic “spar‑ ring partner” of the museum in visual culture since the age of late modernity, then new media possibly is the logical continuation of both. From bottom‑up activities growing out of rapidly multiplying individualistic audiences such as the “museum selfie day” promoted through the online social networking service Twitter43 to the large and centrally orchestrated  –  though interactive  – Google Art Project (fig. 8/ pl. II), the instruments and users of new media are now mining the big data of a

42 Peter Jelavich: “Am I Allowed to Amuse Myself Here?”. The German Bourgeoisie Confronts Early Film, in: Suzanne L. Marchand, David Lindenfeld (eds.), Germany at the Fin de Siècle. Culture, Politics, and Ideas, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004, pp. 227–249. 43 Twitter, https://twitter.com/MuseumSelfieDay (accessed 2 March 2016).

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post-global museum world – a process producing its own interface with artistic and curatorial practices. This again changes roles of agency and perception from within and without institutions, and the digital sphere increases the universal availability of artworks but maybe also mainstreams the experience of art in new and unfore‑ seen ways.44 In any case, the picture has become increasingly multilayered and contested; in fact, we are certainly looking at much more than just one picture when looking at the museum. The rising awareness of socially and culturally diverse agencies plays a crucial role – if not the decisive role – in the reassessment of the museum world from an early twenty-first-century perspective. It will and must open new lines of research in the future that go further beyond established terms and images, yet without losing sight of the museum’s potential and mission to represent and enhance both historical awareness and aesthetic continuity. Taking its cue from this position our collection of essays seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate about museums, embracing the fulcrum between figurative and actual visual images of art and archaeology museums as an access point: How has the image of the art museum been rhetorically framed, used, created, and circulated since the mid-nineteenth century? How do figures of speech and actual images affect museums in terms of identity and on an operational level? How is the notion of the museum applied or related to other strategies of visual representation in the arts? Which criteria are applied or aimed at in these processes of image-making? We thus look at a range of representational regimes, understanding them as epistemological statements that can reveal how the museum works – or sometimes, in the course of history, how it fails, struggles, and changes  – and how it is shaped and perceived across institutional, national, social, or cultural boundaries. The papers collected in this volume will be broadly thematically organized into four sections, but there will be many relationships that cut across the groups and chapters. All of the essays will look closely and critically at selected examples, pri‑ marily exploring how museums or their objects have been subjects of debate and/or how they have been represented through different rhetorics and instruments of visual culture such as photographs, journals, and catalogues, as well as images from art installations, temporary exhibitions, cultural events, art works, and movies.

44 Two collections of recent positions on the impact of new media on museum work and on art and curating are Ross Parry (ed.), Museums in a Digital Age, London: Routledge, 2010; and Beryl Graham (ed.), New Collecting. Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.



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Museum Icons, Iconic Museums: (De‑)Constructing Institutional Bodies The first chapter unites three historically diverse positions, yet there is a recurring theme concerning the notion of an ideal body of art and its relation to institutional representation. Martin Gaier’s essay departs from the very classical premise of the temple of masterpieces only to unfold this notion’s negotiation through the philosophy of art particularly in Germany and France  – a debate that was triggered not least by the musealization campaigns of the Napoleonic age and that took its course further into the nineteenth century. Gaier shows how this discourse questioned the museum’s role in defining a viable relation between art, culture, and life, and how it ultimately paved the way for “taming the body of art”45 by rearranging artworks in a decontextu‑ alized aesthetics within the framework of the museum, responding to classical values of civilization. Yet, at the same time it also incited institutional critique that could even be read as a prehistory to the museum reform movements of the 1890s. Chronologically, Lynn Catterson’s study takes off around the same period in which Gaier’s considerations end. At first glance, she looks at canon building from a radically different angle. Mining the archives of the Florentine art dealer Stefano Bardini, she critically describes his crucial role for the transatlantic “branding” of the canon of Italian Renaissance art and its display between the art market and the museum from the 1860s on. Particularly focusing on the importance of photography, reproduction, and publication strategies for the creation of a veritably iconic object body, this contribution shows how the displacement and circulation of artifacts and the strategic use of modern media together feed into the consolidation of a cardi‑ nal theme within the grand narrative of Western museums and highbrow consumer culture. Kathryn M. Floyd adapts the body metaphor as an analytical tool for her inves‑ tigation into the history of the documenta exhibitions that have evolved around the ruin of the former Museum Fridericianum in Kassel since 1955. Taking as historical benchmarks the fragmentation of the Museum Fridericianum – Germany’s first pur‑ pose-built museum  – during the eighteenth-century, during World War II, and the latest, thirteenth edition of the documenta, she describes the development of a con‑ temporary biennial exhibition format against the background of the Fridericianum’s physical and intellectual heritage. Floyd reads this heritage as a “reproducible, trans‑ portable image” that lies at the very heart of documenta history. This essay thus crit‑

45 Quotes in this synopsis are, unless stated otherwise, taken from the respective contributions in this book and thus not referenced in detail.

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ically links one of the most prominent institutions of the West German postwar art scene back to the grand narrative of museums and its enlightenment origin, but also to the literal disruption of this narrative as a result of National Socialism.

Word and Image, Institution and Audience The essays in the second chapter look at systematic image-politics in the age of glo‑ balization and democratization that play out their impact between institutional inter‑ ests, specialized audiences, or increasingly diversifying and multiplying communi‑ ties of art beholders. Andrea Meyer investigates the “interplay of texts and images” in the professional journal Museumskunde, which was published in Germany – though with a transna‑ tional and even global scope – between 1905 and 1924 and in a new edition between 1929 and 1939. This publication, targeting mostly an audience of museum profession‑ als, informed and mirrored a significant period of professionalization and interna‑ tionalization of museum work and museology. At the same time, this was of course a period that saw significant tensions and shifts in German political history, particu‑ larly considering its relation to cultural pluralism and world politics. Considering the sophisticated image-politics of Museumskunde, which may even have established the genre of the installation shot, Meyer looks particularly at the use of illustrations in the journal in order to ask how they shape the image of European and non-European museums. Through this relational approach, she detects an “underlying value system infused by imperialism or colonialism” inherent to the publication series from the outset. Throughout the first run of the journal, this went hand in hand with a muse‑ ology debate that even seems to resonate with some of the aesthetic discourses of the preceding century, now complicated by a large range of transcultural perception problems that were often dealt with from a Eurocentric perspective. In the second run, soon coinciding with the National Socialist rise to power, the journal increasingly turned into an even more restricted medium. Closely related to this is Melania Savino’s essay, which investigates the historical development of notions of “globalism,” as for instance claimed by current definitions for museum work provided by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Again harking back to the crucial period of the early twentieth century, she applies a similar relational approach, comparing images of Western and non-Western museums within one particular medium. The subject of her study is the journal Mouseion, which ran between 1927 and 1946. This periodical was founded as the bulletin of the “Office International des Musées,” the first international organization that studied museums globally. This contribution provides insight into an important moment in the transna‑ tional formation of meta-institutions that were to have increasing impact on museum history and on the shaping of cultural heritage concepts worldwide. Taking her cue



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from an analysis of the overtly classicist title of the journal, Savino looks into the representation of museums particularly in South America and Palestine to reveal how an increasingly “global” claim continued to “privilege European vision” and also cemented a hegemonic salvage paradigm. Alison Boyd’s essay also addresses a question of image-politics, but it takes us to the realm of private collecting, particularly the case of the American millionaire and philanthropist Albert Barnes. Established from the 1920s on, his collection was not primarily a museum in the classical sense, but rather a programmatic part of an educational foundation addressing all strata of society  – in Barnes’s own words a “democratic” institution, which Boyd however identifies as a classical contact zone of entangled narratives and power relations. The essay focuses on the use (or nonuse) of photographic reproductions of the collection’s objects – an interesting case in point, as Barnes and the heads of the foundation that were to follow him throughout the twentieth century were generally against reproduction, particularly color repro‑ duction, as they deemed it an insufficient and deceptive medium for the representa‑ tion of artworks. Boyd analyzes this position in relation to fundamental discourses on photography and reproduction ranging from Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag. Yet, her main interest is the one and decisive exception to this rule: only African sculp‑ ture was explicitly designated by Barnes to circulate among a larger public by means of photographic reproduction. This particular angle sheds significant light on how “hierarchies of power that were eschewed in the galleries emerged differently in the realm of photographic reproduction.” Julia Kleinbeck looks at how the interrelation or even tension between institution and visitor is spelled out through images in the modern art museum. Though Klein‑ beck identifies this as a question originating as early as with the democratization pro‑ cesses of the early twentieth century, her interest lies in its contemporary dimension. Answers to this question might be found in a kind of visual data mining, considering the numerous images of visitors and art beholders that are produced and circulated today not only by museums and art institutions, but in increasing numbers also by audiences themselves, who share them through social media platforms – a process that is beyond institutional control and that creates new interrelations between artworks and recipients as well as new, globally accessible contexts for art reception. Kleinbeck goes one step further as she analyzes two artistic positions by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Olafur Eliasson that work deliberately with the phenomenon of the omnipresent visitor image – to a certain extent they even instrumentalize the interactive visitor – for two site specific installations that were on view at the Louvre and at Tate Modern, and which counted on the visitor’s own engagement in image production. Participa‑ tory artworks like these can be understood as signs of a “post-medial era”, which, as Kleinbeck argues, provides new platforms and directions of communication and goes far beyond established, more static strategies of picturing the beholder. Some of the latter still provide standard templates for institutional image-making by art museums today. The new interactive practices make the typical “installation shot” as an alleged

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“icon of the twentieth century” obsolete. As Kleinbeck seeks to show, the resulting new generation of visitor images conforms in its own right with Kantian notions of communication as a condition of civilization. Altogether, it thus may bear witness to a reinvention of an art of civilization through the means and media of the twenty-first century.

Politics and Geographies of the “Museal Complex” In this chapter, we turn away from the practices or politics of literal image-making to the realm of politically entangled institution building itself, and the ensuing gaze towards museums or matters of artistic canon within national self-images. These studies, looking at very different parts of the world between the mid-nineteenth century and today, are in many aspects revealingly complimentary to the mechanisms of power and representation detected throughout the previous chapter: they spell out relations between alleged centers and peripheries, between “civilization” and “the primitive,” or they detect and question privileges of representation or interpretation of art and territory alike. Irina Koshoridze’s essay draws a picture of the Georgian National Gallery as a museum’s journey from an instrument of colonial politics to national self-affirmation. Its first nucleus lies in the foundation of the Caucasian Museum in Tbilisi, established as a kind of universal collection related to the colonizing mission of Russian politics in the Caucasus region after 1852. The 1870s saw the first initiatives to establish specif‑ ically Georgian museum politics in reaction to this, but it was not until the first shortlived period of Georgian Republic independence after 1918 that new, more nationally informed museum narratives became functional. As part of an entire wave of founda‑ tions of national cultural institutions, the Georgian National Gallery was founded in 1920. As this museum was founded during a period when photography as a documen‑ tary medium became more and more established, Koshoridze can build upon a gen‑ erous corpus of contemporary photographs that allow a reconstruction of the instal‑ lation of its galleries as conceived in 1920. The canon of paintings presented there included European and Russian works as well as Georgian and also Qajar painting, thus reflecting the position of local artistic practice at a crucial geo-cultural intersec‑ tion – a progressive position the museum and its director would maintain throughout a number of political and practical changes in the years to come. After the Bolshevik occupation drove the Georgian government into exile in 1921, the museum’s history became a story of political resilience. It maintained its identity-shaping mission even into the Great Purge of 1936/37. The museum’s legacy was only rediscovered in the late 1990s, and it now contributes to the image of the Georgian National Museum. Qanita Lilla takes us to the example of a national gallery as well, its perception and its processes of canon building: her essay approaches the South African National



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Gallery in Cape Town and its prehistory and formation across shifting political tides between 1895 and 1947. Looking behind the image of an institution which presents itself with a coherent and stable identity today, Lilla detects “various contingent factors [that] intersected to construct this image” in historical perspective. These factors derive from the particular constellation of a museum that was affected by two subsequent, yet very different colonial interventions. The first concept of the museum is to be understood in the context of British colonialism, harking back to grand narra‑ tives of civilizational history, including the importation of a collection of plaster casts of Greek and Roman antiquities – this in itself a three-dimensional image of an ideal museum canon, and in this particular context an idealizing pedagogical instrument. Later on, Afrikaner nationalism, as a movement growing out of Calvinist Dutch settle‑ ments originally strongly opposed to the British rule, gained ground. And, again from a completely different angle, dissident voices from the South African art scene began to work towards less conservative and classical concepts of art. At the same time, South African indigenous artworks were kept at the natural history museum and clas‑ sified as ethnographic specimens, thus reflecting common Western taxonomies and hierarchies. In the South African context, this contributed directly to the distinction between colonizer and colonized – this apparently remained the great divide uncon‑ tested through all changes in political and cultural history. The underlying dichotomy between the “civilized” and the “primitive” resonated even in debates about modern art that flared up during the late 1940s, including conceptual and terminological parallels to the Entartete Kunst debate that had devastated modernism in Germany during the National Socialist years. British colonial rule  –  and its contestation  – is also the point of departure for Deepti Mulgund: based on original fieldwork, she compares two museum foundations growing out of local initiatives in India, namely the Bharat Kala Bhavan of Banaras, which was founded in 1920 by Rai Krishnadas, and the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangraha‑ laya in the princely state of Aundh, established in 1938 by its ruler Balasaheb Pant Pra‑ tinidhi. Both of these museums were quite explicitly conceived as fine art museums as opposed to more universalist collection types – a constellation that sparks the central question of this essay: “How is the art museum envisioned and deployed by colo‑ nial subjects, and how does it relate to their claims for self-rule?” She shows how for both museum founders an intellectual association with Gandhi as well as with other eminent figures of modern Indian thinking such as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy con‑ tributed to a quest for self-affirmation and individual action aiming towards national independence and based on what could be called an affirmative aesthetics of differ‑ ence:46 “An enduring legacy of this period […] was its insistence on the difference

46 For this concept as a driving force of multiple modernities, see Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz. Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert, 15  Fallstudien, Marburg: Jonas, 2010.

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from the western canon of art, thus turning difference into an aspiration of value.” However, Rai Krishnadas and Balasheb Pant Pratinidhi chose rather different ways to visualize this through their collections. We thus see two very different approaches in dialogue with the Western canon and its civilizational claims – yet both provide telling examples for museum collections anticipating independence against the back‑ ground of a colonial setting. Iro Katsaridou and Anastasia Kontogiorgi show us yet another variety of the inter‑ play between museum, canon, and nation-state, this time in a European-Mediterra‑ nean setting. Taking its cue from Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined com‑ munity,” their essay seeks to critically deconstruct the appropriation of the “iconic painter” Domenicos Theotocopoulos/El Greco for a national Greek identity – as a test case, the authors look particularly at the image-building politics of three exhibitions held at the National Gallery in Athens since the early 1990s. These exhibitions took place in cooperation with major art institutions such as the National Gallery in Wash‑ ington, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, and thus they were embedded into transnational cultural politics on a large scale. In fact, the figure of El Greco, a kind of Mediterranean migrant figure of the early modern period, escaping categorical national and, considering his unique style, also stylistic classification, may be particularly suited as a subject of such endeavors. Despite this, as the authors argue with a quite acute skepticism against the political instrumental‑ ization of art, the National Gallery in Athens confirmed (and possibly overstated) a narrative of El Greco as a “quintessential Greek painter.”47 It thus performed a polit‑ ical act of “repatriation” whose arguments actually reach back into the nineteenth century when Hellenism was promoted for identity building within the Greek nation’s quest for independence from the Ottoman Empire – a process deeply entangled with the agenda of Western nations at the time. As far as the interpretation of El Greco’s work is concerned, this national viewpoint included an emphasis on the painter’s Byzantism, or his origin from the island of Crete, whose particular landscape could be used as an explanation for his specific style. In this vein, the painter’s identity became literally rooted on Greek grounds, while his popularity within a global art canon allowed for contemporary Greek cultural politics and institutions to build a bridge to the aesthetic and ethical values of the larger Western world. Naomi Stead and her co‑authors take us to a very recent case of a modern art insti‑ tution’s function for geo-rhetoric image building. The subject of their essay is not the collection, but the architectural shell of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) located in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland. This museum was com‑ pleted in 2006 with the deliberate claim of being a cultural “flagship.” The genesis and operation of this institution as an instrument of “place branding” and “social engi‑

47 Quote from a New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman, adapted by the authors for their essay.



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neering” is described as an entanglement between aesthetic, ethical, and ultimately political-economic questions. On the surface, this seems a very contemporary issue: this museum seeks to reshape the present and future image of Queensland, as this part of Australia has until recently largely been understood as a peripheral subtropical region “not sufficiently intellectual, too conservative, too philistine.” The construction of the GoMA as an “iconic museum” intends to contribute to a presentable and progres‑ sive cultural profile and thus could be understood as an instrument of local self-affir‑ mation. The building’s architecture is designed as an open space, in fact a forum in correspondence with the surrounding urban structure and ecosystem – a civilizing place between nature and culture. Even more so, it is largely marketed and perceived as a climate-responsive architecture, deriving from principles and materials of vernacular local architecture. Yet, as the authors argue, this progressive and eco-oriented mission has its problematic flipside both from historical and contemporary perspectives: it overstates and reappropriates a notion of traditional climate-responsive Queensland architecture – a narrative whose origin can be traced back to colonial Victorian claims about the qualities of an architecture that would allow for the maintenance of cultural and civilizational standards against the demanding conditions of the North Australian climate. It thus resonates with a debate deeply entrenched in racist notions of civili‑ zational superiority over indigenous practices. Moreover, as Stead and her co‑authors argue further, this “subtropical” profile quite ostensibly orients the museum towards Asia – a move that provides a cultural backdrop for global economic aspirations. The debate around GoMA altogether offers a characteristic case study for the very contem‑ porary complexity of the museum as an institution between the local and the global.

Intermedialities, Shifting Images Most of the examples we have seen particularly in the last chapter could be described as empirical and/or institutional practices of art representation, yet always lined with or informed by political image-making. In this final chapter we seek to apply the aes‑ thetic eloquence of images to larger discourses through strategies of intermedial ref‑ erence. Chronologically, the case studies of this chapter are all roughly placed in the period since the second half of the twentieth century, which has not only seen major shifts and accelerations in visual techniques but also the contestation of the insti‑ tution of the museum in the most fundamental way. Looking at processes of visual translation between fine arts, photography, cinema, literature, and the virtual sphere, the following essays exemplify modern and contemporary images of art representa‑ tion between a sense of place and free floating pictorial data or between the increas‑ ingly indistinguishable realms of “high” culture and the means and media of its com‑ munication and popularization. Altogether, they finally confront us with the essential question of what actually constitutes a museum in and after the twentieth century.

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 Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Norbert Schmitz takes the museum in its classical sense as a “temple of the muses” and puts it into relation with the medium of film. This constellation provides a blueprint for questioning the very idea of the museum as a medium – a method‑ ologically challenging task, which, as Schmitz argues, requires contrasting “two dispositifs, each describing the conventions of society and the attitudes of expecta‑ tion that occur in the communicative process in both media.” These dispositifs are to no small extent characterized by notions of social space and decorum – this ques‑ tion thus again resonates with observations about civilizing rituals in the museum. Based on this premise, Schmitz is interested in how particularly classical entertain‑ ment cinema of the mid-twentieth century negotiates or responds to the image of the museum between a socially codified and a highly symbolic space. His prime example is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. A key scene of this film sets a wordless encoun‑ ter between the male and female protagonists at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Fran‑ cisco’s Marina District, a museum built in the early twentieth century in a monumen‑ tally imposing neo-classicist style. The film shows the museum – both outside and interior – as an auratic and sinister place, where the two protagonists are only con‑ nected through a carefully directed, unilateral gaze that expresses his passive desire. In this aestheticized setting, the ‘object’ on display seems rather the woman than the surrounding paintings – it thus revealingly hints at the idealizing, potentially alien‑ ating or even violent power of the museum as a distinct and difference-producing social space. The film clearly sets up a contrasting confrontation between everyday life and the realm of the museum, which thus becomes a space of alterity, maybe almost a non-lieu, but at the same time a clear-cut reference frame whose symbolism is even more evident when presented through modern mass media. In asking what the relevance of such a cinema studies observation might be for museology, Schmitz comes to the conclusion that “it is exactly the difference between high and popular art which remains not only irreversible, but also sensible and fruitful.” Harking back among others to Norbert Elias’s theories of civilization and the functions of habitus, Schmitz provocatively suggests that the notion of the “traditional museum as ideal‑ istic aesthetics turned to stone” remains not only unavoidable. Maybe it is even more productive as a dispositif than the increasing formal illegibility of seemingly self-crit‑ ical postmodern and contemporary museal image-making – which after all may only be another stage of elitist habitus formation. Walter Grasskamp speaks about some largely unknown aspects in the prehistory of a truly iconic position of modern art perception – one that is distinctly independent from the museum in its spatial sense, yet takes it explicitly as a conceptual reference system: The Musée Imaginaire by André Malraux. The essay looks at a particular part of the complex corpus of publications referred to under this title, namely a volume of Malraux’s trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, published in Paris in the early 1950s. Compared to the larger corpus of Malraux’s work, this book most consequently privileges the visual over the textual, combining a short text with five hundred image plates. This centrality of the visual is even more interesting if regarded



Images of the Art Museum 

 25

against the background of Malraux’s profile as an art theorist: Grasskamp shows us how, in dialogue with Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, it was Malraux who took the discourse on images and reproducibility beyond the topos of the loss of aura, as for him “photography might have taken the art work’s aura, but in return it received a medial ubiquity and therefore a universal importance never known before.” As such, a comparative use of photography corresponds to but also supersedes the canon-build‑ ing function of older media such as plaster casts. However, a central revelation of this essay is the crucial impact of two other, largely forgotten figures for the development of Malraux’s ideas. One of them is the German curator Alfred Salmony, with whom Malraux had been in touch as early as 1923, when Salmony explained the concept of a “comparative exhibition of art” to him by combining photographs of artworks, making him aware of “the possibilities photography provided for a strictly visual dis‑ course on art.” Furthermore, a direct source for photographs used by Malraux can be identified in André Vigneau’s progressive Encyclopédie Photographique de l’Art, with its first volume published in Paris in 1935. Grasskamp’s close reading of the Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale reveals how Malraux systematically adapted, but also altered a sizeable number of Vigneau’s images and also his typographic concepts for his own project, which – seizing the attractive visual metaphor of the “museum” rather than the papery notion of the “encyclopedia” – proved to be more successful and catchy in the long run. With Hubertus Kohle’s contribution we fast-forward to the age of the digital image. Interestingly, even this very contemporary issue takes its vantage point from the notion of the museum as a temple detached from the background noise of everyday life, which at first sight may be considered fundamentally opposed to the steady flow of digital information and communication. However, Kohle argues that holding onto this idealistic image of the museum today may run the risk of inducing institutional fatigue, and we should consider the possibilities of new media rather as a remedy than a threat, as they can be seized productively without automatically abolishing the museum’s fundamental function as a civilizational counterweight. The focus of his essay is on the Internet presence of museums and its impact on visitors. Two exam‑ ples from the – in this respect often avant-gardist – Anglosphere, the Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, illustrate how the museum as such is, so to speak, already a database, and the systematic mining of this data by means of standardized digitalization offers multiple possibilities for the combination of objects and information. A prime example in Germany is the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which embraces possibilities of digital media, yet without moving away from the tra‑ ditional educative purpose of the museum. Such initiatives bring practical benefits for internal processes in the museum, but they also have crucial impact on the outreach of the institution. Experiments with interactive practices such as social tagging or virtual ‘cloud curating’ reveal possibilities for creating individualized virtual ‘musées imaginaires’, based on but independent from the material and spatial restrictions of actual collections, created by or in dialogue with museum audiences. If applied on

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a more consequent, large scale in the future, these kinds of practices subsequently will change the roles of museum professionals and visitors and/or users. Ultimately, the use of new media also carries museum practice and art perception through and beyond the so‑called iconic turn as it contributes to an evolving relation to the visual and its communicative potential. The last essay by Zehra Tonbul and Koen Van Synghel actually takes us a bit beyond the realm of the art museum in its strict sense: to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. This title was chosen by the Turkish novelist both for one of his novels, published in 2008, and for an actual house museum in Istanbul. This museum corre‑ sponds on the one hand to the house of one of the novel’s fictional characters, while the collection – largely a carefully choreographed arrangement of everyday objects and commodities – relates to the collector personality of another protagonist, who is also Pamuk’s alter ego. The museum in turn is accompanied by another publica‑ tion in the form of a catalogue. The Museum of Innocence shows how the concept of the museum can serve as a representational umbrella that unites practices of literary narrative building, collecting, and material bricolage for an intellectual poetics. Alto‑ gether, it represents an intertextual fabric or – in a Benjaminian sense – a “textum” of interwoven references where word, object, and image are closely entangled. Tonbul and Van Synghel focus on the spatial order of the house museum. Its presentation mode merges a domestic interior space with display cabinets in a way that alludes to the presentation mode of the cabinet of curiosities. This contemporary resonance of the Wunderkammer links to the early modern origin of museum history. Yet, at the same time the arrangement of objects and ideas contests any teleological course of linear time and undermines taxonomic categories. Instead, “the museum develops as an extension of Pamuk’s subjectivity.” It thus becomes, as the authors of this essay argue, an “oneiric house” in the constructivist sense of Gaston Bachelard, tailored as a container for the “pride” and – on a Nietzschean note – the “innocence of becom‑ ing” of the individual. It is just this individualist standpoint that allows Pamuk to develop a universalist claim for a world society after the age of colonial and geopo‑ litical inequality, as a manifesto placed at the end of the catalogue shows: “The aim of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to recreate the world of single human beings – the same human beings who have laboured under ruthless oppressions for hundreds of years.”48 Privileging expression and recreation over static representation, Pamuk thus offers a piece of museum critique – and at the same time apparently trusts in the museum’s potential for renewal by placing it at the very core of his almost utopic poetics for an age of the individual.

48 Orhan Pamuk as quoted by Tonbul and Van Synghel: Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap, New York: Abrams, 2012, p. 141.



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 27

At this point, we have covered much ground between images of the “temple” and the “oneiric house”, between discursive cornerstones associated with museums ranging from “civilization” to “innocence.” While this collection of essays is of course far from offering a complete picture or linear history on its own part, all of these case studies together open a spectrum of methodological approaches to deal with the image of the art museum in its literal and figurative dimension. Our aim to include a variety of voices from different academic and institutional backgrounds helped to raise transnational and cross-cultural questions – both within many of the essays as well as through their combination. This book thus will contribute to a historiography of the art museum’s relation to its own image-making, representation, and perception, which takes us a decisive step further through and beyond postcolonial discourses: with a critical eye on the past, but at the same time looking towards the further devel‑ opment of images of the art museum beyond the “global turn.”

Museum Icons, Iconic Museums: (De-)Constructing the Body of Art

Martin Gaier

The Art of Civilization: Museum Enemies in the Nineteenth Century Obviously, by visiting an art museum and contemplating a heap of amazing altar pieces, none of us will deplore the painful odyssey of these paintings entering the museum, the loss of their wings or at least their eternal standstill, their alienation from any liturgical sense, or even the dispersion of single panels all over the art-lov‑ ing world. Museums are the temples where we hold our breath.1 If we had in mind all these things while passing a row of such splendid pieces of art, or if we were exposed to a nearly original situation which puts the beholder into an unfavorable position of dim light and poor visibility, wouldn’t we feel immediately an ebbing of pleasure? The art historian Carol Duncan called what happens inside public art museums “civilizing rituals.”2 Of course, she did not mean the civilization of the artworks standing here at the same level, in uniform and neutral good lighting, reduced in their statement to ‘art’. She meant the people who would have undergone a civilizing process in the art museum. But if we look at the barbaric act by which the museums in the nineteenth century got their things, we will not see these spaces as the best places for a strategy of civilization.3 However, the fact that few voices criticizing the genesis of museums remained in the twentieth century is a sufficient demonstration of their successful ‘civilizing strategy’: they offered to the works, wherever they came from, a new and sheltered home. Only sensitive natures like Paul Valéry perceived the amassment of artworks as a torture to their eyes.4 Maurice Blanchot, in his essay Le mal du musée of 1957, talked

1 Cf. Peter Bürger, Säle, bei deren Betreten man den Atem anhält, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (June 29, 2012), p. 59. The author referred to a decision of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz to move the Old Master paintings from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Only after the protest of more than 20,000 petition‑ ers on August 21, 2013 did the Stiftung announce that it had abandoned its plans. 2 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, 1995. 3 Cf. Martin Warnke, Geburt des Museums aus dem Bildersturm  – Distanz und Nähe historischer Kunst, in: Bazon Brock, Christian Bauer (eds.), Musealisierung als Zivilisationsstrategie. Arbeitsheft zum Symposium am 24. 11. ​2009 in der Temporären Kunsthalle auf dem Schlossplatz in Berlin, Wei‑ mar: VDG, 2009, pp. 86–89. 4 Paul Valéry, The Problem of Museums [1923], in: Jackson Mathews (ed.), The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 12: Degas, Monet, Morisot, New York: Pantheon Books, 1960, pp. 202–207.

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about his shocking psychophysical reactions – a sickness and dizziness face‑to-face with a large number of master works. And he concluded: “Surely there is something insuperably barbarous in the custom of museums. How did things come to this?”5

Between “aesthetic churches” and “castles of art” – Karl Hillebrand That question – How did things come to this? – was confronted already by Karl Hille­ brand, a German writer of cosmopolitan essays and correspondent to several inter‑ national newspapers, who settled in Florence in the 1870s. His pamphlet Zwölf Briefe eines ästhetischen Ketzer’s (Twelve letters of an aesthetic heretic), published anony‑ mously in 1874, was well received by all those conservatives who longed for a social and artistic renewal.6 What was ‘heretical’ in his twelve fictive letters was, firstly, his damnation of the aestheticism of art and, secondly, of the scientific revolution in the field of the arts over the last hundred years. He added to this, mainly, his condemna‑ tion of “the theories of Winckelmann and his followers, the French Revolution and its aftermath, museomania and the democratization of art.”7 In the end, this democra‑ tization was nothing other than what Blanchot called the “insuperably barbarous in the custom of museums.” The term heretic, however, had a specific meaning in the context of aesthetics: In 1797, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck had published a very influential book, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Effusions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk). They compared “the enjoyment of the nobler artworks to prayer,” suggesting that reception of art should be isolated from external, profane factors: Works of Art fit into the common stream of life as little as the thought of god. […] Picture galle‑ ries […] should be temples where we admire, in calm and silent humility and heartfelt, exalting solitude, the great artist […] and where we remain in long, uninterrupted contemplation of their works, warming ourselves in the sun of the most enchanting thoughts and emotions.8

5 Maurice Blanchot, Museum Sickness, in: Id., Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stan‑ ford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 41–49, p. 45 (Maurice Blanchot, Le mal du musée, in: Nouvelle Revue Francaise 5.52 (1957), pp. 687–696, p. 692). All translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own. 6 [Karl Hillebrand,] Zwölf Briefe eines ästhetischen Ketzer’s, Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1874 (repr. in: Id., Völker und Menschen, Strassburg: Trübner, 1914, pp. 323–397); Cf. Martin Gaier, Heinrich Ludwig und die ‘ästhetischen Ketzer’. Kulturpolitik, Kulturkritik und Wissenschaftsverständnis bei den DeutschRömern, Cologne: Böhlau, 2013, pp. 165–240. 7 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), p. 8. 8 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders [1797], ed. by Martin Bollacher, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005, p. 67; Cf. Bernd Auerochs, Die Ent-



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It was against this romantic vision of an ‘aesthetic church’ with the artist as divine priest that the ‘aesthetic heretics’ antagonized. They shared the opinion that a work of art remained alive only in the ‘common stream of life’, and that images remained silent and lonely in an atmosphere of humility and solitude. The other function of the art museum, however, as the new educational institu‑ tion, also raised Hillebrand’s objections. The Humboldtian concept of a guided edu‑ cation in taste had been marginalized by the burgeoning field of art history. Now it was about the acquisition of a teleological evolution of art. In an essay in 1865, the art historian Herman Grimm, for instance, described elbowing his way through a large crowd in the halls of the Berlin Old and New Museum: “Both buildings together, with the originals here and the copies over there, virtually form a castle of art (eine Kunst­ burg). If you are able to conquer it spiritually you will receive immense treasures.”9 What was now important was to mark a distinction in the face of the crowd of Bildungsbürger and he could reveal it on the location with his expert’s eye – the knowl‑ edge that he already had conquered his ‘castle of art’: “In an hour the expert will slide with his eyes over the development of the entire visual arts.”10 Hillebrand had such a bad experience with these gliding eyes at the Vienna ​​ the reason for his booklet. Some artists World Exhibition in 1873 that he made them called his attention to the problem, especially the young sculptor Adolf Hildebrand whose works were displayed not at the exhibition hall but far away from the hustle, in the Austrian Museum for Arts and Crafts. Hillebrand, who demonized the cele‑ brated Tribuna of the Uffizi as the origin of this decadence, distinguished the most important issue in the contexts of creation and destination of an artwork. He wrote that the “barbaric act” of the so‑called “temples of art” was revealed fully in the new context in which the images were brought here, either in a jumble of genres or – worse – according to art-historical methodology: “The gallery is like a chrono‑ logical table, a map, a systematic hand book – you almost would prefer the alphabet‑ ical order of a dictionary.”11 What Hillebrand looked for in a gallery, that is “atmosphere”12 (Stimmung), he couldn’t find anywhere:

stehung der Kunstreligion, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck  & Ruprecht, 2006; Annette Gilbert, ‘Die ästhe‑ tische Kirche’. Zur Entstehung des Museums am Schnittpunkt von Kunstautonomie und ‑religion, in: Athenäum. Jahrbuch der Friedrich Schlegel-Gesellschaft 19 (2009), pp. 45–85. 9 Herman Grimm, Peter von Cornelius, in: Id., Neue Essays über Kunst und Literatur, Berlin: Dümmler, 1865, pp. 70–104, p. 70. 10 Ibid. 11 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), pp. 29–30. 12 Ibid., p. 30.

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 Martin Gaier

Hang a picture of second or third rate, which we pass in the museum with indifferent and satura‑ ted eyes, in an isolated niche or in a study ‑ we will enjoy it better than a Rafael, surrounded by hundreds of satellites, each vying for our attention, and what’s more, each of which has a right to vie for our attention.13

Hillebrand sharpened his skepticism of museums in dealing with like-minded members of his ‘sect’, among them artists who, like him, lived in Italian exile, for example Heinrich Ludwig, Hans von Marées, or Adolf Hildebrand but also private scholars like Theodor Heyse, Conrad Fiedler, or Adolph Bayersdorfer. Some of them pursued nothing less than an idealistic art and social reform fol‑ lowing Schiller and Humboldt. According to Ludwig, the order of the day was not the best enjoyment of a work of art through its optimal presentation but “that the visual arts and their care would have a high impact on the health of the mind and on the civilization of man.”14 He was convinced that the idea of the original function of an artwork declined as a result of the “art-philological disease” called by him “scientific museomania” (wissenschaftliche Museomanie). Only works displayed in public space could really have a civilizing impact.15 Hillebrand also wrote in one of his ‘heretical letters’ against the removal of artworks from the flow of daily life: But if you want to do something for the ‘people’: put your artworks out into public space, such as Giovanni Bologna’s Sabine Woman or Michelangelo’s David – today they carry him away as well, to bury him under the pretext that he had become too delicate! It may be that the daily glance of the passing popolano will linger on the beautiful shapes, sucking their contours and making them his own, without having noticed it really. But don’t put them in art prisons that look more similar to railway stations than to palaces and that the ‘people’ never will enjoy.16

The extent of the effect of these discussions on the German museum reform of the 1890’s cannot be discussed here. But Wilhelm Bode’s well-studied concept of style and period rooms, with which he sought a painterly, recontextualizing arrangement of art, was a direct result of these attacks on Museomania and the so‑called democ‑ ratization of art.17

13 Ibid., p. 31. 14 Heinrich Ludwig, Über Erziehung zur Kunstübung und zum Kunstgenuss [1874], (Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 78), Strasbourg: Heitz, 1907, p. 49. 15 Ibid., p. 69. 16 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), p. 33. 17 For further discussion see Gaier 2013 (as in note 6), pp. 223–231. On the reform: Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums, 1880–1940, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001.



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Roots of Museum Enmity – Quatremère de Quincy In the expanding history of museums, only a few studies are concerned with con‑ temporary voices that criticize the museum.18 Their opinions are too strange to our thought: It is not the museum where the artwork accomplishes its autonomy and freedom; here the artwork loses its autonomy by being placed with other works that are largely irrelevant to it. Instead of an eternal and timeless life of the work of art as we see it today, the museum heretics wanted to look at the artwork as a part of their own lives. To our knowledge an artifact in the museum represents – pars pro toto – the significance of a whole culture. In the opinion of the ‘aesthetic heretics’ separating it from the body of culture the artwork is losing his power and significance. There is strong evidence that Hillebrand’s letters are the direct offshoot of Antoine Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters to Miranda.19 Quatremère was one of the first who accused the widespread looting of art during the French Revolution and the following assemblage of thousands of objects in an universal museum of being a cultural disas‑ ter, and he could be called the founder of museum enmity. His seven fictive letters to General Miranda on the removal of art monuments from Italy were published in summer 1796 in Paris and appeared, still in the same year and slightly shortened, in German in the widely read Hamburg journal Minerva.20 These letters were a highlight in the published attacks on the lootings of the French troops in Italy following the spring of 1796.21 Carl Ludwig Fernow corre‑ sponded from Rome beginning in May. In the August issue, inspired by Quatremère, the editor of the Minerva Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz wrote seven sorrowful

18 Cf. Francis Haskell, Museums and Their Enemies, in: Journal of Aesthetic Education 19/2 (1985), pp. 13–22; David Carrier, Museum Skepticism. A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006, pp. 51–73; James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 140–145; Joachimides 2001 (as in note 17), pp. 62–64. For further bibliography, see: Gaier 2013 (as in note 6), p. 222, note 332. 19 Cf. Gaier 2013 (as in note 6), p. 170, p. 223, p. 231. 20 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres à Miranda sur le déplacement des monuments de l’Art de l’Italie [1796]. Introduction et notes par Édouard Pommier, Paris: Macula, 1989. See now the English edition in: Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, introduction by Dominique Poulet, trans. by Chris Miller and David Gilks, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012, pp. 93–123. For a German edition of letter 1–6 (Minerva. Ein Journal historischen und politischen Inhalts, ed. By Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, 20/4 (1796), pp. 87–120, p. 271–309) see: Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Ueber den nachtheiligen Einfluss der Versetzung der Monumente aus Italien auf Künste und Wissenschaften. Mit einer Einführung von Édouard Pommier, Stendal: Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 1998, pp. 7–33. 21 Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub: Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Folgen, Vienna: Böhlau, 2011, pp. 205–206.

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pages titled Ueber die Verpflanzung großer Kunstwerke aus Italien nach Frankreich.22 The sixty-nine pages by the Frenchman, however, full of invective against art looters and general considerations on the question of ‘Who owned the art?’, raised the dis‑ cussion to a new level and had an impact on it over a year. Quatremère opposed, like Hillebrand later on, the democratization of art, when he warned about the “ignorant friends” for whom “the models of art are often nothing but objects of curiosity.”23 And he also argues against the extradition of the artworks to “large stockpiles of models of art.”24 But he is less concerned with the original purpose of the artworks, the problematic competition between them, or the satura‑ tion or even indifference of the eye than with the so‑called ‘visible history of art’, arranged in the Louvre by Vivant Denon in a very comprehensive manner which fas‑ cinated so many visitors although they condemned the Napoleonic art theft.25 This ‘visible history of art’ is, according to Quatremère, anemic and powerless, because the transplanted works of art are downgraded to historical objects and deprived of their original power. For the German classicists, however, it was no obstacle to accept a resurrection of art at a different location. The same Carl Ludwig Fernow who condemned harshly the looting of Italy wrote to a friend in August 1796: Would the more prudential, who discovers life even in death, not be hopeful that art one day will rise again to life on the Seine and there will flourish even more than in Rome, one would have to fall into despair about this desecration of Rome. […] However, we hear extraordinarily good things about the facilities that are made in France for the housing of the Arts.26

Quatremère, in contrast, developed in his letters a theory of cultural heritage, writing that the preservation of the original context is crucial for the cultural and aesthetic force of the works.27 It was shown that this theory, through Quatremère’s friendship with Antonio Canova, had significant influence on the development of the Italian Monument Protection Act of 1802.28 But we should read this theory especially against

22 Minerva (as in note 20), 20/3 (1796), pp. 201–208. Cf. Savoy 2011 (as in note 21), p. 205; on Fernow ibid., pp. 202–205. 23 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 106 (Fourth Letter) and p. 115 (Sixth Letter). 24 Ibid., p. 110 (Fifth Letter). 25 Cf. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 26 Carl Ludwig Fernow, Römische Briefe an Johann Pohrt 1793–1798, ed. Herbert von Einem, Rudolf Pohrt, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1944, pp. 133–134 (22 August 1796). 27 Cf. Édouard Pommier, Die Revolution in Frankreich und das Schicksal der antiken Kunstwerke, in: Quatremère de Quincy 1998 (as in note 20), pp. 41–99; Dominique Poulot, The Cosmopolitanism of Masterpieces, in: Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), pp. 1–91. 28 Antonio Pinelli, Storia dell’arte e cultura della tutela. Le “Lettres à Miranda” di Quatremère de Quincy, in: Ricerche di storia dell’arte 8 (1979), pp. 43–62.



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the backdrop of the Napoleonic justification for art theft. The main argument of the looters was that the revolution freed the works of art of all bonds – religious and polit‑ ical bonds – and transferred them to a universally accessible temple of the liberal arts. They would also be liberated from the danger of being scattered to the four winds. This argument fell on particularly fertile ground abroad. Fernow was among those who espoused the convenience of the modern museum. Indeed, his report of November  1797 still bore the ambiguous title Italisches Ausleerungsgeschäfft (Italian depletion affair).29 But the art lover in him already exulted “that the many large church paintings, which formerly in dark churches were nearly invisible, now may be situated in France so that we can easily look at them.”30 Quatremère’s strongest argument, however, was his prophetic vision of the museum as a shrine for relics on the one hand and for merchandise on the other.31 He presages nations “treating these paradigms of beauty like so many bundles of goods”32 that are “seen as jewels or diamonds that we enjoy merely for their monetary value.”33 And he adds: “All collections want a Raphael, whether real or fake, just as every church once sought a piece of the True Cross. Unfortunately, the power of the whole is not transmitted – as it is with a relic – to each isolated fragment of a school of painting.”34 Instead, he is convinced that “the power of the whole” would be preserved only in Rome or Italy, with the city or country serving as a kind of ‘universal museum’: You are too well informed to doubt that the surest means of destroying and killing a science is to disperse its elements and materials. If this is true, the decomposition of the museum of Rome would mean the death of all the forms of knowledge whose source is that museum’s unity.35

Beside the metaphor of Italy as a “general museum,”36 Quatremère also writes in his letters of the dismemberment or mutilation of the ‘body of art’. In his third letter he writes: It is a colossus from which limbs could be broken off and their fragments carried away, but its mass is one with the soil like the great Sphinx of Memphis. Attempting a partial transfer of this sort would be nothing short of a mutilation and as shaming as it would be fruitless to its perpet‑ rators.37

29 Carl Ludwig Fernow, Italisches Ausleerungsgeschäfft, in: Der neue Teutsche Merkur 1 (1798), pp. 129–144. 30 Ibid., p. 131. 31 Cf. Pommier 1998 (as in note 27), pp. 65–66. 32 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 109 (Fifth Letter). 33 Ibid., p. 111 (Fifth Letter). 34 Ibid., p. 112 (Sixth Letter). 35 Ibid., p. 100 (Third Letter). 36 Ibid., p. 97 (Second Letter). See also p. 104 (Third Letter) and p. 108 (Fourth Letter). 37 Ibid., p. 101 (Third Letter).

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 Martin Gaier

Two years later, Johann Wolfgang Goethe – obviously aware of Quatremère’s view‑ point – wrote his famous Einleitung in die ‘Propyläen’. Here, he voted for a conve‑ nient inspection of the work of art instead of its close links to a certain location. Of course, Goethe conceded that all these “Dislokationen” were deplorable. But now he was not so much interested in the old “body of art” (Kunstkörper) than in the new one. And he wrote that it pleased him even more “in these times of distraction and loss” to concentrate on an “ideal body of art.”38 The removal of the artworks “from their sacred places” meant to Goethe that art had to be found in a decidedly aesthetic and imaginary place instead of a religious one, “um dem Geschmack zu erstatten, was der Frömmigkeit entrissen war” (“to restitute to the taste what was taken from the piety”).39

Taming the Body of Art Thus the road to the modern museum as an ‘aesthetic church’ was founded. Friedrich Schlegel, in his News from the paintings in Paris of 1803, didn’t hesitate to criticize the Louvre as an “old, shapeless, and sad house” which was constructed “for despots without genius and education” and “not as a temple for the finest of the visual arts.”40 But, like Goethe, he reversed Quatremère’s metaphors of dismemberment into a kind of taming of the body of art: All artworks of one genre belong together, and they best explain themselves to each other. But how far dispersed are the members of this divine body? – Maybe not one person can vaunt that he has even seen everything important. And if there were one who had really seen all of it here and there, how could he put it together in clear and vivid presence in his mind?41

38 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Einleitung in die ‘Propyläen’, in: Id., Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed. Friedmar Apel (Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 18), Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998, pp. 457–475, p. 475. 39 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ueber Kunst und Alterthum in den Rhein und Mayn Gegenden. Erstes Heft, 1816, in: Id., Ästhetische Schriften 1816–1820, ed. Hendrik Birus (Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 20), Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999, pp. 12–99, p. 19; Cf. Helmut J. Schneider, Rom als klassischer Kunstkörper. Zu einer Figur der Antikewahrnehmung von Winckelmann bis Goethe, in: Paolo Chiarini, Walter Hinderer (eds.), Rom  – Europa. Treffpunkt der Kulturen. 1780–1820, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006, pp. 15–28, pp. 27–28; Johannes Grave, Der “ideale Kunstkörper”. Johann Wolfgang Goethe als Sammler von Druckgraphiken und Zeichnungen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, p. 405, interprets Goethe’s “ideal body of art” as his collection of reproductions. 40 Friedrich Schlegel, Nachricht von den Gemählden in Paris, in: Europ. 1 (1803), pp. 108–157, p. 108. 41 Ibid., p. 112.



The Art of Civilization 

 39

And he concludes: “Each new exhibition and compilation of old paintings creates a body of its own where several things will appear to the art lover in a new light, which he had not yet seen so clearly.”42 Quatremère, on the other hand, used the body metaphor to connote far more than just the idea of the ideal, imaginary whole and its parts, and also far more than just the pleasure of seeing the works in one place. It is, as he explains in his powerfully eloquent seventh and last Letter to Miranda,43 especially the loss of the absorbing, provocative, rousing but also civilizing power of artworks that accompanies their decontextualization and dismemberment. With a visionary glance at the eclectic his‑ toricism, Quatremère here declares: […] that any study confined to these kinds of comparison also tends to neutralize taste, fuse cha‑ racter, and produce mixed genres, bastardized mannerisms, and styles without physiognomy; […] that the diverse schools are only different dialects of the same pictorial language, whose spirit, accent, and nuance can only be acquired through habitual frequentation of that region. […] that to fragment teaching, mutilate collections, and split up the galleries of Rome and Italy is to disperse rather than propagate enlightenment, to carve up education rather than broaden and extend it; it is not to transplant but to exile instruction; it is to cut off the branches of the tree rather than foster its groth; it is not, as some think, to disseminate the sources of life but, as in Egypt, to bury the limbs of [Osiris] in as many tombs as there are towns.44

What Quatremère meant with the last suggestion was the necessity of maintaining the integrity of the body of art in order to maintain its forces. Seth, after murdering Osiris, dismembered and buried his limbs at various locations in order to destroy his power. In 1815, when Quatremère again published a moral essay on these problems, it seems that no one really listened to him anymore.45 This was the year of the Treaty of Paris, which included the restitution of artworks that had been pillaged by France, and in many places officials had already begun to establish public art museums according to the model of the Louvre. But Quatremère again insists on the original meaning of the word ‘museum’ – home of the Muses – and on his opinion that art‑ works couldn’t be removed from that home without the loss of their greatest qualities. In this spirit, he reproached his fictive dialog partner:

42 Ibid., pp. 111–112. For Schlegel’s concept of Kunstkörper cf. Hubert Locher, “Construction des Ganzen.” Friedrich Schlegels kritische Gänge durch das Museum, in: Johannes Grave, Hubert Locher, Reinhard Wegner (eds.), Der Körper der Kunst. Konstruktionen der Totalität im Kunstdiskurs um 1800, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007, pp. 99–131. 43 Interestingly, this letter was eliminated by Archenholz, the editor of Minerva, from his German edition. 44 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 118 (Seventh Letter), with note 40 on p. 123. 45 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art […], Paris: Crapelet, 1815.

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Come on, don’t say that the works of art in these depots remain what they were. Yes, you have transported them there materially, but did their convoy also retain the delicate, deep, melan‑ cholic, sublime, and touching feelings that surrounded them? Were you able to transfer to your magazines the ensemble of ideas and references that emanated such a lively interest from within these paintings and sculptures? All these objects have lost their effect with the loss of their motive.46

Whether we love to get lost in contemplation or in the crowd – even two hundred years later this fundamental criticism of the museum as an institution hasn’t lost its relevance.

46 Ibid., pp. 56–57.

Lynn Catterson

Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style: From the Gallery of a Dealer to the Institutional Canon Paul Delaroche was the first painter whose œuvre was represented photographically in a catalogue raisonné. At the time, in 1857, contemporary sentiment regarded this enterprise as one that, in effect, preserved the original works and in doing so monu‑ mentalized them.1 Barely a decade later, the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini would take full advantage of the medium of photography on many levels over his lifetime career as perhaps the most prolific dealer of art and decorative arts in Italy from the mid-1860s until his death in 1922. Just around the turn of the century, the desire on the part of wealthy American and European collectors for Italian Renaissance art was enormous. Operating out of Flor‑ ence for more than fifty years, the dealer Stefano Bardini succeeded in matching that demand by stocking collections with ample quantities of supply.2 Moreover, Bardini

This essay is a redacted and then further developed version of my paper given at the conference. I am most grateful to Dr. Melania Savino and Dr. Eva-Maria Troelenberg for the opportunity to participate in such a rewarding conference. 1 Wolfgang M. Freitag, Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art, in: Art Journal 39.2 (Win‑ ter 1979–1980), pp. 117–123; see also, Geraldine A. Johnson, ‘(Un)richtige Aufnahme’. Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History, in: Art History 36.1, (February 2013), pp. 12–51; Heinrich Wölfflin, Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll, in: Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, part 1, n. 7 (1896), pp. 224–228 / part 2, n. 8 (1897), pp. 294–297 / part 3, n. 26 (1914), pp. 237–244; for an English translation, see Geraldine Johnson, [Heinrich Wölfflin], How One Should Photograph Sculpture, in: Art History 36.1 (2012), pp. 52–71. Anthony Hamber, The Use of Photography by Nineteenth Century Art Historians, in: Visual Resources. An International Journal of Documentation 7.2–3 (1990), pp. 135–161; Anthony Hamber, The Photography of the Visual Arts, 1839–1880: Part I, in: Visual Resources. An International Journal of Documentation 5.4 (1989), pp. 289–310; Part II, in: Visual Resources. An International Journal of Documentation 6.1 (1989), pp. 19–41; “Part III”, VR 6.2 (1989), pp. 165–179. 2 For Bardini, see Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Mario Scalini (eds.), I tesori di un antiquario. Galleria di Palazzo Mozzi-Bardini, Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali, Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici e Storici per le Province di Firenze, Pistoia e Prato, Livorno: Sillabe, 1998; Alberto Bruschi, Stefano Bardini. si scopron le tombe, si levano I morti, Florence: SP 44 Editore, 1992; Gabriella Capecchi (ed.), Arte greca, etrusca, romana (L’Archivio storico fotografico di Stefano Bardini), Florence: A. Bruschi, 1993; Valerie Niemeyer Chini (ed.), Stefano Bardini e Wilhelm Bode: mercanti e connoisseur fra Ottocento e Novecento, Florence: Polistampa, 2009; Christina De Benedictis and Fiorenza Scalia, Il Museo Bardini a Firenze. Le pitture, Florence, Museo Bardini exhibition catalogue, Milan. 1984; Lucia Faedo and Enrica Neri Lusanna, Il Museo Bardini a Firenze. Le sculture, Florence, Museo Bardini exhibition catalogue, Milan. 1986; Everett Fahy (ed.), Dipinti, disegni, miniature e stampe, in L’archivio storico fotografico di Stefano Bardini, Florence: Alberto Bruschi editore, 2000; Fiorenza Scalia, Il carteggio in‑ edito di Stefano Bardini, in: Giovanna Damiani and Anna Laghi (eds.), San Niccolò Oltrarno, la chiesa,

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deftly cultivated a taste for certain kinds of objects that have since moved into public view in museums around the world. These objects represent the Italian Renaissance for much of Europe and America, and, figuratively speaking, Bardini built the bridge upon which this culture crossed the Alps as well as the Atlantic. Bardini would virtu‑ ally stock some foreign museums, such as the Bode Museum and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as royal galleries, such as those of the Princes of Liechtenstein. Bardini was no less active when it came to dealing with private individuals in practically every major European city, and several in America. His conceptualization of the showroom as a “house-museum” was so successful that Bardini objects, and perhaps even more, the “look” of their display, were in great demand by wealthy collectors such as the Jacquemart-André in Paris and Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. Other American clients included Quincy Adams Shaw, Herbert M. Sears, Charles Foulke, W. K. Vanderbilt, and Charles Yerkes, as well as museum directors, such as Henry Marquand, during his tenure at the Met‑ ropolitan Museum in the 1890s. Bardini also had extensive dealings with American agents and middlemen, including the architects Stanford White and Charles McKim. For these kinds of clients, in addition to objects of fine and decorative art, Bardini transacted architectural components by the crate-load, destined for newly built man‑ sions in America. Transported, along with the pieces, was a coherent rationale for their display. Often, the relationship between Bardini and objects in American collections was complicated, as in the dealings among Bardini, Wilhelm Bode, and George Durlacher, with objects going en masse first to Pierpont Morgan, and then to Henry Clay Frick. In other cases, there was a more protracted genealogy of descent. For example, among the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum are paintings that passed from Bardini, through Paris, and then to Philip Lehman; others went from Durlacher to George Blu‑ menthal, although they probably were initially put into marketplace circulation by Bardini. Even more subtle are the relationships between Bardini and persons in the category of “third party,” such as, for example, the case of the expatriate sculptor from Philadelphia, A. E. Harnisch who mediated the sale of Veronese’s Boy with a Greyhound (MMA inv. 29.100.105) to Louisine Havemeyer. Bardini created Renaissance style residences and showrooms stocked with his inventory, inducing wealthy for‑ eigners to shop, acquire, collect, and return home to install and display their objects of desire. In doing so, he supplied a particular brand of Italian Renaissance to the rest of Europe, and most especially to America. As such, Bardini not only shaped taste but also actively participated in the formation of the canon of Italian art in practically all of the major collections outside of Italy formed after 1860. Following his death in 1922,

una famiglia di antiquari, Florence: Assessorato alla Cultura, 1982, pp. 199–208; Roberto Viale, Alcune considerazioni su Stefano Bardini ed i suoi allestimenti, in: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, classe di lettere e filosofia ser. 4, v. 6, 2 (2001), pp. 301–320.



Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style 

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his son Ugo continued the business in the tradition of his father until his own death in 1965. This ensured that Bardini brand objects maintained their art market presence well into the twentieth century. The development of the medium of photography as a technology, the career of Bardini as a dealer, and the global expansion of the art market outside of Italy were cotemporaneous. A collision of these particular factors effectively produced and cod‑ ified what would become the standard for scholarship – and no less the canon – for Italian Renaissance art, especially sculpture, in collections outside of Italy. If one were to ponder this theoretically, there is no escaping the condition of meta-ness of the increasing levels of reproductivity in the developing technologies of photography, the dealing practices of Bardini and the proliferation of sibling objects on the global art market. Bardini’s training as an artist at the Accademia di Belle Arti during the years of Italian unification coalesced to define for him a particular brand of Italian art that he marketed to collectors. Broadly speaking the Italian artistic community as embod‑ ied by the Macchiaioli closely identified with and participated in the Risorgimento. As such, current political events inevitably inspired particular choices for academic history painting. Early in the Risorgimento, the artists as political beings identified with Republican Florence and historical figures such as Savonarola and Machiavelli, while, later, the younger generation, Bardini among them, was drawn to the Florence in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He and others drew upon historic themes from late fifteenth-century Medicean Florence to express anxiety about the potential perils of Garibaldi’s last campaign, for which Bardini volunteered to serve. 3 Ultimately, the appointment of Florence as capital of the new state only served to heighten the cul‑ tural appropriation of a very specific glorious past time – the golden age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. At the same time, contemporary production of arts, decorative arts, and architectural motifs embraced a neo-Renaissance style. Likewise, fifteenth-cen‑ tury Medicean artists such as Donatello, Verrocchio, Luca della Robbia, and Mino da Fiesole enjoyed a local revival, and this had a complex impact on the art market. And perhaps the common ground where contemporary production would meet the old masterworks was in the practice of a certain kind of restoration and, no less, fabrica‑ tion. Dealers like Bardini built palace showrooms decorated in this particular brand of Medicean Renaissance style.4 Lorenzo the Magnificent himself would likely have been comfortable in Bardini’s palace with its internal courtyards, coffered wood ceilings, fabulous collection of antique carpets, quite the quantity of arms and armor, and of

3 For the political-artistic situation, see Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento. Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 4 One hesitates to qualify something as the “first,” but it appears that Bardini’s showrooms were perhaps the most ambitious, if not the earliest, of this type.

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course a healthy dose of stemme. Bardini’s installation of the many rooms was vicar‑ iously didactic, with objects from antiquity through the Baroque. Yet, far and away, the preponderance of them harken back to late fifteenth-century Florence. Moreover, Bardini’s rubric of display is insistently evocative of the structure and rubric of fif‑ teenth-century Florentine inventories, such as that made for Palazzo Medici in 1492 for Lorenzo il Magnifico. This type of taxonomic structuring, that is, room by room and with the particular placements of objects in the rooms, is, in many ways, reborn in the rich visual materiality of Bardini’s displays. Thus, their success may owe some‑ thing to traditions that ran deep in the culture of commodities, notwithstanding the obvious relationship to the ancient practice of loci, the memory palace. Based on my broad preliminary assessment of the Bardini archive (Archivio Storico Eredità Bardini),5 it can be postulated that Bardini branded and marketed certain kinds of objects, which, for the most part, met four kinds of criteria: 1) the objects evoked the golden age of Lorenzo the Magnificent de’ Medici, 2) they were very high quality and thus had tremendous appeal to connoisseurs, 3) they were either small or lightweight, that is, cost effective to export, and 4) they could be reproduced well in a photograph. Bardini flooded the market with his brand of objects, but under‑ lying this was a very particular strategy that included their publication in some of the earliest, illustrated and most authoritative art history books and journals. In doing so, Bardini effectively codified an aura of authenticity that was rooted in the authority of the printed text as the emerging mainstay of the evolving international academic discourse. This was, in turn, a successful marketing strategy for it stimulated demand for more of his “product.”

5 Due to a massively complicated bequest, there are two primary archival Florentine repositories of material concerning Stefano Bardini, his family, and his business of transacting art. One group, rep‑ resenting a small percentage of the entirety of extant material, is located in the archive of the Museo Stefano Bardini, which is under the jurisdiction of the Comune of Florence (Musei Civici Fiorentini: Comune di Firenze Direzione Cultura). This archive has been processed and it represents material largely confined to the decade from 1905 to 1915. The other repository is in the custodianship of the state, under the direction of Dott.sa Marilena Tamassia; it is now known as ASEB (Archivio Storico Eredità Bardini) and AFEB (Archivio Fotografico Eredità Bardini) and located in the offices of the So‑ printendente Polo Museale Toscano, Florence. It is this state archive that has occupied my attention thus far. A recent broad assessment of the archive of Stefano Bardini emphatically underscores the need for a comprehensive digital humanities project on a shared collaborative platform. The scope of this project is vast, thus in the interim only discreet and tentative findings are suited for publication. The first work on this project was done during a Kress fellowship and Leon Levy fellowship both at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection and the Frick Art Reference Library. Continued support has come from the American Philosophical Society. My gratitude is beyond im‑ mense. This project would otherwise be nowhere were it not for the generosity and kindness of Dott. sa Tamassia for continued access to the material, and also to Stefano Tasselli for his magical powers and his deep insights into the world of Stefano Bardini.



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A close examination of Bardini’s transactional strategies suggests that he pur‑ posely marketed multiple versions of the same object with the expectation that they would eventually become the published comparanda for each other. It was on account of these manoeuvrings that in due course Bardini objects came to be – and continue to be – the benchmarks for style for Italian Renaissance art in collections outside of Italy. As such, Bardini contributed in no small way to the formation of a canon that was documented, for the first time, by the accompaniment of published photographs. The evidence of the Bardini archive indicates that early in his career he retained photographs of objects that he acquired for his inventory. Initially, it seems that Bardini kept the photographs attached to the corresponding correspondence, although at some point in the more recent past these photographs were disassoci‑ ated from their written counterparts. The quality of representation in a few early rare survivors, probably dating to the late 1860s, clearly demonstrates the challenges of the relatively new medium of photography. A photograph of a relief of the Madonna and Child, now in the Washington National Gallery, was shot sharply from below and left with focused artificial lighting evidently in order to best capture the face of the Madonna (figs. 1, 2).6 A comparison of the photograph to the present relief is telling

6 Archivio Fotografico Eredità Bardini, hereafter referred to as AFEB. I wish to thank Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture, Washington National Gallery of Art, for the ongoing conversation about this relief. Attributed to an anonymous artist in the style of Agostino di Duccio, Madonna and Child, 1460s or later, marble, overall: 72 × 57.3 cm (28 3/8 × 22 9/16 in.); framed: 117.3 × 86.7 × 6.7 cm (46 3/16 × 34 1/8 × 2 5/8 in.); Washington National Gallery, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, inv. 1937.1.116. The provenance as given by Washington National Gallery is as follows: “Godefroy Brauer [1857–1923], Paris and Nice;[1] purchased 1907 by J. P. Morgan [1837–1913], New York, until at least 1923;[2] (M. Knoedler & Co., New York); purchased January 1935 by Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh and Washing‑ ton, DC;[3] deeded 1 May 1937 to The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1937 to NGA. [1] Belle de Costa Greene of the J. P. Morgan Gallery states in a letter dated 22 January 1940 that Morgan bought the work from “G. Brauer,” most likely the dealer and collector Godefroy Brauer. [2] Provenance prior to Andrew Mellon is according to a letter from the Pierpont Morgan Library, in NGA curatorial records, which indicates the work may have come from the Hainauer Collection. From 1907–1916 the work was on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as indicated in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art II (1907), p. 142. A letter dated 22 January 1948 from M. Knoedler & Com‑ pany, in NGA curatorial files, states that in 1916 the work was relocated to the Morgan Library. Morgan lent the sculpture to The Metropolitan Loan Exhibition of Arts in the Italian Renaissance in 1923. [3] The 1940 letter (see n. 1) states that Morgan sold the work to Mellon through Knoedler & Company.” (http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.123.html) (accessed 1 July 2014) Oddly enough, a very similar object also depicting the Madonna and Child was listed for sale by So‑ theby’s New York (26 January 2012 H0046-L26263561). Lot 327: “Property of Aurora Trust, An Italian Marble Relief of the Madonna and Child, after a composition by the Master of the Piccolomini Ma‑ donna, 19C.; overall: 48 by 31 in.; 121.9 by 78.7 cm sight size of marble: 23 3/4 by 16 in. 60.3 by 40.6 cm Collection Pannwitz.” Additional provenance information is given, “Provenance Musatti [medi‑ cal doctor Cesare Musatti?], Florence; Walter and Catalina von Pannwitz, Berlin and Heemstede, ac‑

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Fig. 1: Albumin print of Madonna and Child, which is currently in the Washington National Gallery, Florence, AFEB.

Fig. 2: Anonymous artist in the style of Agostino di Duccio, Madonna and Child, 1460s or later. Marble. Washington National Gallery, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, inv. 1937.1.116.

of the degree to which objects were subjected to modifications at various points in their transactional history. The crowns of both figures and the necklace of the Madonna have been removed. The upper edge band at the very top of the relief was either an old repair that was removed, or the relief was trimmed afresh. A different frame was added in order to follow the contours of the silhouette of the Madonna’s halo. A plaster cast copy of this relief, currently in the Bardini deposito, conforms with the marble as it exists today, suggesting that Bardini was responsible for the

quired from the above in 1911.” Far exceeding its estimate of USD 8,000 to 12,000, the hammer price with buyer’s premium was USD 59,375. (http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.pdf. N08825.html/f/327/N08825-327.pdf) (accessed 1 July 2014) Before reaching Sotheby’s, the relief was in the inventory of the gallery Botticelli, Via Maggio 39r, Florence. At the very least, it should be noted that Pannwitz was a client of Bardini’s. (http://www. botticelliantichita.com/) (accessed 1 July 2014) (http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/important-old-master-paintings-n08825/ lot.327.html) (accessed 1 July 2014) See also John Pope-Hennessey, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, vol. 1, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964, pp. 262–263, the relief as no. vi of the Master of the Piccolomini Madonnas.



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“restoration,” which removed the upper portion band around the Madonna’s halo. Another archive photograph records its present frame, therefore making it seem likely that Bardini was also responsible for the [nineteenth-century] frame. According to the provenance information in the Washington National Gallery object file, the relief was purchased in 1907 by J. P. Morgan from Godefroy Brauer of Paris and Nice. Indeed, documents in the archive of The Morgan Library attest to the transaction. A note dated 6 April 1907 and signed “G. Brauer, 15 Lungo il Mugnone [Florence]” itemizes the relief as by Agostino di Duccio, with a value of nine thousand pounds.7 Further digging in the Bardini archive reveals nothing in particular about this object, but a letter con‑ firms that Brauer was working with Bardini. Already, almost twenty years before, writing from Paris on 9 November 1891, Brauer informed Bardini that he was sending to Bardini “two English amateurs,” and that he was expecting a 10 per cent commis‑ sion on any sales made by Bardini. Two days later, Bardini replied, “I warn you that it is my habit to pay a commission [only] when someone accompanies the amateurs and helps to make the affair [transaction] a success.”8 It is safe to say that there were far more informal relationships and verbal arrangements than there were formal and recorded ones. In addition, many objects, though apparently coming from one dealer

7 It is noted atop the sheet that it, along with a “collection of nine Italian medals” (which are also itemized) valued at GBP 1,500, was “bought by order of Mr. P. Morgan London.” The sheet is stamped as “paid by remittance on 3 January 1908.” (Morgan Collections Correspondence, 1887–1948 (ARC 1310); Call No.: B) I am grateful to John Vincler at The Morgan for locating this document. Indeed, Morgan bought quite a few objects from Brauer, often objects that were sent from abroad by Brauer for Morgan’s inspection. In some cases, Brauer was evidently trying (unsuccessfully) to out-maneuver Morgan. In one case, Brauer insisted that Morgan bought a book, which Morgan main‑ tained was sent only for approval. Apparently Duveen was questioning its authenticity. In another instance, Morgan’s secretary went to customs to settle accounts and discovered an unusually large bill for the Italian export tax. An exchange of correspondence indicates that Morgan’s original agreement with Brauer was that Brauer cover all export taxes; this was not as it happened. (Morgan Collections Correspondence, 1887–1948 (ARC 1310); Call No.: B) For Godefroy Brauer, see Françoise Barbe, Godefroy Brauer, antiquario e collezionista a Parigi, all’orig‑ ine della collezione di maioliche arcaiche del Louvre all’inizio del XX secolo, in: Lucio Riccetti (ed.), 1909. Tra collezionismo e tutela, (Catalogo regionale dei beni culturali dell’Umbria: Studi e prospettive), Florence: Giunti, 2010, pp. 209–216; Geraldine A. Johnson, Art or Artifact? Madonna and Child Reliefs in the Early Renaissance, in: Stuart Currie (ed.), The Sculpted Object 1400–1700, Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1997, pp. 5, p. 15 and note 25; Paul Tucker, ‘Responsible Outsider’. Charles Fairfax Murray and the South Kensington Museum, in: Journal of the History of Collections. 14.1 (2002), pp. 115–137; See also Catalogue of pictures by old masters: the properties of the most Hon. the Marquess of Linlithgow … Harald Bendixson, Esq., E. Milnes Gaskell, Esq., also from the collection of the late Monsieur Godfroy Brauer, of Nice. Also ancient & modern pictures from other sources, London: Christie, Manson & Woods, 1929. 8 Florence, ASEB: Corrispondenza, 9 11 1891 and Copialettere n. 9 dal 10 09 1891 al 25 09 1892, page 99; response from Bardini on 11 November 1891. So far, this seems to be the only documented exchange between the two. It remains to be seen whether Brauer was buying from Bardini and reselling, or whether the eventual owners reported the name of Brauer as their advisor for the provenance.

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to a client, were actually co-owned by a group of dealers. In the case of Brauer and Bardini, there are several objects with a provenance that lists Brauer, but for which there were either sibling versions transacted by Bardini or photographs of the object in Bardini’s possession.9 Other photographs in the archive bear witness to the ongoing challenges involved with respect to photographing art, most particularly sculpture and especially smooth white marble sculpture. Thus, for example, during Bardini’s early career, to properly photograph a portrait bust in polished Carrara marble meant mediating the depth of field and, no less, properly lighting its surface. A glass negative of the so-called Francesco Laurana, A Princess of the House of Aragon (c. 1475), presently in the Wash‑ ington National Gallery, is testament to the tribulations involved (fig. 3).10 There is, of course, a large positive correlation between how well an object can be reproduced and its potential saleability. Hence, it was a very smart business decision on the part of Bardini to transact large quantities of relief sculpture, for they are easier to photo‑ graph, and so much the better if they are polychromed. Moreover, just as Donatello knew, reliefs carry a higher profit margin because they are generally cheaper to trans‑ port, in terms of weight as well as packing. The other advantage is that they also lend themselves to assemblage, which itself shares a close personal relationship with display, and with the art of display. Bardini also sold enormous quantities of furni‑ ture, no doubt for the very same reasons – furniture is relatively lightweight, it repro‑ duces well in photographs, and it figured prominently in the evolution of the period room as a coherent space of display for collectors as well as museums. The very years that marked the early success of Bardini’s dealing career also marked the proliferation of professional academic expertise as well as of the forum for the expression of expertise, that of serial publications. Thus it was more than for‑ tuitous that one of his first clients was Wilhelm Bode. By the 1870s, the younger Bode

9 Sorting out the evidence of the Bardini photo archive continues to be a challenge for a number of reasons. Just because Bardini possessed a photograph of an object, does not mean he bought, owned, or sold it. Furthermore, many objects were bought and variously tendered in società, that is, financed by a group of dealers. It is not yet possible to understand the precise purpose of multiple copies of the same image. Last but not least, after Bardini died, Ugo continued to actively use the albums and photographs, removing or inserting images, and hence disrupting the archival archaeology of image ownership and “original” arrangement and use of many photographs. 10 Glass negative, Florence, AFEB. This bust is presently in the Washington National Gallery as Fran‑ cesco Laurana, A Princess of the House of Aragon, c. 1475, marble, overall: 44.4 × 45.2 × 22.1 cm (17 1/2 × 17 13/16 × 8 11/16 in.), Andrew W. Mellon Collection 1937.1.119. Provenance as given on National Gallery website: “Alessandro Castellani, Rome, before 1883. Stefano Bardini c. 1902; sold 1906–1907 to Jacques Seligmann, Paris; sold 1909 to Thomas Fortune Ryan, New York; his estate; (sale, Ameri‑ can Art Association-Anderson Galleries, New York, 23–25 November 1933, no. 416); (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris); purchased 15 December 1936 by The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh;[2] gift 1937 to NGA. [1] According to the 1933 sale catalogue. [2] The original Duveen Brothers invoice is in Gallery Archives, copy in NGA curatorial files.”



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Fig. 3: Glass negative of a so-called Francesco Laurana, A Princess of the House of Aragon, c. 1475. Presently in the Washington National Gallery, inv. 1937.1.119, Florence, AFEB.

was riding a meteoric career trajectory, building the collections of several German museums with the blessing of the newly minted German emperor, Wilhelm I.11 By 1874, and surely even earlier,12 Bardini was offering objects to Bode. Bardini main‑ tained an active and energetic relationship with Bode first because Bode had a com‑ paratively big budget, but also because, moving forward, Bode would prolifically publish. Bode’s level of self-assuredness was remarkable, for his early publications gave equal stature and authority to objects whether they were housed in monuments, in institutions, or in the hands of private collectors and dealers. The six-page object index

11 The earliest material related to Bode in ASEB dates from 1874, though it is apparent that their relationship was already well established. Although the archive actually preserves very little material prior to c. 1883, there is a small batch of correspondence from Bode to Bardini, dating to 1875 (ASEB, Miscellanea, 1875), from which emerges a picture of the relationship between the two. 12 Volker Krahn, Wilhelm von Bode and His Engagement with Two Bronze Groups of Hercules and Antaeus, in: Peta Motture et al. (eds.), Carvings, Casts and Collectors. The Art of Renaissance Sculpture, London: V & A Publishing, 2013, pp. 148–159, p. 150 and note 7, as given by Krahn: [24 January 1873 written from Rome by Meyer to Usedom, Bode] “[C]hoice here in Italy is particularly poor whereas the interest great. I have not found masterpieces from the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth centuries for sale on either the art market or in private collections – excepting a portrait by Robbia, for which 2,200 francs is being demanded.”

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at the end of Bode’s Italienische Bildhauer der Renaissance (1887)13 was organized by city, and within each city objects were comingled whether they were located in the major churches, the museums, or private collections. Thus, for example, for Florence, equal representation was given to objects in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, the Uffizi, the Bargello, and the Florentine collections of Stefano Bardini, the con‑ noisseur Baron von K. E. Liphardt, and the French antiquarian Augusto Riblet. More to the point though, the index of Italian Renaissance sculptural objects, composed as it was, served also to promote Bode’s professional expertise, which in the late nine‑ teenth-century art market was an increasingly valuable commodity in Europe and abroad. In an American newspaper interview Bode remarked that he “feared many American collectors did not take sufficient time to make judicious selections of art works as to purchase the same with safety, and […] that in earlier days American col‑ lectors of wealth, such as Henry G. Marquand and Quincy A. Shaw went to Europe almost every year and devoted months of study and research, before the purchase of art works.” He added that, “Nowadays some noted American collectors rush through Europe in a motor [car] and one I know has been to Europe twice only in his lifelife.”14 And every bit as much, the 1887 index promoted the many Bardini objects it featured; this would also be the case with Bode’s numerous later publications, where Bardini’s objects were well represented.15 Bode himself was keenly aware of the relationship between the institutional canon and the role of photography. In an interview given to The Fortnightly Review in 1891, Bode addressed the recent growth and increased prestige of the German museums as compared to the situation in England. After firmly dispelling the notion abroad that the German acquisitions budget was bigger than England’s, he went on with his self-promotional rhetoric with respect to the savvy with which the objects were acquired. Bode tipped his hat a bit when he spoke about museum publications, remarking that they took their lead from the British museums. He then described the strategy of the German museums for improvement: In the large illustrated Catalogue of Sculptures of the Christian Epoch, and in the smaller hand‑ book on the same subject, we have attempted to enlarge on the English plan by the aid of photo‑ type pictures. If we have achieved more than you in this direction, we have to thank principally the remarkable progress that has been made lately in photographic processes.16

13 Wilhelm von Bode, Italienische Bildhauer der Renaissance. Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Plastik und Malerei auf Grund der Bildwerke und Gemälde in den Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Berlin: W. Spemann, 1887. 14 Wilhelm von Bode, in: American Art News 10.7 (Nov. 25, 1911), p. 4. 15 See also Wilhelm von Bode, Denkmäler der Renaissance-Sculptur Toscanas in historischer Anordnung, Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1892–1905; Register von F. Schottmüller, 1905, p. 22, p. 36. 16 Wilhelm von Bode, The Berlin Renaissance-Museum, in: The Fortnightly Review 50 (1891), pp. 509–510.



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The Art Market and Object Taxonomy Owing to the increasing commodification of art and decorative arts transacted on a global level, there is, by the mid-nineteenth century, a discernable shift in the orga‑ nization and categorization of the objects themselves as they are readied for sale.17 Classification changes from the more general, the more random, to the more specific and consequently hierarchical. This trend may be gleaned from a survey of auction catalogues over the course of the century wherein collections and dealers of bric-àbrac and curiosities evolve into collections and dealers of objects of fine and deco‑ rative arts.18 Thus, from around 1860, that is, at the beginning of Bardini’s career, a more complex taxonomy evolves, one that parses inventory on the basis of value and more finely articulated categories. In other words, it is smart to group fifty Madonna and Child reliefs on the wall of a showroom, while displaying portrait busts on period cabinets and tables. This not only had the effect of enhancing the aura of authentic‑ ity, but, in a very practical way, the photographs taken of rooms and assemblages allowed for the inclusion of many objects in one photograph, which was cost effec‑ tive. As photography took on an increased presence in auction catalogues and art historical publications, the representation of this new taxonomy was transported via photographic illustration to the market at large–its collectors, its institutions, and their displays. And for them, these photographic illustrations provided a relatively cheap alternative to shopping in Europe, most especially for the Americans. This shift from experiencing the object in situ to long-range apprehension via the photograph was not without a certain amount of accompanying anxiety. Writing from Switzerland in 1928 to Bardini’s son Ugo, the American sculptor and collector George Grey Barnard remarked, “[…] I realize it is imperative one sees a work of art before purchasing, yet I did see your father’s collection of art objects, and remember them quite well. Of course I did not see the carved wood decorations in his garages, but these might be determined upon by photograph.”19

17 For an absolutely scrupulous study of the art market in London during the first half of the nine‑ teenth century, see Mark Westgarth, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer, 1815–c. 1850. The Commodification of Historical Objects, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 18 The Lugt’s Répertoire Online, together with the Arts Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO), published by Brill (http://lugt.idcpublishers.info/) and available onsite at the Frick Art Reference Library is an indispensable research tool for art market studies, and I thank Suz Massen, Chief of Public Services (FARL), for calling my attention to it. 19 Florence, ASEB, Corrispondenza, 1928: 15 August 1928, Letter from Barnard in Beotenberg, Swit‑ zerland, to Ugo Bardini in Florence. In another (undated) letter of the same year, Barnard takes the opportunity to inform Ugo that he has “created the Gothic museum in America, now the new part of the Metropolitan museum,” known today as The Cloisters, is itself an uber-manifestation of the period room as the period museum.

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With the growing use of published photographic illustrations, the relationship between Bardini and his brand, and Bode and the creation of the canon of Italian Renaissance sculpture becomes very clear. There is a plain yet complex historical coevality of the development of photography, the publication of illustrated art his‑ torical material, and the rise of both the museum as institution and the prestige of the private collector. As such, one finds a striking level of resonance, even when it comes to display, when one compares many of Bardini’s glass negatives with Bode’s published illustrations (figs. 4, 5). The combination of Bode’s ambitious publication agenda, Bardini’s aggressive use of photography, and the fact that so many of Bode’s acquisitions came from Bardini meant that a huge amount of Bardini objects were published and illustrated. From 1892 through 1905 Bode published his Denkmäler Der Renaissance-Sculptur Toscanas in Historischer Anordnung in 112 parts.20 All in all there were 567 large-for‑ mat photographic plates. In 1905, another Bode protégée, Frida Schottmüller, pro‑ duced the register, wherein the objects were indexed both by artist and location. Fol‑ lowing the rubric employed earlier by Bode, Schottmüller’s register gave its contents equal authority, regardless of whether the object had a fifteenth-century site-specific provenance or a nineteenth-century art market provenance.21 Using similar strategies, Schottmüller reiterated and expounded upon Bode’s Die italienischen Hausmöbel der Renaissance with her 1921 publication of Furniture and Interior Decoration of the Italian Renaissance.22 Schottmüller has been credited as the “developer of the ‘period room’ concept in museology.”23 However, the selection of objects as well as the rubrics of display substantially derived, via Bode, from Stefano Bardini, who was already evolving his period rooms in his house museum begin‑ ning in the early 1880s. What Bode and Schottmüller had previously done with the indexes, Schottmüller now did instead with copious amounts of photographic illus‑ trations. The book begins with illustrations of frescoes depicting domestic interiors, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio’s scene of the Birth of the Baptist in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella,24 and Andrea del Sarto’s Birth of the Virgin in Santis‑ sima Annunziata.25 These are followed by illustrations of extant Renaissance inte‑ riors, such as those in Palazzo Vecchio. In turn, there are eleven illustrations of the

20 Bode 1905 (as in note 15). 21 Schottmüller would do likewise in her monograph on Donatello, for which see Frida Schottmüller, Donatello. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis seiner künstlerischen Tat, Munich: Bruckmannn, 1904, p. 135 (“Sammlung Bardini”). 22 Frida Schottmüller, Furniture and Interior Decoration of the Italian Renaissance, New York: Bren­ tano’s, 1921; the Strozzi sgabello (NY MMA), which Albert Figdor bought from Bardini, is illustrated from the front and the back, p. 170; Bardini wall stands and socles, p. 199. 23 http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/schottmullerf.htm (accessed 1 July 2014). 24 Commissioned in 1485. 25 Located in the entrance atrium of Santissima Annunziata and dated to 1514.



Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style 

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Fig. 4: Glass negative of Bardini display. Florence, AFEB.

Fig. 5: Illustration from Wilhelm Bode, Die Italienische Plastik: Mit 86 Abbildungen im Text. Berlin: W. Spemann, 1893, p. 123.

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1918 Bardini Auction

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

NY, Hyde Collection

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

Bardini plaster cast

Cleveland

Vienna

Washington

Boston

Sant’Andrea Bovezzano

Fig. 6: The many versions of the so-called Luca della Robbia Madonna of the Lilies.



Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style 

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interiors of Palazzo Davanzati – the showcase of the then contemporary dealer and Bardini’s protégé, Elia Volpi. Here the comingling of objects – those with site-specific old provenance and those on the market or in private collections – becomes a very powerful visual testimony for the perceived authenticity of art market objects. And, to be sure, the choice of the English language was in no small way connected to the already burgeoned American market. It took little time for Bardini to take full advantage of the authority of Bode’s pub‑ lications. With mind-numbing circuitousness, Bardini would go on to cite Bode, while at the same time he would provide comparisons to other versions – extant siblings, as it were. From 23 to 27 April 1918, the American Art Galleries conducted an “unre‑ stricted public sale” of Bardini objects. Among the 782 objects offered for sale, listed as item #341, was a “Fifteenth Century Florentine Colored Terra-Cotta Bas-Relief” attributed to Luca della Robbia (1400–1481)”26 (fig. 6/pl. III). This so-called Luca della Robbia Madonna of the Lilies depends from one in the church of Sant’Andrea in Rovez‑ zano;27 today the auctioned relief is in the Hyde Collection in New York. The catalogue gives a description of the relief and notes that it is “in the original Tabernacolo frame of molded, carved, painted and gilded wood. Molded cornice, plain frieze supported on two fluted pilasters with Gothic capitals, and molded base, the plinth with a Latin inscription in Roman characters.”28 Beneath the description, the catalogue entry cites Bode’s Florentine Sculpture of the Renaissance and mentions a version in the Quincy Adams Shaw collection in Boston,29 and another in the Liechtenstein collection in Vienna.30 In doing so, Bardini adverted the reader’s attention to an American Gilded Age collection and a princely collection. What gets rather quickly obfuscated in the pre-internet epistemological conditions of the late nineteenth century is that both Shaw and Liechtenstein bought their Madonna of the Lilies from Bardini. And, to add

26 Deluxe illustrated catalogue of the beautiful treasures and antiquities illustrating the golden age of Italian art. Belonging to the famous expert and antiquarian Signor Stefano Bardini of Florence, Ander‑ son Galleries, [Thomas Ellis Kirby, American Art Association] New York, 23–27 April, 1918. 27 For Luca della Robbia, with additional bibliography, see Giancarlo Gentilini, I della Robbia. la scultura invetriata nel Rinascimento, 2 vols., Florence: Cantini, 1992. 28 Ibid. 29 Currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Attributed to Luca della Robbia; overall: 48 × 38cm (18 7/8 × 14 15/16 in.); inv. 17.1476; provenance as given by the MFA: Quincy Adams Shaw (b. 1825– d. 1908), Boston (see note 1); 1917, gift of Quincy Adams Shaw, through Quincy Adams Shaw, Jr., and Mrs. Marian Shaw Haughton, to the MFA. (Accession date: 29 March 1917). My debt is enormous to Marietta Cambareri, curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture and Jetskalina H. Phillips curator of Judaica, Art of Europe at the MFA, for the ongoing and hugely productive conversation regarding the Shaw objects in the MFA. 30 Luca della Robbia, Madonna in a Lily Bower, Terracotta relief, polychrome glaze, traces of gilding; height 48 cm, width 38 cm; Liechtenstein. The Princely Collections, Inv.-No. SK113; acquired from Bar‑ dini in 1890. I am grateful to Alexandra Hanzl, Deputy Director & Curator, Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, for helping out with the provenance.

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yet another level of collusive circuitousness, Bode was responsible for the catalogue of the Liechtenstein collection published in 1894.31 There are sure to be many more versions of this relief out there since the medium of glazed terracotta is durable and lends itself to reproduction.32 However, it is interesting to note that in addition to sup‑ plying at least three of them to collectors, Bardini was also in possession of a plaster cast.33 The archive preserves two other photographs in addition to the one of the relief in the 1918 auction catalogue, and both have yet completely different frames.

Transatlantic Contamination The spawning of Luca della Robbia has been touched upon variously in the literature and remains to be the subject of a much wider study, but it seems likely that a signif‑ icant contribution was made by the Bardini-Bode “machine,” which gained tremen‑ dous momentum in America in the early twentieth century. This is borne out in no small way in Allan Marquand’s Della Robbias in America, published by Princeton Uni‑ versity Press in 1912, with its dedication, “To Dr. Wilhelm Bode, The Pioneer in Robbia Studies”. Marquand further acknowledged the contribution of Bode’s protégée Dr. W. R. Valentiner,34 the then director of the Metropolitan Museum, thanking him for

31 Wilhelm von Bode, Die Fürstlich Liechtensteinische Galerie in Wien, Vienna: Gesellschaft für ver‑ vielfältigende Kunst, 1896. 32 Two other versions have provenances from the twentieth-century art market. One is in Washing‑ ton, as Luca della Robbia, Madonna and Child, c. 1475, glazed terracotta, overall: 48.3 × 38.9 cm (19 × 15 5/16 in.), framed: 102.2 × 62.2 × 13.3 cm (40 1/4 × 24 1/2 × 5 1/4 in.), Washington National Gallery, Wid‑ ener Collection. 1942.9.141. The provenance as given on the museum’s website is: “J. W. Boehler, Sr. (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris); inheritance from Estate of Peter A. B. Widener by gift through power of appointment of Joseph E. Widener, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, after purchase 12 November 1924 by funds of Joseph E. Widener;[1] gift 1942 to NGA. [1] Acquisition date and source according to Widener card file in NGA curatorial records.” Another copy of this relief is in the Cleveland Museum of Art: glazed terracotta, Overall h: 111.15 cm (h: 43 3/4 inches). Bequest of John L. Severance, 1942.782. The following additional provenance infor‑ mation was kindly provided by Louis Adrean on behalf of the museum: “Baron Antonio Winspeare (Rome, Italy). John L. Severance (Cleveland, Ohio), upon his death, held in trust by the estate. Estate of John L. Severance, by bequest to the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1942.” Descendant of an Anglo– Neapolitan family, Antonio Winspeare was a politician, prefect of Milan, and he died in Florence. For Winspeare, see M. M. Rizzo, Famiglie e potere nell’Ottocento. La lunga carriera di un prefetto nei ricordi inediti e nelle carte private (Antonio Winspeare 1840–1913), in: Per la ricerca e l’insegnamento. Studi in onore di Fausto Fonzi, O. Confessore and M. Cassella (eds.), Galatina: Congedo, 1999, pp. 103– 144 and M.M. Rizzo, Potere e grandi carriere. I Winspeare, secc. XIX–XX, Galatina: Congedo, 2004. 33 Florence, ASEB, photograph; among the objects inventoried in the 1960s. 34 For the career of Valentiner and additional bibliography, see: http://www.dictionaryofarthistori‑ ans.org/valentinerw.htm (accessed 20 May 2014). Not incidentally, Henry Thode, with whom Valen‑ tiner studied as a graduate student at Heidelberg, is listed among Bardini’s clients (Rubrica A 1889).



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directing his “attention to various examples in private collections.” And in a way that is perhaps all too telling from a present day vantage point, Marquand produced a census that reflected the recent marketplace propagation of Luca della Robbia, begin‑ ning his preface: When Cavallucci and Molinier published in 1884 a catalogue of all the then known works of the Della Robbias, four hundred and eighty-one in number, they knew of only one in America. By 1902, when Miss Cruttwell’s book on Luca and Andrea della Robbia appeared, the total list had been increased to nearly eleven hundred. Of these only ten were in this country. At the present time [1912] America is known to possess more than seventy examples of Della Robbia work.35

One cannot underestimate Bode’s influence on the development of art history in twen‑ tieth-century America, directly and perhaps even more pervasively via Valentiner. Bode’s photographs of Rembrandt paintings provided the fodder for Valentiner’s dis‑ sertation, Rembrandt und seine Umgebung.36 Two years later, Bode hired Valentiner and in turn recommended him for a curatorial position at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, hence beginning his lifelong curatorial career in American museums. From the Metropolitan Museum (1908), Valentiner went to the Detroit Institute of Art (1924), then the Los Angeles County Museum (1946), finally retiring in 1955 having developed the J. Paul Getty Museum. Valentiner’s influence was enormous at the institutional level, but perhaps even more far reaching was his editorial activity for Art in America and The Art Quarterly, both of which he inaugurated not long after his arrival in America. A more opaque systemic propagation of Bardini objects occurred with respect to the scores of objects in private collections. Three of these collections – those of Oscar Hainauer and of the brothers Rodolphe and Maurice Kann – were considered major, old, and illustrious, and they were built with the advice and expertise of Bode. In preparation for its eventual sale, Bode undertook the publication of the collection of Oscar Hainauer in 1897 and 1907.37 In 1907 he published the collection of Rodol‑ phe Kann,38 and he had published that of Maurice Kann by 1911.39 At the time, Bode had high hopes of acquiring the collections on behalf of Germany, but all three were scooped up en bloc by Josef Duveen.40 Another important major collection built on

35 Allan Marquand, Della Robbias in America. Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology 1, Princ‑ eton: Princeton University Press, 1912, preface. 36 Wilhelm Valentiner, Rembrandt und seine Umgebung, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg, 1904. 37 Wilhelm von Bode,  Die Sammlung Oscar Hainauer, Berlin: W. Büxenstein, 1897; Wilhelm von Bode, The Collection of Oscar Hainauer, London: Chiswick Press, 1906. 38 Wilhelm von Bode, Catalogue de la collection Rodolphe Kann. 2 vols., Paris: C. Sedelmeyer, 1907. 39 Wilhelm von Bode, La collection Maurice Kann, Paris: [s.n.], 1911. 40 For the Hainauer collection, see Treasures’ Fate: British Nation Has the Refusal of the Collection as a Whole, The New York Times, 7 July 1906, p. 3. On 6 August 1907, the collection of Rodolphe Kann

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the advice of Bode and from the inventory of Bardini was that of Eduard Simon. This was readied for sale and published by Schottmüller in 1929, the year that Bode died.41 This is to say that so many objects that currently carry a provenance from Duveen actually originated from Bardini and were eventually readied for sale via catalogues of the collections published by Bode. This type of Bardini propagation, however, can be readily found well beyond Luca della Robbia. So far, I have identified dozens of case study examples for objects of every kind – marble reliefs, marble busts, paintings, small bronzes, and furniture. In each case, all the versions, sibling objects as it were, can be predictably located within Bardini’s client network, or further along in the provenance descent. To be sure, the amount of provenance research required in order to demonstrate the proof in print is extraordinary, multiplied many times over. However, I think just one case study is enough to make the point. The so-called Madonna di Verona is a fairly deep relief composition of the Madonna, shown from the waist up, in a position slightly oblique from frontal. She holds the child close while resting an elbow on a plinth, from which the child’s left foot also projects. The two are face to face, though she gazes down while he looks out at the viewer through the parted fingers of the Madonna’s left hand. This relief exists in many versions, some with a rectangular background and some of which are incised away from any kind of background matrix; almost all are either terracotta, stucco, or cartapesta, with varying degrees of polychromy and gilding.42 Variations

was purchased for USD 5 million, for which see, The New York Times, 7 August 1909. On 31 August 1909, the collection of Maurice Kann was purchased for USD 2.5 million, for which see, The New York Times, 1 September 1909. 41 Max J. Friedlander, Die Sammlung Dr. Eduard Simon, Berlin, P. Cassirer/H. Helbing, 10–11 October 1929. “Sale catalogue of a splendid collection of works of art formed by Dr. Simon under the influence of Wilhelm Bode and housed in a mansion designed for the purpose by the Berlin architect Alfred Messel. Bode’s influence accounts for an extensive group of Renaissance sculptures and bronzes.” Frida Schottmüller, Die Sammlung dr. Eduard Simon, Berlin. 3 vols., Berlin: P. Cassirer/H. Helbing, 1929; on Bode’s advising of Simon from 1882, see James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 158–159. See also Cella-Margaretha Girardet, James Simon, in: Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 19 (1982), pp. 77–98. 42 The point of departure for the collocation of the versions of the Madonna di Verona was John Pope-Hennessy, assisted by Ronald Lightbown, A Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: HMSO, 1964. Cat. 69, pp. 84–86. This was followed by: Anthony Radcliff, cat. 15, in: A. P. Darr (ed.), Italian Renaissance Sculpture in the Time of Donatello. An Exhibition to Commemorate the 600th Anniversary of Donatello’s Birth and the 100th Anniversary of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI: Founders Society, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1985, cat. 15, pp. 110–111; Giancarlo Gentilini, in: Paola Barocchi et al., Omaggio a Donatello 1386–1986. Donatello e la storia del Museo, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence: Studio Per Edizione Scelte, 1985, cat. 18, p. 113, note 236 and pp. 432–434; Volker Krahn and Johanna Lessmann, Italienische Renaissancekunst im Kaiser Wilhelm Museum Krefeld, Krefeld: Krefelder Kunstmuseen, 1987; Anna Jolly, Madonnas by Donatello and His



Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style 

Fig. 7: Madonna di Verona, formerly in the Berlin Staatliche Mu­seen (lost), inv. M24.

Fig. 8: Annotated photograph of the Madonna di Verona, recto, Florence, AFEB, no. 1160r.

 59

Fig. 9: Annotated photograph of the Madonna di Verona, verso, Florence, AFEB, no. 1160v.

exist in the treatment of the haloes and the plinth. The date of manufacture as given in the various institutional repositories covers the complete range from “Donatello” to “nineteenth century,” with ample doses of workshop, school, follower, and circle in between. Almost all believe that it is based on a presumed lost original, though some have questioned the very existence of an actual original.43 The scholars who accept a connection to Donatello mainly date it to his days in Padova, relating it to the stylistic persuasions of Mantegna while acknowledging the unusual expressionistic tenden‑ cies in the very elongated fingers of the Madonna. In some respects, it has achieved

Circle. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992, pp. 121–125, published, as Madonnas by Donatello and His Circle, Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 1998; Anthony Radcliffe, Malcolm Baker, and Michael Maek-Gé‑ rard, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Renaissance and Later Sculpture with Works of Art in Bronze, London: Sotheby’s, 1992, cat. 1, pp. 48–53. For the most current and comprehensive treatment of the subject of the multiple versions, see Marie-Noëlle Payre, La Madone de Vérone. Rapport de restauration d’un bas-relief en carta pesta. La carta pesta, recherche sur une technique italienne du XVe et XVIe siècles. Mémoire de fin d'études, Diplôme de Restaurateur du patrimoine – Spécialité Sculpture, Paris: L’Institut national du patrimoine, 1989. For a discussion of the various classifications and their criteria used in sorting the versions, see Payre, II.3 ff. 43 Gentilini, 1985 (as in note 42), p. 113, note 236 and pp. 432–434. I am immensely grateful to Prof. Gentilini for sharing so many thoughts and insights with me, along with his deep passion for sculp‑ ture; his generosity is extraordinary.

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epitomical representation in the not insubstantial body of literature on “the Madon‑ nas of Donatello.”44 Like the Luca della Robbia Madonna of the Lilies, it is difficult to find a version with a secure provenance before the nineteenth century. As for the two versions currently in Verona, they should be the closest to any presumed prototype. However, any mention of them is conspicuously absent from four of the more com‑ prehensive guidebooks to Verona written respectively in 1803, 1821, 1825, and 1854.45 Currently there are at least twenty-three versions of the Madonna di Verona. On the basis of demonstrative business and social connections amply indicated in the mate‑ rial of the archive, at least seven of them can be linked to Bardini. Predictably, their currency in the canon was increased by Bode when he included the Madonna di Verona along with a line drawing illustration in his Die Italienische Plastik in 1893.46 The relief was also included in the several subsequent editions, with a photograph replacing the drawing of the Berlin version in cartapesta (N. 49A) in 1911.47 In the next year, Valentiner published the version in the Metropolitan Museum.48 This was followed and expanded upon by Marquand in 1913 with his article, “Some Works by Donatello in America,” published in Valentiner’s inaugural volume of Art in America.49 By 1928,

44 Charles Avery, Donatello’s Madonnas revisited, in: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (ed.), Donatello-Studien, Munich: Bruckmann, 1989, pp. 219–243; John Pope-Hennessy, The Madonna Reliefs of Donatello, in: J. Pope-Hennessy and John Wyndham, The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980, pp. 85–102. There is also the literature that interprets the function of these kinds of reliefs during the Renaissance, as in, for example, Geraldine A. Johnson, Art or Artefact? Madonna and Child Reliefs in the Early Renaissance, in: Stuart Currie and Peta Evelyn (eds.), The Sculpted Object, 1400–1700, Brookfield, VT.: Scholar Press, 1997, pp. 1–17. 45 Saverio Dalla Rosa, Catastico. Delle pitture e scolture esistenti nelle chiese e luoghi pubblici situati in Verona [c. 1803], Verona: Istituto salesiano “San Zeno” Scuola grafica, [1996]; G. B. Persico, Descrizione di Verona e della sua provincia, Verona: Società tipografica editrice, 1821; Scipione Maffei, Verona illustrata, 4 v. in 5, Milan: Società tipografica de’classici italiani, 1825–1826, esp. vol. 4. Gi‑ useppe Maria Rossi, Nuova guida di Verona e della sua provincia, Verona [Tip. Frizierio], 1854, who notes thirty-four Madonnas in various media, though not this one. 46 Wilhelm Bode, Die Italienische Plastik, Berlin: Spemann, 1893, p. 70. 47 Wilhelm Bode, Die Italienische Plastik, Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902, p. 69; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1905, p. 80; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1911, p. 78. 48 Wilhelm R. Valentiner, A Relief by Donatello, in: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 7.7 (July 1912), pp. 128–130. 49 Allan Marquand, Some Works by Donatello in America, in: Art in America (1913), pp. 211–252, es‑ pecially pp. 221–222: “The first is represented by two examples: one in the collection of Mr. V. Everit Macy, Scarborough, N.Y., from the collection of the sculptor George Grey Barnard (fig. 4); the other in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, formerly owned by the late J. Hampden Robb (fig. 5). It rep‑ resents the Madonna in half figure, tenderly pressing a draped Child to herself. The Child is naively sucking his finger, the Mother anxious for his future. There are at least four other existing examples of this type, all of terracotta. One is in Verona, near the Albergo di Londra, in the Via delle Foggi. Two musical angels, one on either side of the Madonna, recall those of Donatello’s altar at Padua. Hence this type is distinguished as the Verona type. Another example, acquired in Venice, is now in the Kai‑ ser Friedrich Museum in Berlin; a third in the collection of Herr von Beckerath, Berlin, and a fourth



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the relief had achieved a full-page illustration in Bode’s Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance.50 My purpose here is not to recite the litany of the Madonna di Verona. Nor is it my purpose necessarily to weigh in on individual attributions, especially since two insti‑ tutions holding a version cite physical analysis dating them prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, my purpose is to raise and confront the question: Where was Bardini getting so many of these? More evidence from the archive partially answers that ques‑ tion. There is an extraordinary annotated photograph of the relief, probably of the version formerly located in Berlin and now lost (figs. 7–9).51 On the verso, the contours of the Madonna and Child have been traced in pencil, and overlaying this are inkdrawn lines with measurements of the height at the right edge (84 cm), the height of the central vertical axis (84 cm), the distance from the bottom edge of the frame to the nose of the Madonna (50½ cm), and from the tip of her nose to the tip of the index finger of her left hand (35 cm). A note at the top of the sheet reads: “Dalla punta del naso della Madonna alle estremità del dito pollice del Bambino misura cent. 50½.” (From the point of the nose of the Madonna to the extremity of the thumb of the Child measures 50½ cm)52 At first glance, the note seems incorrect, since that measurement was already given on top of the drawing as the distance from the bottom edge of the relief to the tip of the nose. However, these are not simple two-dimensional measure‑ ments. The one marked “35” is indicating what is actually a projection of the relief surface. Therefore the reiteration of the “50½” in the annotation refers to the location of a particular point in the projection as well. Taken together, it would seem that they are coordinates to be used in the process of duplication. Thus it is hardly surprising that Bardini owned not one but two plaster casts of the relief. This of course forces the conclusion that at least some of the multiples were made in the atelier of Bardini. But rather than nit-picking the Madonna di Verona, it

published by Schubring (p. 127), as if it were the example in the Berlin Museum. All of these Madon‑ nas were formerly adorned with color, of which only traces remain, except in the case of Mr. Macy’s Madonna, where much of the original and some more recent coloring is well preserved. In modeling there are slight variations in detail. Thus the Verona and Beckerath examples preserve haloes for both Virgin and Child; Mr. Macy’s, that in the Metropolitan Museum, and Schubring’s so-called Berlin Museum example have haloes only on the Madonna; whereas the Berlin Museum example has no haloes whatever. From these slight variations it would be hazardous to infer priority of execution. Do‑ natello himself at Padua gave haloes to both Mother and Child in the small bronze relief, but omitted them in the freestanding group. The type of this Virgin and Child, and the composition, fall naturally in line with Donatello’s other works.” For Valentiner’s reference to Schubring, see Paul Schubring, Donatello: des Meisters Werke in 277 Abbildungen. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1907, p. 127. 50 Wilhelm Bode, Jessie Haynes, Florence L. R. Brown, Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance, Lon‑ don: Methuen, 1928. 51 Michael Knuth, Katrin Achilles Syndram, Anna Iov, Dokumentation der Verluste. Skulpturensamm­ lung. Band VII. Skulpturen. Möbel, Berlin: Staatliche Museen, 2006, p. 137. 52 Florence, AFEB, n. 1160.

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is perhaps more constructive to turn to the example of another client relationship of Bardini’s that demonstrates that the practice of fabrication was a substantial aspect of Bardini’s business practice. The archive contains a wealth of material regarding other early and voracious clients of Bardini, the American architects/decorators Charles McKim and Stanford White, who bought boatloads upon boatloads of stuff from Bardini in order to decorate their American Gilded Age mansions. McKim and White had a steady and ongoing need for astounding quantities of fine and decora‑ tive art objects and architectural components. No less, they required them in specific dimensions to fit the rooms of the mansions they were designing. Evidently, the sheer quantity of objects ordered mitigated what McKim and White had to have known were Bardini fabrications. In the winter of 1903, White wrote to Bardini requesting pho‑ tographs of “all of the chimneys you have, all of the doors you have and all of the ceilings you have […].”53 He expressed regret that the Donatello door [sic] was sold. Bardini replied to White in a telegram, “Donatello door sold, send photograph of new one, Bardini”.54 Today there are more than sixty thousand objects in storage from the estate of the Bardini family. The photographic inventory made in the 1960s after the death of Ugo Bardini is testament to the level at which Bardini engaged in restoring, pastich‑ ing, and fabricating. These inventory images document the tools of Bardini’s atelier – pattern stencils, tools, art supplies, moulds, plaster casts, and, just as much, the boxes, baskets, containers, and heaps of spare parts – rosettes, hinges, door and cabinet pulls, table and chair legs, capitals, cornices, mouldings, frames, cassone pieces, sculptural body parts and fragments. And so for clients like Charles McKim and Stanford White, one or two old rosettes would be joined by hundreds of modern ones, and together they would become a made-to-order renaissance wooden coffered ceiling in a mansion in New York. Neither Bardini nor McKim and White ever really mention or discuss the fabricated Italian Renaissance things, but that they knew is inescapable – they actively participated by ordering huge quantities of stuff that nec‑ essarily had to be custom fit. Perhaps the larger and even more murky question is that of complicity on the part of Bode. To what extent did Bode know and participate in what I would suggest was the creation of the canon of Italian Renaissance sculpture for collections outside of Italy? This is crucial because both canonical authority and standards for display were prolifically propagated on a global scale via Bode’s publications and their illus‑ trations. An answer like this is tough to come by, especially when an archive like Bardini’s does not preserve especially what Bardini chose to purge or chose never to record, notwithstanding the many transactions, deals, and agreements conducted

53 Florence, ASEB, Corrispondenza 1903, 27 January 1903. 54 Florence, ASEB, Copialettere Vols. 1902 10 18 – 1903 04 09, without date, but immediately preceed‑ ing the entry for February 1903.



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per voce and under the table. Yet, there is a bit of circumstantial evidence that sug‑ gests the relationship between Bode and Bardini was likely one that anticipated, and perhaps served as the business model for Berenson and Duveen, that is, where the supposedly impartial and objective art historian expert was actually working on com‑ mission with the dealer. Preserved in the archive is a small postcard printed by Bode in the fall of 1906. Bardini had recently acquired the Torre del Gallo and Villa la Gallina in the southern hills of Florence as a property on which to expand his gallery showrooms. The photo‑ graph on the front of the postcard scenically captures the Torre del Gallo and Villa la Gallina. In print on the verso, Bode lauded Bardini’s recuperation of the ancient prop‑ erty and extolled what would become in effect a new Florentine monument wholly inspired by classic Florentine art.55 It is safe to say without too much cynicism that Bode was not advertising Bardini out of altruism. Rather, this printed advertisement, signed by Bode, strongly suggests that Bode had quite a stake in the success of Bar‑ dini’s business – which was incredibly successful. Moving forward, it only remains to be seen to what extent Bardini and Bode effectively constituted a very contaminated canon.

55 Florence, ASEB, Small printed postcard; recto: photograph of Torre del Gallo; verso: printed text as follows: “Cartolina Postale Italiana (Carte Postale d’Italie) Vossische Zeitung. Berlin. 25 Ottobre 1906. Musei sopra Musei a Firenze. [...] Per Firenze invece e per i suoi visitatori si prepara nel corso del prossimo anno una ben più gradita sorpresa, quando sarà terminata, la villa Torre del Gallo del conosciuto negoziante d’arte Stefano Bardini. Il Palazzo Bardini in Piazza Mozzi di faccia al Palazzo Torrigiani era già rinomato come un ‘piccolo Bargello;’ la sua villa a Marignolle era conosciuta per il suo autentico addobbo e per i suoi numerosi bei mobili antichi, ambedue sorpassa molto la nuova villa. Si, noi non esitiamo a dichiararla la più bella villa moderna in stile antico costruita con vec‑ chio materiale che abbiamo mai veduta. Poco è rimasto dell’antica villa; la moderna è tre volte più grande e addirittura nuova nella pianta e nella disposizione. I fiorentini hanno già criticato su questo, giacche non amano il Bardini, ma ammutoliranno quando potranno vedere la disposizione straordi‑ nariamente pittoresca, l’esemplare ispirazione all’Arte classica fiorentina, l’impiego del più splendido materiale che sia mai venuto in commercio, antiche colonne, capitelli, porte, finestre, soffitti ecc. e tutto il mirabile arredo. E per di più la magnifica veduta su Firenze ed i dintorni. La Torre del Gallo diventerà una delle principali attrattive di Firenze. Bode.”

Kathryn M. Floyd

The Museum Exhibited: documenta and the Museum Fridericianum1 Introduction: The Fridericianum as Fragment In 1943 Allied bombs devastated Kassel, Germany’s eighteenth-century Museum Fri­dericianum (1779). Designed by Simon Louis du Ry for Landgrave Friedrich II’s library and collections of statuary, natural specimens, and historical artefacts, the Fridericianum was Europe’s first purpose-built public museum structure. The 1943 bombings leveled the once-grand galleries, which the city had preemptively cleared of objects. Despite the structure’s near-total destruction, incredibly, its neoclassical facade remained upright like the flat backdrop of a theatre set on the ruined Frie‑ drichsplatz (fig. 1). Rent from its museal function – the museum’s collections were never reinstalled – and reduced to a fragment of its former self, the Fridericianum, like many German buildings, languished in the postwar years as a shell in need of restoration. But the unusual, even deceptive, ‘wholeness’ of its still-upright front facade, its image-like public face, also pointed towards what it would soon become: a museum-image that documenta, a periodic exhibition of contemporary art, would refashion into a reproducible, flexible, and adaptable sign for its ongoing series of temporary events, and a free-floating, transportable representation of its accumulat‑ ing history and growing power. Twelve years after the bombing, local artist Arnold Bode, inspired by both the practical and symbolic possibilities of the defunct structure, provisionally refur‑ bished the museum for his temporary, international exhibition called documenta. Along with a committee of experts, Bode organized the summer 1955 show, a survey of twentieth-century vanguard art from 1905 to 1955, to educate artists and the public about modernism, present optimistic ideals of pan-European internationalism, and revitalize the cultural and economic life of Kassel. Through these aims, the sym‑ bolic resurrection of the Fridericianum, the birth of the documenta series, and the reconstruction and redevelopment of Kassel became inherently intertwined with one another.

1 I wish to express my gratitude to Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino for organizing the 2013 conference “Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. Their perceptive comments and questions, along with those of the conference attendees and other readers of drafts of this essay, were particularly helpful. Special thanks also goes to the staff of the documenta Archive in Kassel, espe‑ cially Susanne Rübsam and Martin Groh.

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Fig. 1: The war-damaged Museum Fridericianum in the postwar period.



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The museum’s wartime fragmentation and postwar refurbishment lent the Fri­ dericianum a split personality. It now existed both as a localized structure and contin‑ uous architectural object detached from any actual museum functionality, but also, paradoxically, as an image and signifier of “museum” through its meaningful, if inop‑ erable, facade and the memory of its unique museal past. At documenta 1955, the Fri­ dericianum served both capacities simultaneously; its derelict, empty shell allowed it to function as an adaptable vessel for the exhibition’s temporary and ephemeral displays, but its image, operating both inside and outside the geographic space of the event, signified the ideals of permanence, continuity, and quality touted by Bode’s show. The juxtaposition of these distinct but connected “museums” continues today as documenta has, since 1959, grown into a series of what will soon be fourteen megaevents that twice a decade defines the ever-changing state of global contemporary art. Ultimately, at documenta, it is the image of the museum and not the architectural structure that is museum-like. Images of the Fridericianum accumulate and hold documenta’s always-expanding histories, memories, and meanings. The original museal function (the unification of disparate “objects” under a singular logic) once possessed by the three-dimensional architecture has now been transferred to its image. Fragmentation creates something that is both partial and complete. In a constant state of becoming, the fragment signifies a series of temporalities, from a moment of detachment in the past to a possible reunification with a larger whole in the future. But once defined as fragmentary, the fragment is also complete-in-itself; its incom‑ plete form perfectly embodies its unfinished state.2 The Fridericianum’s division into undefined architectural shell and meaningful museum-image also creates fragments that are both being and becoming, that embody memories of their former connec‑ tions, but are simultaneously autonomous and independent. The separation of the building from its original use, for example, fit it for new innovative purposes, despite its structural, spatial, geographic, and temporal continuity. The many images of the museum derived from the singular structure, especially visual images like architec‑ tural elements or models, or photographs and drawings of its facade, embody the historical memory of the moment of separation/reproduction but also possess their own autonomy and agency. Specifically, these images reenact the museum’s change of state – they miniaturize its monumentality, shatter its wholeness, multiply its sin‑ gularity, destabilize its groundedness, and dissolve its permanence – and counter conventional definitions of “museum.” In this way, they suggest the constructed,

2 Theories of fragmentation have been applied to a variety of forms from literary to material and visual cultures. See, for example, David Rosand, Composition/Decomposition/Recomposition. Notes on the Fragmentary and the Artistic Process, in: Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Fragments. Incompletion and Discontinuity, New York: New York Literary Forum, 1981, pp. 3–30; also see William Tronzo, In‑ troduction, and Glenn W. Most, On Fragments, in: William Tronzo (ed.), The Fragment. An Incomplete History, Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2009, pp. 1–20.

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fragile nature of its unifying logics that fuse disparate elements through appropria‑ tion, collection, categorization, and containment. But in the end, the museum-image at documenta ultimately holds the same potential to enact these powerful processes through its role as one of the series’ most significant periodic and defining signs and structures. documenta’s instrumentalization of images of the Fridericianum and of museums in general offers the institution a freedom to move, transport, and relocate its power to regularly define and redefine ‘modern and contemporary art’ beyond any single structure’s spatiotemporal limitations. The detached but ever-linked museum-im‑ age allows the seemingly grounded Fridericianum to move and travel. As an image, it can extend itself beyond its four walls or go inside itself in ways that, much like a museum, collapse and collect histories and geographies, and accumulate, orga‑ nize, and contain moments of time and space. At a periodic event like documenta, the unique possibility to juxtapose the enduring architectural structure with a series of historical images of itself allows documenta to confront its own memories from within and enact a self-referentiality and self-historicization that legitimates its future authority (and therefore its continuation), but also makes possible self-criticality or intervention by outside agents. The reproducibility, multiplicity, flexibility, and trans‑ portability of the museum image also provide documenta with the potential to under‑ take late-capitalist and neoliberal strategies of expansion and appropriation, even incursion and colonization, far beyond its local borders. The museum-image is, then, a special kind of icon: forever associated with its museal origins, it also takes on new powers as a complete, autonomous, and adaptable fragment. This dual state allows it to both problematize the museum but also to simultaneously replicate its logics and functions. Like a mirror, the museum-image affords the museum a crucial and endlessly self-sustaining consciousness. This essay begins at the heart of the series’ most recent edition dOCUMENTA (13) where organizers installed The Brain, itself a very conscious museum-image. A minia‑ ture model of the expansive summer 2012 event of which it was a part, The Brain and other nearby displays merged fragments related to present and former documenta editions and to broader histories and information to create a web of spatial and tem‑ poral links inside the Fridericianum’s central rotunda. In particular, The Brain evoked memories and historical processes through a strategy whereby objects in the present were juxtaposed with images of themselves in their past lives, including the collision of the enduring and continuing museum structure with historical museum-images. The Brain itself ultimately became a model for the appropriative powers and cumu‑ lative processes of documenta’s periodic format of which the museum is a primary reflection. The interrelationships of continuity and change (a kind of being and becoming) are at the heart of the periodic exhibition format. The second half of this essay returns to the event’s origins as a series to trace documenta’s evolution from singular event to established institution in order to understand how the original disconnection of



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museum structure from museum-image created a flexible and adaptable set of con‑ cepts that allowed documenta to maintain its relevance through postwar modernism and into the era of postmodernism and beyond. This section looks at the variety of ways the museum-image has been employed, adapted, and contained within the exhibition, most recently as a way to ground and stabilize an ever-expanding event that seeks more and more to extend itself beyond its local borders. The essay ends with a final exploration of documenta’s use of the museum-image not only to histori‑ cize itself as it did in and around The Brain, or to establish relevance, stability, and authority as it did its over fifty-year history, but now to ensure its future extension into wider and wider global territories. Ultimately, we see that the fragmented double-life of the Museum Fridericianum has made of the museum not a container of displays, but a museum itself contained and instrumentalized by a periodic exhibition.

The Brain at the Heart of an Exhibition At the center of the Museum Fridericianum at summer 2012’s dOCUMENTA (13), orga‑ nizers installed a display of objects called The Brain, a conceptual museum within the museum or the image of a curatorial curiosity cabinet inside the thirteenth edition of this venerable periodic exhibition of international contemporary art (fig. 2/pl. IV). Directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, documenta’s latest chapter was a temporally and spatially open-ended network of ideas, objects, spaces, and situations, not sub‑ sumed under an overarching curatorial theme, but instead inspired by a set of critical questions “driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that […] is shared with, and recognizes, the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people.”3 Similar to the ever-expanding series itself, dOCUMENTA (13) attempted to create a boundless exhibition that dealt broadly with the world and its natural, social, economic, ideological, and historical complexities and purported to explore all things and beings and their infinite interconnectedness. Spread over seven venues and twenty sites in Kassel, as well as events and exhibits in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Canada, the exhibition was truly the “unruly organism” critic Roberta Smith deemed it.4 Beyond the hundreds of projects by contemporary artists and thinkers, the show also presented unpublicized exhibits, surprise perfor‑ mances, disappearing artworks, and simultaneous happenings across its expansive, global terrain. The impossibility of experiencing everything or locating dOCUMENTA (13) within a framework of complete encounter was simply unachievable by design.

3 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Epigraph, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Book of Books (Catalogue 1/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 2. 4 Roberta Smith, Art Show as Unruly Organism, in: New York Times (June 15, 2012), p. C21.

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Fig. 2: The Brain in the rotunda of the Museum Fridericianum at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012. Photo: Roman März.

At the conceptual core of this beautiful chaos, The Brain occupied the semicircu‑ lar rotunda of the Fridericianum. In addition to the museum’s enduring facade, often reproduced in the exhibition series’ ephemera and catalogues, the rotunda, centrally located behind the main entrance and formally different from the building’s other “white cube” galleries, is also considered a special location. As Lawrence Weiner’s typographic piece comprised of text affixed to The Brain’s glass partition suggested, the rotunda was “THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDDLE OF” documenta,5 a specific position, but in the exhibition’s expanding universe, also everywhere and nowhere at all. Behind the transparent wall, The Brain “center[ed] the thought lines of dOCUMENTA (13)” and condensed its massive constellations into “an associative space […] where a number of artworks, objects, and documents are brought together in lieu of a [curatorial] concept.”6 It ultimately became a miniature dOCUMENTA (13), composed of its fragments and scaled down to a manageable size.

5 Lawrence Weiner’s 2012 piece “implies a position in the context of concentricity. Concentricity is a closed system: it has no easy exit – as opposed to an open-ended spiral.” See Lawrence Weiner, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Guidebook (Catalogue 3/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, pp. 132–133. 6 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Rotunda in the Fridericianum. The Brain, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Guidebook (Catalogue 3/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 24.



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Many of the objects on view were overtly connected to displays from other nearby venues: Etal Adnan’s palette knife used to create her paintings hanging in the Do­cu­ menta-Halle; a puppet from Wael Shawky’s video of his marionette histories, the Cabaret Crusades (2010–2012), shown in the Neue Galerie; a model of Konrad Zuse’s Z1 computer installed in the Orangerie. Other objects directly expressed the curator’s stated philosophical themes: “on stage”; “under siege”; “in a state of hope”; and “on retreat.”7 The complexities of historical trauma, for example, were found in Vandy Rattana’s 2009 photographs of Cambodian “bomb ponds” or in the 4,000-year-old Bactrian “princesses” from conflict-ridden areas of Central Asia. The Brain’s collec‑ tion, however, was not limited to synecdochical fragments that directly referenced dOCUMENTA (13). Curators also included objects with rich associations to broader histories such as Ahmed Basiony’s video of Cairo’s Tahrir Square uprisings or plans by Horst Hoheisel for a “counter-monument” to replace Kassel’s Aschrott Fountain destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. The various kinds of fragments encountered in The Brain connected the event back to itself, but also to constellations of knowledge beyond its spatial and temporal borders. Organizers contained these fragments in the semicircular glassed-in rotunda with a traditional white-walled installation of orderly pedestals and conventional cabinets quite different from the rambling, crowded exhibits beyond its walls. Only forty spec‑ tators were allowed in at a time; those queued outside The Brain could observe the rotunda’s visitors through the glass as if they too were “on display” like the figures in a historical installation photograph. The Brain translated dOCUMENTA (13)’s enor‑ mity into an image at once navigable, objectified, and seemingly “real.” Judith Barry’s short guide to The Brain, also on exhibit, perhaps expressed it best; her illustrated information sheet about the exhibit could be folded into an origami polyhedron that easily fit in the palm of one’s hand.8 The name The Brain moreover suggested not just that visitors were stepping inside a miniature model of dOCUMENTA (13)’s conceptual apparatus or peeking at the intellectual obsessions of the curator. It also proposed that the space could be read more broadly as a global “memory palace”, a museum-image of the mind used as the foundation for an ancient mnemonic technique. Dating back to antiquity (and revived in the Renaissance) the space- and image-based method of remember‑ ing allowed individuals to save, order, and recall information, specifically to map the knowledge of the universe onto a miniature world or an accessible model of reality

7 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, The dance was very frenetic…, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Book of Books (Catalogue 1/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 35. 8 Judith Barry’s piece is titled For when all that was read was…so as not to be unknown (2012). A prospectus is available at http://p-exclamation.org/post/50098158891/judith-barry-for-when-all-thatwas-read-so-as-not (accessed 9 March 2014). A video showing the construction of the polyhedron is available from Project Projects at http://vimeo.com/44122954 (accessed 6 April 2014).

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in the form of a palace, theater, or gallery. The Brain’s form even resonated with the concept; its semicircular shape in the rotunda suggested, for example, Giulio Camil‑ lo’s well-known sixteenth-century plan for a “Theatre of Memory” modeled on the Roman amphitheater. Such imagined architectural settings were then to be mentally populated with unique objects, images, emblems, and fragments that represented various sets of knowledge the subject wished to remember. The subject envisioned his or her movement through the palace or gallery, observing each object and recall‑ ing the complex sets of data with which it was associated, essentially retrieving them from past storage and mentally transporting them into the present. Or, in Camillo’s model the subject was to stand on a stage and look out into an auditorium of radiat‑ ing drawers labeled with emblems representing the fields of knowledge contained within. In each case, the “spatialized” collection of mental images and the temporal process of retrieval and memory created an unusual collection of fragmentary ref‑ erences whose strange juxtapositions and surreal disjunctions helped to aid recall.9 While The Brain’s fragments made a surreal collection of associations, the rotunda also contained a set of evocative tautological displays in which documenta’s own six‑ ty-year institutional history began to loop back on itself in both overt and subtle ways. These uncanny situations engaged a strategy by which present and material objects and spaces confronted images of themselves, fragments of the narratives of their former lives, thereby creating within the museum a meaningful polytemporal col‑ lapse at the center of the exhibition. At the front of The Brain, for example, opposite its glass wall, hung six still lifes by Giorgio Morandi whose well-known paintings of bottles were shown in the Fridericianum at the original 1955 documenta. In a nearby case, curators placed the actual bottles depicted in some of these works, as well as books from Morandi’s library, and a photograph of his atelier in Bologna, which today serves as a museum. Using a similar approach, The Brain also presented four photo‑ graphs by David E. Scherman of Lee Miller soaking in Hitler’s bathtub on April 30, 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide in Berlin and Scherman and Miller toured the liberated camps at Dachau with Allied troops. The photographers had stayed over‑ night in the abandoned Munich apartment. Curators installed the challenging por‑

9 It is also interesting to note that Ludovico Dolce’s concept for a memory palace specifically recom‑ mended the use of paintings in place of emblems to create an aesthetic “delight” that “excites the memory.” These mental techniques were also associated with actual early art galleries and cabinets, like Francesco I de Medici’s studiolo in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari’s decorations on the cab‑ inet exteriors represented the objects contained within but also related to one another across the space, thus unifying a flexible constellation of disconnected, fragmentary information, not unlike The Brain. The memory palace was also recently explored at the 2013 Venice Biennial: http://www. labiennale.org/en/art/news/13-03.html (accessed 10 October 2013). For histories of the memory pal‑ ace, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1966, p. 164 and Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory. Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, p. 246–249.



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traits of Miller near a case holding the actual objects from the bathroom, which are visible in the historical photographs, items that Miller herself took from the apart‑ ment: a portrait of Hitler, a figurine, a monogrammed towel, and Eva Braun’s perfume bottle and compact.10 On the shelf above these “artifacts,” curators placed versions of Man Ray’s surrealist Object to be Destroyed (1932) a readymade metronome featuring a photograph of Miller’s eye on its pendulum. While neither works by Scherman nor Miller, Man Ray’s former companion, collaborator, and model, had been previously shown at documenta, and Man Ray’s art was not included until documenta 6 (1977), this display, like the Morandi installation, suggested visual, spatial, and temporal connections among objects and their images – and even a kind of back-and-forth rhythm between past and present, and memory and contemporaneity – and subtly referenced documenta’s origins and development, in particular the history of fascism to which the founders responded by exhibiting modern art and formerly “degenerate” styles like Surrealism and Expressionism. The implicit disconnection and reconnec‑ tion of enduring objects and documentary photographs that fragment a part of these objects’ narrative histories created a profound, even visceral sense of aura, historical continuity, temporal connectivity, and spatial collapse in which objects existed simul‑ taneously in the past and present. dOCUMENTA (13) was oriented from its early stages towards thinking about such radical relationships of time and place, as well as looking closely at the fragments of its own ongoing history, although Christov-Bakargiev maintained that the event was not really “about” documenta’s past, but about its present, a condition that neces‑ sarily contained the ghosts of its history.11 In 2009 she examined these institutional narratives systematically at the start of her tenure as artistic director at a “confer‑ ence towards dOCUMENTA (13)” structured around presentations about the twelve previous editions.12 Early on, Christov-Bakargiev also made plans to install a series of artworks from each past edition at dOCUMENTA (13), but this was never carried out.13 More fruitful was Christov-Bakargiev’s research in the documenta Archive, which contains thousands of documentary photographs as well as other historical materi‑ als from the series.14 One find, an installation photo of the museum at II. documenta

10 For more on these experiences, see Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller. A Life, Chicago: University of Chi‑ cago Press, 2007, p. 262. 11 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Dirk Schwarze, In Conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Part 2, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Logbook (Catalogue 2/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 287. 12 The conference program is located at: http://d13.documenta.de/research/assets/Uploads/pieghe‑ voleWebENG.pdf (accessed 14 April 2014). 13 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Making dOCUMENTA (13), in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Logbook (Cata‑ log 2/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 24. 14 Established in 1961 by Arnold Bode, the documenta Archive in Kassel collects and maintains materials related to the creation and response to each edition. Website at: http://documentaarchiv. stadt-kassel.de/miniwebs/documentaarchiv/01977/index.html (accessed 8 May 2014).

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Fig. 3: Visitors to II. documenta examining sculptures by Julio González in the Museum Fridericianum, 1959.

(1959) became a touchstone used in promotional materials and in an evocative instal‑ lation around the corner from The Brain. The 1959 photograph shows a woman and man examining three small sculptures by Julio González on display in the Fridericia‑ num (fig. 3). Over fifty years later in the same space at dOCUMENTA (13) this historical photograph became a mirror of the present as it hung next to a reinstallation of the very same works in the image. In her reflections, Christov-Bakargiev recasts the pho‑ tograph as a springboard for personal, historical, and documenta-specific memories of 1959: “On June 9, a few days before this photograph was taken, the USS George Washington was launched as the first submarine to carry ballistic missiles […].”15 She also relates the picture to González’s biography and to the fact that these works from the 1930s were shown posthumously after his death in 1942 and were again on display at the first documenta in 1955. This recognition created a priori a sense of return and repetition of fragments from past events within the 2012 reinstallation. Spectators at dOCUMENTA (13) who viewed the photograph next to the reappearing

15 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, An Image / Un’immagine. Notes towards Documenta (13), in: Mousse Magazine 34 (June 2012): http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=842 (accessed 14 February 2014).



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sculptures no doubt recognized their own recursive positions mirrored in the two his‑ torical viewers and thus connected their own “present-ness”, so-to-speak, to a histor‑ ical past through the doubling of bodies, objects, images, and spaces in two separate but interconnected moments. With an imaginative leap, they perhaps also projected the situation forward in time and imagined, as in a hall of mirrors (the Droste effect), future visitors looking back similarly at them and remembering 2012 as yet another point in an accumulating chain of images in documenta’s museum of memories.16 While The Brain and the nearby González display constructed self-referential con‑ stellations of fragments from both dOCUMENTA (13) and the history of the series as a whole, in the northern wing of the Fridericianum it was a stark absence that brought the museum image clearly into focus by emphasizing the gallery’s architectural struc‑ ture. The room, free of the objects one typically expects at exhibitions, was instead full of gentle, invisible breezes produced by Ryan Gander’s hidden wind machine, a piece aptly titled I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012). In addition to visitors milling about the empty rooms, the only other object present in the seemingly “empty” space was an encased five-page letter from artist Kai Althoff to Christov-Bakargiev, a display that also played with the theme of appearance and disappearance, visibility and invisibility. In the letter, Althoff, who had been invited to participate in dOCUMENTA (13), outlines his personal reasons for withdrawing his participation. The solitary missive displayed in the breezy space evoked feelings of longing for the presence of “missing” objects. Together, the two invisible works by Gander and Althoff simultaneously helped, through their invisibility, to put “on view” the architectural framework of the Fridericianum. The seemingly “empty” room sug‑ gested the Fridericianum’s past transitions, in particular its wartime emptying of books, objects, and decorations and its derelict and withdrawn status in the postwar years. The “vacant” space also raised questions about the museum’s status as both space/object and image and its simultaneous creation of, and engulfment within, a variety of powerful “scopic regimes.”17 While the purpose-built structure, its history, and conceptual associations lingered as elements to be instrumentalized by the exhi‑ bition, the traditional museum function of the Fridericianum was now a thing of the past. Instead, since its wartime fragmentation, postwar renovation, and the founding of documenta, it had been replaced by repetitive cycles of filling, emptying, and filling

16 For a theoretical explication of the so-called “Droste effect,” also known as the mise en abyme, see Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, transl. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Originally published in French in 1977 as Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. 17 For more on the notion of “scopic regimes,” see Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier. Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1982, pp. 61–63. See also, Martin Jay, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 3–27.

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again, and patterns of creation, fragmentation, and creation anew. This was nothing less than the intermittent ebb and flow of contemporaneity, disappearance, memory, historicization, and renewed manifestation that are at the heart of the “biennial” or periodic exhibition format, a kind of double-life as both ongoing, overarching institu‑ tion as well as a set of discrete “parts,” the individual editions that occur every two, three, or five years and are linked together by the series.18 Within the museum at dOCUMENTA (13) the various constellations of independent but linked and associated fragments, and the simultaneous manifestation of objects and spaces in both the past (in photographs) and the present (as objects on display), created a similar sense of historical connectivity, continuity, and collapse. The folding and unfolding of tempo‑ ral and spatial moments within the museum-cum-memory hall suggested the recur‑ ring, always returning format of the documenta series itself, its own accumulated history, and its ability, despite its ephemeral format, to create a conceptual “museum” in which to locate the past, present, and future. What was truly in the middle (of the middle of the middle) of the unwieldy, unending, rhizomatic dOCUMENTA (13) was not the Fridericianum’s rotunda, but a set of images of the museum both connected to and embodied in, but ultimately uncoupled from, the building itself that thereby transferred to the exhibition the powers of the museum’s processes, histories, and authority. Indeed, all this had been present from the very beginning.

The Museum at the Heart of an Institution Just as documenta was founded during a period of reconstruction, the Museum Fri­ dericianum (completed 1779) was built after the Seven Years’ War in a plan to revital‑ ize Kassel. And while the building housed the princely collections of Landgrave Fried‑ rich II, the museum was intended to be public.19 The neoclassical building embodied eighteenth-century ideals about art’s ability to provide moral education and aesthetic uplift, which du Ry expressed in his U-shaped plan that linked a facade of nineteen bays divided by Ionic pilasters to a long, low foundation.20 The balustrade above, with urns and sculptural allegories of the arts and sciences, soared over a simple

18 For more on theories and concepts of biennials, see the diverse essays in Elena Filipovic, ‎Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader. An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. 19 For a history of the development of the princely collections in Kassel, see Franz Adrian Dreier, The Kunstkammer of the Hessian Landgraves in Kassel, in Oliver Impey and Arthur Mac Gregor (eds.): The Origins of Museums. The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 102–109. 20 For information about Enlightenment-era German museums and the Fridericianum, see James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 36–42.



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portico that extended into the public space of Friedrichsplatz.21 Inside, to the right and left of the square vestibule, were long rectangular halls containing statuary, and a library and reading room, the same spaces that would one day hold the González and Gander installations. In 1808 the open rotunda was added behind the vestibule as a Ständesaal (parliament chamber) for Jérôme Bonaparte, who reigned briefly in Kassel as king of Westfalia. With this change the Fridericianum experienced the first of many transformations. By incorporating the central, spherical element, extending out the back like an apse, the museum took up the image of an ancient temple, and suggested ideal state architecture, spaces of display, and sites of collective memory.22 In 1954, when documenta organizers sought a space for their ambitious project, the decision to resurrect the defunct museum as a venue paralleled the museal con‑ cepts the group was already formulating.23 Bode and the Society for Twentieth-Cen‑ tury Western Art, composed of local, national, and international art professionals, viewed documenta as a grand art historical survey of significant European and Amer‑ ican avant-garde movements based in large part on Werner Haftmann’s text Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (1954).24 From major collections they borrowed ‘quality’ works by modern masters that epitomized the free (often abstract) art “of our time.” The group eschewed anything local, arbitrary, atypical, or experimental. Instead, great works by Picasso, Kandinsky, Chagall, Moore, and others became object-based evidence, the “documents” (hence the name), of the history of the modern epoch and the man‑ ifestations of the modern spirit. As the committee noted, the goal was to show the “documentation of results”25 or the display of the milestones of “true” Western art and culture from 1905 to 1955.26 documenta argued for the historical value and con‑

21 David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal, 1740–1840, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 240. 22 For utopian museum architectural forms see Andrew McClellan, From Boullée to Bilbao. The Mu‑ seum as Utopian Space, in: Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.), Art History and its Institutions. Foundations of a Discipline, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 46–64. 23 The most sustained and valuable overview and analysis of documenta’s origins and history is Harald Kimpel, documenta. Mythos und Wirklichkeit, Cologne: DuMont, 1997. See also these semi‑ nal texts: Dieter Westecker, et al. (eds.), documenta-Dokumente 1955–1968, Kassel: Georg Wenderoth, 1972; Manfred Schneckenburger (ed.), documenta: Idee und Institution, Munich: Bruckmann, 1983. 24 For more on Haftmann’s contribution, see Annette Tietenberg, An Imaginary Documenta, or The Art Historian Werner Haftmann as an Image Producer, in: Michael Glasmeier, Karin Stengel (eds.), Archive in Motion. 50 Jahre/Years documenta 1955–2005, Göttingen: Steidl, 2005, pp. 35–45; Haftmann’s original text was published as Werner Haftmann, Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1954. 25 A transcription of the original text for this public relations brochure is located in the Documenta 1 file, Mapp. 11a, documenta Archive, Kassel, Germany. 26 In the postwar period, National Socialism was rewritten as a tragic detour in the longer progress towards a free German society. Visual styles sanctioned by the Nazis, especially a kind of kitschy realism or fascist classicism, were later rewritten in opposition to definitions of Western art. See Paul

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temporary relevance of these landmark styles by displaying these objects alongside the recent work of younger mid-century artists to prove that the avant-garde deserved a place in both the “museum” of art history and the contemporary public’s collective memory. This re-historicization stood in stark contrast to the horrific “de-musealiza‑ tion” the avant-garde had suffered at the hands of the Nazis who purified German museums, broke up private collections, and stripped modern art of its value through derogatory exhibitions, cheap sales, or outright physical destruction. While simul‑ taneously conjuring the memory of these objects’ troubled pasts, documenta 1955 returned modernism to its proper place by reinstating it, if only temporarily, in its rightful, German museal context, behind the damaged but upright image of the Fri­ dericianum.27 The derelict museum also opened up other possibilities of meaning. As Harald Kimpel writes, “[S]ince the burnt-out shell had yet to be assigned a new function, [Arnold Bode] was able to live out the ‘adventure of design’ there.”28 A progressive local artist, designer, and teacher who lost his job in 1933, Bode waited out the war creating trade fair displays for local industry. Inspired by innovative installations like the 1953 exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at Milan’s ruined Palazzo Reale, he identified in the Fridericianum’s museal past and provisional present the unique ability to link various images, objects, spaces, and concepts to create a specific notion of continuity between past and present. On a practical level, the building provided excellent proportions and light and required few costs. On a thematic level, it allowed Bode to create an ideal genealogy for modern art and design. The selection of artworks linked international postwar modernism to prewar antecedents, thus omitting fascist visual culture and fashioning a “usable” German past that idealized the golden twenties as the true precursor to the new Federal Republic. documenta’s exhibition design also linked the neoclassical museum’s shell as a symbol of an earlier enlightened, liberal history with 1950s “good design” and the capitalist innovations of the Wirtschaftswunder. Bode’s team tempo‑ rarily renovated the damaged interior, whitewashed its reconstructed brick walls, and hung the space with contemporary materials like colorful wallboard and translucent plastic provided by local businesses. The merging of historical architecture and con‑ temporary décor created a dynamic stage for the artworks, reanimated the Fridericia‑

Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator. Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 27 For a nuanced discussion of the relationship of documenta to so-called ‘degenerate art’, see Walter Grasskamp, ‘Degenerate Art’ and Documenta I. Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed, in: Daniel J. Sherman, Irit Rogoff (eds.), Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Minneapolis: Univer‑ sity of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 163–194. 28 Harald Kimpel, The Unhoused Exhibition. Documenta in Search of its Own Architecture, in: Glas‑ meier 2005 (as in note 24), pp. 68–76. Kimpel employs the idea that documenta is “unhoused” to de‑ scribe the series’ changing relationships to its venues.



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Fig. 4: The Museum Fridericianum and the Friedrichsplatz, Kassel at documenta 1955.

num, and produced a unique experience of temporalities colliding and collapsing for the spectator moving through the space.29 The effect was a linking of fragments and signs that brought history into the present. The documenta team maintained the Fridericianum’s surviving facade in its simple, neoclassical form leaving its damage meaningfully exposed; they added only an unob‑ trusive placard above the door spelling out “documenta,” in the event’s modernist wordmark. But before visitors reached the Fridericianum, they had to pass through the wide Friedrichsplatz and by a large sign marking out the exhibition’s urban territory that circumscribed the museum (fig. 4). documenta indeed considered the redevelop‑ ment of the city and region as a key goal – the growth of tourism, local businesses, and jobs were all discussed in the planning process and by the media – and the exhi‑ bition therefore extended its reach beyond the museum’s walls in a number of ways. Programs that advertised the show with its typographic logo and large initial “d” were

29 Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience. Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, New Haven: Yale University, 2009, pp. 173–189. Klonk specifically develops the notion of documenta 1955 as part of a new trajectory of experiential exhibition environments in and around the mid-century. For more on the aesthetics of the early documenta installations, see Kimpel 1997 (as in note 23), pp. 242–274.

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found in and around Kassel on signs, posters, brochures, and other publicity materials. Occasionally organizers also employed pictures of the museum’s facade for this sort of marketing.30 For example, in a brochure outlining the upcoming event’s themes and goals for the public, designers included a black line drawing of the Fridericianum’s ele‑ vation paired with a short text on the building’s historical significance and the advan‑ tages of its provisional, shell-like state (Rohbau). Without the need to contain the event within the fixed architectural, institutional, and historical confines of a functioning museum, the documenta team gained a kind of freedom to use the ruined structure in new ways and, as the text noted, engage with innovative exhibition technologies while employing the authority and prestige derived from the structure’s museal associations. A second brochure featuring a photo of the facade on its cover showed a red field with the text “Kunst des XX. Jahrhundert” floating “behind” the entablature, causing the museum image to hover between flat icon and three-dimensional structure. Beyond the door to this museum (or, inside the brochure) floor plans and an exhibition map were overlaid with a full-page red grid that systematized and contained the exhibitionary space. The grid continued to the edge of the page, beyond the borders of the muse‑ um-image, as if claiming an ever-expanding territory beyond its walls. The first documenta attracted 130,000 people to its 670 works by 148 artists. But when the successful survey exhibition closed, the resurrected museum returned to its transitional, unfinished status in a city still under reconstruction.31 But in the wake of its success, organizers used the venue again for an updated documenta edition in summer 1959, a pendant show focused primarily on new art made after 1945. With 339 artists and 1,770 works, the second edition added another venue, the Baroque Orangerie, whose bombed-out structure became a backdrop for temporary outdoor “white cubes” containing contemporary sculpture.32 With the production of a subse‑ quent third documenta in 1964, the event now moved beyond these pendant shows to become a true, ongoing series. documenta III also broadened the historical trajectory by looking back to the nineteenth-century while also showing recent art. But as Justin Hoffmann notes, documenta III’s development lay not in finding new connections of past and present, but in its now “consolidated and extended the position of authority

30 Brochures and marketing materials can be found in the documenta Archive, Kassel, Germany. 31 Local press noted that until the museum’s future function was established, it was the ideal loca‑ tion for short-term trade shows or temporary exhibitions and events. See Museum Fridericianum als Ausstellungsbau, Hessische Nachrichten (Kasseler Lokalausgabe) (6 February 1954), p. 31. The byline reads “Eine zerstörte Stadt sucht Dauerzweckbestimmung für ein einmaliges Gebäude.” The story contains photos of the grand gallery and the rotunda. In the story below, on train connections for the 1955 Federal Garden Show, Kassel is described as needing “connections to the world.” 32 Kimpel notes that the ruined Orangerie in the park became “public space” that offered “access free of charge.” It “provided the frame for the encounter between contemporary sculpture and the na‑ ture of the park” and between “derelict historical architecture” and “untamed nature”. Kimpel 2005 (as in note 28), p. 72.



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secured by the first two exhibitions” through the restructuring of its administrative scaffolding.33 First a private organization, then a limited liability company (GmbH), the documenta organization now became a public board with the governments of Kassel and Hessen overseeing the finances and a “documenta council” of art experts formu‑ lating and executing each edition. In 1964, with an established organization, recurring structure, and concept of historical continuity, documenta became not just a series but also a nascent institution creating a narrative of its own, with the museum at its core. It is fitting then that at documenta III Arnold Bode, still at the helm of the curato‑ rial wheel, described the exhibition, now slated to reappear regularly twice a decade, as the “Museum of 100 Days”. As he wrote in the catalogue, “[H]ere, the artistic achievements of the twentieth century are presented, not in an imaginary museum, but in a real one […].”34 Indeed, documenta III added the nearby Alte Galerie, also under reconstruction, as a third venue.35 But the “real” museum Bode referenced was more conceptual than architectural. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1960 Museum der modernen Poesie (Museum of Modern Poetry), an anthology of poems by ninety-six authors like Arp, Brecht, and Neruda, inspired the motto.36 Enzensberger employed a reinvigorated notion of “museum” to characterize his volume not as a collection of inert historical examples embalmed in history’s mausoleum or a fixed canon of unchanging texts revered for their timelessness. Instead, his museum was, like Bode’s documenta, a living place where the past was in dynamic dialogue with the present so that each might be continually transformed. Bode must have recognized in documenta’s dual character an institution with accumulating history and an ephemeral contemporary event, and in his reimagining of the Fridericianum’s image, he must have applied Enzensberger’s relevant and flexible museum concept.37 The institutionalization of documenta created a cascade of changes for the series with 4. documenta (1968), visited by over 200,000 spectators, which marked a turning point. Organized during this landmark year of global protests and generational upheaval, it was called “the youngest documenta ever” for its concentration on very

33 Justin Hoffmann, documenta III, in: Glasmeier 2005 (as in note 24), p. 211. 34 Excerpts of Bode’s Foreword to the documenta III catalogue reprinted in English translation in Glasmeier 2005 (as in note 24), p. 210. 35 This museum reopened as a space for modern and contemporary art in 1976 as the Neue Galerie. Original antiquities and Old Master works from when the structure served as the Alte Galerie had been vacated during the war and were later reinstalled in Kassel’s Schloss Wilhelmshöhe. Kimpel notes that while documenta III was able to use the empty gallery in 1964, after the 1976 reopening the organization also attempted to “lay claim” to the reinstalled spaces (even requesting the temporary deinstallation of some of its collections) for documenta 7 (1982) and 9 (1992). Kimpel describes this as an “occupation” and “infiltration”. Kimpel 2005 (as in note 28), p. 73. 36 Hans Magnus Enzensberger (ed.), Museum der modernen Poesie, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1960. 37 See Alan J. Clayton, Writing with the Words of Others. Essays on the Poetry of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010, pp. 235–236.

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contemporary art, namely Pop Art and other “American” forms, which instigated pro‑ tests by German youth.38 4. documenta also became the last edition led by the old guard; Haftmann had left in 1964 and Bode would soon resign. With an overt focus on “the new” and the Fridericianum now occupied by the glossy worlds of Tom Wesselman’s lips, Sol LeWitt’s grids, and Robert Indiana’s graphics, the committee downplayed the museum symbolism. And, despite its character as a series with its own history – Bode had initiated the documenta Archive in 1961 to collect and preserve documenta’s papers and organizational materials – the characterization of “institution” was also denied, especially as criticism of the show mounted.39 “This documenta,” defended Bode, “does not belong to the Establishment either – in our opinion. Its importance is probably due to the fact that it does not exist as an established institution.”40 Perhaps surprisingly, it was the following iteration, 1972’s groundbreaking and anti-establishment documenta 5, where the museum image returned in full force. But here the sign was not employed to connect the historical and the contemporary. Nor was the museum to signify arguments about quality, value, influence, or canon. Instead, documenta 5 saw the inclusion of the museum, specifically the museum-im‑ age brought within the museum, as a gesture of institutional critique and self-criti‑ cality. Independent curator Harald Szeemann led the event, the first to be organized under a scheme in which each new edition, now focused primarily on recent art, would be assigned to a professional director-curator selected by an official committee. The temporary director, who personified the ever-expanding collaborative processes of staging mega-exhibitions, was understood as an auteur of a unique chapter within the broader “whole” of the series.41 This structure, which continues today, allows documenta to continually renew itself with new approaches thus maintaining its authority as an innovative force in contemporary art and keeping conceptual stagnation at bay.42 At documenta 5 the museal was evident in Szeemann’s section of artists’ museums, part of his concept for a “100-day-event.” Szeemann reconfigured Bode’s slogan to redirect the museum’s association with stasis, materiality, classification, and con‑

38 Approximately one-third of the artists at documenta 4 were from the United States. 39 Information about the documenta Archive may be found at: http://documentaarchiv.stadt-kassel. de/ (accessed 5 May 2014). 40 Arnold Bode’s Foreword to the documenta 4 catalogue reprinted in English translation in Glas‑ meier 2005 (as in note 24), p. 232. 41 Nathalie Heinich, Michael Pollok, From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur. Inventing a Singu‑ lar Position, in: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking About Exhibitions, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 231–250. 42 With each new chapter as a kind of curatorial ‘artwork’ created from an individual perspective, responsibility for the relative success or failure of each edition lay not in the hands of the overarching organization but with the individual curator. In this sense, the institution remained ever successful in its constant, stable, museal framework that accumulates and “collects” these individual manifesta‑ tions as its history and thus its sense of continuity and authority.



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ventional aesthetics towards ideas of inquiry, interaction, and relativity. These were apt strategies for documenta 5 where Szeemann also interrogated basic concepts like ‘image’, ‘reality’, and ‘information’. “The words ‘museum’ and ‘art’,” wrote Szeemann in his plan, “imply the idea of viewing objects and material property […] documenta 5 is not, in the first instance, a place for a static accumulation of objects, but a process of events that refer to one another.”43 The exhibition included works of kinetic, instal‑ lation, conceptual, and performance art, as well as post-minimalism and Arte Povera, by Hermann Nitsch, Janis Kounellis, Joseph Beuys, and others, and actual examples of advertising, propaganda, and popular kitsch. These diverse forms complemented each other and Szeemann’s themes in their boundary-smashing qualities. The show’s discursive nature was also embodied in the catalogue, a ringed binder whose cover by Ed Ruscha depicted ants coalescing in the shape of a ‘5’; unlike a traditional bound volume, this catalogue could be easily broken apart and infinitely reconfigured. Despite Szeemann’s alteration of Bode’s museum motto, documenta 5 was again installed in the Fridericianum and the Alte Galerie. Aware of documenta’s accumulated institutional power, Szeemann rejected staging works in alternative public spaces, calling the approach a “museum of the street”, and a “phony freedom”.44 Instead, the museum interior became useful to Szeemann when no longer viewed “as a protective aid to works on the assumption that […] art […] needs a museum context and place of ‘consecration’.”45 Szeemann thus subjected the museum to critique through com‑ parison and intervention from within as museum images were meaningfully inserted into the museum space. Just beyond the Alte Galerie’s entrance, for example, he installed a section of artists’ museums. Herbert Distel’s Museum of Drawers, Ben Vau‑ tier’s Cupboard, Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, and Marcel Broodthaers’s Department of Eagles were, like The Brain, ‘miniature’ collections of artworks and objects. By clearly comparing these three-dimensional museum-images with the surrounding space of a ‘real’ museum, Szeemann revealed the constructed nature of all museums and their systems of fragmentation, appropriation, classification, historicization, and consumption. Through visitor memory, the museal nature of documenta itself with its established structure and history, consolidation of authority, and power to create meaning and cultural capital, all recalled through Szeemann’s updating of Bode’s slogan, also became subject to critique. The final artist’s museum, Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum (1972), was an enclosed, functional structure within the gallery whose plain, square exterior masked an interior plan in the shape of a mouse head comprised of a square and two cir‑

43 Harald Szeemann, First Exhibition Concepts, in: Florence Derieux (ed.), Harald Szeemann. Individual Methodology, Zurich: JRP/Riniger Kunstverlag, 2007, p. 93. 44 Ibid, p. 104. 45 Ibid, p. 105.

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cles.46 The installation referenced Mickey Mouse, the Disney character and logo, but its perfect geometry also suggested white cube galleries, rotundas, and apses and recalled Oldenburg’s designs for a mouse-shaped facade for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Inside, visitors examined vitrines containing small versions of his soft sculptures not unlike his 1961 “commercial” action, The Store.47 Within the broader exhibition, the diminutive Mouse Museum pointed to a world of commodity culture and corporate structures hidden behind the public walls of the museum and, by association, within the documenta organization. Oldenburg thus revealed another museum “face” signifying ubiquitous marketing and corporate expansion.48 The infiltration of commodity culture, brands, and advertising into the museum foreshadowed the increasingly corporate-like structures developed by global peri‑ odic exhibitions in the following decades, including public non-profit endeavors like documenta. Not only did the number of new periodic exhibitions balloon in the age of “festivalism,” older institutions like the Venice Biennale (1895), the São Paulo Biennial (1951), and documenta incrementally grew their administrations, staffs, ter‑ ritories, displays, and audiences.49 This expansion followed in large part from the increasing professionalization of exhibition-making, the coming of the specialized curator’s “moment,” and the progressively speculative art market and its rapid cycles of “emerging” products.50 At documenta expansion took many forms (new adminis‑ trators and committees, increased corporate sponsorship, extended public relations programs) but was also reflected in its localizing architectural activities: documenta 7 (1982), staged during the German “museum boom,” saw the completion of the Frideri‑ cianum’s renovation; documenta IX (1992) made use of traditional venues and tempo‑ rary pavilions but also the new documenta-Halle, the first permanent structure built for the series; and documenta11 (2002) undertook an expensive adaptive reuse project to temporarily outfit an abandoned commercial brewery. This overall expansion stemmed not only from late twentieth-century arts pro‑ fessionalization and managerialism, but also from the very different trajectories of

46 The floor plan, which made the mouse image embedded in the design visible, was provided in the gallery and catalogue. See Grundplan zum Maus Museum, in documenta 5 (exhibition catalogue), Kassel: documenta GmbH and Bertelsmann Verlag, 1972, sec. 13, p. 8. In later versions of the work, the contours of the head were visible in the museum’s exterior. In emphasizing the mouse-architecture, Oldenburg suggests relationships between the words maus (mouse) and mausoleum. 47 Genevieve Waller, Unattributed Objects. The Mouse Museum, The Ray Gun Wing, and Four Artists, in: John C. Welshman (ed.), Sculpture and the Vitrine, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 159–177. 48 Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida opened in October 1971. 49 See Ivo Mesquita, Biennials, Biennials, Biennials, Biennials, Biennials, Biennials, Biennials, in: Melanie Townsend (ed.), Beyond the Box. Diverging Curatorial Practices, Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2003, pp. 63–68. 50 See, for example, Heinich 1996 (as in note 41) or Michael Brenson, The Curator’s Moment, in: Art Journal 57 (Winter 1998), pp. 16–27.



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poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism that encouraged the ques‑ tioning and critique of such institutions, their nineteenth-century colonialist origins, their powerful positions in a global “art world” of centers and peripheries, and their predominantly “Western” definitions of aesthetics and history. documenta curators, especially beginning in the 1990s, called these conditions into question from within the periodic exhibition framework through inclusive, discursive, and interdisciplin‑ ary editions that redressed the format’s traditional imbalances, but that were also more diffuse, and sometimes more abstruse or excessively “theoretical”. In 1997 documenta’s first female curator, Catherine David, organized a “retro-perspective” to interrogate concepts of the historical and contemporary and the context of urbanity. For her 630,000 visitors, David installed 700 works across Kassel and organized “100 Days – 100 Guests,” a series of presentations by global intellectuals that encouraged open public conversation on these themes. For documenta11 (2002) Okwui Enwezor selected more participants from non-NATO countries than ever before, including practitioners from Africa, Asia, and South America among the 116 invited artists. The event also extended itself beyond the Kassel exhibition (which attracted over 650,000 viewers) through programming in Lagos, Saint Lucia, New Delhi, and Vienna. Chris‑ tov-Bakargiev furthered these globalizing strategies; a record breaking 905,000 spectators experienced dOCUMENTA (13)’s vast terrain and infinite constellations of ideas, objects, and events. As documenta grew and expanded, it simultaneously consolidated and strength‑ ened its visual identity, branding, and publicity programs not only through local architecture, but also through cohesive designs that improvised on its original mod‑ ernist wordmark.51 Increasingly, photographs of the Fridericianum, the “heart” of the series, also began to appear in official publicity materials and publications.52 Like The Brain, these museum-images made “consumable” documenta’s expansive endeavor, an institution whose complex organizational structures, histories, and authority had, by the turn of the millennium, become enormous. Artists and curators, following in Szeemann’s footsteps, continued to engage the image and space of the Fridericianum critically, but the documenta organization simultaneously harnessed the symbol to reify itself, cement its status, and ground its location in Kassel, which continues to benefit greatly from the regular influx of tourists every five years. With its 100-day

51 Graphic designers and firms are selected for each edition to create variations on the theme of the basic documenta wordmark. For a brief history of the documenta design programs, see Stephanie Herbst, Meaning Communicated. Documenta Design between Convention and Transmission of Val‑ ues, in: Glasmeier 2005 (as in note 24), pp. 62–67. 52 For more on catalogues, museum images, architecture, and exhibitionary experience, see this au‑ thor’s essay on the use of installation photographs in the documenta catalogues: Kathryn M. Floyd, Simulated Journeys, Travels Through the Documenta Photo Albums, in: Jonathan Carson, Rosie Miller, Theresa Wilkie (eds.), The Photograph and the Album. Histories, Practices, Futures, Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc, 2013, pp. 276–316.

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displays punctuated by long absences, and its temporary freelance curators, shifting venues, massive displays, international projects, engagement with complex modes of interconnectivity, and growing online presence,53 the permanent image of the now-stable Fridericianum provides a constant, visual “location” or grounded, stable backdrop for documenta’s expansiveness, diffuseness, and multiplicity. This idea was summed up effectively by the individual booklets of dOCUMENTA (13)’s “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” project, the essays of which became the text of The Book of Books.54 The inside covers of eighteen of the small notebooks contained fragments of a histor‑ ical photo of the Fridericianum that could be put together to create the image of its facade. Similar images of the museum also figure prominently on the homepages of offi‑ cial websites for the documenta Archive and for documenta 11, 12, 13, and the upcom‑ ing documenta 14 (2017) where they are both the “faces” of these individual editions and the overarching institution. Here, they embody documenta’s tradition, history, and authority, and reify its vast networks. But the museum image serves as more than just a straightforward emblem. Unlike the basic documenta wordmark or the logos of other periodic exhibitions,55 the exhibition’s long-term instrumentalization of images of a specific museum space enacts and rehearses the very museal strategies that make up documenta’s periodic format. Images of the Fridericianum signify its processes of collecting, accumulating, and juxtaposing the diverse, critical, even contradictory works, concepts, editions, and histories that it unifies under its singular institutional banner in the form of a museum. Like devices in a memory palace, individual images of the Fridericianum also call up specific moments within documenta’s history. But when connected and compared, like variations on a theme, these repetitive images of the recognizable spaces form a consistent backdrop that, in a classical spatio-temporal model, makes visual the march of time and of (art) history that documenta attempts to embody. This strategy could be clearly seen at the organization’s 2005 special exhibition at the Fridericia‑ num in celebration of its half-century anniversary.56 Here, collections of historical

53 The first documenta to have a webpage was documenta X (1997). Websites of past editions are ar‑ chived here: http://documentaarchiv.stadt-kassel.de/miniwebs/documentaarchiv/02252/index.html (accessed 28 April 2014). 54 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Preface, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Book of Books (Catalogue 1/3), Ost­ fildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, pp. 14–15. 55 For example, the logo of the Venice Biennial is the winged lion of St. Mark. The São Paulo Biennial currently makes use of a semi-abstract signet. 56 The exhibition was essentially two juxtaposed exhibitions: Archive in Motion and Discrete Energies. For an analysis of the exhibition in relationship to notions of memory and “remembering exhi‑ bitions,” see Reesa Greenberg, ‘Remembering Exhibitions’. From Point to Line to Web, in: Tate Papers 12 (Autumn 2009), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/issue-12 (accessed 02 June 2014).



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museum images featured prominently alongside artworks from previous editions and newly commissioned pieces inspired by documenta’s past. The exhibition, as well as the catalogue, was ordered in part by individual chapters for each edition and con‑ sistently included documentary photographs of the museum’s installations from its then-eleven accrued iterations. Standing in the real space of the Fridericianum, and viewing repetitive but differentiated images of the rotunda, the facade, and import‑ ant galleries next to actual objects from these historical moments affected a visceral sense of the power of the place itself and the strength of documenta’s methods. The past was linked once again to the present through fragments and memories. But the idea of continuity embodied in a museum-image originally derived from a defunct museum now contained by a periodic exhibition ultimately suggested the always-ap‑ proaching, ever-expanding future.

documenta Beyond Heart and Brain The Brain’s temporal collisions at the center of the Fridericianum embedded a kind of memory palace firmly within the local boundaries and borders of the museum. This museum-image both grounded dOCUMENTA (13)’s vastness in the context of Kassel and collapsed and projected forward the series’ history within the space. The documenta itself as a kind of museum-image and museum-process began to come into focus. But this strategic centering was not the end of the story. Two floors above The Brain another image of a different kind of palace of frag‑ ments hugged the curving wall of the upper rotunda, a tapestry by Goshka Macuga entitled of what is. that it is. of what is not. that it is not, 1 (2012) (fig. 5/pl. V). Macuga, along with Christov-Bakargiev and other agents had traveled to Afghanistan in 2012 to work with local artists as one of many parallel events organized by the curatorial team. While in Kabul, Macuga made photos of the neoclassical Darul Aman Palace, built by Amanullah Khan (1892–1960) in the 1920s as part of a modernization project for his city. The palace was destroyed by fire in the late 1960s, restored as the Defense Min‑ istry, and destroyed again in the 1980s during the Soviet Invasion. While the Taliban still attacks the ruined structure, other citizens hope to one day rehabilitate it as a Parliament building. Like the Fridericianum, the structure has a U-shaped plan and possesses an apse-like projection on its front elevation rather than in back where the Fridericianum’s rotunda pushes beyond du Ry’s original footprint. Macuga collaged a photographic image of the curving palace facade with a group portrait of documenta participants and others she met on her visit to Kabul. She turned the resulting digital photograph into a large, high-resolution tapestry that hung in the Fridericianum. Macuga also made a pendant piece that depicted audiences at the ceremony in the Fridericianum for the Arnold Bode Prize (which she won) in 2011. She collaged this photo with images of protesters from the Occupy movement and the Orangerie

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Fig. 5: Goshka Macuga, of what is. that it is. of what is not. that it is not, 1 (2012) installed in the Museum Fridericianum at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012.

lawn. Macuga dictated that the two tapestries of mirrored “twin space[s]” in Kassel and Kabul must always be connected, yet they must always remain apart. They are to be displayed simultaneously, but never in the same location.57 For dOCUMENTA (13) the tapestry of Kassel hung in Kabul while in the Fridericianum’s rotunda, the curving facade of the Afghani palace, with its many parallels to Kassel’s museum, could not help but mimic documenta’s original museum-image. The effect of Macu‑ ga’s work was an uncanny doubling suggesting that a palace of memories had finally taken up residence in the Fridericianum, while simultaneously documenta’s museum had somehow transported itself to a Kabul hilltop. The Logbook for dOCUMENTA (13) reproduces emails between Macuga and Christov-Bakargiev that record the work’s development and their debates about documenta’s move away from its “center” to a country gripped by “political turmoil, a corrupt government and the sensitive issue of

57 Eva Scharrer and Andrea Villani write of this work: “Metaphorically, these two semicircles, lo‑ cated in different places, and evoking multiple times, create a whole […].” See Eva Scharrer, Andrea Villani, Goshka Macuga, in: dOCUMENTA (13). The Guidebook (Catalogue 3/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 88.



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cultural censorship.”58 Having risen from the rubble of fascism and war, documenta, its once-broken Fridericianum, and reanimated museum-image, now also had to con‑ sider the political questions at stake for an institution that possesses not only a brain and heart, but also legs. The same kind of fragmentation, and the tensions of connection and disconnec‑ tion and location and dislocation implicit in Macuga’s piece and fundamental to documenta’s instrumentalization of the Fridericianum, will now also form the basis of the next documenta in 2017, directed by Adam Szymczyk, the former director of the Kunsthalle Basel. The working theme of documenta 14, as of this writing, is “Learning from Athens” (“Von Athen lernen”). For the first time, documenta will occur at two equally important sites – or, as one headline announced, “documenta […] splits self in two”59 – producing a pair of autonomous but interconnected exhibitions in Kassel and Athens, Greece. In an attempt to decentralize documenta and call into question its powerful recurring role as “host”, documenta will now also experience the simul‑ taneous condition of being a “guest” by producing not an ancillary off-site event, but a fully developed second incarnation created in collaboration with Athens-based organizers. The selection of this Mediterranean city is no random choice. Itself a kind of urban “museum” of ancient and modern fragments, Athens and modern Greece have complicated relationships with history and modernity, cultural influence and destruction, migration and immigration, colonialism and capitalism, and absolut‑ ism and democracy. documenta 14 will no doubt contend with the difficult modern connections between Greece and Germany, from the wartime occupation of Athens by the Nazis to the 2010 German bailout and austerity measures imposed during the Greek economic crisis, as well as other entanglements between the two countries. As Szymczyk states: “Greece in 2014 […] embodies the economic, political, social, and cultural dilemmas that Europe must face today – much as Kassel in 1955 embodied the need to deal with the trauma of destruction brought about by the Nazi regime and […] as a strategic location at the onset of the Cold War.”60 But the curator’s main focus, according to his early statements, is Athens’s role not as a location broken apart by historical and contemporary situations, but as a place whose foundation is built on interaction, transaction, convergence, and movement – in short, a portal to and from places beyond its borders. Current plans call for events in Athens to begin in April 2017 and overlap by one month with the Kassel exhibit that begins in June. Even more than the far-reaching

58 Email correspondence between Macuga and Christov-Bakargiev reprinted in dOCUMENTA (13). The Logbook (Catalogue 2/3), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, pp. 100–102. 59 Brian Boucher, Documenta 17 Goes to Athens, Splits Self in Two, in: Art in America (October 7, 2014) http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/documenta-17-goes-to-athens-splitsself-in-two (accessed 19 October 2014). 60 See Documenta 14, Kassel. Learning from Athens. Von Athen lernen, in: documenta 14 News (no date) http://www.documenta.de/en/news.html (accessed 19 October 2014).

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terrain of dOCUMENTA (13), the split of documenta 14 into two equal parts (or is it instead a doubling or mirroring?) will provide a new challenge for visitors who may not be able to see both iterations, or achieve a sense of complete exhibition experi‑ ence. It also remains to be seen whether, given the political and economic questions raised by the pairing, the Kassel site will be truly upended as the “central location” by curators, critics, and visitors (after all, the position implied by the exhibition’s theme, the subject who is “learning from Athens”, implies that of the typical North‑ ern European documenta visitor, not a new Greek or “Southern” perspective) who may or may not be able to navigate beyond old models of center and periphery. In a city famous for its long struggle over control of its cultural patrimony – the case of the Parthenon Marbles held by the British Museum has recently been in the news again – will Athens find itself yet another fragment subsumed within documenta’s uncanny museum or will it lend documenta 14 a new, competing image? And what will documenta ultimately learn about itself from its (temporary) relocation? With the recent refugee crisis in Europe still unresolved and the next documenta begins to draw near, how will the event’s “migration” be understood? In this unprecedented context of fragmentation anew, will the museum-image and its memories continue to provide an effective, flexible, powerful symbol for documenta, or will the institution now con‑ front a new reflection of itself?

Conclusion: The (Museal) Mirror in the Fragment In the case of documenta, from its origin in 1955 to its latest edition, we recognize an exhibition that has itself appropriated, contained, and instrumentalized a fragmen‑ tary museum, its spatial and material presence, its logic and concepts, and its repro‑ ducible, transportable image. Simply a shell of its former self when founder Arnold Bode first integrated it into documenta, the defunct Fridericianum initially repre‑ sented a set of values and ideals related to historical notions of museums. Moreover, it linked a particular German past to the postwar present in a physical and visceral way. But over time the image of the Fridericianum and the idea of the museum came to serve other purposes: it helped establish and legitimate documenta as a permanent institution; publicized and spread its influence through a set of stable, consumable, and transportable symbols; allowed for the critical analysis of its form and history; and created spatial, temporal, and narrative connectivity, fundamental to its bien‑ nial format and its focus on contemporary art, as its audiences grew and its purview expanded to reflect the global, unending network of artists, objects, events, and his‑ tories that documenta is today.

Word and Image, Institution and Audience

Andrea Meyer

Museums in Print: The Interplay of Texts and Images in the Journal Museumskunde Western museum practice was marked by transnational cross-fertilizations from the very start. Models of construction and interior design, principles of taxonomy and display, management structures, or even operational aspects like opening hours were vigorously discussed, imitated, and adopted beyond national boundaries, with art connoisseurs and the museum staff being the driving forces of the various transfer processes.1 Around 1900, when “making” museums had already turned into a pro‑ fessional business, a journal was launched in Germany that was as much a product of these dialogues as a medium aimed at intensifying the exchange: the Museumskunde (fig. 1). Published between 1905 and 1924 by the art historian and museum reformer Karl Koetschau, the organ included an astounding number of contributions by foreign museum representatives – partly written directly in English.2 Articles written over the years on basically any type of museum from Bulgaria, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, the United States, and many more countries are to be found. Aside from rather comprehensive reports, short items were featured in the chronicle at the end of each issue. The chronicle covered worldwide museum plans or openings, exhibitions, personnel issues, and announced new catalogues or other museum liter‑ ature. Every event, however remote, every incident, however exotic, was taken note of – like the archaeological museum planned by the French in Phnom Penh, Cambo‑ dia, the decision to erect a museum for commerce and industry in Peking, or the new appointment of a museum assistant in the department of amphibians in Pretoria.3 It is not my intention to praise the journal as an objective organ of global com‑ munication among museum experts, though. Rather, one should bear in mind that the Museumskunde reflected the extending scope of public museums in Europe at the time, in particular of those with art, archaeology, and arts and crafts collections. With the advent of universal exhibitions in the mid-nineteenth century, the increas‑ ing number of officially sponsored excavations in the Near and Middle East, and the

1 Andrea Meyer, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), The Museum Is Open. Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 2 The international coverage of the Museumskunde is subject of my article The Journal Museums­ kunde – ‘Another Link between the Museums of the World’, in: Meyer, Savoy 2014 (as in note 1), pp. 179–190. For further details on the journal see Werner Hilgers, 100 Jahre – 69 Jahrgänge. Zum Jubiläum der “Museumskunde”, in: Museumskunde 70 (2005), pp. 7–17; Wolfgang Klausewitz, 66 Jahre Deutscher Museumsbund, Cologne: Rheinland Verlag, 1984, pp. 10–14; on Koetschau see Ute Gärtner, ‘Kunst soll man nur so lange sehen, als man sie genießen kann’ – Zum Gedenken an den Kunsthis‑ toriker und Museologen Karl Koetschau, in: Dresdener Kunstblätter 54 (2010), pp. 41–52. 3 See Museumskunde 2 (1906), pp. 110–111.

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Fig. 1: Cover of the first issue of the journal Museumskunde, 1905.

import of “curiosities” from all over the world,4 preserving and collecting material heritage was no longer restricted to the widely accepted canon of fine art objects from antiquity to the seventeenth century. As a result, artifacts that had been unknown to or ignored by museum staff before were now included in the holdings. Moreover, new departments and museums with specialized profiles came into existence. To name just a few examples: Based on the financial success of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the first institution dedicated exclusively to the history of art and design was created in the following year, the Museum of Manufactures, today’s Victoria and Albert Museum. On the initiative of Wilhelm Bode, the Islamic Art Collection and the East Asian Art Collection were founded in Berlin in 1904 and 1906. In the provincial city of Hagen, the Folkwang Museum installed both European and African exhibits as artworks, thus distancing itself from the habit of assigning the latter to either natural history or ethnology.5 The expansionist collecting practices around 1900 ran parallel to contemporary scholarship. In the discipline of art history, attempts to outline a global history of art

4 On the effects of global trade, exhibitions, and excavations on the discipline of art history see e.g. Susanne Leeb, Weltkunstgeschichte und Universalismusbegriffe: 1900/2010, in: Kritische Berichte 40 (2012), pp. 13–25, p. 13. 5 Wiebke von Hinden, Die Macht kunstwissenschaftlicher Reproduktionen. Überlegungen zu den Fotografien der Schriftenreihe “Kulturen der Erde,” in: Irene Below, Beatrice von Bismarck (eds.), Globalisierung, Hierarchisierung, Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004, pp. 43–53.



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can be traced back to Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History of 1842.6 While stressing European and Asian traditions and taking into account the Americas but neglecting Sub-Saharan Africa, Kugler summed up much of what was known about the visual arts around the world.7 In Germany, Kugler’s book served as model for later publica‑ tions like Carl Schnaase’s, Anton Springer’s, or Karl Woermann’s overviews of the art of “all times and peoples.”8 Even though their books evidenced that the art historians’ field of subjects had become much more comprehensive, this often did not hold true for the methodic approach. Frequently, customary principles of style were applied in the evaluation of objects from all cultures, thus submitting them to Western patterns of interpretation – a process that today’s efforts to conceptualize world art studies from a non-Eurocentric perspective aims at avoiding.9 Yet the Museumskunde’s coverage is not only expressive of the then prevalent ambition to provide worldwide surveys of mankind’s cultural heritage, whether in museum spaces or in historical writings. One central function of its international outlook was certainly to optimize museum work, which in turn warranted the com‑ petitiveness of German museums in the international arena. It is essentially from this perspective that one needs to discuss both the discursive and the visual images of museums the journal brought home to its readers. In the following, I will concentrate on an analysis of the exact images of Euro‑ pean and non-European museums distributed by the journal. My observations are based on a close reading of selected issues and on documents from the archives of the

6 Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1842. On Kugler’s hand‑ book see e.g. Hubert Locher, Kunstgeschichte als historische Theorie der Kunst 1750–1950, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2nd edition, 2010, pp. 244–254. 7 See Wilfried van Damme, Introducing World Art Studies, in: Kitty Zijlmans, Wilfried van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies. Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008, pp. 23–61, pp. 52–53. 8 Carl Schnaase, Geschichte der Bildenden Künste, 8 vols., Düsseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1843–1879; Anton Springer, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 6 vols., Leipzig: Seemann, 1895; Karl Woermann, Ge­ schichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker, 6 vols., Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1900–1911; van Damme 2008 (as in note 7), p. 53; Locher 2010 (as in note 6), pp. 236–242; Marlite Halbertsma, The Many Beginnings and the One End of World Art History in Germany, 1900–1933, in: Zijlmans, van Damme 2008 (as in note 7), pp. 91–105, p. 92. 9 For a detailed discussion of the differences between “world art studies” in the nineteenth century and today see e.g. Leeb 2012 (as in note 4); Locher 2010 (as in note 6); Zijlmans, van Damme 2008 (as in note 7); Ulrich Pfisterer, Origines and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000), in: ibid., pp. 69–89; Universalität der Kunstgeschichte?, Kritische Berichte 40 (2012); James Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global?, New York: Routledge, 2007; Wilfried van Damme, Kitty Zijlmans, Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies, in: Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher et al. (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 217–229.

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publishing house De Gruyter and those of the German Council of Museums.10 Both the Museumskunde and the council are strongly linked: Koetschau was the initiator of the journal and one of the initiators of the council, which was founded amidst World War I in 1917.11 Moreover, a second edition of the Museumskunde launched in 1929 was declared the official organ of the professional association. Its new editor was pre-his‑ torian and ethnologist Karl Herrmann Jacob-Friesen, who at that time was the director of the provincial museum in Hannover.12 The essay consists of three parts: First of all I would like discuss the illustrations as being constitutive for the overall hands-on profile of the journal. Secondly, I will ask what role the illustrations played in the context of the transnational exploration of museums that the journal conducted. Whereas these two parts mainly refer to the first period of the journal under Koetschau as editor, in the final section I will take the new edition into account, which was issued from 1929 to 1939. Both editions, then, appeared in periods of severe political crises – World War I, the transition from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic, and the changeover from democ‑ racy to National Socialism. It therefore seems natural that not only the replacement of the art historian Koetschau by pre-historian Jacob-Friesen, who belonged to a younger generation of museum staff than his predecessor, would have had a deci‑ sive impact on the coverage and the layout of the journal, which will be the subject at the end. An exploration of the interplay of texts and images in the Museumskunde has been not attempted so far, which is rather surprising, because the journal was richly illustrated and thorough research has been done on the layout of specialized liter‑ ature lately, including that of art historical survey books and periodicals.13 Investi‑

10 The estate of the publisher Walter de Gruyter is preserved by the department of manuscripts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK), the documents of the Deutsche Muse‑ umsbund are preserved by the Zentralarchiv, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, SPK (SMB-ZA). I would like to thank Bettina Bartz from De Gruyter and Angelika Königseder, who currently works on the research project “Der Verlag Walter de Gruyter im Nationalsozialismus,” for their valuable information on the estate, as well as Beate Ebelt for supporting my research on the Museumsbund in the central archive. 11 See Klausewitz 1984 (as in note 2). 12 See Ernst Klee, Jacob-Friesen, Karl-Hermann, in: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945, Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 2007, pp. 277–278; Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Jacob-Friesen, Karl-Hermann, in: Stadtlexikon Hannover, Hannover: Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009, p. 320. 13 See e.g. Locher 2010 (as in note 6), pp. 66–81; Locher, “Musée imaginaire” und historische Nar‑ ration. Zur Differenzierung visueller und verbaler Darstellung von Geschichte, in: Katharina Kraus, Klaus Niehr (eds.), Kunstwerk – Abbild – Buch. Das illustrierte Kunstbuch von 1730 bis 1930, Mu‑ nich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007, pp. 53–83; von Hinden 2004 (as in note 5); Katharina Krause, Klaus Niehr, Eva-Maria Hanebutt-Benz (eds.), Bilderlust und Lesefrüchte. Das illustrierte Kunstbuch von 1750 bis 1920, Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 2005; Andrea Meyer, Deutschland und Millet, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009, pp. 92–119; Iris Lauterbach (ed.): Die Kunst für Alle (1885–1944). Zur



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gations of this kind clearly show how dramatically the perception of artworks was changed following the invention of different techniques of reproduction throughout the nineteenth century. Apart from making artworks available for the consumption of a broad public, the reproductions shaped the discipline of art history, and, as I will argue, developed into substantial instruments in museum practice as well.

The Functions of the Illustrations for the Hands-On Character of the Museumskunde A closer look at some issues of the Museumskunde reveals numerous halftone prints of museums, which are integrated in the articles. The combination of views of build‑ ings, interiors, and of specific historic exhibition situations reflects the nature of the journal as an organ in which all fields making up the daily routine of museum profes‑ sionals were covered, from the actual presentation of the artifacts through to the use of lighting, the furnishings of the museum spaces, or the choice of showcases (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Illustration of a hall in the Wallace Collection in Hans Dedekam’s article “Reisestudien,” Museumskunde 1 (1905), p. 89.

Of course, statements on, for example, the colour of walls were hard for the reader to evaluate because of the black and white of the reproductions. Yet the images assisted in giving a comprehensive impression of the subjects discussed, particularly in the case of lengthy travel accounts, like those by Hans Dedekam or Frida Schottmüller, who

Kunst­publizistik vom Kaiserreich bis zum Nationalsozialismus, Munich: Zentralinstitut für Kunst­ geschichte, 2010.

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Fig. 3: Double page from the article “Die Entwicklung der römischen Museen,” by Frida Schottmüller, Museumskunde 9 (1923), p. 178–179

touch upon a vast number of examples (fig. 3).14 The same applies to reports exploring sites out of reach for many readers, like the Fogg Museum in Cambridge (fig. 4).15 Apart from the photographs, there is a second type of illustration, which appears quite frequently in the journal: diagrams and graphics (fig. 5). These can be under‑ stood as manuals. They not only helped in understanding complex (technical) issues but encouraged the readers – all of them practitioners themselves: museum directors, curators, restorers – to adopt the very models under discussion or at least to review the practices common in their respective institution. If we compare the Museumskunde with other periodicals, either with earlier spe‑ cialized journals dedicated to museography or with contemporary art journals, we will hardly find views of interiors or of exhibition situations but rather close-ups of artifacts. Thus I would like to stress that the illustrations gave the periodical its distin‑ guished profile. They reinforced its hands-on character and – being understandable

14 Hans Dedekam, Reisestudien, in: Museumskunde 1 (1905), pp. 75–91, pp. 153–166, pp. 229–231; Frida Schottmüller, Die Entwicklung der römischen Museen, in: ibid. 9 (1913), pp. 1–26, pp. 85–105, pp. 162–181. 15 Margaret T. Jackson, Alterations in the Fogg Museum Cambridge, U.S.A., in: ibid. 10 (1914), pp. 206–214.



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Fig. 4: Illustration of the Fogg Museum in Margaret T. Jackson’s article “Alterations in the Fogg Museum Cambridge, U.S.A.”, ­Museumskunde 10 (1914), p. 208.

Fig. 5: Diagram in Francis Bather’s article “The Northern Museum, Stockholm,” Museumskunde 4 (1908), p. 75.

to all readers, regardless of their mother tongue – were of programmatic character in as much as the Museumskunde addressed itself to museum staff beyond national borders.

Images as Instruments in the Communication of World Art Yet another observation about the illustration policy is striking: all of the examples I have pointed out above pertain to European collections or museums located in North America. Even though the coverage of the Museumskunde under Koetschau was explicitly global, the illustrations did not show any museum activities localized at

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the “periphery.” There are surely a few pragmatic reasons for this imbalance: Firstly, much of the information on events in museums worldwide, like the aforementioned museums planned in Cambodia and China, and plans for new personnel in South Africa, appeared in the chronicle, which per se was not illustrated. Secondly, repro‑ ductions of buildings and exhibitions from all over the world might still have been unavailable or simply too expensive to include. Indeed, the archival documents of the late 1920s and 1930s constantly evidence the difficult economic situation. They reveal that the relaunch of the journal was preceded by ongoing negotiations over the price of the journal between the editor Jacob-Friesen, his forerunner Koetschau, and several publishing houses.16 Only when the publishing house De Gruyter, which had already published the Museumskunde under Koetschau, agreed to sell each issue for the reduced price of twenty marks to members of the German Council, was it commis‑ sioned with the new edition. In the contract, the number of illustrations, which were no longer integrated in the essays but printed on separate plates, was limited from the outset.17 The volumes contain twenty-four plates at the most, but sometimes as few as nine or ten plates. Unfortunately, I do not know if the old contract between Koetschau and De Gruyter included such a regulation since so far I have not been able to find relevant archival material on the initial phase of the journal. It is very well possible that there was such a limitation in spite of the fact that the economic situation was far less disastrous during the empire than during the Weimar era. Leaving economics aside, I contend that the lack of illustrations of both non-Eu‑ ropean art and non-Western museums is but an effect of the value system infused by imperialism or colonialism. To substantiate this, I would like to refer to a few arti‑ cles in the journal that explicitly deal with fine arts and design from Asia. In the very first volume, Ernst Grosse, ethnologist and curator at the municipal art collection in Freiburg, and the art historian Woldemar von Seidlitz, whose position at the royal museums in Dresden was tantamount to that of a general director, gave an overview of public and private collectors competing for Asian artworks in Europe and the United States.18 Grosse addressed the historic development and the different media of art pro‑

16 See Jacob-Friesen’s letters to the zoologist Carl Zimmer, director of the Zoologisches Museum der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, today’s Museum für Naturkunde, on July 7, 1928, November 28, 1928 and December 14, 1928, III/DMB 004; as well as his letter to de Gruyter, December 14, 1928, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253. 17 See a copy of the contract between de Gruyter and the Deutsche Museumsbund, sent by the pub‑ lisher to Karl Koetschau, February 26, 1929, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253. 18 Ernst Grosse, Über den Ausbau und die Aufstellung öffentlicher Sammlungen von ostasiatischen Kunstwerken, in: Museumskunde 1 (1905), pp. 123–139; Woldemar von Seidlitz, Ein deutsches Museum für Asiatische Kunst, in: ibid., pp. 181–197. See Herbert Butz, Wege und Wandel. 100 Jahre Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, in: id. (ed.), Wege und Wandel. 100 Jahre Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2007, pp. 11–80, p. 19, who refers to both articles. For Grosse’s and von Seidlitz’s biographies see Herbert Ganslmayr,



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duction in China, Japan, and Korea, stressing that Europeans usually lacked expertise and thus were misled by faulty priorities when acquiring Asian objects. He also pointed out potential hazards to their conservation, such as European heating and lighting systems. In general, he was very critical of the dense display of Asian objects in the museum space. For Grosse, it prevented the exhibits from unfolding their “solemn beauty.”19 He demanded that less objects be presented and that the presentation follow guidelines that were scientific but that, predominantly, appealed to good taste. Just like Grosse, von Seidlitz, too, prioritized artistic over scientific principles for the organization of collectibles from Asia. In fact, even more strongly than his col‑ league from Freiburg, von Seidlitz urged the establishment of a state-funded, central museum of Asian arts in the German Empire. Both articles not only underline the pop‑ ularity of non-European art among museum representatives, collectors, and connois‑ seurs, but also confirm the above-mentioned paradigm shift in the scholarly under‑ standing of non-Western artifacts as exhibits with an aesthetic value of their own. Strikingly, the articles had hardly any illustrations. Grosse provided only one drawing showing a generic Japanese interior (fig. 6), and von Seidlitz refrained from using any illustrations at all. I will address this lack of images in more detail later. For now, let me only briefly suggest that they did not want to present images that in their opinion were rather inappropriate as models for the display of Asian artifacts. Besides Grosse’s and von Seidlitz’s contributions, the Museumskunde published further articles on Asian art or archaeological exhibitions and museums. On the occa‑ sion of the opening of the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne, director Adolf Fischer introduced the readers to his institution in May 1914.20 In August 1916, the annotated bibliography on museum literature by Valentin Scherer listed the catalogue of the exhibition of Indian art in Berlin in 1881, which was considered a welcome survey book rather than an exhibition guide.21 In the following, I would like to draw particu‑ lar attention to just one more article, though, which took the reader beyond national or European borders all the way to India itself. In an issue of the Museumskunde in 1911, a text entitled “A Museum of Indian Sculpture” was published.22 Its attribution to “J. Glaser” makes it difficult to identify the author. So far I have found no clue as to who J. Glaser was, or any hint that the initial of the first name may simply have been

Grosse, Ernst Carl Gustav, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 7 (1966), pp. 148–149, URL: http://www.deut‑ sche-biographie.de/pnd117564273.html (accessed 14 September 2014); Claudia Janke, Seidlitz, Wolde‑ mar Eduard von, in: Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde e.V. (ed.), Sächsische Biografie, http://saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Woldemar_von_Seidlitz_%281850-1922%29 (accessed 14 September 2014). 19 Grosse 1905 (as in note 18), p. 139. 20 Adolf Fischer, Das Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst der Stadt Cöln, in: Museumskunde 10 (1914), pp. 71–107. 21 Valentin Scherer, Bibliographie deutscher Museumskataloge, in: ibid. 12 (1916), p. 119. 22 J. Glaser, Ein Museum Indischer Plastik, in: ibid. 7 (1911), pp. 214–215.

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Fig. 6: Illustrated page from Ernst Grosse’s article on public collections of East Asian art, Museumskunde 1 (1905), p. 134.

a mistake. The author might have been Curt Glaser, who indeed contributed an article on East Asian Art Museums in the Museumskunde of the following year.23 In 1909 the latter had been appointed curator of the prints and drawings division (Kupferstich‑ kabinett) in Berlin, exactly when Koetschau, the editor, headed the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum.24 Glaser is also said to have been on a one-year study trip to Japan in 1911 – East Asian art was to become his field of expertise.25 Whether he travelled to India in the course of this trip is not known, but very well possible. The focus of this Glaser article is the Archaeological Museum in Sarnath.26 In his introduction the author explains the significance of Sarnath for Buddhism and mentions the purpose of the museum, which was to accommodate the findings from

23 Curt Glaser, Ostasiatische Kunstmuseen, in: ibid. 8 (1912), pp. 146–152. 24 On Glaser see Hartmut Walravens (ed.), Curt Glaser. Historiker der ostasiatischen Kunst. Mit seinem nachgelassenen Werk “Materialien zu einer Kunstgeschichte des Quattrocento in Italien”. Mit Einleitung, Schriftenverzeichnis und Register, Berlin: Staatsbibliothek, 2012; Andreas Strobl, Curt Glaser. Kunsthistoriker – Kunstkritiker – Sammler. Eine deutsch-jüdische Biographie, Cologne: Böhlau, 2006. Neither Walravens nor Strobl attributes the article on “A Museum of Indian Sculpture” to Curt Glaser. 25 See Strobl 2006 (as in note 24), pp. 70–84. 26 Glaser’s article immediately caught my attention because I visited Sarnath with its Buddhist exca‑ vation site and the archaeological museum in 2012 and was very curious about his account.



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the excavations of the Buddhist temple and the nearby stupas. Glaser furthermore describes the architecture of the building and gives a short survey of the evolution of Indian sculpture. His statements reveal his appreciation of the aesthetics of the objects on view – Glaser speaks, for example, in high terms of the Lion Capital of Ashoka (circa 250 BC), which was to become the National Emblem of India after its independence (from the British Empire) in 1950. “No other museum,” Glaser states, “can boast the possession of a magnificent piece like this.”27 He was troubled, though, by the artifacts’ display, which hardly differed from a storage area. Objects of high quality, he argues, were difficult to find in the vast abundance of diverse material. He advised dividing the holdings into public and study collections. Moreover, he regrets that not artistic but archaeological principles had served as the basis for the arrange‑ ment and, finally, concludes that the chance to present the evolution of Indian sculp‑ ture in a series of remarkable examples had been passed up. The quotations reveal Glaser’s interest, if not active involvement, in the museum reform movement.28 His plea for the display of only masterpieces and for the muse‑ um’s division into a public and a study collection echoes contemporary European and North American discussions on ways to counteract museum fatigue. Furthermore, his reading of the archaeological findings as art works again reflects the taste of the time, in which Asian objects were becoming fashionable collectibles in Europe. Concerning the removal of non-European objects from the realm of ethnography and their reeval‑ uation as art, the author’s opinion is identical with that of Grosse and von Seidlitz.29 For this very reason, I tend to identify him as Curt Glaser, who was also an outspoken protagonist of this trend. What is more important than the identity of the author, though, is that Glaser does not mention the colonial background of the excavation of the Buddhist site and of the museum. At the time it was probably self-evident and needed no further comment that the British and not the Indians themselves had taken the initiative at Sarnath. For my argumentation, though, it is important to know a little bit more about the colonial context of the museum. The Archaeological Survey in India, founded by the British, was responsible for expeditions, documentations, and the retrieval of monuments from the field. Personalities like Alexander Cunningham, Henry Hardy

27 Glaser 1911 (as in note 22), p. 215. The translation of this quote and the following ones is mine. 28 See Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des mo­ dernen Museums 1880–1940, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001. 29 Strobl 2006 (as in note 24), p. 72; for the reevaluation processes, see Elke Bujok, Kunstgeschichte und Ethnologie um 1900. Ein Streiflicht, in: Claudius Müller (ed.), Weiter als der Horizont. Kunst der Welt, exhibition catalogue, Munich: Hirmer, 2008, pp. 7–23; Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Islamic Art and the Invention of the “Masterpiece”. Approaches in Early Twentieth-Century Scholarship, in: Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Islamic Art and the Museum. Approaches to Art and Archaeology of the Muslim World in Early Twentieth-Century Scholarship, London: Saqi, 2012, pp. 183–188.

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Cole, and James Ferguson dominated these archaeological efforts, with the intention – I cite Kavita Singh – to save the objects “not just from the elements […], but from the Indian people.”30 They were convinced that the Indians “were bound to plunder” the artifacts “for building materials, or destroy them in iconoclastic acts.”31 As a result, enormous numbers of movable objects were transported to London and to museums in Indian cities. Around 1900, however, with the arrival of Lord Curzon as Viceroy, the Archaeological Survey turned into a permanent institution with the duty to protect the Indian monuments in situ. From now on, museums were to be built at the site, “removing and yet not removing” the objects from their contexts, as Singh described the paradoxical new strategy.32 The museum at Sarnath, initiated by the then director of the survey, Sir John Marshall, and planned by the architect James Ramson, was in fact the first site museum the Archaeological Survey ever installed.33 Glaser’s article contains no reference at all to the key position the museum at Sarnath had in the reframing of the Archaeological Survey’s politics. Of course, I do not expect a post-colonial interpretation of the Sarnath project as a vital constituent in the production of knowledge and the control over India and its cultural heritage. But the silence regarding any political and ideological implications of this and many more museum foundations is conspicuous, and in the end shows how fragmentary the worldwide coverage of the Museumskunde really was. Its biased outlook also manifests itself in the handling of illustrations. Glaser’s article was neither accompanied by drawings nor photographs, both of which prob‑ ably would have been available – photographs of the excavation site and the interior of the museum at Sarnath were published by the Archaeological Survey as early as 1904/06 (fig. 7). It is more than likely that Glaser or the journal decidedly abstained from illustrations since Sarnath, similar to the installations of Asian art in Europe that were surveyed by Grosse and von Seidlitz, did not recommend itself as a shining example for a reformist museum practice. Hence photography was used – or in this case, not used – as a means of argumentation against what German museum staff then considered outmoded display principles.34 The inevitable side effect of this sort of visual argumentation was that the non-European objects themselves remained

30 Kavita Singh, Material Fantasy. The Museum in Colonial India, in: Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009, pp. 40–57, p. 47; Tapati Gu‑ ha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories. Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 31 Singh 2009 (as in note 30), p. 47. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 48. 34 See Hubert Locher, Creative Visions. Photography, the Art Historical Canon, and the Object of Art History, in: G. Ulrich Großmann, Petra Krutisch (eds.), The Challenge of the Object. 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art. Congress Proceedings, vol. 3, Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2013, pp. 851– 855.



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Fig. 7: View of the gallery in the Sarnath Museum, 1911–1912.

almost invisible for the readers of the Museumskunde. In this respect, its strategy of publishing images corresponds to the use of photographs in art historical manuals or periodicals, in which well-known, recognized art works were constantly reproduced, whereas images of unfamiliar, non-canonized objects appeared rather seldom.35 The textual and the visual arguments put forth by the journal were highly contradictory: on the textual level, the quoted authors spoke in favor of the enlargement of the canon; on the level of images, they refrained from challenging the existing canon.

Doomed to Failure? The Museumskunde under National Socialism On the initiative of the German Council of Museums, the Museumskunde, abandoned in 1924, had a second run from 1929 onwards. The journal’s looks had changed, but apart from the new flashy red cover, at first sight not many aspects seem to have

35 Ibid., p. 854.

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been modified (fig. 8/pl. VI).36 Koetschau, who had supported Jacob-Friesen in his attempts to find a publisher, contributed a preface to the first issue.37 He insisted that the Museumskunde needed to revive its relations with its friends abroad. Indeed, up to three extensive articles covering museums or exhibitions in other countries were included in quite a few issues. Since a separate column had been created for them, the transborder dialogue was formally underlined. Brussels, Mitau, Rome, Vienna, Winterthur – the journey beyond national borders continued, yet it no longer reached beyond Europe.38 In addition, the transnational exchange was to last only a short period of time. After the National Socialists’ ascent to power, the journal, being the official organ of the German Council of Museums, turned into a medium for debates on the question of how museums might best serve the new regime.39 Particularly the issues of late 1933 and of 1934 reveal that all reformist achievements of popularizing the museum were subjected to ideological ends. The contents of the articles, for example on the “polit‑ ical museum” or on the “museum in the post-liberal age,” lead me to believe that the specter of museum fatigue fought against so intensely throughout the 1920s had left the museum staff with a deep anxiety, the anxiety that the institutions they repre‑ sented were of no value for the new society proclaimed by the National Socialists.40 The volumes of the second edition were still illustrated. The only difference was, as described earlier, that the number of illustrations decreased and that these were no longer imbedded in the texts. And archival documents give evidence that the

36 Jacob-Friesen was not at all satisfied with the cover of the first issue, which in fact led to a contro‑ versial discussion among the attendants of the convention of the Deutsche Museumsbund in Danzig in 1929. The DMB resolved to allocate 300 reichsmark for the new design of the cover for the issues in 1930 and all the following years. See Jacob-Friesen’s letters to Werner Noack, March 10, 1930 and April 1, 1930, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253, as well as the minutes of the session of group A of the DMB (Art and Culture Museums) on October 10, 1929, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 003. 37 Koetschau, Zum Geleit, in: Museumskunde n.s. 1 (1929), p. 1. 38 William Meyer, Das kurländische Provinzial-Museum in Mitau, in: ibid., pp. 136–138; Bruno Grim‑ schitz, Die Moderne Galerie in Wien, in: ibid., n.s. 2 (1930), pp. 23–24; Eduard Briner, Das Gewerbemu‑ seum in Winterthur, in: ibid., pp. 25–26; Karl Hermann Jacob-Friesen, Die Königlichen Museen d’Art et d’Histoire des Cinquantaire zu Brüssel und ihre didaktische Arbeit, in: ibid., n.s. 4 (1932), pp. 134–162; Angelo Lipinsky, Pinacotheca Vaticana, in: ibid., n.s. 5 (1933), pp. 24–33. 39 The research on the DMB and the Museumskunde during the era of National Socialism is only at its initial stages. See Christian Saehrendt, Zwischen Vernissage und Saalschlacht. Der Deutsche Muse‑ umsbund und sein Kampf für die moderne Kunst 1925–1937, in: Museumskunde 68 (2003), pp. 112–121; Hilgers 2005 (as in note 2), pp. 12–13; Klausewitz 1984 (as in note 2), pp. 22–35; Kristina Kratz-Kesse‑ meier, Für die ‘Erkämpfung einer neuen Museumskultur’. Zur Rolle des Deutschen Museumsbundes im Nationalsozialismus, in: Tanja Baensch, Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Dorothee Wimmer (eds.), Museen im Nationalsozialismus. Akteure – Orte – Politik. Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau (Veröffentlichungen der Richard-Schöne-Gesellschaft für Museumsgeschichte e.V.), 2016, pp. 23–43. 40 Erich Keyser, Das Politische Museum, in: Museumskunde 6 (1934), pp. 82–91; Niels von Holst, Das Kunstmuseum im nachliberalistischen Zeitalter, in: ibid., pp. 1–9.



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Fig. 8: Cover of the second issue of the new edition of the Museumskunde n.s. 2 (1930).

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Fig. 9: Plate accompanying Oskar Karpa’s article on the rearrangement of museums in the Rhine Province, ­Museumskunde n.s. 6 (1934), plate 10.

publisher was much concerned about the illustrations when, in 1931, he demanded to have the quality of the plates improved.41 In an issue of the 1934 volume, Oskar Karpa for example relies on photographs to demonstrate some of the transformations taking place in the installation techniques used by museums of local history in the Rhine Province (fig. 9).42 The pictures show two interiors of the regional museum in Zülpich, a city close to Cologne and Bonn.43 One pair of illustrations documents each hall before and after its rearrangement, thus showing the adoption of modern display principles that had already been implemented during the era of the Weimar Republic. The images confirm recent research on museums under National Socialism, in which

41 See the copy of a letter dated April 1, 1931 in the archive of Walter de Gruyter in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Dep. 42 (de Gruyter), Nr. 166 (10): “Eben erhalte ich […] die ersten Probehefte von der Muse‑ umskunde. Die Tafeln, die dem Heft beigegeben sind, sind sehr schlecht gedruckt. Die ganzen Tafeln sind statt schwarz richtig grau. So dürfen wir in Zukunft keine Klischees für die Museumskunde mehr drucken. […] Sie werden selbst zugeben müssen, dass diese Wiedergabe unter aller Kritik ist.” 42 O. Karpa, Durchgreifende Neugestaltung des Museumswesens in der Rheinprovinz. Kulturelle Aufbauarbeit der Rheinischen Provinzialverwaltung, in: Museumskunde n.s. 6 (1934), pp. 159–166. 43 Ibid., pl. 10, pl. 11.



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scholars have stressed the continuities instead of the ruptures that characterized museum practice during that time.44 In exactly this sense, it would also be too simple to ascribe the changes in jour‑ nalistic coverage exclusively to the political caesura in 1933. Despite the contributions on international museums and despite the contributions by international authors, the new edition was from the very start less globally oriented than the first. Notably, the chronicle was far less comprehensive in scope. Information on exhibitions abroad or on journals released by foreign institutions was only rarely given. Possibly JacobFriesen’s transnational network was not as extensive as Koetschau’s had been, or the Museumskunde was competing for articles with Mouseion, a new journal the Interna‑ tional Museums Office began publishing in Paris in 1927.45 Whatever the answer may be – contrary to its proclaimed goal to enhance cross-border exchange and contrary to the institutionalization of transnational museum practice as propelled by the Interna‑ tional Museums Office – the Museumskunde steered an opposite course. There is yet another decisive aspect that distinguishes the new edition from the preceding one: the weight of the coverage shifted away from art museums to natural history and local history museums. Koetschau criticized this tendency in a letter to Werner Noack, the president of the art and cultural history museums within the council, in January 1931, stating “that the first issues have left a very unpleasant impression on me.”46 However, the correspondence between Noack and Koetschau’s successor Jacob-Friesen reveals that the latter was anxious to keep a balance in the coverage. In August 1933 he complained that he had been let down by the art history colleagues and that he felt obliged to reject the abundant material he had received from the natural scientists.47 Given the dismissal of numerous museum directors in 1933, particularly the Jews and those who had supported modern art, Noack got to the heart of the problem when he dryly answered: “It seems that a certain indifference has come up in our circles, at least a reserve to utter oneself in writing.”48

44 See Julia Pfannschmidt, Review of the Conference Museen im Nationalsozialismus, Deutsches His‑ torisches Museum, Berlin, 13.–15.06.2013, in: H-ArtHist (10 May 2014), http://arthist.net/reviews/7686 (accessed 14 September 2014). 45 Nonetheless Jacob-Friesen endeavored to win correspondents for the international coverage. In a letter to Werner Noack dated November 26, 1930 he claimed to have won contributors in St. Ger‑ main-en Laye, Oslo, and Budapest and that he was in negotiations with colleagues in Spain and Vienna. See SMB-ZA, III DMB/ 253. On Mouseion see Marie Caillot, La revue Mouseion (1927-1946). Les musées et la cooperation culturelle international, Thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe, Ecole nationale des chartes, 2011, http://theses.enc.sorbonne.fr/2011/caillot (accessed 11 November 2012); Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel, The Journal Mouseion as Means of Transnational Culture. Gug‑ lielmo Pacchioni and the Dawn of the “Modern Museum” in Italy, in: Meyer, Savoy 2014 (as in note 1), pp. 89–100; and Melania Savino’s chapter in this volume. 46 Koetschau to Noack, January 7, 1931, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253. 47 Jacob-Friesen to Noack, August 8, 1933, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253. 48 Noack to Jacob-Friesen, October 20, 1933, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 253.

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A few years later, Jacob-Friesen’s conduct towards colleagues from art and cul‑ tural history museums became harsher. In 1939, before the Museumskunde ceased to be published, he was confronted with De Gruyter’s plans to reform the journal, according to which the natural history museums supposedly were to be “eliminated” from its pages.49 In a letter to Max Rauther, the president of the Council of the German Natural History Museums, Jacob-Friesen deemed these plans to be the product of the “snob-like attitude of art historians, who generally disliked natural history.”50

Conclusion In the light of my re-reading of the Museumskunde and in light of the correspondences I have quoted, I would like to draw the following conclusions. The Museumskunde’s ambition to serve as a medium for a transnational discussion of a broad spectrum of museum issues resulted in the publication of a rich body of illustrations. One might even claim that the journal was engaged in bringing about a new genre of photogra‑ phy, the genre of the installation shot. Yet the outreach into global museum culture did not prevent the Museumskunde from reflecting a Eurocentric, Western perspective in both its visual and written texts. This becomes evident at first glance when taking into account that the articles on collections or museums of Asian art cited above were written exclusively by German scholars trained in the context of the European value system. The opening up to the “other” was in line with imperial cultural politics, since it was instrumental in advancing reforms and in strengthening the professionaliza‑ tion process. The second edition stood in this same tradition in spite of its new per‑ sonnel. Yet economic constraints made it difficult to maintain the standard. Hidden from the public view, Jacob-Friesen had disputes with the publisher and had to cope with the seeming indifference of both subscribers and contributors within an expand‑ ing, diversifying professional field. The images of the museum got even more frag‑ mentary once the National Socialist regime came into power. Both the discussions published in the journal and behind the scenes confirm that National Socialism had driven a wedge between those who eagerly wanted to continue or to boost their career and those who did not or were not allowed to do so. But they also show that a gap had opened up between the representatives of art or cultural museums on the one hand and natural history museums on the other.

49 Jacob-Friesen to Max Rauther in Stuttgart, January 14, 1939, SMB-ZA, III/DMB 329. 50 Ibid.

Melania Savino

Creating the Idea of the Museum through the Pages of the Journal Mouseion A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tan‑ gible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.1

This definition, formulated in 2007 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) during the Twenty-First General Conference in Vienna, aims to describe the institu‑ tion of the museum as we intend it today. On the same Internet page on the ICOM website, we find the following statements: “This definition is a reference in the inter‑ national community” and “The definition of a museum has evolved, in line with developments in society. Since its creation in 1946, ICOM updates this definition in accordance with the realities of the global museum community.”2 As we can observe from this manifesto, there is a great emphasis on the “global” aspect of this definition: potentially any institution in the world, regardless of what it displays and where it is located, can be categorized in accordance with these criteria. But how did ICOM come to formulate such a definition? How did the idea of the museum change through the centuries? And, in particular, what was the role of international organisations in the construction of this image of the institution? There have been several studies in recent decades focusing on the role that inter‑ national organizations, especially UNESCO, played in the creation of the Global Her‑ itage concept, particularly after 1972 and the promulgation of the Convention Con‑ cerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.3 Scholars have analysed the notion of “global” heritage, identifying how this concept was created in a “privileged context”, one driven by ethical and cultural principles profoundly rooted in Western society.4

1 http://icom.museum/the-vision/museum-definition/(accessed January 2014). 2 Ibid. 3 See, for example, Sophie Labadi, Representations of the Nation and Cultural Diversity in Discourses on World Heritage, in: Journal of Social Archaeology 7 (2007), 147–170; Sophie Labadi, Outstanding Universal Value: Value-Based Analyses of the World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Conventions, Lanham, MD: AltaMira press, 2013; Mads Daugbjerg, Thomas Fibiger, Introduction: Heritage Gone Global. Investigating the Production and Problematics of Globalized Pasts, in: History and Anthropology, 22.2 (2011), pp. 135–147, and Christiaan De Beukelaer, Miikka Pyykkönen, J. P. Singh (eds.), Globalization, Culture, and Development. The UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 4 Wiktor Stoczkowski, UNESCO’s Doctrine of Human Diversity: A Secular Soteriology?, in: Anthropology Today 25.3 (2009), pp. 7–11; Lynn Meskell, UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention at 40. Challeng‑

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While these studies have enhanced our understanding and perception of the shaping of modern museology, when analysing the function and image of the museum in our society it is crucial to investigate the historical and political context in which it evolved. By going back to the beginning of the twentieth century to shed light on some crucial events in the development of modern museology, this essay aims to contribute to the analysis of how the institution of the museum was conceived and perceived during this specific historical period. In particular, it considers the idea of the museum that was developed and promulgated via the pages of the journal Mouseion, Bulletin de l’Office International des Musées. This was the official publication of the International Museum Office, the first international organization with the aim of studying the institution of the museum at a global level. The articles and images included in this journal constitute a precious information source, enabling us not only to grasp the mentality of that time, but also to outline some basic principles of a much more widespread conception of the museum as an institution. This concep‑ tion is part of Western mentality, co‑produced through a constant dialogue between scholarly representation and popular perception. Based on a close inspection of the articles and images in all the magazine’s issues from 1927 to 1946, this article will give particular attention to an analysis of the images of European and non-Euro‑ pean museums disseminated by the journal. I hope to demonstrate how the journal profoundly mirrored and reinforced the dominant ideology of the time, shaping the image of the museum through Eurocentric norms and conventions.

Intellectual Cooperation and a New Museology The founding of the journal Mouseion in the 1920s coincided with a transformed worldview. The end of the First World War is largely considered to have been a major turning point in the history of the twentieth century, marking profound political, cul‑ tural, and social changes across Europe and the entire world. The period that termi‑ nated with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles witnessed crucial changes in the way nations related to each other, and numerous international organizations were estab‑ lished as a consequence.5 In particular, in 1919 the League of Nations was created with the aim of maintaining world peace through conflict resolution and preventing

ing the Economic and Political Order of International Heritage Conservation, in: Current Anthropology 54.4 (2013), pp. 483–494. 5 For an examination of the roles that international organizations play in the modern world, see Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.



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global scale wars.6 The League initially involved thirty-two member countries, more than half of which were outside Europe, from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. From its first establishment it embraced a number of affiliated organizations, including the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (CICI), which aimed to promote cultural and intellectual exchanges among nations and to develop international cultural and intellectual exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists, and other intellectuals.7 But as several scholars have noted, while the principles of peace and cultural dialogue were perceived in a global and interna‑ tional sense by the CICI, since it included several representatives of extra-European countries, the intellectual and moral values at its core were profoundly European.8 These important socio-political changes also had a considerable effect on the development of the discipline of museology on a global scale. Following the same internationalist principles, in July 1926 the International Museums Office (IMO) was created as the result of a decision by the International Commission for Intellec‑ tual Cooperation. Its secretariat was based in Paris and was directed by a board of commissioners from the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, as well as a few museum experts.9 Despite the IMO’s dependence on the League of Nations, which included non-European associates, the members of its commit‑ tee were exclusively of a European or North American background.10 The necessity of establishing an institution entirely dedicated to museums was first raised in a report written by Henri Focillon, a famous French art historian and professor at the Sorbonne University, who became the main founding member of the Interna‑ tional Museum Office. To convince the other members of CICI of the importance of museums he wrote: Since the Renaissance, since the age of curiosity cabinets, museums, just as much as books, play a leading role in the history of travel, exchange of ideas and influences. Beyond the purely natio‑ nal issues, they were the first sketch or the first instrument of a European and global conscious‑

6 The League of Nations lasted until 1946 and was replaced at the end of the Second World War by The United Nations (UN), which inherited a number of agencies and organisations originally founded by the League. 7 Iriye 2002 (as in note 5), pp. 21–22. 8 Annamaria Ducci, Europe and the Artistic Patrimony of the Interwar Period: the International Insti‑ tute for Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations, in: Mark Hewitson, Matthew D’Auria (eds.), Europe in Crisis. Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012, pp. 227–242, p. 230. 9 For a detailed history of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and its relation‑ ship with the League of Nations system, see Jean Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oublée. La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle (1919–1946), Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999. To date, this is the only work that deals with the history of the CICI and the IMO. 10 L’Office des Musées a la Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle, in: Mouseion 1 (1927), pp. 134–138.

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ness. In them there is a series of resources which the Commission thought had no right to exist. How to use them, to help the international organization of intellectual work and to facilitate, render more accurate, richer and more efficient the knowledge of the peoples of other nations?11

From its creation, the office played a fundamental role in advancing methodologi‑ cal and epistemological discussions about the role and definition of the museum in modern society. Operating as the institutional center for international communica‑ tion, it acted as the central mediator of international collaboration.12 As Anna-Maria Ducci has observed, the International Museums Office was conceived as the central organ, having the purpose of connecting with one another all the museums of the world and of promoting the transmission of knowledge of works of art and monuments belon‑ ging to a global patrimony. It was hence a kind of super-museum, the main task of which was to undertake ‘federal’ initiatives such as the documentation, the preservation and the exchange of works of art and reproductions. It can be said that it created a first, embryonic, ‘network of museums’.13

The office had a twofold aim: the conservation and protection of monuments, and the legal protection of public collections at an international level.14 The International Museums Office ceased its functions in 1946, when it was replaced by the newly estab‑ lished United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM).15 With the establishment of the IMO, the twentieth century saw museology becom‑ ing “global”: new efforts were undertaken by numerous nations to begin to study museums through the sharing and comparison of institutions. The first decades of the twentieth century, defined by Ivo Maroević as the “proto-scientific phase of muse‑ ology”, mark a period of newfound interest in professionalizing museum work and in exchanging good museum practices.16 This intense museological activity at the beginning of the twentieth century was well manifested in a new network of museum professionals, scholars, and experts, who started to share and compare information about these “new” disciplines through specialized journals and special publications. National museum associations, such as the Museums Association of the U. K., the

11 L’œuvre de coopération intellectuelle et l’Office International des Musées, in: Mouseion 1 (1927), p. 4. Translated from the original text in French. All translations are my own. 12 Ivo Maroević, Introduction to Museology: The European Approach, Munich: Verlag Dr. C. MüllerStraten, 1998, p. 79 and Jan Marontate, Museums and the Constitution of Culture, in: Mark D. Jacobs, Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, pp. 286–301, p. 287. 13 Ducci 2012 (as in note 8), p. 235. 14 Renoliet 1999 (as in note 9), p. 310. 15 Jo-Anne Pemberton, The Changing Shape of Intellectual Cooperation: From the League of Nations to UNESCO, in: Australian Journal of Politics and History 58.1 (2012), pp. 34–50. 16 Maroević 1998 (as in note 12), pp. 76–79.



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American Association of Museums, and the Deutscher Museumsbund, were already established in several countries at that time, but most of their initiatives remained circumscribed to national domains.17 This period also saw the publication of museum manuals based on observation and practice and the founding of museum study pro‑ grams or courses, including those taught at the Louvre and the programs available in American universities.18 During the 1930s, the office not only published the journal Mouseion, but it also organized international conferences on matters of importance for the international museum community, concerning the latest trends in the profession. These events were considered the first international gatherings of museum experts, and they played a crucial role in consolidating global technical and scientific guidelines in the development of wide patrimonial benefits. Mouseion devoted great attention to the coverage of these conferences and published some proceedings in special issues of the journal. In 1930, a first conference was held in Rome, dedicated to the study of sci‑ entific methods for the examination and preservation of works of art.19 The following year, another conference took place in Athens, and this is considered a key moment in the history of heritage studies, since for the first time the notion of a common heritage of mankind (later to be used by UNESCO) was discussed by the participants. Address‑ ing the “new idea that certain monuments of art belong to a common patrimony of humanity”, the scholars listed the benefits of legislating monuments, especially the option of establishing an international law to govern their protection and classifica‑ tion.20 They also discussed the disparity between different countries’ administrative and legislative standards for the protection of monuments.21 In 1934, IOM organized a conference in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Madrid, on the architecture and man‑ agement of art museums. This event marks another very important shift in the field: for the first time, the term “museography” was internationally recognized as indicat‑ ing museum practice in general, as opposed to “museology”, which refers to museum theory. The topics discussed concerned architecture, installations, and the display and organization of the collections.22 The final conference organized by the office was

17 For the Deutscher Museumsbund in Germany, see Andrea Meyer, The Journal Museumskunde – “Another Link between the Museum of the World”, in: Andrea Meyer, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), The Museum is Open. Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 179–190 and her chapter “Museums in Print. The Interplay of Texts and Images in the Journal Museumskunde” in this volume. 18 Janick Daniel Aquilina, The Babelian Tale of Museology and Museography: A History in Words, in: Museology, International Scientific Electronic Journal 6 (2011), pp. 1–20, p. 11. 19 La Conservation des Peintures, in: Mouseion 41–42 (1938). 20 Minutes from the Meeting of the Directors’ Committee, in: Mouseion 15 (1931), pp. 97–98. 21 Ibid. Also see Report to the CICI, in: Mouseion 27 (1933–1934), pp. 291–293. 22 Muséographie. Architecture et Aménagement des Musées d’Art. Conférence Internationale d’Études, Madrid 1934, Paris: Société des Nations, Office International des Musées, 1935.

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held in 1937 in Cairo and concerned the regulation of archaeological excavations and techniques.23

Shaping the Discipline: The Journal Mouseion and its Contributions One of the main tasks of the International Museums Office was the dissemination of knowledge about its activities, through radio broadcasts and the journal Mouseion, Bulletin de l’Office International des Musées, which was first published in 1927, one year after its establishment.24 The journal, the first of its kind, opens a window into the perception of museology at the beginning of the last century, and it represents a key resource for the study of the development of the discipline of museology in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite its importance, it has received relatively little scholarly attention, and only a few studies have analysed its contents.25 A total of fifty-eight issues of the journal were published between 1927 and 1946, with an interruption of three years from 1941 to 1944 during the Second World War. The journal was published mainly in French, with some sporadic articles in English, and was aimed at a highly specialized readership with specific knowledge of the field. Its aim was to disseminate knowledge about the progress made in museums around the globe and to show the high level of improvements achieved in the new century through a range of new methods and technologies. Although we can recog‑ nize a gradual change in the topics covered by the journal, the main subjects are the role of the museum in contemporary society and its educational responsibility, the construction of an international museum policy, the inventorying and cataloguing of collections, and research, acquisition, and conservation guidelines. All the articles were written by curators and academic experts who described the status of different museums in different countries, using technical language. In this way, the journal

23 La Technique des Fouilles, in: Mouseion 45–46 (1939). 24 Renoliet 1999 (as in note 9), pp. 310–311. Unfortunately, due to the lack of sources in the UNESCO Archive related to these radio broadcasts, it is difficult to identify who was the targeted audience for these programmes. 25 For the most comprehensive work concerning Mouseion, Bulletin de l’Office International des Musées, see Marie Caillot, La revue Mouseion (1927–1946). Les musées et la coopération culturelle internationale, Thèse pour le diplôme d’archiviste paléographe, Ecole nationale des chartes, 2011. Other works include: François Mairesse, The family album, in: Museum International 50.1 (1998), pp. 25–30; Annamaria Ducci, “Mouseion”, Una Rivista al Servizio del patrimonio Artistico Europeo (1927–1946), in: Annali di Critica d’Arte 1 (2005), pp. 287–313; and Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel, The Journal Mouseion as Means of Transnational Culture. Guglielmo Pacchioni and the Dawn of the “Modern Museum” in Italy, in: Meyer, Savoy 2014 (as in note 17), pp. 89–100.



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diligently defined the distinctive characteristics of the museum profession: a museum conservator in Washington, DC and a curator in Rome could read the same article, reflect on the same difficulties, and come up with the same solution. Especially during the years marked by the tragedy of the war and military threats, we can see museum experts designing international standards to protect cultural heritage. Usually, each issue of the journal was organized according to the same structure: initial articles dedicated to general topics in museography (Muséographie Générale) were followed by a section about the conservation of works of art (La conservation des Oeuvre d’Art) and a section on the activities of the office (L’activité de l’Office international des Musées). Frequently, the closing pages were labelled La Vie des Musées (literally, the life of museums). This section was used to present news and activities from museums around the world, in the form of brief paragraphs about new exhibitions, the rearrange‑ ment of displays, the opening of new rooms, or staff changes. As previously mentioned, in addition to these normal editions, a few special issues of the journal were dedicated to specific themes: some of these were published in concomitance to specific events,26 while others focused on the history and management of particular institutions.27 At a first glance, both the title of the journal and its front cover strongly empha‑ size a link with ancient Greece. The title in fact, comes from the Greek word Mouseion, which denotes a place or a temple dedicated to the Greek divinities of the arts: the Muses. To reinforce this connection, the front cover of the first nine issues of the journal displays the image of an ancient coin, probably inspired by some Hellenis‑ tic coins with the profile of the Greek god Apollo (fig. 1).28 This focus on the Greek past was purely the consequence of the European idealisation of Greece as the origin of Western civilisation and the identification of the remains of classical Greek and Roman cultures as the remains of their illustrious past. Classical ruins and motives were frequently used to support the presumed cultural superiority of the European powers until well into the early twentieth century. The design of the journal evolved rapidly, and in 1929 the cover already presented a much more minimalist design without any image (fig. 2).29 The first issues of the journal, published in April 1927, opened with a couple of articles about the establishment of the organisation and its program.30 Initially, the

26 See footnotes 19, 22, and 23. 27 See, for example, the special issue dedicated to the National Gallery in Washington, DC: J. B. Eggen, La Galerie Nationale d’Art de Washington, in: Mouseion 57–58 (1946). 28 Ducci 2005 (as in note 25), p. 297. 29 Unfortunately I could not find any sources in the UNESCO Archive related to this change of image for the cover. 30 L’œuvre de coopération intellectuelle et l’Office International des Musées, in: Mouseion 1 (1927), pp. 3–10 and Programme de l’Office International des Musées. Première réunion d’experts, Genève, 13 et 14 janvier 1927, in: Mouseion 1 (1927), pp. 11–16. As stated on the table of contents of this journal’s issue, all of the unsigned articles had to be attributed to the staff of the IOM.

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Fig. 1: Cover of the first issue of the journal Mouseion, 1927.

article highlighted the role played by Henri Focillon, who captured the attention of his colleagues during the initial meeting of the commission, defining the museum as “an institution dedicated to intellectual cooperation”. He continued to highlight the international mission of the office to promote all the institutions, including the small local and provincial museums, that represented the genius of the nation and foreign civilizations.31 The article stressed the importance of international cooperation that would include many countries around the globe. Therefore, we can observe how, in accordance with the wishes of International Museum Office, the review was from the beginning intended to be international in its scope. Despite these intentions, by looking at all issues of the journal we can observe how some continents and subconti‑ nents not considered part of the so‑called Western world, like India, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Africa, the Middle East, received little attention. While throughout the journal hundreds of articles were devoted to the develop‑ ment, theorization, and creation of European and North American institutions, with essays by European architects discussing their ideal museum projects or by museum professionals illustrating in detail the criteria according to which they had rearranged their collections, only in seven editions of Mouseion do we find full articles regarding non-Western institutions.32 In these few cases, the aim of the text is always descriptive

31 L’œuvre de coopération intellectuelle et l’Office International des Musées, Mouseion 1 (1927), p. 3. 32 Laurence Vail Coleman, Le Musées de l’Amérique du Sud, in: Mouseion 9 (1929), pp. 249–260; Paul Fierens, Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, in: Mouseion 21–22 (1933), pp. 209–215; T. Akiyama, Architecture, Aménagement et Activité des Musées au Japon, in: Mouseion 31–32 (1935), pp. 83–101; P. Dikaios, La réorganisation du Musée de Chypre, in: Mouseion 33–34 (1936), pp. 81–100; Détermina‑



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Fig. 2: Cover of the tenth issue of the journal Mouseion, 1930.

rather than theoretical or analytical and the authors typically provide the readers with a long and general description of the musicological panorama in a given country or a particular museum. In some papers the local museums are compared to European institutions: two essays are quite representative of this position, namely “The Man‑ agement and Activities of the Museums in Japan” by T. Akiyama,33 which appeared in 1935, and “The Reorganization of the Cyprus Museum” by P. Dikaios, published in 1936.34 In these articles, both authors make sure to mention how their institutions resemble and respect European institutions and standards. Akiyama, in his long article on the history of museological activities in Japan, constantly compares Japa‑ nese museums to European ones: he begins by drawing an analogy between the new Museum of Modern Art in Japan to the Musée du Luxembourg in France, and then he continues to explain how “The first public gallery of works of art in the modern sense of the word, was built in Japan in 1872. Since then, museums have progressed fairly slowly compared to the remarkable development of other Western institutions in Japan.”35 Furthermore, later in the article, he continues to make comparisons on the architectural style of Japanese museums: “The modern Japanese style is a clever mix of Japanese and European styles, where the typical Japanese gabled roof is adapted to

tion expérimentale de l’éclairage au Musée Impérial de Tokio, in: Mouseion 33–34 (1936), pp. 191–193; Le Musée des Chemins de Fer à Tokio, in: Mouseion 35–36 (1936), pp. 107–109; and Robert W. Hamil‑ ton, Le Musée Archéologique de Palestine, in: Mouseion 43–44 (1938), 35–54. 33 Akiyama 1935 (as in note 32), pp. 83–101. 34 Dikaios 1936 (as in note 32), pp. 81–100. 35 Akiyama 1935 (as in note 32), p. 83.

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the European-style building, which overall achieves a resemblance to an old Japanese castle.”36 One year later, writing about the reorganization that occurred in the Cyprus Museum,37 the conservator of the museum P. Dikaios makes sure to reassure readers that the renovations carried out in the institution followed the latest trends elaborated by the IMO during the Madrid conference of 1934: “In the case of the Cyprus Museum, it was clearly inspired by the principles of modern museography as defined and estab‑ lished by the International Office of Museums, in either its publications or especially during its international conference in Madrid in 1934 after which its Traité de Muséog‑ raphie was published.”38 In his mind, the Cyprus Museum could be regarded only as a regional museum, with objects coming exclusively from the island – and consequently they could not compete with other big European museums that attracted more attention since they represented “les arts de plusieurs pays”.39 This new makeover conducted fol‑ lowing the IMO guidelines could therefore help to modernize the institution and attract more visitors. Aside from the articles by Akiyama and Dikaios, the other brief references to non-Western museums are always included in the section La Vie des Musées where practical information was given in a few sentences. Another important feature I would like to highlight is the desire to create inter‑ national standards for all the institutions: the journal presented several articles concerning the construction of an international museum policy, which included the inventorying and cataloguing of collections, and research, acquisition, and conser‑ vation guidelines.40 In these articles, the committee of expert members of the IMO always refer to the “leading museums” or “the most important museums”, without specifying the names or locations of these institutions. In the second half of the 1930s, which saw the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Italian occupation of Abyssinia, and Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, Mouseion concentrated more on the threat of war and the special mea‑ sures needed to preserve objects in case of conflict. In addition to the normal arti‑ cles, practical and technical advice was printed in the journal to help museum staff in dealing with the destructive effects of the war. Mouseion therefore embodied a set of contradictions. On the one hand, we can note the aspiration of the organizers to give a global portrait of museums in this period. On the other hand, we see in Mouseion the consistent promulgation of an ideology replicating the Eurocentric perspective, where foreign museums were not

36 Ibid., p. 84. 37 For a short history of the Cyprus Museum, see Pamela Gaber, The Museums of Cyprus, in: The Biblical Archaeologist 52 (1989), pp. 170–177. 38 Dikaios 1936 (as in note 32), p. 85. 39 Ibid. 40 See, for example: Réunion de la Commission consultative d’experts de l’Office International des Musées, Mouseion 7 (1929), pp. 76–84.



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regarded as being on the same level as European ones. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the museum became a dominant component of the political ideology of European states and their colonies. It became a new form of legitimisation for the rising nation-states, cementing the inextricable link with that nation’s politics and practices. As is evident in the articles of the journal, the institu‑ tions in non-Western contexts did not receive the same attention from Western schol‑ ars who, until recently, believed in the superiority of Western scientific-based muse‑ ology and organisation of cultural heritage management. We can therefore observe that Mouseion was based on a binary opposition typical of the public discourse of that period: this opposition was constructed showing the non-Western museums as inac‑ tive and static institutions aiming to store and conserve works of art versus Western museums, portrayed as dynamic agents and symbols of progress. The European insti‑ tutions were valorized and celebrated not only as symbols of progress in themselves, but in juxtaposition with the contrasting image of the others, discredited as the rep‑ resentation of backwardness.

Photographic Documentation: Selective Images in Mouseion Along with the texts, black and white photographs became the hallmark of Mouseion, and these play a key role in helping to reveal the trajectory of the journal. As with the articles, a gradual development of museum imagery is evident throughout: while the initial pictures always highlighted the importance of single artefacts, the pictures in later issues reflected the change in the topics covered in the journal. More diversi‑ fied images started to appear, depicting buildings, exhibition arrangements, museum maps, and details concerning conservation techniques. Furthermore, diagrams and graphics helped to illustrate technical issues, and details and architectural sketches helped the authors to describe the “ideal” museum. As in other scholarly journals, the photographs were mainly used as academic reference and documentary records, and to record artistic and architectural details. While the first issues contain only ten plates at the most, the last volumes include up to fifty images.41 From the first issue, the most frequent photographic image in the articles is the unique artefact: these free-standing masterpieces abound from the earliest to the most recent issues of the journal, almost invariably representing precious paintings

41 This period coincided with the proliferation of new reproductive techniques, and the numerous newly established newspapers and magazines started to use more and more images as powerful tools of communication. Mary Warner Marie, Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd ed., London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006, pp. 235–239.

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or beautiful artefacts that have been extrapolated from their original contexts, placed against a dark background, and photographed. To increment this sense of an “imper‑ sonal past”, the pictures of museums’ displays and objects were never accompanied by a human figure: in this way, the emphasis was placed not on the museum and its public but on the objects themselves. However, the museum imagery in the journal is also slanted by systematic geo‑ graphic and topical emphases, giving disproportionate attention to the represen‑ tation of Western culture and museological institutions. The diversity of museums did not attract the journal editors, who concentrated on the visual representation of European museums: preponderant coverage is given to European fine art museums, especially those in France and Italy. Surprisingly, an overall examination of the pho‑ tographs in the fifty-eight issues of the journal reveals that exceptions were made only for three non-European institutions: Museum of La Plata in Argentina, and the Museum of Italian Art of Lima in Peru,42 the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers,43 and the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.44 A closer inspection of these rare cases reveals their similarities and can help us to understand the motivations that led the authors to choose these images as the only visual representations of non-Western institutions. The first two images taken into consideration accompanied the museums dis‑ cussed in an essay about South America, which was the first article about non-West‑ ern museums that appeared in the journal.45 Written by the director of the American Association of Museums, Laurence Vail Coleman, the essay aimed, in a few pages, to provide general information about all the museological institutions in South America as a whole. Starting with a brief history about the establishment of the museums in the various South American countries, Coleman continued to make a list of every type of museum present in the territories: from the scientific institutions to the archaeolog‑ ical ones. To conclude, the paper presented some general remarks on the contempo‑ rary activities undertaken by the museums and their financial administration. While the essay gave details concerning the typology, history, and daily management of several organisations, the two photographs chosen simply depicted the facade of two buildings, which were only briefly mentioned in the article: the Museum of La Plata in Argentina (a natural history museum, part of the local university) and the Museum of Italian Art of Lima in Peru, which was established in the first half of the twentieth century as a gift from the Italian community in the country (fig. 3).46 These two insti‑ tutions, while different in their typology, presented a classicist exterior that forced

42 Coleman 1929, (as in note 32), pp. 249–260. 43 Fierens 1933 (as in note 32), pp. 209–215. 44 Hamilton 1938 (as in note 32), pp. 35–54. 45 Coleman 1929 (as in note 32), pp. 249–260. 46 Ibid., p. 246.



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Fig. 3: Illustration of the Museum of La Plata in Argentina and the Museum of Italian Art of Lima in Peru (external facades) from the article “Le Musées de l’Amérique du Sud,” by Laurence Vail Coleman, Mouseion 9 (1929), p. 247.

the reader to associate them with European models. Architectonically, both of these buildings resembled European institutions: the first in its neoclassical style and the second in its renaissance influences, manifested in the decorations with mosaics and heraldry of the main Italian regions, as well as a spectacular stained-glass window, reminiscent of Botticelli’s La Primavera. The second article appeared in 1933 and concerned the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers.47 It was accompanied by five plates reproducing some of the rooms and gal‑ leries of the institutions. Designed by the French architect Paul Guion and resembling

47 For the establishment and development of this museum, see Nabila Oulebsir, Les Usages du patrimoine. Monuments, musées et politique coloniale en Algérie, (1830–1930), Paris: Ed. de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2004; Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics. Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 249–273; and Bärbel Küster, French Art for All! Museum Projects in Africa 1912–1931 between Avant-Garde and Colonialism, in: Meyer, Savoy 2014 (as in note 17), pp. 245–258.

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an Italian villa,48 the museum was officially opened in 1930 to celebrate the centenary anniversary of French colonial rule in the country. It housed a large collection of Ori‑ entalist paintings of French and European artists living in Algeria, modern French painting after 1850 (with a special focus on impressionism), and French sculpture from the later nineteenth century to 1930.49 Indigenous forms of art were completely excluded. The essay, written by the French art historian Paul Fierens, celebrated the opening of the museum as one of the “youngest” in France, established in a modern city with a barbaric50 past. In his words: “I believe this is the youngest museum of France. Together with that of Grenoble it is the most “alive”. The rapid, and overall harmonious, development of Algiers transformed the old barbaresque harbor into a large modern city.”51 Fierens praised the efforts undertaken by the French authorities to build the new institution, and he tried to describe the display of the objects in the three-floor building in detail.52 As the photographs show, the display of paint‑ ings and sculptures in the galleries mirrored French institutions and embodied all the prejudices of the mission civilisatrice (fig. 4).53 In particular, in describing one of the images (fig. 5), Fierens explained how the visitor could observe the evolution of French sculpture through the collection of casts displayed in the museum, with pieces from the Trocadero and the Louvre.54 To further reinforce the image of the museum as an extension of a French institution, Fierens’s article was followed by an essay dedi‑ cated to the French Museum of Contemporary Foreign Schools in Paris (fig. 6).55 Given the similarities between the two places, and the objects depicted in the images, at first glimpse the reader could easily think that they represented the same place. The last article that used images relevant to the present study concerned the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.56 This institution was officially inau‑ gurated in 1938 during the British Mandate and was initially managed by British

48 Benjamin 2003 (as in note 47), p. 261. 49 Ibid., p. 256. 50 The term barbaric here translates literally the term barbaresque, which could refer either to the expansion of Islam in Europe from the Mediterranean coasts, specifically the Maghreb, but might also allude to the indigenous tribal Berber cultures. It is a vague term and in this case was used with pejorative connotations. 51 Fierens 1933 (as in note 32), p. 209. 52 Ibid., p. 210. 53 Benjamin 2003 (as in note 47), p. 273. 54 Fierens 1933 (as in note 32), p. 214. For the role that plaster cast collections of classical or European models played in other non-European museums, see the chapters by Quanita Lilla and Deepti Mul‑ gund in this volume. 55 This museum does not exist today, and its collection is part of the Centre Pompidou. Jeanne Le‑ jeaux, Le Musée des Écoles étrangères contemporaines à Paris, Mouseion 21–22 (1933), pp. 221–227. 56 Hamilton 1938 (as in note 32), pp. 35–54. The institution is known today as the Rockefeller Mu‑ seum.



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Fig. 4: Illustrations of the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers from the article “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” by Paul Fierens, Mouseion 21–22 (1933), plate XXIV.

Fig. 5 Illustration of the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers from the article “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” by Paul Fierens, Mouseion 21–22 (1933), plate XXV.

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Fig. 6 Illustrations of the French Museum of Contemporary Foreign Schools in Paris from the article “Le Musée des Écoles étrangères contemporaines a Paris,” by Jeanne Lejeaux, Mouseion 21–22 (1933), plate XXVII.

experts.57 Written by the British archaeologist and chief inspector of antiquities in Palestine, Robert Hamilton, the essay concentrates on the development of the col‑ lection and the daily management of the institution, and gives details concerning the provenance of the objects. The exhibition contained objects from prehistory to the Islamic period, coming from archaeological excavations carried out in the area. From the nineteenth century and throughout the years of the British Mandate, exca‑ vations in these territories remained mainly the prerogative of foreign teams, due to the interest that Europeans had in Biblical archaeology and thus their desire to learn

57 For further information on the history of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, see Jean Perrot, Le Musée archéologique de Palestine a Jérusalem, in: Syria 25, Fasc. 3/4 (1946–1948), pp. 268–300; James L. Kelso, The Palestine Archaeological Museum, in: Archaeology 3/2 (1950), pp. 66–68.



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Fig. 7 Illustrated page from the article “Le Musée Archéolo­ gique de Palestine,” by Robert W. Hamilton, Mouseion 43–44 (1938), p. 39.

more about the cultures that were mentioned in the Old Testament. The value of the ancient remains was therefore connected to their role in the history of Judeo-Christian religions.58 The visual representations associated with this article once again showed the reader the magnificence of precious single artefacts, such as jewels or statues from the classical period as well as parts of the museum's own sculptural program (fig. 7). Only a few pictures revealed the architecture of the building, focusing on the impressive exterior of the institution, once again designed by the British architect Austen Harrison. His style mixed local architectural elements with a wide range of Oriental sources to form what has been defined as “colonial regionalism”, a move‑ ment focused on “localizing architecture [and] motivated by a paternalistic and pres‑ ervationistic conception of colonial rule”.59

58 Many studies have been written on the history of archaeology in Palestine, see among others Nadia Abu El-Haj, Producing (Arti)Facts: Archaeology and Power during the British Mandate of Palestine, in: Israel Studies 7 (2002), pp. 33–61; Margarita Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology. Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 131–166; and Neil Asher Silberman, David B. Small (eds.), The Archaeology of Israel. Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd, 1997. 59 Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert, Representing Palestine: Austen St. Barbe Harrison and the Rep‑ resentational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922–37, Architectural History 43 (2000),

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In each of these cases, museums in non-Western contexts were made more “acces‑ sible” through the lens of contemporary Western museology, which homegenized all the institutions so that they looked like European ones, with the same categories of objects and display techniques. In these three cases, in fact, images of non-Western museums were deliberately associated with European institutions and ideals: the symbolism of the neoclassical architecture chosen for the images of the South Amer‑ ican and Algerian museums suggest that these institutions stood as a symbol of their countries’ relationship to Europe and to its territories. The architecture positioned the museums in the family of Euro-American museums, which often use neoclassi‑ cal forms and facades that resemble Greek temples. The Palestine Archaeological Museum instead represents one of the institutions established under the mandate rule and designed and directed by foreign experts. Although not directly connected to the European tradition through its appearance, it held a key role in ideologically connecting Europeans to the Judeo-Christian religions. When these museums opened in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly supported by colonial elites, they were far from being an instrument of bicultural association. The museum images represented were not intended as instruments of education for the local population, but primarily as means to disseminate imperial largesse to colonials remote from the metropolis. On the contrary, they privileged European vision, failed to create a dialogue with the local population, and excluded indigenous participation. The images presented to the reader of Mouseion mirrored this dominant mentality: rather than propose a museum on a model of equal repre‑ sentation for diverse peoples, the institutions recognized European objects and insti‑ tutions as the perfect essence of civilization. Throughout the journal, several other images represented “exotic” objects on display in the galleries of Western museums: for example, we can find a few images of ‘negro’ sculptures60 or Indian artefacts on display in the Boston museums.61 In this respect, museums showed the European capacity to incorporate the treasures of other cultures: non-European cultures were not seen as an alternative present but rather as historical phases that had been surpassed by European civilization, a fact that justi‑ fied European colonialism and intervention. In the later issues of the journal, the emphasis shifted towards systematic depic‑ tions of more technical problems, and considerable attention was given to images

pp. 281–333, p. 324. 60 L. Szesci, L’art nègre et les Musées, in: Mouseion 25 (1934), pp. 66–70. The term “negro” is used in this context to literally translate the word nègre, which was frequently used in the first half of the twentieth century. For the complex historical relationship between the terms negro and nègre and their translation see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 25–38. 61 Ardelia Ripley-Hall, La Collection indienne du Musée de Boston, in: Mouseion 43–44 (1938), pp. 111–130.



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Fig. 8 Illustrations of the Restauration of Cyrene from the article “Les restaurations architectoniques de Cyrène,” by Carlo Anti, Mouseion 20 (1932), plate XV.

depicting the restoration of objects. As for the texts, numerous visual elements bore witness to the progress achieved towards preserving artefacts through different techniques. These images not only contributed to the understanding of complicated technical issues, but they also reasserted the capacity of Western society to protect heritage from external damages. In this context, we can also find images of non-West‑ ern monuments in the process of being restored in countries under colonial domina‑ tion: three articles include images of North African monuments in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia (fig. 8).62 A rare exception is constituted by the numerous plates depicting the

62 J. ‑P. Lauer, La restauration et la conservation des monuments du Roi Zoser à Saqqarah, in: Mouseion 19 (1932), pp. 117–126; Carlo Anti, Les restaurations architectoniques de Cyrène, in: Mouseion 20 (1932), pp. 69–75; and Louis Poinssot, La restauration du mausolée de Dougga, in: Mouseion 20 (1932), pp. 76–77.

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restoration of monuments in the Dutch East Indies.63 Photographs of foreign objects restored in European museums were also present.64 This focus on preservation and restoration implemented by European inter‑ vention reinforces what James Clifford terms the “salvage paradigm”, the “desire to rescue ‘authenticity’ out of destructive historical change”. In his idea, the search for the authentic “other” is at the core of Euro-American efforts to collect.65 Thus, this process of “salvage” that represents the Western idea of rescuing the cultural, aes‑ thetic, and institutional practices at risk in colonized countries is evident in the pages of Mouseion where all the images show the benefits achieved through foreign inter‑ ventions that made the preservation of monuments for future generations possible. In this way, for an international public, Mouseion asserted Western technolog‑ ical superiority, which enabled the accurate conservation of the objects and monu‑ ments. The primacy of the role given to scientific technology confirmed that those nations possessing sophisticated technology must be at the forefront of museological research. Moreover, these images of technological expertise highlighted the right of these nations to display and exhibit works of art from all over the world, thereby legit‑ imizing colonial expansionism and the accompanying asymmetrical social relations. The ultimate aim of these images and accompanying texts was to highlight the evo‑ lutionary progress of European museums in all fields, in contrast to the evolutionary arrest of others.

Conclusion In the first half of the twentieth century, Mouseion played an active role in promul‑ gating the idea of the museum as a product of Western ideology, an outcome of the cultural and technological superiority claim of the Western world. From the first issue in 1927, the editors asserted that the aim of the journal was the “creation of a kind of international agency that would aim to connect all the museums of the world to each other”.66 But on the basis of the analysis presented in this paper, it is clear how the journal reflected a profoundly Eurocentric world, both through emphasizing European cultures and practices, and in distinguishing ‘progressive’ Europeans from

63 F. A. J. Moojen, La conservation des monuments aux Indes néerlandaises, in: Mouseion 21–22 (1933), pp. 143–146. 64 See, for example, the restoration of cuneiform tablets carried out in the Chemical Laboratories of the museum in Berlin: C. Brittner, La Laboratoire de chimie des Musées de l’Etat à Berlin. Ses buts, ses méthodes, Mouseion 10 (1930), pp. 20–22. 65 James Clifford, Of Other Peoples. Beyond the “Salvage” Paradigm” in: Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Seattle: Bay Press, 1987, pp. 121–130, p. 121. 66 L’œuvre de coopération intellectuelle et l’Office International des Musées, Mouseion 1 (1927), p. 3.



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‘static’ other peoples: museums are represented by their objects mainly associated with the European tradition, while those non-Western museums represented in the journal are especially those established during colonial rule, and which mimic their European counterparts. Its textual and visual representations of the institutions are generally limited to depictions of the spectacular display of masterpieces, frequently associated with the mythical origins of European civilisation. Certainly, the emphasis the journal places on European museology is partly explicable in terms of the relative accessibility of information: we can imagine it was much easier to obtain information from France, Italy, or the United States than from countries that were politically, culturally, and linguistically more distant, such as China and India. To obtain good quality photographs and other illustrative materials from such countries could be especially difficult, and the journal relied heavily on the visual aspect. These facts would contribute to explaining the restriction on the coverage given to such countries. But this Eurocentric imbalance cannot be explained simply as a product of practical constraints; the distorting influence of traditional Eurocentrism must be operating here as well. In spreading knowledge around the globe for museums and heritage experts, Mouseion distorted the image of the institutions by stressing the dominance of Western institutions and overemphasizing the importance of new techniques used for the restoration of objects. Despite its potential role as a global influencer, Mouseion was therefore subject to intrinsic limitations, exemplified by an attachment to politi‑ cal and cultural ideals such as civilization, empire, and nationhood. As Jan Marontate has observed: “institutionalization processes that have helped to establish museums as cultural authorities were premised on assumptions that are difficult to reconcile with cultural relativism, even with respect to seemingly straightforward matters such as the principles for care of material objects in collections.”67 It was the opening premise of this volume that the different images of the museum are mediated by present social contexts and actively contribute to the creation of knowledge about the institution. In this case, filtered through an ideological lens, the journal mirrored the ideological premises of the time: Eurocentrism, nationalism, and the tendency to see the museum as a product of Western culture and knowledge. The image that has been constructed through the articles and photographs of this journal, then, is more than passively conditioned by the political and cultural system; it is a direct product of, and an effective vehicle for, that system’s ideological messages.

67 Marontate 2005 (as in note 12), pp. 297–298.

Alison Boyd

The Visible and Invisible: Circulating Images of the Barnes Foundation Collection Introduction In the early 1920s, the self-made American pharmaceutical millionaire Albert Barnes established an education foundation dedicated to the aesthetic life of the common man, of “plain people, that is, men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories, schools, stores and similar places.”1 Nevertheless, a great paradox of the foundation is that while its mission was the power of art to transform the lives of “plain people”, Barnes and his successors until the 1990s were extremely resistant to the photographic reproduction of most of the collection, although that would have, at face value, seemed to be the most straightforward way to make art education as democratic and accessible as possible. The foundation was built around Barnes’s remarkable collection of art, which has always been most famous for its modern French paintings (it has one hundred and eighty-one Renoirs, sixty-nine Cezannes, fifty-nine Matisses, forty-six Picassos, and the list goes on). However, Barnes was also a very early and dedicated collector of African sculpture and a wide range of temporally and geographically diverse art from Old Master European paintings, to Native American textiles, to early American craft work as well as metal hooks and keys and other ‘industrial’ objects that viewers would often not even consider art (fig. 1/pl. VII). The foundation’s courses were all discussion based and held in the art galleries; they intentionally put a diverse group of both people and objects into dialogue with one another. The foundation grew out of aesthetic and pragmatist philosophy courses on William James and John Dewey (who was nominally head of the education program) that Barnes taught to the primar‑ ily African American men who worked at his pharmaceutical factory. The staff and teachers at his foundation included white women from working-class backgrounds who had originally worked as administrators in his factory.2 In setting out the origi‑

I would like to thank Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino for organizing the “Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology” conference in which this paper was first presented and for all their generous feedback and support in editing this edition. 1 Albert C. Barnes, By-Laws of the Barnes Foundation (1946), in: Gilbert Cantor, The Barnes Foundation Reality vs. Myth, Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1963, p. 198. 2 The sisters, Mary and Nelle Mullen, who were born in the small south central Pennsylvania town of Columbia, were both pivotal business and intellectual forces in the development and administration of the Barnes Foundation. Nelle Mullen had a high school degree when she came to work for Barnes’s factory at eighteen. Her sister joined her a few years later, and they would both work for Barnes for the

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Fig. 1: Barnes Foundation, South Wall Ensemble, Room 22.

nal bylaws for the foundation, Barnes was adamant that “the prime and unwavering contention has been that art is no trivial matter, no device for the entertainment of dilettantes, or upholstery for the houses of the wealthy, but a source of insight into the world, for which there is and can be no substitute, and in which all persons who have the necessary insight may share.”3 Towards the end of his career Barnes reflected back that “[t]he students enrolled in our classes have come from all parts of the world,

rest of their lives. Nelle eventually ran much of the business end of his pharmaceutical company and later handled all of Barnes’s investments at the foundation and was, eventually, its president. Mary became a teacher at the foundation, published its first book, travelled extensively through Europe to collect and study art and was secretary of the Board of Trustees until her death. They also both amassed their own sizable collections of primarily modern art. Mary Ann Meyers, Art, Education, & African-American Culture. Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy, New Brunswick, NJ: Transac‑ tion Publishers, 2004, pp. 16–17, p. 154, p. 282, pp. 304–305. 3 By-Laws of the Barnes Foundation, p. 200. Albert C. Barnes. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Mer‑ ion, PA. Reprinted with permission.



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have comprised all strata of society from college professors to truck drivers, all races and all shades of political and religious beliefs.”4 Barnes’s favored term for the principle that guided the foundation was “demo‑ cratic,” but in practice the foundation’s educational experiment produced nuanced relations of power and conflict across cultures and classes. The foundation presents a case study of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a ‘contact zone’. Pratt defines a contact zone as “a social space where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical conditions of domination and subordina‑ tion”.5 Viewing the Barnes Foundation as a contact zone – as it assembled a diverse group of art and people – exposes the complex negotiations between Barnes and his interlocutors on what the foundation’s collection meant and what it could do. Barnes, as well as his staff, students, critics, visiting intellectuals, and artists, all grappled with the competing demands of the narrative of formalist modernist art that was at the heart of the collection and its display, and the articulations of social empower‑ ment, especially for African Americans, which drove its mission.6 For this paper, though, I want to explore a more amorphous contact zone than that of the galleries, a second life of the objects as they were seen, or in many cases until the 1990s not seen, in photographic reproduction. If the galleries were intended, at least, as a fully democratic space in which categories of high and low, craft and fine art, center and periphery were collapsed, then a more complicated story emerges when one follows photographs of the collection as they circulated outside of the enclosed gallery spaces. Indeed, hierarchies of power that were eschewed in the gal‑ leries emerged differently in the realm of photographic reproduction. Albert Barnes has famously been remembered as an eccentric for both the policies he set for his galleries and his contentious relations with those he considered the elite of Philadelphia, to whom he often refused entry to the galleries. The Barnes Founda‑ tion has recently been in the news because of the controversy of its move into the city center from its original location in the suburbs of Philadelphia. In order to make this move, the foundation went to court to break its own bylaws, which had specified that no work of art be removed from its place on the wall after Barnes’s death. This freez‑

4 Pamphlet, How it Happened, p. 1, undated, Albert C. Barnes. The Barnes Foundation Library, Phila‑ delpha, PA. Reprinted with permission. 5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2008, p. 29. While the majority of Pratt’s work focuses on the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, she has also discussed models of community that arise in places like the modern university. Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, in: Profession 91, New York: MLA, 1991, p. 33. 6 Kobena Mercer’s employment of the term “contact zone” in his analysis of Haiti, Paris, and Cuba in the 1940s is foundational for my own use of the term. Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Contact Zones, in: Tanya Barson, Peter Gorschlüter (eds.), Afro Modern. Journeys Through the Black Atlantic, Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2010, pp. 40–47. See also Mary D. Sheriff (ed.), Cultural Contact and the Making of Euro­ pean Art Since the Age of Exploration, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

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ing of the collection also excluded any traveling shows or loans, which Barnes had, for the most part, resisted during his lifetime. In the move, the unusual arrangement of the galleries was preserved. Barnes’s “ensemble” displays are highly compressed and full of heterogeneous objects hung and stacked from floor to ceiling (fig. 1). These displays continue to jar viewers who are more accustomed to a white cube, linear model of exhibition, especially for viewing modern art.7 Although Barnes undeniably had an obstinate personality, these policies must also be understood as outgrowths of his intention for the foundation to be a school for “plain people.” The ensembles of art were to function as teaching tools that put unexpected works of art into multiple relations with one another. This was intended to offer opportunities for even the most novice viewer to make visual comparisons between objects. The limits on numbers of visitors, and the often sarcastically worded refusals of entry to Philadelphia social‑ ites, were intended to maintain the integrity of the foundation as primarily a serious school rather than an art gallery (not to entirely discount the chip Barnes had on his shoulder because of his own working-class background). Barnes – and the subsequent directors of the board of trustees, his wife Laura Barnes in the 1950s and 1960s, and Violette de Mazia in the 1970s and 1980s – also limited the photographic reproduction of works of art from the foundation and forbade color repro‑ ductions. This, combined with strict caps on the number of visitors meant that relatively few people actually saw the collection in those years. Barnes’s policy on photography has often been considered his most extreme eccentricity, but on closer examination, like many of the choices he made, it was actually a deeply felt and thought-out position that was part of his larger argument for the primacy of experience in front of objects. The first half of this paper explores Barnes’s and his successor’s resistance to photographic reproduction and the second half analyzes the one major exception to their position: African sculpture, which was not only extensively photographed but widely reproduced with the support and blessing of the foundation. My central ques‑ tions are: In an institution that was dedicated to collapsing the boundaries between art objects in its galleries, why did one category of art object, African sculpture, get treated so differently in the realm of photographic reproduction? And what are the implications of this divergent treatment?

7 Brian O’Doherty coined the term “white cube” in a series of articles for Artforum in 1976 that cri‑ tiqued modernist conventions of display. Reprinted in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.



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The Barnes Foundation’s Photographic Reproduction Policy Perhaps Barnes’s most colorful articulation of his reservations about photographic reproduction was expressed in a 1935 letter that he wrote to refuse a magazine editor an interview for an article. He concluded: “And don’t let anybody tell you that a colored reproduction by even the best specialist has any real relation to what the painting con‑ tains; its analogue is a hearsay version of a honeymoon narrated by an octogenarian.”8 Although generally skeptical about any photographic reproduction of paintings, in his own lifetime Barnes did include black-and-white reproductions of paintings in many of his book publications. He believed they could be useful as visual illustrations for the text and that in black and white they would be seen as references to works of art, and not risk being seen as stand-ins for the originals. He did not include images in the foundation’s published journal in the 1920s or in the edited book it produced in 1929, Art and Education. But he did include small black-and-white photographic reproduc‑ tions of paintings in his 1926 primer to his methodology, The Art in Painting (fig. 2). The Art in Painting relied far more heavily though on a ninety-page final section, “Analysis of Paintings.” In this section he provided his own written visual analysis of individ‑ ual paintings – from those of Giotto to Picasso – primarily in lieu of photographic reproductions. He would continue this practice in all his subsequent books. Barnes was adamant that these visual descriptions were “compiled exclusively from my own observations recorded in notes made in front of the paintings themselves.”9 The policy of refusing permission for color photographs persisted after Barnes’s death. In 1952 Laura Barnes refused Henri Matisse’s direct request for color photo‑ graphs of his paintings. She gave as her reason that the photographs did “not faith‑ fully reproduce the exact colors of the artist.”10 After lengthy discussion, in 1962 the Board of Trustees decided to continue to turn down all requests for color reproduc‑ tions, since, “It was agreed that, giving in to the ideas of having color reproductions made of the paintings would be acting in direct contradiction to basic principles gov‑ erning the foundation’s philosophy of education in art.”11 Barnes’s skepticism around photographic reproduction generally, and color reproduction specifically, was magnified and calcified through the position of Vio‑

8 Carl W. McCardle, The Terrible Tempered Dr. Barnes Part 4, in: Saturday Evening Post (April 11, 1942), pp. 20–21 and 66–68, p. 68. 9 Albert C. Barnes, Art in Painting, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 3rd Edition 1965, Preface to the First Edition (1926). 10 Letter, Laura Barnes to Henri Matisse, April 29, 1952. Administration, Central File Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 11 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, Barnes Foundation, July 10, 1962, p. 585. The Barnes Founda‑ tion Archives Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.

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Fig. 2: Pablo Picasso, “Picasso”, reproduction of “Violin, Sheet Music, and Bottle”. From: The Art in Painting (Albert Barnes).

lette de Mazia who came to the foundation as a French tutor in 1924, began to co-write books with Barnes in the 1930s, and and ultimately headed the education department from 1950–1988. In terms that echo Susan Sontag’s early critique that photography enables a combination of acquisitiveness and passivity that blunts experience, De Mazia expressed her position on color photography in a 1986 pamphlet produced by the foundation entitled: “The Lure and Trap of Color Slides in Art Education.”12 This text claimed – in deeply ironic terms – to be an event hosted by the “Possessors Club”, an “International club with elite wide-angle membership, open to those addicted, trigger-happy camera clickers who deceive themselves that, once they have ‘taken’ the Taj Mahal, the painting by Leonardo, by Renoir – and/or otherwise acquired color slides or color prints of them – well, then, they have the Taj Mahal, the Leonardo, the Renoir, they own them, possess them.”13 De Mazia opened her diatribe against color reproductions of art in an imagined movie hall cum art history lecture hall: As in the movie house moments before the film is projected, so in the lecture hall or auditorium moments before the slide presentation begins, we sit in darkness and wait. We wait for the magic instant, the instant when light will strike the screen, our visual receptors, arouse particular visual sensations, allow us to see, while allowing us, also, to be, or to feel to be, unseen in the darkness of the rest of the room […] For, whether we are aware of it or not, the focusing area of

12 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1973. 13 Violette de Mazia, The Lure and Trap of Color Slides in Art Education. The Time-Released Venom of Their Make-Believe. A Repast in Five Courses Followed By Entertainment and Postprandial Musings, Merion, PA: VISTAS the V.O.L.N. Press, 1986, Cover.



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light, in duplicitous collaboration, so to speak, with the dark surroundings which blur our iden‑ tity, captivates, fascinates, casts a spell. A kind of Peeping Tom we then are, with no fear of any recrimination or punishment to spoil that inherently enjoyable situation.14

De Mazia continued to say that color slides give us both a false sense of actually having seen works of art without traveling to other cities or museums and, even more insidiously, that they blunt our ability to see when we actually do view works of art in person. She writes of color slides: In short, everything has been tampered with, altered, adjusted, diminished or intensified, reduced or enlarged, sharpened or blurred, and so on – the color, the tone, the scale, the surface, the texture, and, of course, the relationships among these […] as Matisse observed, the quantity of a color has a lot to do with its quality, and, also, a square centimeter of blue is not the same blue as a square meter of it […] each picture projected on the screen is a deceptive substitute, an ersatz, not to say a downright sinful dissembling, a bold-faced falsehood […] For color slides not only do falsify, but how they falsify! Oh, the splendor and éclat of that Renoir “Bathers,” with its appearance of being drenched in dazzling, golden light, glowing with molten reds, brilliant blues and greens that speak of nothing so much as of rubies and aquamarines and emeralds, brought to the ultimate of their sensuousness! And how we savor it all, blinded by our own default to the truth that it is only an effigy that we see there and cheated by our blindness of what Renoir’s painting, in reality, is expressing.15

In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s well-known argument on the revolutionary potential of the shriveling of aura in the modern age of mechanical reproduction, Barnes, and more forcefully De Mazia, adamantly worked to maintain the aura of the works of art in the gallery by holding mechanical reproduction at bay.16 For De Mazia, especially, all reproduction, but particularly color slides, held a dangerously seductive false aura that put original works of art at risk. A second reservation that Barnes had in relation to photographic reproduction of the collection was his belief that it was unethical to make money from it. In a 1923 letter to the American artist Charles Sheeler, Barnes explained that people had been nagging him for years for an illustrated catalogue of the collection and for photo‑ graphs (black-and-white reproductions were still the norm). Sheeler had, at that point, already completed a commission by Barnes to photograph his African sculpture col‑ lection. Barnes wrote that, while he refused to be bothered with a catalogue, Sheeler was welcome to take and sell photographs of the rest of the collection. He continued: “I make neither the request nor advise you to accept the suggestion; the only idea that

14 Ibid., p. 5. 15 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 16 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969 (originally published in 1936), pp. 217–251.

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influences me is that I am not going to complicate the work of the foundation with the business of selling books or photographs, but it is possible that there might be enough sales to make it profitable to somebody and, of course, I would prefer to grant the privilege to you.”17 In a letter to his dealer, Paul Guillaume, Barnes further explained his offer to Sheeler: “I don’t want to sell anything at the foundation, but somebody will have to sell photos and catalogues because there will be a big demand for them.”18 Barnes, in fact, went on to spend much of his time over the next thirty years writing long, densely detailed books on artists in his collection and on his aesthetic method. He, however, relied primarily on descriptive text and illustrated those books with only small black-and-white photographs, and he never produced the catalogue requested of him.19 One way that Barnes overcame his antipathy to personal profit from photographic reproduction of paintings from his collection was to ask young artists like Sheeler, who were also active painters, to photograph the collection. Barnes posed this as an act of study and as a way for the artists to make some money on the side by selling the photographs. After Sheeler photographed parts of the collection, he and Barnes had a falling out. This type of arrangement was quite fruitful, though, for a young visual art student from UCLA, Barbara Morgan, and for her husband Willard Morgan, who photographed (in black and white) parts of the collection in the early 1930s.20 Barbara Morgan either perfectly aligned with Barnes’s position on the primacy of experience before objects, or she read the situation with savvy. In either case, over a long corre‑ spondence with Barnes she managed to express a deep skepticism for photographs of art – in one letter she called them “only symbols of the actual paintings” – while, with her husband, she photographed large portions of Barnes’s art collection includ‑ ing reproductions for Barnes’s upcoming book on Matisse.21 She was able to walk that line as well as she did by emphasizing that the close observation of art involved in photographing Barnes’s collection had, in turn, inspired her primary work as a painter. After her second visit she wrote: “Even tho my time there was shorter than

17 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to Charles Sheeler, January 23, 1923. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 18 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to Paul Guillaume, March 19, 1923. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Cor‑ respondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 19 A partial exception to Barnes’s refusal to write a catalogue is a book written by the Barnes Founda‑ tion teacher Mary Mullen in 1923, An Approach to Art. In this book she briefly laid out the foundation’s educational principles and methods followed by fifty small black-and-white images of works from the collection. Mary Mullen, An Approach to Art, Merion, PA: Barnes Foundation, 1923. 20 Vivian W. Chapel, a professional photographer, also photographed some of the ensembles and individual works of art in 1928. 21 Letter, Barbara Morgan to Albert C. Barnes, September 11, 1931. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.



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I wanted it to be the experiences were so enriching and illuminating, potently so, that I feel that they will be the departure point for whatever original work I may do […]. It will be a treat to see the paintings again. Good or bad as [my own paintings] may be, painting is more satisfying than I had dared hope.”22 At the end of a year of photographing the collection, Barbara Morgan wrote how the experience had made her “feel wonderfully free now to paint.”23 In this way, Barnes’s commission to the Morgans functioned as an extension of his patronage and training of young artists rather than as a way to profit from his own collection or endorse its representation in photographic reproduction. This relationship was also productive for one of Barnes’s long-term students, Angelo Pinto. In his correspondence with both Morgan and Pinto, Barnes put the emphasis entirely on their primary work as painters and how the act of close looking involved with photographing the collection would improve their painting. Pinto went a step further than Morgan. He actually took color photographs of the collection in 1942 for a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post with the juicy title “The Ter‑ rible Tempered Dr. Barnes.” Barnes wrote Pinto in response to his request to take the photographs: “It is gratifying to have you say that what you learned during your courses at the foundation was one of the principal means of opening your eyes to the possibilities of color in photography.”24 The color photographs for the article were the first ever taken and turned out to be the last for another fifty years. Barnes agreed to the photographs as an “experiment” because he respected Pinto’s skills and dedica‑ tion as a photographer and, perhaps more importantly, because of Pinto’s intimate knowledge of the collection as a foundation student.25 The reproduction of Pinto’s photographs for the magazine rendered the collection in high contrast almost garish colors, and since Barnes fundamentally distrusted color photographs to start with, it is perhaps not surprising that Barnes disliked them. (It cannot have helped that the content of the article itself infuriated him – it was entitled, after all, “The Terrible

22 Letter, Barbara Morgan to Albert C. Barnes, June 2, 1931. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 23 The underlining is original to the letter. Letter, Barbara Morgan to Albert C. Barnes, September 11, 1931. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 24 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to Angelo Pinto, November 11, 1941. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 25 See draft of contract between the Barnes Foundation and Salvatore Pinto, Angelo Pinto, Biagio Pinto, Dominic Pinto and Joseph Pinto. The document distinguishes the Pintos from other color pho‑ tographers, “WHEREAS, the Pintos are artists and photographers who have studied and have been trained at the foundation and are therefore thoroughly familiar and in accord with its educational purposes and high standards, and desire to participate in the making and distributing of such re‑ productions.” Contract Draft, Barnes Foundation with Salvatore Pinto, Angelo Pinto, Biagio Pinto, Dominic Pinto, and Joseph Pinto, June 6, 1945. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.

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Tempered Dr. Barnes.” He believed it grossly mischaracterized him and the founda‑ tion, and he threatened for months to sue the Saturday Evening Post for libel.)26 Dis‑ appointed by the result of Pinto’s photographs in published form, Barnes concluded that no further color photographs should be taken.

Photographic Reproduction of African Sculpture at the Barnes Foundation Reproductions at the Barnes Foundation were thus treated at best as a necessary evil and at worst in the words of De Mazia as a “a lure and a trap.” After Barnes’s death, first his wife Laura Barnes and then Violette de Mazia made it a systematic policy to refuse requests for the reproduction of works of art from the collection in both black and white and in color. However, from the beginning, there was one big exception to this policy: the photographic reproduction of African sculpture from the collection. As important as it is to emphasize the broad diversity of the collection, its two primary pillars, especially in its formative years, were modern French paintings and African sculpture. This was what Barnes collected most rapidly from 1917 to 1925, the years leading up to the opening of the foundation. The importance of African sculpture to the foundation was particularly announced on the facade of the newly constructed building itself, as the portico was decorated with tiles – designed by Barnes – that represented African sculptures from the collection. In contrast to the rest of the collection, however, photographic reproduction of the African sculpture was not simply tolerated but actively sought out. While one major reason for the different photographic treatment of African sculpture was prob‑ ably that the primarily monochromatic sculptures were more photogenic in black and white (Barnes’s preferred form) than colorful paintings would have been, that is surely not the whole story. Barnes’s medieval sculptures, his Jacques Lipchitz sculp‑ tures, his extensive collection of metalwork and other decorative arts – all of which, in theory, should have been equally photogenic in black and white – were not pho‑ tographed and circulated in the same way. Charles Sheeler photographed mainly the African art collection in 1922. Although the Morgans photographed different parts of the collection, in Barbara Morgan’s letters it was only the African sculpture photo‑ graphs that she was ever satisfied with. After she complained, at length, in a letter to Barnes about her, and her husband’s, disappointment in their photographs of Matisse’s paintings and their decision to retake all of them, Morgan concluded with relief that, “Most of the negro sculpture we have already taken and we are very happy

26 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to John Dewey, February 24, 1942. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.



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over the results.”27 Of the three hundred photographs that the Morgans took of the Barnes Foundation collection, one hundred and forty-five were of African sculpture.28 Moreover, although Barnes was far more critical of color photographic reproduction, he was usually still wary of black-and-white photographs. There was a particular appeal to photographs of African sculpture though, a way in which they fell outside of Barnes’s usual categorization of art, which allowed these photographs to evade his general skepticism.

The New Negro Movement’s Engagement with Barnes’s Photographs of African Sculpture Not only did Barnes request that the African sculpture be photographed, he also advo‑ cated for its reproduction wherever possible. In the 1920s, Barnes himself had lantern slides made of the African sculpture in the collection. He would project these images in talks he gave, which were accompanied by African American spirituals sung by the local New Jersey Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Youth’s Glee Club and by poetry readings by Harlem Renaissance poets.29 Barnes urged the editor Charles Johnson to reproduce the photographs in many issues of the monthly publication Johnson edited for the National Urban League, Opportunity. A Journal of Negro Life. The 1924 “African Art” issue was the first time that a major African American journal had devoted an issue to this subject, so that Barnes’s images were among the first to reach a wide African American public.30 He asked the cultural critic Alain Locke to include pictures from the collection in the special issue of Survey Graphic he edited: “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro” (fig. 3). The photographs were also featured in international journals in the 1920s, such as Der Querschnitt in Germany31 and Paul Guillaume’s avant-garde French art journal Les Arts à Paris and the journal Ex Libris in Paris.32 They also illustrated much of Locke’s

27 Letter, Barbara Morgan to Albert C. Barnes, August 26, 1931. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 28 Christa Clarke, Defining Taste. Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States during the 1920s, University of Maryland Dissertation, 1998, p. 140. For more on Barbara and Willard Morgan, see pp. 137–143. 29 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to W. R. Valentine, April 3, 1926. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 30 Clarke 1998 (as in note 28), p. 158. 31 Albert C. Barnes, Die Negerkunst Und Amerika, in: Der Querschnitt (Januar 1925), pp. 1-8. Barnes, Negro Art and America, in Ex Libris (May 1924), pp. 323-327. 32 See for example: Paul Guillaume (ed.), Les Arts à Paris. Actualités Critiques et Littéraires Des Arts et de la Curiosité (May 1926).

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Fig. 3: Barnes Foundation African Sculpture Photographs, Survey Graphic, “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”, March 1925.

groundbreaking and widely circulated anthology, The New Negro. Indeed, the Afri‑ canist scholar Christa Clarke has argued that Barnes’s collection of African sculpture and the widely circulated reproductions of it were crucial to establishing the catego‑ ries and canon of African art in the United States.33 Photographs of African sculpture during those years were certainly in vogue. Charles Sheeler photographed the collector John Quinn’s African sculpture in 1916 and Louise and Walter Arensberg’s collection in 1919 before he photographed Barnes’s collection.34 Or one could think of the 1918 to 1919 Alfred Stieglitz photograph in which

33 Christa Clarke, African Art at the Barnes Foundation. The Triumph of l’Art Nègre, in: Christa Clarke, Katherine Berzock (eds.), Representing Africa in American Art Museums. A Century of Collecting and Display, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011, pp. 93–94. See also, Christa Clarke, Defin‑ ing African Art. Primitive Negro Sculpture and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Albert Barnes, African Arts 36.1 (2003), pp. 40–51 and Clarke 1998 (as in note 28). 34 Yaëlle Biro, The John Quinn Collection of African Art and Its Photographic Album by Charles Sheeler, in: Yaëlle Biro, Monica Blackmun Visonà, Alisa LaGamma, Constantijn Petridis, Helen Shan‑ non, and Wendy Grossman (eds.), African Art, New York and the Avant-Garde, Belgium: Tribal Art Magazine, 2012, pp. 44–49.



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Fig. 4: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe (pictured with Côte d’Ivoire spoon), 1918–1919.

Georgia O’Keeffe, a friend of Barnes, posed both her body and an anthropomorphic spoon from the Côte d’Ivoire against the backdrop of her painting (fig. 4). Barnes’s motivation for advancing the wide reproduction and circulation of art from Africa was also certainly motivated by his deep engagement with the New Negro movement and what we now term the Harlem Renaissance, and his belief that estab‑ lishing the cultural patrimony of Africa would be an important way to instantiate communal pride among African Americans. Barnes gave out free copies of the 1924 Opportunity “African Art” issue at a large meeting of an African American political and cultural club that he organized in Philadelphia, and he encouraged members to subscribe to the journal.35 After the 1926 release of another issue of Opportunity, ded‑ icated to art and also featuring photographs from his collection, Barnes paid for an additional two thousand copies. The foundation itself then posted and sent the jour‑ nals “to various universities, colleges, schools, etc. which we know are interested in art but which probably know not much about that part of the negro which makes him a leader in certain fields.”36 In a 1928 radio broadcast entitled Primitive Negro Sculpture and Its Influence on Modern Civilization, Barnes argued that, “as this knowledge of the great art achievements of the Negro becomes more generally diffused there is every reason to look for an abatement of both the superciliousness on the part of the

35 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to Charles Johnson, May 5, 1924. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 36 Letter, Albert C. Barnes to Charles Johnson, April 6, 1926. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.

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white race and of the unhappy sense of inferiority in the Negro himself, which have been detrimental to the true welfare of both races.”37 Ultimately, however, Barnes’s interlocutors, Charles Johnson and Alain Locke, tended to focus more strongly on the goal of using the photographs of African sculpture to establish cultural patrimony for African Americans than Barnes did himself. Barnes put more emphasis on the important role these images could have in pro‑ moting modern art in the United States. Like other artists and critics of the period, Barnes drew connections between the abstract visual language he saw in African sculpture and that taken up by many of the modern artists that his collection favored. Mask-like faces painted by Picasso or Modigliani, according to Barnes, offered straightforward formal parallels to African sculpture. And he placed them close to each other in his displays to emphasize these formal similarities (fig. 1). Moreover, Barnes believed that ancient African art provided something more atavistic and intangible for contemporary artists: a “well of unsuspected spiritual richness […] from which the whole modern movement in art has drunk deeply.”38 Barnes premised his argument on the dramatic temporal divide between these art forms. Barnes placed a millennium between the modern movement and the African art of which it had “drunk deeply.” He wrote: “These artists [Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Soutine, Lipchitz, Strawinskys [sic], Satie, Auric, Honneger, Appollinaire] acknowl‑ edge freely the great debt they owe to the black savage of a thousand and more years ago.”39 His collector Paul Guillaume went even further in Les Arts à Paris, asserting that “archaeologists do not hesitate to date certain ancient pieces to a period that long predates the Christian era.”40 The great, unrecognized irony of Barnes’s (and many of his modernist contemporaries) proposed project – to use ancient African sculpture to inspire and explicate modern European art – is that more recent analysis has shown that most of his African collection was not in fact ancient at all. Much of it was prob‑ ably even roughly contemporary to his modernist European works, since it is now accepted that the vast majority of African wood sculpture in Europe and America was made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 Historian John Warne Monroe argues that modernists’ insistence to treat African sculptures as “decontextu‑ alized formal ciphers” and to imagine a radical temporal divide between the African art they were studying and modern art created both the conditions to reinforce the

37 Albert C. Barnes, Primitive Negro Sculpture and Its Influence on Modern Civilization, in: Opportunity. A Journal of Negro Life 2.17 (1924), p. 147. 38 Albert C. Barnes, The Temple, in: Opportunity. A Journal of Negro Life 2.17 (1924), pp. 139–140. 39 Ibid. 40 Paul Guillaume, Actualités, in: Les Arts à Paris 1 (March 15, 1918), p. 3. 41 Susan Vogel, Whither African Art? Emerging Scholarship at the End of an Age, in: African Arts 38.4 (2005), p. 14.



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notion of the primitive and also to overcome it.42 He writes particularly of the French fascination with African art in the inter-war years: On the one hand, it advanced the cause of cultural tolerance by transforming a select group of objects, previously rejected in racist terms, into potential masterworks of world art; on the other, it perpetuated inequalities by drawing a sharp, if often illusory, line between the ancestral artists capable of producing such masterworks and the current, allegedly decadent inhabitants of the distant lands where these objects were created.43

It was a contradiction in which Barnes was deeply entangled. This was even further complicated for Barnes as an American (although one enamored by Paris). Barnes vacillated between his impulse to use photographs of African sculpture to support the New Negro movement and to promote modern French art in America, and his writing manifests the intersections and contradictions within and between those goals. Barnes’s position became fuzziest when he described the link between supposedly ancient African sculpture and the work of contemporary African American artists. The subtle divide between the ways Locke and Barnes chose to position African sculpture can be found in the divergence of their essays for Locke’s anthology The New Negro. In Locke’s introductory essay he described the new condition of the “Negro” of the North as one “where tutelage [by white Americans], even of the most interested and well-intentioned sort, must give place to new relationships […]”.44 This sentiment could perhaps tactfully describe Locke’s evolving relationship with Barnes. Locke was grateful when, over a weekend spent with Charles Johnson at Barnes’s home and at the foundation in 1924, Barnes introduced him to his collection and ideas on African sculpture. Over that weekend they planned the special “African Art” issue in Opportunity to which both Barnes and his dealer Paul Guillaume contributed articles.45 Locke thanked him “for the most stimulating and educative experience I have had for years” and attributed his quick study of African art to Barnes’s tutelage.46 After a second weekend visit to the foundation, he offered his “deepest thanks and appreciation of

42 Monroe uses the term “decontextualized formal ciphers” to refer to curator William Rubin’s aesthet‑ ic approach to African sculpture in the MoMA’s influential 1984 show, “Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern but, moreover, to describe how this approach represents a culmination of a high modernist vision that goes back to the institution’s founding director Alfred Barr. John Warne Monroe, Surface Tensions: Empire, Parisian Modernism, and ‘Authenticity’ in African Sculpture, 1917–1939, in: American Historical Review (April 2012), p. 446. 43 Ibid. 44 Alain Locke, The New Negro, in: Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925, p. 8. 45 Letter, Alain Locke to Albert C. Barnes, March 25, 1924. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Corre‑ spondence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 46 Letter, Alain Locke to Albert C. Barnes, April 9, 1924. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspon‑ dence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission.

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your stimulating and enlightening interest in our big new problem.”47 But by the end of 1925 he would only reluctantly publish Barnes’s essay in The New Negro.48 Barnes’s “Negro Art in America” – the first article after Locke’s introduction to the anthology – subtly, although probably not deliberately, opposed Locke’s propo‑ sition of a New Negro. Barnes was invested in the idea that “Negro” art emerged from a universal temperament and psychology. Although Barnes and Locke often seemed to employ similarly essentialist language, Locke increasingly nuanced the notion of a transhistorical and transcultural “Negro”. Barnes’s language spoke of continuity: “The most important element to be considered is the psychological complexion of the Negro as he inherited it from his primitive ancestors and which he maintains to this day.”49 Locke by contrast emphasized that contemporary African American artists had more reason to be inspired by African art than Picasso or Matisse: “And if African art is capable of producing the ferment in modern art that it has, surely this is not too much to expect of its influence upon the culturally awakened Negro artist of the present generation.”50 Throwing an even greater wrench in the notion of inherited psychology, Locke wrote (in rather broad strokes) about the fundamental differences between African and African American art: The characteristic African art expressions are rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, heavily conventionalized; those of the Aframerican, – free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental and human. Only by the misinterpretation of the African spirit, can one claim any emotional kinship between them […] [The characteristics of contemporary African American art] represent essenti‑ ally the working of environmental forces rather than the outcropping of a race psychology […].51

The difference in the emphasis of their writing was often subtle. But Locke consis‑ tently tended to give agency to the works of African art or to the African Americans

47 Letter, Alain Locke to Albert C. Barnes, May 22, 1924. Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspon‑ dence. The Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, PA. Reprinted with permission. 48 Before ultimately publishing Barnes’s original essay “Negro Art in America” from the Survey Graphic issue, “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”, Locke first requested that the writer and pho‑ tographer Carl Van Vechten replace it in the anthology. Locke praised Van Vechten’s knowledge of Langston Hughes and specific African Americans’ contributions to music, drama, and poetry; he wrote that he and the publishers “imperatively need something more suggestive and concrete than Dr. Barnes’s kindly but vague assertions.” Only after Van Vechten turned down Locke was Barnes’s article included. Alain Locke. Letter to Carl Van Vechten, May 24, 1925. Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 49 Albert C. Barnes, Negro Art in America, in: Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925, p. 20. 50 Alain Locke, The Ancestral Arts, in: Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925, p. 267. 51 Ibid., p. 254.



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who found pride and inspiration in them.52 Barnes, on the other hand, tended to praise the white European artists and collectors who had “discovered” African art and through their work made evident its value to European and American culture.

A Modernist Engagement with Photographs of African Sculpture Barnes was by no means alone in his position. A modernist camp argued that a new appreciation of ‘ancient’ African sculpture was central to understanding modern art.53 Critics and gallery owners such as Marius de Zayas and Alfred Stieglitz in the United States, Roger Fry and Clive Bell in England, Carl Einstein in Germany, and Paul Guillaume in France, argued in the 1910s, each in his own terms, for the need to collect and study African sculpture to establish its formal relation to modern art.54 Photographs of African art, both surrogates for the sculpture and works of art them‑ selves, were often used as a vital tool for many of these gallery owners and critics.

52 In later years Locke would further distance himself from the essentialist language of “The Ances‑ tral Arts.” In the 1942 article, “Who And What is ‘Negro’,” for example, Locke worked systematically through the question of what constitutes the category of “Negro art” itself, and how it is complicated by factors of class, culture, region, and nationality. He poses the question for himself, “Sooner or later the critic must face the basic issues involved in his use of risky and perhaps untenable terms like “Negro art” and “Negro literature,” and answer the much-evaded question unequivocally, – who and what is Negro?” He concludes that the terms always prove to be hybrid and composite. Opportunity, February/March 1942, reprinted in Jeffrey C. Stewart (ed.), The Critical Temper of Alain Locke. A Selection of his Essays on Art and Culture, New York: Garland Publishing, 1983, p. 309. 53 More recently, curator William Rubin’s 1984 show at the MoMA, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, and the reactions to it, sparked a scholarly re-assessment of the terms and conditions for the relationship between traditional African art and modern European and American art. See: William Rubin (ed.), “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Boston, 1984. And for responses: James Clifford, Histories of the Tribal and the Modern, Art in America 73.4 (April 1985), pp. 164–177; Hal Foster, The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art, October 34 (Autumn 1985), pp. 45–70. 54 With the exceptions of Roger Fry and Paul Guillaume, Barnes’s esteem for these critics was low. In a letter to Walter White (of whom he had even worse things to say) Barnes ran down the list of his fellow critics of African art: “[Stuart] Culin (Brooklyn Collection) nice guy but a mental cripple, a hopeless doddering old ignoramus in anything which relates to art. Einstein is a mental giant and a connoisseur compared to him – that doesn’t detract any thing of truth or sobriety of statement from my public assertion the other night that Einstein is a colossal bluff. De Zayas is in somewhat the same class as Einstein with dullness substituted for Einstein’s Clive Bell-like counterfeit thinking in smooth slick language […] If you wish my advice, as well as my opinion, it is that you let the sole reference to Negro plastic art be what Roger Fry has written. The rest of your references are the literary equivalents of prostitution.” Albert Barnes, Letter to Walter White, March 25, 1924, Howard University. Printed in: Mark Hebling, African Art. Albert C. Barnes and Alain Locke, in: Phylon, 43.1 (1st Qtr., 1982), p. 58.

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Marius de Zayas, for example, sold signed copies of Charles Sheeler photographs of African sculptures at his gallery, side by side with (although more affordable than) the sculptures themselves.55 Carl Einstein’s work especially relied on a dramatic body of photographs of African sculpture. The relatively short text of his 1915 book, Negerplastik, was followed by one hundred and eight photographic reproductions of unlabeled African sculpture by anonymous photographers.56 Of all the critics, Einstein most emphasized that the contribution of African sculpture was its extraordinary formal innovations and inde‑ pendence from mimetic naturalism, which he believed to be a burden that European art had not yet shaken. Art historian Wendy Grossman has argued that the formal style of photography, displayed in books like Negerplastik, which discretely framed each sculpture, were crucial to the process of translating these objects into a mod‑ ernist context. She explains: “In this paradigm, the unfamiliar is contained within a knowable autonomous art frame and as such becomes for Western modernism a means of possessing and appropriating objects with profoundly different meaning in the cultures from which they are extricated.”57 Grossman makes the further argument that not only was photography crucial to promoting a shift in a perception of African sculpture as art rather than artifact, but also, inversely, that photographs of African art were important in shifting the perception of object photography from entirely doc‑ umentary to modernist. These photographs did not simply function for these modern‑ ist critics as documentary reproductions of African sculpture but as important medi‑ ators between African sculpture and modern European art. The relationship between African sculpture and modern art had been firmly entrenched by 1935 when New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted its major exhibit, African Negro Art, that took over all four floors of the building. This exhibit made much of the symbiotic relationship between African sculpture, photographs of African sculpture, and modern art. In addition to a lengthy illustrated catalogue, the head curator, Alfred Barr, commissioned an unprecedentedly elaborate set of sev‑

55 Wendy A. Grossman, African Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Photography at the Crossroads, in: Cordula Grewe (ed.), Die Schau des Fremden. Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, p. 334. For more on Grossman’s work on the role of photography in the early reception of African objects as art in the United States and Europe, see Wendy A. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, Washington, D.C.: International Arts and Artists, 2009. 56 Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, Munich: K. Wolff, 1915. The majority of the photographs may have come from the art dealer Josef Brummer who was also a supporter and potential financer of the proj‑ ect. Z. S. Strother, Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik, in: African Arts 46.4 (Winter 2013), p. 11, p. 20; Jean-Louis Paudrat, Jean-Louis, From Africa, in: Rubin, 1984 (as in note 53), pp. 125–175; Ezio Bassani, Les œuvres illustrées dans Negerplastik (1915) et dans Afrikanische Plastik (1921), in: Etudes germaniques 53 (Jan.–March 1998), pp. 99–121. 57 Grossman 2006 (as in note 55), p. 334.



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enteen photographic portfolios by Walker Evans, each with four hundred and sev‑ enty-seven photographs of sculpture from the exhibition (this project just preceded, and at its end overlapped with, Evans’s most famous work for the WPA). Evans was already a well-established photographer. Barr had acquired earlier works by him for MoMA’s permanent collection. And Evans was used in MoMA press releases to draw attention to the exhibit and photographic project.58 These portfolios were given or sold to major art museums and universities. Additionally, seventy-five of Evans’s prints were enlarged and shown at sixteen venues, primarily African American col‑ leges, for a “poster exhibition” from 1935 to 1936.59 Between the catalogue, portfolio, poster exhibition, and the publicity around Evans, the photographic representation of African sculpture may have equaled, if not eclipsed, the reach and influence of the physical show of sculpture at the MoMA itself. Virginia-Lee Webb, the curator of a 2000 MoMA exhibition of Evans’s photo‑ graphs of African Negro Art, argued that although these photographs were popular and influential when they were produced, they quickly disappeared from Evans’s oeuvre precisely because they fell between categories. Indeed, just a few years later, MoMA left this portfolio out of Evans’s 1938 retrospective and out of all the catalogues produced on his work. Wendy Grossman has argued that, “the tension between the dual functions these photographs were meant to serve – art and document, image and object, beauty and truth – made their accommodation within traditional art his‑ torical narratives impossible”.60 African art photographs’ resistance to an art historical narrative may have been relevant for Barnes as well. He may have felt a related ambivalence on their status. He never collected photography, but he made a habit of commissioning mainly artists that he liked, such as Charles Sheeler, to photograph his collection. Were these doc‑ umentary photographs or modern art themselves? Or a form that mediated between the two? In Barnes’s case, it may have been African sculpture photographs’ very resistance to categorization that allowed him to support and promote their creation and reproduction. Indeed, it could have been their status as neither art photography (which he did not collect) nor documentary reproductions of art (which he did not approve of) that allowed the photographs of African sculpture to rise above (or below) Barnes’s usual skepticism of photography.

58 Virginia-Lee Webb, Perfect Documents Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2000, p. 30. 59 Ibid., p. 40. 60 Grossman 2006 (as in note 55), p. 338.

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The Barnes Foundation’s “Primitive Negro Sculpture” Barnes’s own emphasis on the role of photographs of African sculpture to promote modern art is clear in the Barnes Foundation’s earlier 1925 publication Primitive Negro Sculpture co-written by foundation teacher Thomas Munro and Barnes’s collector in France, Paul Guillaume. As archival letters reveal, it was heavily guided and edited by Barnes himself. The first thing to note about this publication is that it looks quite different than any of the other many publications produced by the foundation while under the leadership of Barnes or De Mazia. The regular format for Barnes Founda‑ tion books was hundreds of pages of dense text with a few quite small photographic reproductions as illustration. Primitive Negro Sculpture functions much more like the catalogue that Barnes otherwise refused to create, with a relatively short text and for‑ ty-one beautiful, large-format photographic reproductions of African sculpture from the collection (fig. 5). The authors first tell the reader to unmoor these works from their historic specificity in Africa and urge the reader to understand them as aesthetic objects. Guillaume then takes a third step to legitimize them as art objects because of the “joy and instruction” that they can provide both viewers and artists trying to understand and create modern art.61 It is in this final injunction that the different treatment of African sculpture and the rest of Barnes’s collection in photographic reproduction becomes clear, for African sculptures were not simply aesthetic objects but objects for ‘joy and instruction’ to revitalize modern art. This notion of instruction is also apparent in the way the photographs were shot and presented in Primitive Negro Sculpture. The catalogue’s photographic illustra‑ tions provide both front and back images of the sculptures. In the accompanying texts Guillaume and Munro lead us around the photographically imaged, and rhetorically imagined, sculptures, in order to instruct the reader how to see them. “Going around the figure, we see the serpentine masses […] Returning to the front, we see the oval, convex plane […]”62 (fig. 5). One begins to suspect that for Guillaume and Munro, the geometric shapes and intersecting planes on the surface of the photograph, and not the sculptures themselves, best conveyed African sculpture’s potential for future instruction. Embedded in the catalogue’s text, the sculptures become images that are perhaps more effectively communicative as photographs since their two-dimensional surfaces can best instruct the viewer of the analogy between African sculpture and modern painting. What emerges, then, is a differentiation between the African sculpture and modern French paintings that is denied in the galleries but subtly emerges in photo‑ graphic reproduction. In an institution that believed that the individual, material aura

61 Paul Guillaume, African Art at the Barnes Foundation, in: Opportunity. A Journal of Negro Life 2.17 (1924), p. 140. 62 Paul Guillaume, Thomas Munro, Primitive Negro Sculpture, New York: Harcourt, 1926, p. 110.



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Fig. 5: “Congo”. From: Primitive Negro Sculpture (Guillaume & Munro 1926: pl. 31).

of works of art must be protected against photographic reproduction, the wide repro‑ duction of African sculpture paradoxically secured its second-class status. Two-di‑ mensional images of African sculpture were intended to help the viewer understand the flattened planes of modern French paintings, but that same viewer had to come to the foundation itself if she wanted to see and appreciate the French paintings with all their auratic presence in time and space.

Conclusion One can trace the afterlife of these photographs, their circulation, and the discourse they produced and participated in by looking at a much more recent 1992 exhibition by the Barnes Foundation after de Mazia’s death. The Barnes Foundation’s only traveling

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exhibit, Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation – made possible because of much needed repairs to the building – featured the collection’s famous paintings and some small photographs of the galleries’ installations with African sculpture. The paintings, which had not circulated heavily as reproductions, did travel in the exhibit. The sculptures, though, which had extensively circulated as reproductions, did not travel, but some small photographs of them embedded in the ensemble displays did. This perhaps expresses the culminating logic of Barnes and De Mazia’s policy: the African sculptures had come to have artistic value only as photographic images that offer instruction. In this paradigm, these sculptures, as photographic images, enrich the viewer’s understanding of modern European paintings, but as material, auratic objects themselves, they disappear altogether.

Julia Kleinbeck

Double Reflections: Art Museums and the Image of the Beholder1 Introduction On September 28, 1921, the French art historian and museologist Henri Focillon, in the section on communication and “muséographie” of the Congrès d’histoire de l’art, raised a question that, in retrospect, seems rhetorical: “Is there still a place for a third position between those two concepts of a museum: the museum of the artists, and the museum of the historians? I think yes, and, albeit rather paradoxically, do not hesitate to say that museums are there for the public.”2 Focillon’s programmatic speech on the museum as a public place, titled “La conception moderne des musées,” not only served to shape the development of the museum in France. Today, nearly a century later, one may reply to Focillon that especially the modern art museum has also defined its position by fathoming the tensions between the museum as an insti‑ tution and its visitors. In the process, connecting references via objects to the present no longer seemed like a paradox. Instead, forms of presentation are being developed through which the beholder can adequately perceive and experience both layers – the present and the past. Due to such efforts, beholders have also had to confront new issues. During the last century, they have been assigned varying roles, from the “join-in beholder” via the “institution critic” to the mere “background actor,” to name but a few. And we have all seen pictures of each of those types. These pictures are part of the respective exhibitions’ photographic documentations, the artists’ reflections, or the beholders’ photographic souvenirs of their sojourn at the museum. And these images are today shared on Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media platform. In most cases, these photographs attract us by means of their aesthetics of “seeing-someone-seeing.” So, when defining the factors that constitute the image of the museum, some of these images deserve scrutiny. This paper’s purpose is to examine some highly interesting examples of contem‑ porary pictures showing beholders in art museums, all while pursuing the question: to what extent do these “images of the beholder” influence in turn what is under‑

1 For their remarks and the ensuing discussion my thanks go to my audience at the Florentine confer‑ ence; translation into English by Thomas Reiser, whom I cordially thank. 2 Quote translated into English from the German edition: Henri Focillon, Die moderne Museums­ konzeption (1921), in: Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Andrea Meyer, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), Museums­ geschichte. Kommentierte Quellentexte 1750–1950, Berlin: Reimer, 2010, pp. 134–139, p. 134.

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stood as and what is expected from an art museum, and how do they raise completely new challenges for the museum. A distinction between two types of beholder-images, therefore, becomes essential. Those that were produced by the recipients themselves sometimes show – as we shall see – a novel, hitherto maybe unrealised, museum. And these pictures made by the beholders and museum visitors also have to be dis‑ tinguished from those images that are circulated by the museum itself with the aim of – in the literal and metaphorical sense – shaping its own image.

In the Mirror In 2013, the Louvre was in the most literal sense a place of reflection and self-reflec‑ tion where the beholder was at first rather unwillingly put in the picture. Three works by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, who is numbered among the Arte Povera movement, could be seen at three places within the museum. The exhibition was titled Année I. Le Paradis sur Terre (Year I. Earth’s Paradise). The artist’s clamorous retrospective was arranged around his Quadri specchi anti (Mirror Paintings). These are large polished steel surfaces onto which photographs or a thin canvas have been applied.3 Mirroring metal surfaces are a medium that Pistoletto has identified, since his first experiments, as fascinating him the most. Dissecting this particular charm, he concludes: “It is a natural part of the content of the mirror works. You become a part of the work, if you wish. You become a collaborator […] Whatever material an artist chooses to work with, he must exploit the key properties of that material. The main property of the mirror is inclusiveness. The Mirror Paintings are like a movie that is continually in the present. You decide how much you want to be involved.”4 Approximately since the mid-1960s, Pistoletto has quite literally been integrating the beholders into his works by superimposing pictures of them making different ges‑ tures, under different circumstances, and in different constellations onto his mirrors’ surfaces. Lui e lei abbracciati (He and She Embracing)5 from 1968 shows us the back view of an enamoured couple. Visitatrice con catalogo (Female Visitor with Catalogue)6 from 1969 features a female visitor who – as we can gather from the catalogue she is

3 On the manufacturing, extensively: Suzanne Penn, ‘The Complicity of the Materials’ In Pistoletto’s Paintings and Mirror Paintings, in: Carlos Basualdo (ed.), Michelangelo Pistoletto. From One to Many, 1956–1974. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 143–169, pp. 153–154. 4 Michelangelo Pistolletto as interviewed by Michael Auping in Biella (Italy), 4 May 2010, quoted from: Katherine Burton (ed.), Michelangelo Pistoletto. Mirror Paintings, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011, p. 69: “Ohne unsere Blick gäbe es keine Bilder, sondern wären die Bilder etwas ganz anderes oder gar nichts. Zwar empfangen wir Bilder von außen, aber wir machen sie zu unseren eigenen Bildern.” 5 Painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 120 x 100 cm, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. 6 Painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 230 x 120 cm, Collection of Pietro Valsecchi.



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Fig. 1: Installation view on Flickr, Ragazza che fotografa (Girl Taking a Photograph), Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2013.

holding – is most probably strolling through an exhibition of Pistoletto. And in Sacra conversazione. Anselmo, Zorio, Penone (Sacred Conversation between Anselmo, Zorio, Penone)7 we spot three young men sternly talking with each other. One of these Mirror Paintings was presented in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: Ragazza che fotografa (Girl Taking a Photograph) (fig. 1/pl. VIII).8 It most likely never shows only one two-dimensionally applied female beholder of art, who is (in the wellknown posture) raising her arms above her head while clicking her camera. The work, developed in the 1960s, duplicates the iconic Louvre visitor, the one who single-mind‑ edly seeks the shortest way to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and, upon arriving, is exclusively interested in producing their own reproduction of the painting. Thus, the glittering mirror face causes a double reflection: the work directly points to the present appear‑ ance of the museum space, while at the same time indirectly looks back at history – thus seemingly enabling a dialogue between the past and the present. Both layers are blended into one picture. In his Mirror Paintings, Pistoletto further raises questions about models of artistic production and reception that interlink in the person of the beholder. He envisions his oeuvre as a call to overcome established points of view

7 Silkscreen on polished stainless steel, 230 x 120 cm, Collection of the artist. 8 Silkscreen on polished stainless steel, 230 x 125 cm, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella.

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and perceptive patterns: “Traditional perspective opened up like a window on the world toward the space inside the window. The Mirror Painting is a door that opens in two directions: The viewer can enter the picture while moving away from it. So the observer – and consequently, society – is active within the work.”9 Statements like this reverberate in an intellectual engagement with the phenomenology of percep‑ tions as put forth by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl – an echo that has also been heard by many.10 Thus, this work of art opens a meta-discourse on the structure of seeing and the perceptual process while scrutinizing what these processes mean for drafting the image. Are the mirrors objects we are looking at, or are they subjects as well, looking back at us? The mirror works also include the space of reception – the museum – and, thus, the whole discourse on reception within one staging. Yet, apart from aspects of perceptual theory, symbolic participation, or phenomenology, there is something else to be said about the work: the so-called “installation shot” taken by a visitor and uploaded on Flickr makes it evident again that the beholder has, in the very moment of art reception, always created new images. The photography that shows the image that is being received yet also the beholders themselves becomes the pictorial theme. Indeterminable situations of mise en abyme are the result. Spaces of perception, visual axes, and social conditions of aesthetic reception seem to be endlessly crossing and intersecting. This is a mise-en-scène of the quarrel about the “true place of images” – or as Hans Belting would put it: “Without our sight there were no images, but images were something totally different or nothing at all. Though we are perceiving images from outside, we are turning them into images of our own.”11

Staging the Beholder While Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings inevitably force the recipient to be a producer of images, other artists work with volunteers. This is the case with the flood of pictures surrounding Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project. With over 2 million visitors, Eliasson’s light spectacle (from autumn 2003 until spring 2004, one of nine Unilever installations at the Tate Modern London) has been one of the last decade’s most successful exhibitions. Whether or not one has visited, the copious media coverage still keeps the memory of the basic scenario alive: the Turbine Hall has been blacked out, its

9 Michelangelo Pistoletto as interviewed by Andrea Bellini, quoted from: Andrea Bellini (ed.), Facing Pistoletto, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2009, p. 23. 10 Cf. e.g. Jeremy Lewison, Looking at Pistoletto/Looking at Myself, in: Burton 2011 (as in note 4), pp. 7–35, especially pp. 15–19. 11 Cf. Hans Belting, Der Ort der Bilder, in: Hans Belting, Lydia Haustein (eds.), Das Erbe der Bilder. Kunst und moderne Medien in den Kulturen der Welt, Munich: Beck, 1998, pp. 34–54, p. 35.



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ceilings mirrored, giant humidifiers set to work, and, all of a sudden, two hundred monochromatic lamps let the sun rise. Apart from this “indoor sun,” the host of reproductions mostly show: the visitor. One notices that they are no longer a mere accompaniment within the art event’s documentation, but have instead become the actual pictorial theme. The Weather Project’s documentary pictures are a somewhat eccentric counterpart to Thomas Struths’s Museum Photographs, which are centred on the beholding of the beholder. In the case of Eliasson’s work, the experience of a complete sensual immersion in the three-dimensional space of the Turbine Hall installation has been transferred to the aesthetics of two-dimensional pictures. The experience has been fixed in place, and thus made bereft of its uniqueness. In many representations, we see the back view of silhouettes. In others, we recognise small groups of visitors forming a peace sign or standing out against the yellow-orange ambient space with political messages. It seems that many professional reviewers were blind to the particular aesthetics that resulted from the interaction of beholder and installation space. As such, they habitually drew parallels between Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape paintings and the light art by Eliasson. This association may be explained by the fact that the installation was broadly perceived as a reflection on the present day discourse of climate change, and was presumed to arbitrarily contrast with its location – the said Turbine Hall. Accordingly, Eliasson’s contribution to the Unilever installations was read as a “doomsday metaphor” that the reviewers found tinged by a romanticism like that of Caspar David Friedrich. The Weather Project, said one reviewer, was: “the doomsday of the fairy electricity, of industrial progress, of faith in resources of energy, climatic theory. Like the ‘Klosterruine Oybin’ […]: a grand ruin lit by a sinking star.” 12 It is telling that, in this chain of associations, images of beholders interlink and stand out like paper cutouts against a giant sun – therefore being interpreted as dis‑ playing a proximity to Caspar David Friedrich. Yet, one wonders whether such asso‑ ciations were not incited primarily by the two-dimensional picture of the beholder. If this is the case, the work’s interpretation all of a sudden can no longer be separated from its reproduction, in which the beholder seems to play the dominant role. Similar to Michelangelo Pistoletto, Olafur Eliasson places an emphasis on the con‑ stitutive part the beholder plays within a work of art: “I find it interesting to see the environment for once as the subject and myself as the object, that is to think that the beholders are created by their environment. Clearly, subject and object can’t simply be exchanged, yet a nervous flickering between the two, that’s what I find productive,

12 Cf. Annelie Lütgens, Lichtkunst im 20. Jahrhundert, in: Olafur Eliasson – Your Lighthouse. Arbeiten mit Licht, 1991–2004, Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2004, p. 40. (“Eine Götterdämmerung der Fee Elektrizität, des industriellen Fortschritts, des Glaubens an die Energieressourcen, der Klimatheorie. Etwa wie die Caspar David Friedrich zugeschriebene Klosterruine Oybin […]: eine erhabene Ruine be‑ leuchtet von einem sinkenden Gestirn”).

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it’s a kind of anti-vanishing point.”13 This change of perspective is most productively employed by Olafur Eliasson within the publications documenting his light instal‑ lations. He obviously saw the potential of photogenic beholders, for he dedicated several plates in the exhibition catalogue to them (figs. 2/3).14 They will be regarded as evidence of the work’s impact, and this iconic impact will be inscribed into future reception – outlasting any temporal installation.15 The motif of the beholder within the museum space also points to the expansion of this space, designed not only as a setting to exhibit but also as a kind of public space for the visitors.16 Eliasson emphasized the beholders’ role as a collective instance of observing by offering them a stage. Thus, the public became visible; it was exposed as such, and its presence was divulged. As they are moving through the light-flooded museum space, and as they are aware both of themselves and of all the other visitors (likewise in motion), the beholders engaged in an act of collective perception, becoming both visible and at the same time part of an artwork – which in its turn is being perceived by others. This act of being and becoming visible is what is “public” about encountering Eliasson’s works. The public as described here seems to duplicate itself once more. Since the begin‑ ning of the twenty-first century, the social web has made platforms available by which the public and the pictures of an exhibition are at first de-contextualised only to gain a new public having then been re-contextualised. Thus, the spaces coming to pass are keenly denominated by Nina Gerlach as “hybrid exhibition spaces of the post-medial era.”17 However, her enthusiasm does not leave room for consideration of more pessi‑ mistic responses to these processes. The new structures resulting from this novel way of dealing with images deserves analysis. The new format holds fresh possibilities and challenges. Artists are probing new strategies of reproduction on online portals,18 and there are utterly new-fangled

13 Olafur Eliasson as interviewed by Maja Peter, quoted from, Licht hat eine soziale Funktion, in: Das Kulturmagazin DU 796 (2009), p. 32–44, p. 39. 14 Cf. e.g. Olafur Eliasson: Studio Olafur Eliasson. An Encyclopedia, ed. by Anna Engberg-Pedersen, Cologne: Taschen, 2008, pp. 115–122. 15 On the different indicators for a work of art’s impact cf. generally: Peter J. Schneemann, Zeugen gesucht. Die Wirkung eines Kunstwerkes als Anekdote, in: Caroline Arni, Andrea Glauser et. al. (eds.), Der Eigensinn des Materials. Erkundungen sozialer Wirklichkeit, Festschrift für Claudia Honegger zum 60. Geburtstag, Basel/Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2007, pp. 395–409. 16 Cf. Philip Ursprung, From Observer to Participant, in “Olafur Eliassons Atelier”, in: Olafur Eliasson. Studio Olafur Eliasson. An Encyclopedia, Cologne: Taschen, 2008, pp. 10–20, p. 17. 17 Cf. Nina Gerlach, Online Videoportale als hybride Ausstellungsräume des postmedialen Zeitalt‑ ers und das kunstwissenschaftliche Instrument der kognitiven Metapher, in: Zeitschrift für Kunst­ geschichte 1 (2014), pp. 117–131. 18 Cf. Ariane Mensger (ed.), Déjà-vu. Die Kunst der Wiederholung von Dürer bis YouTube, exhibition catalogue, Bielefeld: Kerber, 2012.



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Fig. 2: Documentation of Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, London, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, 2003.

Fig. 3: Documentation of Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, London, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, 2003.

methods of presentation inherent in the new medium.19 Museums also transfer their physical exhibition space into virtual space. Ultimately, these novel “hybrid exhibi‑ tion spaces” provide a democratic stage for artistic exchange and self-fashioning.20 Yet how the beholding of art also became within this context an independent pictorial theme has hitherto not been questioned. Novel formats of art as well as an ever-grow‑ ing group of producers not only come into being, but these platforms also make the conditions of art reception a more general subject of discussion. To foster this reason‑ ing, let us dwell a bit longer upon Eliasson’s crowd-pleasing installation. These days, the documentation of a visit to an exhibition no longer remains on the single visitor’s private computer, but is also shared with other users. One year before Eliasson’s Weather Project, the online community Flickr came to existence exis‑ tence. It provides a space in which the art beholders are, so to say, staging themselves

19 Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, Stockholm: National Library of Swe‑ den, 2009; Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 20 Cf. Ramon Marek, Understanding YouTube. Über die Faszination eines Mediums, Bielefeld: Tran‑ script, 2013; Ramón Reichert, Die Macht der Vielen. Über den neuen Kult der digitalen Vernetzung, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013.

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Fig. 4: Screenshot from Flickr, query: The Weather Project.

a second time. Typing the query “Weather Project” unfolds an impressive virtual gallery (fig. 4/pl. IX) – an experience of art that beautifully demonstrates the previ‑ ously introduced idea of “theatricality” as applied to spaces beyond and outside the white cube. By employing the terms of a “stage” and its “actors” in this regard, one refers less to aesthetic structures than a type of social interaction, as Juliane Reben‑ tisch has elaborated for the installation in general.21 On the one hand, the visitors turn this virtually created stage into a space of self-fashioning, whose mechanisms lie in the public showing and discussing of images. Though all these platforms contain a function for leaving written comments, attention is mainly generated by those who transform their own installation experience into a highly creative pictorial composi‑ tion. On the other hand, the beholders are, by publicly showing and discussing these images, again acting as a collective. This structure is revealed by Immanuel Kant’s positing of the condition and the necessity of the aesthetic experience. Within his Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft), he emphasises the value of exchang‑ ing aesthetic experiences: “Only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being, but a human being refined in his own way (the beginning of civiliza‑ tion) - for that is how we judge of one who has the bent and turn for communicating his pleasure to other, and who is not quite satisfied with an object unless his feeling of delight in it can be shared in communication with others.”22 According to Kant,

21 Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, p. 23. 22 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), § 41, 297. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. “[…] nur in Gesellschaft kommt es ihm ein, nicht bloß Mensch, sondern auch nach seiner Art ein Mensch zu sein (der Anfang der Zi‑



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the solitary, individual art experience as such cannot exist. The experience of art is essentially a public experience of art in which society, at least as a hypothetical posit, is present. The museum or the virtual gallery can be understood as a space that de facto guarantees social beholding and thus the fundamental condition of aesthetic experience. The enormous production of images surrounding art events such as the Weather Project proves how the said condition also correlates to the beholder’s need and wish to sense the museum space as a ‘space of experience’.23

Self-Fashioning The images made by the museum visitors themselves can in a second step be juxta‑ posed with the pictures of beholders that the museum creates and employs to fashion its own image. Although aware of the aesthetics of beholders as image makers, the museum puts their representations to quite a different purpose. A number of pho‑ tographers have already specialised in representing the museum space. Their work results in highly staged and through and through choreographed glances into the rooms of collections and exhibitions in which the beholder has been placed with utmost care. These photographers develop a particular aesthetic to suit this re-repre‑ senting of the beholder. Blurred beholders, men and women out of focus, explore the museum space. A new pictorial formula for the temporal aspect of perceiving seems to have been discovered. It is not museum space that is reproduced, but a specific kind of interacting.24 Florian Holzherr’s documentation of light artist James Turrell’s Wolfsburg Project may be prototypical (fig. 5).25 Holzherr’s photographs are more than mere documentary material; they develop a pictorial aesthetic of their own in the manner that they employ the beholder. Besides this pictorial method, another popular form of presenting the museum exists. Observe, for example, the picture of two art beholders in front of the Grossstadt triptych by Otto Dix inside the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (fig. 6). These photographs open up museum spaces in which the beholders confront the expository object in utter isolation from other visitors. The visual language chosen thus evolves entirely from a focus on the dialogue between the artwork and the subject. Any kind of social

vilisierung): denn als einen solchen beurteilt man denjenigen, welcher seine Lust andern mitzuteilen geneigt und geschickt ist, und den ein Objekt nicht befriedigt, wenn er das Wohlgefallen an demsel‑ ben nicht in Gemeinschaft mit anderen fühlen kann.” 23 Cf. generally: Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, New Haven et al.: Yale University Press, 2009. 24 On the observation that most of the beholders in question are women, see Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Blickfänger, in: Art 10 (2013), p. 54. 25 Markus Brüderlin (ed.), James Turrell. The Wolfsburg Project, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

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Fig. 5: Documentation of James Turrell’s Wolfsburg Project, Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

interaction, distraction, or even jocularity is lacking. But the pictorial level aside: What do images like these tell us about their creators’ concept of the beholder, and what may these people expect from these images? These images revive the idea (which has been thought overcome long ago) of the museum as a sacred temple of art. Carol Duncan, while castigating this way of self-po‑ sitioning, once pointed out that one should not underestimate the novel “ritualistic structure” that the museum cultivates.26 Although the terms “ritual” and “museum” in Western thought may seem antagonistic, the art museum is nevertheless a place where “ritualistic structures” define the most minute and subtle symbolic actions. Take, for example, the handing out of museum maps, which are intended to lead the way through an institutionally created microcosm. Audio guides also serve a function within relational structures, steering and navigating the visitor by means of an insti‑ tutionally pre-set choreography. These said ritualistic structures are further cemented when such depictions are shown and when they are seen. Then we see images of beholders and become beholders ourselves, or better: observers. It is this act of observing from which Dirk Baecker derives an overall cultural theory. He formulates his ruminations on “The Beholders’ Knowledge” (Wissen der Beobachter) according to strict logic: “Define culture as the acknowledging of one beholder’s position given this position be contingent. Define society as the occasion, the circumstances, and the outcome of contest among such beholders for a position towards each other. Define knowledge as each stake within this contest. Define non-knowledge as the knowledge of a non-knowledge. Distinguish beholders by the distinctions they make.”27

26 Cf. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, London/New York: Routledge, 1995. 27 Cf. Dirk Baecker, Beobachter unter sich. Eine Kulturtheorie, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013, p. 17: “Nenne Kultur die Anerkennung der Position eines Beobachters unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Kontingenz dieser Position. Nenne Gesellschaft den Anlass, die Art und Weise und das Ergebnis der Auseinander‑ setzung dieser Beobachter um ihre Position zueinander. Nenne Wissen jeden Einsatz innerhalb dieser Auseinandersetzung. Nenne Nichtwissen das Wissen um ein Nichtwissen. Unterscheide Beobachter anhand der Unterscheidungen, die sie treffen.”



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Fig. 6: Two beholders in the Kunst­ museum Stuttgart looking at Otto Dix’s Grossstadt Triptych.

When one accepts this definition, it becomes significant that the museum’s display and advertising material is likewise based on these aesthetics, aesthetics that celebrate the white cube as a secular temple and that portray the beholder’s isolation and concentration within the museum as honoring or venerating objects of contem‑ plation. Why then is the beholder integrated into the presentation in such a prominent manner? We know of presentations in which the act of reflecting the conditions of reception is assigned to beholders within the picture. They may serve as mere props, indicate the scale, or be role models of meta reflection of, for example, the conditions of the reception. One of the most evident examples, illustrating the long-standing tra‑ dition of this pictorial mode in art history is Hendrick Goltzius’s copperplate engraving of the Farnese Hercules (fig. 7). The two companions are looking at the sculpture’s side, which is turned away from us while we are seeing the hero’s reward, the apples of the Hesperides. By integrating beholders into the picture, Goltzius’s engraving gives a new answer to the debate about the supremacy of painting or sculpture. For it reveals that the “total view” (Allansichtigkeit) is a sheer fiction. Thus the two companions stand for a twofold representation of the beholder, on the one side the “implicit beholder” as a category of the aesthetics of reception,28 and on the other side the beholders as

28 Cf. Wolfgang Kemp, Der Anteil des Betrachters. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Maeander, 1983, p. 32: “The implicit beholder embodies the totality of pre‑ requisites which a work of art offers its potential beholders as conditions of reception. By conse‑

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Fig. 7: Hendrick Goltzius, Farnese Hercules, c. 1617. Engraving. Kupfer­ stichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.-Nr. 683-11.

they are represented. Describing this phenomenon in a discussion of Las Meninas by Velazquez, Svetlana Alpers coins the term of “land surveyor” for the beholder as rep‑ resented within the image, standing within “the very world he maps”.29 While Goltzius’s engraving generally depicts the conditions of art reception, the iconography of the art gallery also depicts the historical fascination of this spe‑ cific place of reception. Through the integration of beholders, architectural spaces turn into social spaces. Early representations of gallery spaces show beholders who wander around savouring and debating, boasting their chic wardrobe, and struggling to get a glance at works of art – the actual protagonists. Thus the beholder within the pictorial space has different roles. Above all, she performs different ways of seeing in the museum space. On the other hand, this provides a marvelous opportunity to stage the gallery space as its founders had originally intended: as a space of representation.

quence the implicit beholder is not rooted within an empirical substrate but grounded within the work’s structure itself. If it is assumed that works of art only obtain reality in the process of being beheld this implies there be qualities for becoming up-to-date embedded within the work’s actual state. These qualities then permit to situate the work’s significance within the mind of its receivers.” In German: “Der implizierte Betrachter verkörpert die Gesamtheit der Vororientierungen, die ein Werk seinen möglichen Betrachtern als Rezeptionsbedingungen anbietet. Folglich ist der implizite Betrach‑ ter nicht in einem empirischen Substrat verankert, sondern in der Struktur der Werke selbst fundiert. Wenn wir davon ausgehen, daß Werke erst im Gesehenwerden ihre Realität gewinnen, so heißt dies, daß dem Verfaßtsein der Werke Aktualisierungsbedingungen eingezeichnet sein müssen, die es er‑ lauben, den Sinn des Werkes im Rezeptionsbewusstsein des Empfängers zu situieren.” 29 Svetlana Alpers, Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas, in: Representations 1 (1983), pp. 31–42, p. 37.



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And, upon taking a closer look, this iconography always serves a double purpose: it represents not only the self-fashioning of the visitors, but also the self-fashioning of the people who founded the institution. Therefore spotting “surveyors” – in the sense of Svetlana Alpers – within such contemporary representations is far too simplistic. The museum instead intends to generate an image of itself according to the behold‑ ers’ own aesthetics. This means that the moment of art experience is defined as the point of time at which the subject is compelled to self-reflect within a museum space stylized as a place of insight. As the act of observing has already been mentioned, we should also enter the pictorial level and talk about the fact that pictures show the beholder. And voilà: the chaos of categories – unravelled only recently by Lambert Wiesing – ensues. 30 There‑ fore, stating that the pictures mentioned here show who the beholder is may be tempt‑ ing, but it is intellectual self-deception; or, as Lambert Wiesing – in words banal but true – puts it: “What pictures show depends on them being employed to what end within what context.” 31 To me, it is this concept that today’s image theory, should it wish to be more than a footnote to postmodernist theory, has to understand. Images of the beholder within museum spaces are – as we have seen – a reward‑ ing example of the intersection of different contexts and pictorial conceptions. First, the pictorial language of these representations ought to be analysed and classified to better comprehend a potential subtext of messages on part of the image produc‑ ers. Second, the constellations in which these images are to be employed have to be focused upon. And it has to be fathomed whether the chosen form of representation complies with the individual producer’s actual intentions.

Conclusion To return to Henri Focillon’s speech from September 1921, a few lines below his implicit wish that the museum should primarily serve the public, he writes: “How often did I have to hear capable people with good intentions say that the museum truly was a place of fiddling and struggling, an exclusive place of monstrous boredom? So let us not only lend them a hand with labels and signs, but by understanding their needs rightly.”32

30 Cf. Lambert Wiesing, Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. 31 Ibid., p. 182: “Was Bilder zeigen, ist von der Verwendung zu einem Zweck in einem Kontext an‑ hängig.” 32 Focillon 1921 (as in note 2), p. 134: “Wie oft musste ich tüchtige Leute, voll der besten Absichten sagen hören, das Museum sei wahrlich ein Ort des Zauderns und der Schwierigkeiten, ein exklusiver Hort ungeheurer Langweile? Helfen wir ihnen also, nicht nur durch Beschriftungen und durch Schil‑ der, sondern dadurch, dass wir ihre Bedürfnisse richtig verstehen.”

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This essay has demonstrated that, when one reflects on the needs of the beholder, a glance at representations of the museum space that include its public can be quite telling. Brian O’Doherty once called the “installation shot” the icon of the twentieth century. The beholder’s absence there is due to the same necessity that once drove artists to depict thronging crowds in representations of the museum spaces of the nineteenth century in order to legitimize an institution called “the museum.”33 Today the beholders often appear as the producers of their own image within the museum. Their role as image producers has already been critically reflected on in a variety of art works, including the work from Pistoletto’s retrospective discussed above. The Weather Project showed not only that artists critically reflects upon the role of the beholder, but also welcome their often photogenic appearance. What’s more, artists even anticipate the beholder’s ability to be photogenic to establish the work’s impact. It has also been pointed out that the beholders not only recognize themselves within the museum space as a motif, but they also stage themselves in different postures. From this behaviour it can be gathered that they wish to perceive the museum as an experiential space. This desire lives on in virtual galleries. The museums now follow a different intention when staging beholders. Being purposefully positioned and set as the representation’s focal point, the beholders do not betray their aesthetic impact. Yet, in such a mise-en-scène, the beholder seems to be somewhat Janus-faced. On the one side, the museum opts for the aesthetics of a generally understandable picto‑ rial language that addresses a wide audience, not least by choosing somewhat “com‑ monsensical” compositional devices familiar to us from fashion and architecture photography. But, on the other side, one is baffled: when museums have to justify themselves in the face of cultural political austerity, they are staging themselves as places that have just the odd occasional visitor. This rather hazardous practice under‑ estimates the influence of such images. Via such pictures the museum is subtly summoned again as a ritually regulated place of insight and introspection. And exemplary imagery instructs the beholder as to how they are to behave in front of a piece of art, what they are expected to do, and what they must not do. That the beholding of art together with others is capable of creating a community is carelessly negated. Nonetheless, museum education pro‑ grammes are attempting to open up the museum space. There are, for example, yoga classes within the museum space, and there are special guided tours for singles. House rules were raucously broken when one museum started offering tours for nudists. But such phenomena do not contribute at all to the image the museum conveys of itself. Within the official look inside the museum space those phenomena are missing. The museum seems to convey the very opposite as it depicts the beholder in a state of solitary and sacred art experience. The needs of different image producers, the visi‑

33 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986, p. 15.



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Fig. 8: Double-presence robots enable patrons to experience a museum remotely.

Fig. 9: Screenshot, Double by Double Robotics.

tors, and the museums that this paper has addressed could not be further apart. This evolved self-awareness on the part of the beholder presents both a new challenge and a fresh opportunity for museology – that of reconsidering one’s role within this novel awareness of art on the side of the beholder, and that of reconsidering the implica‑ tions and circumstances of one’s own in-house production of images. At the picto‑ rial level, depicting the beholder within the museum space will always be an issue because of the challenge and the fascination of the mise en abyme situation. For, while the beholders perceive the historical time of the pictorial space, they are simultaneously part of the present, of their present space of observation within a present-day institution and all its implications. Both levels interfere in the gaze of the visitor. By photographically reproducing the museum experience, one creates the already discussed interminable mise en abyme. Any attempt of defining this constel‑ lation is limited by the coinciding of an aesthetic experience and one’s own act of reception within a picture. To conclude, I would like to present a new type of beholder (figs. 8/9): the tablet computers in their laps, they slouch on their sofas and revel in the, let us call it, home-delivery of images. Thanks to the so-called “telepresence robots”, the digital doppelgangers of the beholders roam the museum space. Fully remote-controlled via an app, the robots pause in front of and move around exhibits, thus interacting with the works of art. Yet whether such systems can really be introduced on a massive scale

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and whether we shall in the future mainly meet ‘avatars’ inside the museum space can still be doubted. As several institutions have reported that such trials have hith‑ erto failed, the whole scenario remains science fiction.34 Here a desire harbored by museum visitors becomes visible: the desire for a space beyond everyday life and for an unmediated art experience, a place where aesthetic experience becomes a moment of social interaction. The museum is per definition such a place. Herein lies its enor‑ mous potential. In order not to waste it, the museum has to remain attractive, and must re-establish barriers that have already been scaled. Otherwise the museum will be condemned to stay a mere “image of a museum”. Just think of directors like Phil Grabsky, who offer the beholding of art on a cinematic scale.35 Here an utterly new genre emerges between a guided exhibition visit and a plain dolly shot through the institution of the museum. Thus we come to a different and much more complicated circle of the image of the art museum, a circle of beholding the permanently expand‑ ing inside and outside of the art museum.

34 Cf. e.g. the TOURBOT project, http://www.ics.forth.gr/tourbot/ (accessed 20 February 2014). Thanks to Evi Baniotopoulo und Stella Sylaiou for this reference. 35 Bill Grabsky, Leonardo Live, 2012, film.

Politics of the “Museal Complex”

Irina Koshoridze

From a Colonial Approach to National Branding: The Evolution of the Concept of the Art Museum in Georgia The Imperial Legacy (1850–1920) The museum is a social institution that invariably reflects the political changes in a country. These changes often inform different approaches to the museum itself, to artefacts, to exhibition contexts and contents, and to their interpretation. The aim of this paper is to study the history of the establishment of the first national institution in Georgia – the Georgian National Gallery, founded by the painter Dimitri Shevard‑ nadze – in order to show its role at a politically difficult time when no one was inter‑ ested in studying and advertising Georgian culture. I will try to put the establishment of this institution into a broader context, comparing it to other institutions in the country that operate similarly but pursue different objectives. The evolution of modern museums in Georgia goes back to the mid-nineteenth century when Georgia was a colony of the Russian Empire.1 At the time, efforts to create museums were closely linked to general colonial policies. A new premise emerged, however, with political changes in Georgia and Caucasia as a whole in the course of the nineteenth century.2 The first period from 1801 until the 1840’s was a time of military occupation. After the incorporation (and thus abolishment) of the kingdom of Georgia into the Russian Empire, Tiflis became the administrative centre of the Caucasian region in 1801. As a consequence the Bagrationi, the royal family of Georgia who had ruled the country since 975, were exiled. The occupation also led to numerous rebellions against Russia, which were all ruthlessly crushed. Those who took part in the revolts – mostly members of the Georgian nobility and the royal family – were sent to Siberia and other places. Furthermore, the Georgian church was abolished and mural paintings in churches throughout the country were whitewashed

1 Shalva Chkxetia, Rusuli mmartvelobis sistema saqartveloshi [The system of Russian rule in Geor‑ gia], in: Moambe (Issues of Georgian State Museum), Mecniereba, vol. XII-B (1944), pp. 1‒145; F. Kep‑ pen, Neskolko svol o kavkasckom muzee [A few words about the Caucasian Museum] St. Petersburg: Balashov i K, 1896, p. 150; Gustav Radde, Istoria razvitia kavkazskogo museia, 25 let [History of the development of the Caucasian Museum, the first 25 years], Tbilisi: tipografia A. A. Mikhelsona, 1891, pp. 100‒135; Gustav Radde, Avtobiografia, kolekcii kavkazskogo muzeia [Autobiography, Collections of Caucasian Musem], vol. VI, Tbilisi: tipografia A. A. Mikhelsona, 1912. 2 Guram Chkaidze, Saqartvelos saxelmcifo muzeumi (1852–1932) [Georgian State Museum (1852– 1932)], Tbilisi, 2003, Mecniereba, pp. 15‒35.

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to ensure Georgian compliance with Russian orthodoxy.3 During this period countless church treasures were stolen and sold to collectors in Europe and Russia. Yet Russia’s objective of annexing Georgia was never completely realised due to strong resistance, ultimately forcing Russia to change its policies towards the Georgian citizenry.4 The shift in global colonial politics from domination and annexation to a policy of association5 occurred at a much earlier time in Georgia than elsewhere in Europe and was associated with Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, who was appointed governor of Caucasia in 1844. The second period began with an administrative change: a civil one, which had a direct impact on the protection of the local population, replaced the mil‑ itary administration.6 The headquarters of numerous institutions were established in Tiflis, which came to serve as a very convenient southern hub for Russia. (The Cauca‑ sian wars against Imam Shamil, as well as the Russian-Iranian and Russian-Turkish wars in the nineteenth century were all managed from Tiflis.) The importance of this city is also underscored by the names of the generals and viceroys who governed the region in the following years, including General A. Yermolov, high-ranking diplomats such as M. Vorontsov, and members of the House of Romanov, such as Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich and Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich. During this period the main objective of the Russian Empire was to colonise the Georgians culturally and morally. To accomplish this, new educational institutions such as museums, theatres, and commissions as well as new newspapers and journals were established. Addi‑ tionally, many Georgians were sent to study at Russian universities, so as to be pre‑ pared to serve in the imperial military and administration upon their return.7 It was in this political context that the Caucasian branch of the Russian Royal Geo‑ graphic Society established the first museum in Tbilisi in 1852 (fig. 1).8 This museum was later expanded and renamed the Caucasian Museum. Soon afterwards the first permanent displays were opened for the public.9 The museum was not devoted specifically to Georgian history, art, or ethnology but rather to the entire Caucasian region with its multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic composition under the wise and peaceful rule of the Russian Empire. The charter of the Caucasian Museum,

3 Niko Berdzenishvili, Saqartvelo XIX s is I meotxedshi [Georgia in the first quarter of the 19th cen‑ tury], in: Saqartvelos istoriis sakitxebi [Materials for the History of Georgia] vol. II, Tibilisi: Mecnierba, 1965; Merab Vachnadze, Vakhtang Guruli, Sakartvelos istoria. XIX‑XX saukuneebi [History of Georgia, 19th–20th Centuries], Tbilisi: Artanuji, 2003, pp. 135‒204. 4 Chkaidze 2003 (as in note 2), pp. 35‒40. 5 Nadia Erzini, Cultural Administration in French North Africa and the Growth of Islamic Art His‑ tory, in: Stephen Vernoit (ed.), Discovering Islamic Art. Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950, London: I.B. Taurus Press, 2000, p. 71. 6 Berdzenishvili 1965 (as in note 3), pp. 130‒137. 7 Chkxetia 1944 (as in note 1), p. 125. 8 Radde 1891 (as in note 1), pp. 136‒140; Radde 1912 (as in note 1), pp. 25‒45. 9 Keppen 1896 (as in note 1), p. 135; Chkaidze 2003 (as in note 2), p. 134.



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Fig. 1: The first museum building. From the Ermakov photo archives of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Georgian National Museum.

in fact, proscribed the hiring of Georgians, and only very few exceptions were made to this rule.10 Furthermore, the Caucasian Museum provided the framework for the establishment of another museum, the Temple of Glory, dedicated to the victories of the Russian Empire in the Caucasian region with a particular emphasis on the East. It presented artefacts from the Russian-Caucasian, Russian-Turkish and Russian-Ira‑ nian wars (figs. 2, 3).11 Eventually, the Russians started to explore the Caucasian region from different perspectives, recognising its potential resources and the convenient locations for mil‑ itary bases it provided. At the same time the region was becoming an attractive tourist destination. In 1899 the Kovkassky Kustarni Komity, or Caucasian Crafts Commity, was created with the aim of promoting the study and development of the crafts in Cauca‑ sia. (It was later superseded by newly established silk and crafts museums in Tbilisi.) It stimulated a major flow of ancient and contemporary Caucasian and non-Cauca‑ sian rugs to the international markets of Europe and the USA.12 But as mentioned

10 Chkaidze 2003 (as in note 2), pp. 115‒120. 11 Sostavitel B. Esadze (ed.), Boevie Podvigi Kavkazskix Voisk, albom, alibom kavkazskoi galerei voenno-istoricheskogo muzeia [Military victories of Caucasian armies. Album of Caucasian historic military gallery], Tbilisi: Metekhi fortress press, 1899. 12 Irina Koshoridze (ed.), Caucasian Rugs. Georgian Museums and Private Collections. 3rd International Textile Symposium, 11–14 September 2001, Universali, Tbilisi: Universali, 2001, pp. 45‒50; Irina

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Fig. 2: Temple of Glory. From the Ermakov photo archives of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Georgian National Museum.

Fig. 3: Interior of the Temple of Glory during Russian Imperial times. From the Ermakov photo archives of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Georgian National Museum.



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earlier, all these institutions served the interests of the Russian Empire. Only very few Georgians were involved and no attention was paid to Georgian art and history. In reaction to this, Georgians established organisations in the 1870’s with the aim of collecting and studying Georgian artefacts and historical documents and, beyond this, of working to establish museums devoted, wherever possible, to the history and art of Georgia.13 These included two major organisations: the Association for the Pro‑ motion of Literacy14 and the Georgian Historical and Ethnological Society.15 Unfortunately, none of the initiatives succeeded in establishing museums under Russian rule, but they did leave amazing collections that would later form the core of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the History Museum.16

Creation of the National Gallery (1918–1921) The short-lived independence of the Georgian Republic (1918–1921) was very import‑ ant for the history of Georgia. Numerous national institutions such as theatres, the university, and newspapers were established.17 Existing national organisations (the Association for the Promotion of Literacy and the Historical and Ethnological Society) helped organise expeditions to study and research old monuments, such as churches, relief sculptures, and mural paintings, in various regions of Georgia and Turkey. Young painters, architects, and scholars participated in those expeditions, which led to exhibitions, catalogues, and various publications that helped create a better under‑ standing of Georgian national culture.18 This period also marked the turning point for the project of a new national museum, the Georgian National Gallery. Established in 1920, it was the first institu‑

Koshoridze, Dekoratiul-gamokenebiti xelovneba-dargebi, stilebi, epoqebi [Decorative applied art. Movements, styles, époques], Tbilisi: Universali, 2013, p. 36 and pp. 234–240. 13 Levan Goderidze, Kulturul saganmanatleblo modzraoba. me- 19 saukunis meorenaxevarsa da me- 20 saukunis dasackisshi [Enlightenment movement from the mid 19th to the early 20th century], Tbilisi: Mecniereba, 2005. 14 Vladimer Gagua, Qartvelta shoris cera-kitxvis gamavrcelebeli sazogadoeba [The association for the Promotion of Literacy among Georgians], Tbilisi: Mecniereba, 1979; Besarion Tabidze, Aleqsandre Roinashvili, Tbilisi: teatraluri sazogadoebis stamba, 1962; Trifon Xundadze, Qartvelta shoris cera-kitxvis gamavrcelebeli sazogadoeba [The Association for the promotion of literacy among Georgians], Tbilisi: Sabchota Xelovneba, 1960. 15 Roin Metreveli, Saqartvelos saistorio da saetnografio sazogadoeba [Georgian Historical and Ethno‑ logical Society], Tbilisi: Xelovneba, 1982. 16 Chkaidze 2003 (as in note 2), pp. 226‒230. 17 Vakhtang Beridze, Kultura da Xelovneba damoukidebel saqartveloshi (1918‒1921) [Culture and art in the independent Georgia (1918–1921)], Tblisi: Mecniereba, 1992, pp. 26‒40. 18 Vakhtang Beridze, Mogonebebi [Memories], Tbilisi: Sabchota Saqartvelo, 1987, pp. 150–160; Ibid., pp. 100‒120.

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Fig. 4: Self-portrait of Dimitri Shevardnadze. Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts, Georgian National Museum.

tion to focus on the visual arts. The idea for a national gallery is closely connected with the figure of Dimitri Shevardnadze (fig. 4). Dimitri Shevardnadze was born in the small village of Bakhvi in Western Georgia in 1885. He studied at the art academy in St. Petersburg and continued his training as a painter at the Munich art academy until 1914.19 After returning to Georgia he established the Society of Georgian Artists.20 In his new capacity he planned and personally participated in scientific excursions to research authentic Georgian monuments in Georgia and Turkey. He would also sub‑ sequently organise exhibitions about those field trips,21 including an exhibition on modern Georgian artists in the spring and fall of 1919. The success of these shows allowed for a first group of Georgian painters to be sent abroad to study.

19 Irine Abesadze, Ketevan Bagratishvili, Dimitri Shevardnadze, Tbilisi: Sakartvelo, 1998, pp. 14‒45; Giorgi Eristavi, Dimitri Shevardnadzis gaxseneba [The memory of Dimitri Shevardnadze], in: Sabchota Xelovneba 11 (1985), pp. 106‒112; Gia Jokhtaberidze (ed.), Dimitri Shevardnadze (1885–1937), Tbilisi: Neostudia, 2001, pp. 6‒12. 20 Giorgi Megrelidze, Qartvel xelovanta sazogadoeba (1918–1919 clebi) [The Society of Georgian Art‑ ists 1918–1919], in: Xelovneba 1 (1991), pp. 23‒27; Ivane Javaxisvili, Qartvel xelovanta sazogadoebis gamgeobas [To the board of Georgian Artists’ Society], in: Dzeglis megobari 7 (1966), pp. 43‒50. 21 Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19), pp. 156‒157.



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In addition to these activities, Shevardnadze was involved in designing the coat of arms for the newly established Tbilisi State University (which still exists today), and he created the first designs for a national currency as well as for postal stamps with images of Saint Nino. Upon his return from a trip to Germany, his major project became the establishment of the Georgian National Museum where Georgian arte‑ facts would be collected, preserved, and exhibited alongside artwork from other countries. The government of the Independent Republic of Georgia supported his ideas, and by a decree issued on 30 March 1920, the Georgian National Gallery was founded.22 The aim of this gallery was to collect old and modern paintings and sculptures with a focus on Georgia and its neighbouring countries. The gallery also included a library that collected books, archive materials, drawings, and gravures along with artistic journals and illustrations of famous artists. The gallery was placed under the control of the Ministry of Education and managed by a director who was appointed by the Minister of Education. In addition to managing the gallery, the director’s tasks included creating job descriptions and an exemplary charter for the museum in coop‑ eration with similar institutions and individuals. He had to present every new staff member to the Ministry of Education for approval. Furthermore, a board composed of artists and scholars was to assist in the management of the Georgian National Gallery, although this body had only a consulting function. The gallery had a logo and letterhead featuring the words “Georgian National Gal‑ lery.”23 In a document issued by the board, the mission of the gallery was described as follows: “Collecting artefacts; collecting items/artworks for the library; classifying and cataloguing of the collections, generating inventories; establishing the conserva‑ tion laboratory, in which paintings are to be restored and studied; promoting scholar‑ ship through the sponsoring of expeditions and the organisation of exhibitions (espe‑ cially after field trips), etc.; publishing the catalogues of the gallery.”24 Dimitri Shevardnadze was authorised by the government to do research in various institutions and collect artworks (i. e., paintings, drawings, and sculpture) for the gallery. All materials were eventually assembled in the gallery, and the collec‑ tions were grouped as follows: Georgian portraits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from collections of the Church Museum and the Historical and Ethnolog‑ ical Society; Persian miniatures and paintings from the Georgian History Museum (formerly the Caucasian Museum); and paintings acquired after the exhibition Old Painting held in 1919, which was organised by the Society of Georgian Artists. This col‑

22 Ibid., p. 156; Jokhtaberidze (as in note 19), pp. 15‒16. 23 Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19), p. 140–160. 24 Archive of Georgian State Museum, 1910, 48.38; Saarqivo masalebi, Shalva Amirana Svilis saxelobis xelovnebis muzeumis memorialuri fondi [Materials from the archives of Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts].

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Fig. 5: View from the library and European exhibition halls to the Oriental art exhibition. Georgian National Gallery. Prints from old negatives. From the photo archives of the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts, Georgian National Museum.

lection included Dutch, French, German, and Italian paintings; books, western Euro‑ pean furniture, decorative and applied art objects acquired by the National Education Commissariat; artefacts acquired after the first exhibition held at the gallery in 1920, which showed artefacts from museums, societies, and private collections, including the collection of the former Romanov Palace in Likani. The Temple of Glory, which had been housed in a building that previously belonged to the Caucasian Museum, now became home to the Georgian National Gallery. Its first permanent displays opened there. In addition to accounts of schol‑ ars and visitors, photo archives from the time fortunately allow us to reconstruct the exhibition spaces in the building.25 The long, narrow gallery building was divided

25 Nacionalnaia galerea gruzii [Georgian National Gallery], in: Zaria Vostoka VII (1925), p. 920; Saarkivo Masalebi (as in note 24), pp. 12‒17.



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Fig. 6: Exhibition hall of Oriental painting. Georgian National Gallery. Prints from old negatives. From the photo archives of the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts, Georgian National Museum.

into seven sections where the first permanent display was opened in 1920. The central section was reserved for the library. European and Russian paintings were displayed in the gallery’s left wing (fig. 5), while the Georgian paintings from the Historical and Ethnological Society and the collection of Persian (Qajar) easel paintings from the Georgian History Museum were presented in the right wing (fig. 6). Among the Western and Russian paintings were works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, the schools of Rembrandt van Rijn and Titian, Salomon van Ruysdael, Fyodor Rokotov, and Dmitry Levitzky. There were also important paintings from private col‑ lections, and numerous letters by Shevardnadze document his quest to obtain funds to acquire some of these works for the collections of the gallery. Not all requests were successful, but in general Dimitri Shevardnadze found ways to expand the museum collections. The Ministry of Education eventually gave him 4.2 million manat,26 and the gallery acquired twenty-seven European paintings from the sixteenth and eigh‑ teenth centuries, among them a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder (acquired in

26 In modern currency this is equal to ca 400 000 Euros.

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Fig. 7: View of the displays at the Caucasian Museum. From the Ermakov photo archives of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Georgian National Museum.

November 1920 for five hundred thousand manat)27 and a Rembrandt (three hundred thousand manat).28 During this time both the concept of the gallery and its approach to displaying artefacts were completely revised  – mainly by Dimitri Shevardnadze himself, who was responsible for the design and arrangement of displays. The major objective of his presentation was to show Georgian art in a broader context, i. e., within the frame‑ work of unfolding political and cultural influences, and at the same time to highlight its specific artistic language, which had been developed over the centuries. When we compare the exhibition spaces of the Caucasian Museum and the National Gallery exhibitions, we can see that the Caucasian Museum tried to display all media together, hence creating a macro-cultural space and filling the museum’s exhibition spaces with a wide variety of objects, including reconstructed interiors (figs. 7, 8). Georgian cultural and artistic traditions, however, were ignored on account

27 In modern currency, this is equal to ca. 50,000 Euros. 28 In modern currency, this is equal to ca. 30,000 Euros.



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Fig. 8: View of the displays at the Caucasian Museum. From the photo archives of the Georgian National Museum, Ermakov funds.

of the policies of the Russian Empire.29 Everything was arranged in a chronological and geographic order, so that paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts were dis‑ played side by side in the same space with the intention of providing a complete picture of the visual arts. The paintings of the Georgian, Persian, and Russian schools were mounted with wall space between them, so that visitors could focus on the details of each artwork. The same applied to sculpture and decorative and applied art. The gallery’s walls were painted in a monochrome, light colour that facilitated undistracted viewing of the paintings (fig. 9). The walls inside the Caucasian Museum were richly decorated with oriental motifs (fig. 10).

29 Archive of the Georgian State Museum, 1870 16/5; Archive of the Georgian State Museum, 1878 22 III.

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Fig. 9: European art in the Georgian National Gallery. Prints from old negatives. From the photo archives of the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts, Georgian National Museum.

Fig. 10: View of the displays at the Caucasian Museum in the Oriental style. From the Ermakov photo archives of the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, Georgian National Museum.



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Under the Bolsheviks (1921–1937) The first permanent exhibition was a major success and drew large numbers of visi‑ tors.30 However, the situation radically changed after 1821, when the Bolsheviks occu‑ pied Georgia. As a result of this, the government of the Georgian Independent Republic was forced into exile in France. Despite these developments Shevardnadze struggled to maintain his position as director of the museum and continued his activities in different directions. His reports from 1926‒1927, which have come down to us, show that in those first years of new rule the gallery was open every day except Monday from 9 a. m. until 2:30 p. m. The entrance fee was low –10 kopeek31 per person – and admission was free for students, workers, and soldiers of the Soviet army. But revenue was very low as well, since less than half of the visitors paid admission (only 6,000 out of a total of 21,000 visitors). At times the museum thus lacked the funds to pursue its mission of expanding the collections and library, publishing catalogues, installing special equipment for the restoration of paintings, equipping the photography work‑ shop and conservation laboratory, and creating new display venues for temporary exhibitions.32 During the Soviet era the gallery operated according to Soviet standards and planned its budgets and activities based on a five-year plan. The accounts from this period indicate that activities were focused primarily on expanding the collections, cataloguing, establishing the conservation laboratory, and promoting art historical scholarship (the museum spearheaded the founding of the Institute of Art History). Moreover, the gallery organised field trips to study historical monuments, partic‑ ularly churches and mural paintings. In 1925 alone the gallery acquired 355 paint‑ ings-including easel and miniature paintings and drawings. Western European, Russian, Oriental, and Georgian artworks were equally important to Shevardnadze. The gallery also acquired some highlights of Far Eastern art in those years, one of the most amazing works being a silk painting from the Ming Dynasty titled Waterfall in the Mountains. It was purchased between 1920 and 1925 from a famous Chinese bota‑ nist who started tea plantations in Georgia. Shevardnadze’s impact on the collection of artworks by the native Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani has been enormous. He himself owned eleven paintings by Pirosmani, who by that time was already was dead, but quite popular and well known among professionals and connoisseurs of art. Dimitri Shevardnadze’s donation of the Pirosmani paintings to the gallery greatly enhanced that painter’s popularity. Also, Shevardnadze had permission to examine artworks in other institutions and,

30 Metexis jurnmulebi- socialisturi kulturis kera, [Metekhi Journals as the centre of Socialist culture], in: Saliteraturo gazeti (1933), p. 24. 31 In modern currency, this is far less than 1 Euro. 32 Saliteraturo gazeti 1933 (as in note 30), pp. 145–167; Saarqivo masalebi (as in note 24), p. 20 and p. 23.

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if deemed valuable, to transfer them to the gallery. As part of that project the Palace of the Artists (Soviet Union of Writers) and the Historical Archives were revisited, and some Islamic miniatures as well as Georgian and Russian paintings were transferred to the gallery.33 It goes without saying that Shevardnadze had the obligation to pay tribute to the Soviet regime and from time to time to receive and acquire some paintings executed in a Socialist Realist style. Similarly, he was obliged to exhibit paintings of this kind in the gallery.34 The Association of Revolutionary Painters (CAMPA) was among the organisations whose paintings were for a brief period bought and displayed in the exhibition halls of the gallery. Shevardnadze was interested in contemporary Georgian painters as well. Works of modern artists such as Lado Gudiashvili, Shalva Kikodze, Elene Akhvlediani, and the aforementioned Pirsomani were from the outset part of the gallery’s collection. The modes of acquisition could differ: Shevardnadze sometimes bought them directly from their personal exhibitions (as in case of Kikodze), and sometimes he acquired them from temporary annual exhibitions organised by the gallery. Shevardnadze also frequently insisted that modern Georgian artists needed more space – if possible in another building that could be under the auspices of the gallery: “In my opinion the gallery of modern art should exist separately. Our museum has to be like the Hermit‑ age, the Louvre and other museums of old art.”35 The gallery organised not just local but also international temporary exhibitions. To mark the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union, an interesting exhibition was organised that showcased modern Geor‑ gian art created during the previous decade. One of the most important international projects was an exhibition of Georgian art in Germany (Leipzig, Cologne, Nuremberg, Munich). Giorgi Chubinashvili and Dimitri Shevardnadze were active members of the special committee created for this purpose. On the German side, the show was organised by the Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Studium Osteuropas (the German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe). The exhibition included architectural drawings, copies of frescoes, silver and gold icons, manuscripts, and embroideries. A small catalogue (forty-eight pages with sixteen illustrations) titled Georgische Kunst was published in 1930.36 Lectures by Georgian

33 Nacionalnaia kartinnaia galerea SSRG (National Gallery of GSSR), in: Zaria Vostoka X (1924), p. 692; Muzeumitvis Metekhis gadacema 1933; Metexis sarekonstruqcio samushaoebis shesaxeb [The reconstructive works in Metekhi], in Tiflisskii rabochii (1934), pp. 91‒112. 34 Metexis jurnmulebi- socialisturi kulturis kera (Metekhi Journals as the centre of Socialist culture), in: Saliteraturo gazeti, (1933), p. 24. 35 Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19), p. 200. 36 Georg Tschubinashvili, Die georgische Kunst und die Probleme ihrer Entwicklung in: Ausstellung der Deutschen Gesellschaft zum Osteuropas und des Volksbildungskommissariats der S. S. R. ​Georgien in Berlin, Köln, Nürnberg, München, Wien. Juli/Oktober 1930, Berlin and Königsberg: Ost-Europa-Verlag, pp.  759‒769.



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scholars accompanied the openings of the exhibition in Berlin, Leipzig, and Cologne. After Germany the exhibition travelled across Russia. There was strong demand for another Georgian international exhibition of the works of the Georgian primitivist painter Niko Pirosmani, but unfortunately this project was not realised. Dimitri She‑ vardnadze did curate several travelling exhibitions of Pirosmani in the Soviet Union. In the final decade of his life – the 1930’s – Dimitri Shevardnadze tried to expand the collections by transferring all visual art objects to the gallery and reorganising the gallery as a fine arts museum, which would make the building multifunctional and create shared exhibition spaces for all kinds of visual and sculptural art forms. His superior in Soviet Georgia, Vukol Beridze, supported his ideas and so he proposed a reform of all cultural institutions, which were to be divided according to the types of collections: the Museum of Natural History (including zoological, botanical, and natural history collections); the Historical and Ethnological Museum; the Fine Arts Museum (to include old and new art); the National Public Library; and the Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts.37 In dozens of letters addressed to various officials, Shevardnadze underlined the importance of the Fine Arts Museum as an educational institution. At that time he already recognised what a significant role the museum could play in the education of modern society. The gallery’s space was indeed very limited, and in 1932 the central committee finally made available the old Metekhi Fortress, which had served as a prison under the Russian Empire and was abandoned in the 1930’s. Shevardnadze was pleased with the new space for the Fine Arts Museum and planned to rebuild the museum following the example of the Louvre.38 In August 1932 the government authorised the establishment of the new museum by decree. The gallery was thus reorganised in the new building, and all artefacts from antiquity until the nineteenth century were placed together.39 One year after its formation, the institution was renamed the Central Museum of Fine Arts Metekhi, and at the same time an institute for visual arts research was founded. In a major ceremony the keys of the former prison were handed over to the director of the new museum, Dimitri Shevardnadze.40 Unfortunately, we have no visual materials documenting the interior and the display of artefacts at the Metekhi Museum, but we do have various postcards, albums printed by the museum (fig. 11), and work plans that, in fact, look quite progressive for the time, as they cover most of the activities that are typical for modern museums,

37 Beridze 1987 (as in note 18), p. 134. 38 Muzeumistvis Metexis gadacemis shesaxeb [About the transfer of Metekhi to Museum], in: Tiflisskii rabochii (1933), p. 101. 39 Muzeumitvis Metekhis gadacema 1933 (as in note 33); Metexis sarekonstruqcio samushaoebis she‑ saxeb (The reconstructive works in Metekhi), in Tiflisskii rabochii (1934), pp. 91‒112. 40 Saliteraturo gazeti 1933 (as in note 30).

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 Irina Koshoridze

Fig. 11: Postcard printed by the Museum Metekhi.

including, for instance, the study of the museum’s audience. These work plans also detail initiatives to: collect, preserve, and study the visual art collections; collect books and other publications on fine art; create concepts for temporary exhibitions; permanently exhibit medieval Georgian art; and publish materials on the works in the collections of the Metekhi Museum. Particularly interesting are Shevardnadze’s ideas about the study of Georgian Art in the framework of broader intercultural relations with neighbouring civilisations.41 The subjects for future study suggested by scholars seem very courageous and pro‑ gressive for the period of Soviet rule: Georgian and Byzantine art; the importance of classical art in medieval Georgian society; concepts of exhibitions at the Metekhi Museum and their role in the education of modern Soviet society; restoration and conservation methods; methods for installing fresco and mosaic paintings; and the role of Socialist Realism in modern Georgian society (this was the only topic reflecting the political situation in the country). According to Shevardnadze’s plans, the museum was to have its own publishing house for advertising its collections. From 1933 until 1937 the museum prepared a tri-lingual catalogue of the Metekhi Museum featuring the works of Pirosmani, old

41 Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19), pp. 145‒160; Saarqivo masalebi (as in note 24), p. 37, 40.



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mosaics (Tsromi), Iranian paintings and miniatures, as well as Georgian miniatures. Unfortunately, only a small part of those materials was published due to the changing political climate in the country. During the Great Purge from 1936 to 1937, thousands if not tens of thousands of members of the Georgian professional classes were killed and millions exiled to Siberia. Dimitri Shevardnadze was among those executed. Preserved in the museum’s archives are important documents linked to this, including one issued in 1953 that rehabilitated Shevardnadze. (All family members of those killed would eventually receive documents of rehabilitation, which stated that they were innocent of being enemies of the state.) In a second significant document, Ketevan Magalashvili, a close friend of Dimitri Shevardnadze and a professional painter, tells the story that led to his execution. I will summarize the story here: The Metekhi prison mentioned earlier was initially unsuited for use as a museum because of its construction, and so a major renovation and reconstruction of the existing buildings was embarked on. When She‑ vardnadze finished the reconstruction of one of the buildings, a construction team sent by Lavrentiy Beria, the General Secretary of the Communist Party in Georgia and leader of the Republic, suddenly showed up. They had orders to destroy the twelfth-century Metekhi Church and to construct in its place a monument to Shota Rustaveli, whose 750th anniversary the Soviet regime wanted to celebrate. Shevardnadze and his sup‑ porters – art historian George Chubinashvili, writer Michal Javakhishvili, and theatre director Sandro Akmeteli – were shocked. They went to Beria to ask to save and pre‑ serve the church. Beria was furious. He sent the three men back and said to Shevard‑ nadze: “Why did you bring them with you? To show the protest of society? You will destroy the church with your own hands, and I’ll give you the money for the new build‑ ing.”42 Shevardnadze, of course, refused. In fact, he went to Moscow and brought back 5 million manat43 for a new museum building. Within just a short time Shevardnadze was first dismissed from his position, then exiled, and eventually killed. Only after more than half a century of independence (in the late 1990’s) did Geor‑ gian society and scholars such as V. Beridze, I. Abesadze, and K. Bagratishvili start talking about Dimitri Shevardnadze again.44 A first retrospective exhibition was organ‑ ised by the Museums of Fine Arts (2001) and the Georgian National Museum (2004). Moreover, a first catalogue of his works was printed in colour and included unique photographic and archival material highlighting his role as a painter and  –  most important  – as the preeminent promoter of Georgian culture of his time.45 Dimitri

42 Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19), p. 245; Nana Kanchaveli, Mxatvari da sazogado mogvace [The painter and the eminent man], in Sabchota Xelovneba 9 (1985), pp. 88‒96. 43 In modern currency, this is equal to ca. 96,000,000 Euros. 44 See Beridze 1992 (as in note 17); Beridze 1987 (as in note 18); Abesadze and Bagratishvili 1998 (as in note 19). 45 Jokhtaberidze 2001 (as in note 19), pp. 2–11.

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 Irina Koshoridze

Shevardnadze was one of the first Georgians in modern times who clearly understood the connection between past and present and the importance of fine arts museums as cultural and social institutions for the future development of the nation. It is his immense merit not only to have established the first institution of this kind in Georgia but also to have tried to save the museum in precarious times, which ultimately led to his sacrifice for this institution.

Qanita Lilla

Classical Impressions, Modernist Aspirations: Shaping a Field of Contention at the South African National Gallery (1895–1947) Few institutions of South African visual culture demonstrate shifting patterns of officially sanctioned artistic bias more articulately than the South African National Gallery (fig. 1). Its very name provokes impressions of the nation bound up with the ideological construction of art. However, along with the construction of meaning

Fig. 1: The South African National Gallery, 2014, Cape Town, South Africa.

came the processes by which meaning was made. But the construction of coherent meaning was nowhere near as stable, constant, and authoritative as the National Gallery would have its audiences believe. Today, the museum gives the impression of an institution with a long and con‑ tinuous history of sober practices of collection, display, and scholarship.1 Behind its façade, and throughout its history, however, various contingent factors intersected to

1 Scholars such as Andrew Crampton have investigated the more recent history of the museum, with a particular reference to the idea of nation building in a democratic context. This paper, however, investigates an earlier history and pays particular attention to the 1940’s at the museum. Andrew

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 Qanita Lilla

construct this image. The early historical context positioned the museum as a British colonial institution, a replica of similar institutions in the motherland. On one hand, academic elites found that this context frustrated attempts to replicate the National Gallery, London in a colonial outpost. But, on the other, the location also worked to uphold the authority of British-trained academics. This dynamic environment deter‑ mined a continual negotiation of settler identities, where British conservative pre-em‑ inence was increasingly undermined by a rising Afrikaner nationalism. These factors demonstrate how unpredictable and how reliant on place and time the institution was. The South African National Gallery is unique in that it is an art museum with a history of two separate colonial interventions. From 1910 to 1947 it was a British colo‑ nial institution, but from 1948 to 1994 it became part of a larger Afrikaner Nationalist cultural project. By the early seventeenth century, the Cape of Good Hope had attracted attention from the English and the Dutch, both of whom had formed trading companies to chal‑ lenge Portuguese domination of the lucrative trade route with Asia.2 In 1795 Britain laid claim to the Cape as they were determined to prevent this strategic colony from falling to revolutionary France. In 1814 the Cape was established as a crown colony administered by a civilian governor based in Cape Town. From the 1830’s onward, Cape Town became the capital of an expanding British colony, and by the 1840’s Cape Town was a thriving British colonial city. By the 1850’s libraries and scientific bodies emerged as the centres of high culture.3 The South African Public Library, for example, acquired a new building in 1860 and shared this building with the South African Museum. While art, literature, and science were means of displaying British hegemony, Cape Town itself was by no means a racially homogenous city. Besides the British, indigenous Khoi, ex‑slaves, ‘free blacks’, Dutch, German, Scottish, Irish, Indian, Chinese, and Malay were all groups that made up the population of the town.4 The incorporation of the Cape into the empire of an industrializing Britain led to a more mobile but still impoverished labour force. Outrage at the subversion of the social order as well as economic impoverishment led to the migration out of the colony of about fifteen thousand eastern Cape pastoralists of Dutch heritage in the 1830s. This event provided symbolic images crucial to the ethos of Afrikaner nationalism.5

Crampton, The Art of Nation Building: (Re)presenting Political Transition at the South African Na‑ tional Gallery, in: Cultural Geographies 10 (2003), pp. 218–242. 2 Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town. The Making of a City, Cape Town: David Philip, 1998, p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 155. 4 Ibid., p. 86. 5 Afrikaner nationalism has a long and complex history. As a political ideology, it created its own mythology, symbolism, and history that emphasized the experience of the volk. According to this tri‑ umphalist history, which unified the experiences of Afrikaners, it originated from the aforementioned act of trekking away from British domination, surviving hostile attacks from Africans in the interior,



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After the Afrikaner nationalists came into power in 1948, government institutions, such as the South African National Gallery, became part of a larger, Afrikaner nation‑ alist project. The 1940’s were therefore a period of great significance in the history of the South African National Gallery. This formative time profoundly shaped the ideo‑ logical construction of the museum as well as exposing divisions amongst its interest groups. Not only did this period coincide with a critical political change culminating in the dawning of apartheid, but it was also defined by a vast and controversial sale of art from the permanent collection. It was a time when the imperial legacy of the museum was questioned, when audiences started debating the views of the director, and when organisational structures were formally scrutinised. As a colonial venture, with an imported form and a function that encouraged distinction and differentiation, the political and social contexts impacted on the insti‑ tution in profound ways. Yet the museum related to its environment in a far more complex way than by simply responding to a new political dispensation. It also responded to professional communities, to its audiences, to collectors, and to funders. This paper will explore the inventive construction of the South African National Gallery from its origins to the early years of its establishment. It looks at a large gift of plaster casts that positioned the museum as part of an imperial project and exam‑ ines how this fed into a larger part of the “aesthetics of Union.”6 The Second World War caused a frisson at the museum, both through the provocative rhetoric used by stakeholders and by the sale of art works from the permanent collection. The fact that a collection of British sporting paintings were used by the museum to smooth over public discontent did not help the image it sought to promote as an art museum for the nation. The conflict of the old, manifested in the aesthetics of Union, and the new, manifested in an increasing awareness of modernism, shows that the construc‑ tion of a national identity through the museum was a fraught endeavour. This tension originated from how different interest groups perceived the museum, and how they considered what its function should be and the kind of art it should contain.

defending themselves against the British in the 1870’s, suffering in the British concentration camps, rebelling against South African support for the British cause in the First World War, triumphing in the 1920’s when Afrikaans was made an official language alongside English, and finally winning the election of 1948. The ultimate achievement was breaking with the Commonwealth and establishing a republic in 1961. There was much diversity in the experiences of Afrikaners of different regions and classes, and the notion of Afrikaner nationalism had to be consciously forged. Culture was used, in various forms, in a conscious attempt to cultivate an Afrikaner identity. The Afrikaans language, for example, was developed as distinct from Dutch to stress the common heritage of all Afrikaners. In 1929 the Federasie van Afrikanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Associations) was established by a secret society, the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), who worked toward disseminating a separate Afrikaner identity. Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa, Ox‑ ford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 87. 6 Peter Merrington, Pageantry and primitivism. Dorothea Fairbridge and the ‘aesthetics of Union’, in: Journal of Southern African Studies 21 (December 1995), pp. 643–657.

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Origins and Background of a Colonial Art Museum: 1895 The seeds of the South African National Gallery were sown with the formation of the South African Fine Arts Association in 1871.7 Abraham de Smit, a leading member of the association, Surveyor General of the Cape (1872–1889), and an amateur artist, mooted the idea of a gallery in an essay “An Art Gallery for South Africa” in the same year.8 In his article, De Smit sketched out the benefits of an aesthetic education.9 The association’s main aim was to promote fine art, as well as to “encourage and foster colonial art” in the Cape Colony, and many of its members were wealthy industrialists in the city.10 The group’s chief activity was to collect funds, and it aimed to eventually establish a national collection of art in a permanent art gallery. The association’s aims were also educational: in its early years it accumulated material for students including copies of paintings, books, a few casts, and a small collection of original paintings.11 The first efforts to form a national collection were galvanised by the bequest of Thomas Butterworth Bayley in 1871.12 This bequest was made up of forty-five paintings, mostly by European artists.13 After the Bayley bequest, other notable bequests followed, which helped to establish a national collection.14 By 1895, the South African Gallery was formally established with the passing of the South African Gallery Act (No. 20 of 1895).15

7 John Fairbairn, The South African Art Gallery, in: The State (April 1910), p. 550. 8 Abraham de Smit, An Art Gallery for South Africa, in: Cape Monthly Magazine (April 1871). 9 Anna Tietze, Classical Casts and Colonial Galleries. The Life and Afterlife of the 1908 Beit Gift to the National Gallery of Cape Town, in: South African Historical Journal 39 (November 1998), pp. 70–90. 10 The New Art Gallery, Cape Monthly Magazine X (1900), p. 366. 11 Ibid. 12 Bayley “bequeathed to the trustees the amount of £500, and the greater part of his excellent col‑ lection of Paintings to be made over to the South African Fine Art Association, if within eighteen months a further sum of £1,500 should have been raised for the erection of a suitable building, and should the Association still merit the confidence of the public”, see ibid. 13 Joe Dolby, A Short History of the South African National Gallery, in: The Lantern (December 1981), p. 38. 14 “From 1880 the collection grew rapidly due to grants received from the government as well as be‑ quests made by wealthy colonials.” South African National Gallery Library. Select and Summary Guide to the Permanent Collection Excluding Prints and Drawings, Cape Town: National Gallery of South Af‑ rica, 1958, p. 13. 15 “The collection of paintings and drawings, and other works of art, including art literature to the value of about £3000 and the immovable property in New Street belonging to the South African Fine Arts Association, were transferred to the government by voluntary gift of the Association in 1895.”, The South African Art Gallery, in: The Cape Town Guide (1910), p. 148.



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Classical Casts for the Colony: 1908 Art historian Anna Tietze’s 1998 article concerning the gift of classical casts by Alfred Beit in 1908 sheds some light on the emerging museum and an early division over the type of art deserving to be in the museum.16 In his essay of 1871, Abraham de Smit had suggested that plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statuary at a museum would satisfy a range of educational needs.17Closely associated with the British academies of fine art, cast drawing was offered at the academies as the prime method of teaching drawing. For the new museum, besides having an aura of classical sophistication, casts had the added advantage of being cheap and easy to acquire.18 By 1895, however, a fledgling collection policy was already forming at the National Gallery.19 Discussion at the trustees’ meetings resulted in a consensus view on contemporary art and an anti-classicism that rejected De Smit’s advocacy of the classical cast. The purchases that followed were of British art of the present or recent past, reflecting the perceived tastes in the colony.20 Contemporary art seemed consis‑ tent with ideas of industrial progress in the prosperous colony and concurred with the appealing notion of the self-made man making his fortune in a country rich with possibility. Plaster casts, in contrast, were perceived as elitist and backward- looking, harkening back toward entrenched class distinctions in Britain that were felt to have little bearing in the colony. This tension between the old and the new would have lasting reverberations throughout the history of the museum. It is interesting then that in this unsympathetic context a gift of plaster casts was made at all. According to Tietze, the motivating factor behind the gift had more to do with self-interested ambition than with aesthetic considerations. Powerful colonial industrialists, acting on the suggestion of Rudyard Kipling, rallied together to make the gift a reality.21 Kipling was close friends with Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate

16 Tietze 1998 (as in note 9), pp. 70–90. 17 The exact composition and provenance of the Beit gift is unclear. De Smit, however, mentions that casts could be bought cheaply from ‘respectable dealers’ in England and given the close association with the British art world it is probable that they were bought from there. De Smit makes mention of free standing statuary, such as the Venus De Medici, the Dying Gladiator, the Laocoon Group as well as friezes. A description of the collection by a commentator looking back from 1946, notes that the nudity of the gladiators, athletes, gods and goddesses caused the curator to keep them locked behind closed doors which he opened only to select art students. Tietze 1998 (as in note 9), p. 86. 18 In the absence of an art museum De Smit visualized the casts in a public library, pointing to the educational and functional interest in art museums rather than the purely aesthetic. Tietze 1998 (as in note 9), pp. 70–90, p. 75. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 76. 21 The professional connection between the four men, Beit, Michell, Jameson, and Rhodes, was the British South Africa Company. It was established with the aim of spreading British colonial rule north‑ ward through Africa through the establishment of industries in the area. Ibid.

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and British imperialist. Tietze suggests that the cast gift was inspired by Rhodes and Kipling’s sense of South Africa as part of the British Empire, as well as their colo‑ nial ambitions.22 In a period following the Anglo-Boer war, it was also important to demonstrate a proud British nationhood, symbolised by monuments of a glorious past. In this way, the casts made a connection between the British Empire and a gen‑ eralised classical world. Classical statuary yoked the British Empire to empires past, signalling that the British were fit to rule.23 Furthermore, along with their promotion of classical architecture in the colony, classical casts served as markers of differenti‑ ation between the British and other national groups. The gift therefore worked more generally as a symbol of Britain’s imperial presence in South Africa, and this political function was perhaps more significant, at least to Rhodes, Kipling, and their circle, than the casts’ educational function.24 It is important to note, however, that although the lofty intention of the gift might have been clear to its benefactors, the arrival of the casts in Cape Town was met with official bungling. At the time the South African National Gallery was housed in a small annex of the South African Museum.25 On a practical level there simply was not enough space to accommodate forty-six plaster casts weighing an estimated 450 tons. Two shipments of casts were therefore stored and partly displayed haphazardly in a room in the annex. One observer notes that “works were crowded together going up the staircase with pictures of all sorts indiscriminately mixed up with plaster casts.”26 It was only after the South African National Gallery was moved to a purpose-built building more than twenty years later that the casts were moved into the atrium of the new building (fig. 2).27 The Beit gift perhaps signalled an attempt, however haphazard, to cultivate civility in the colony, but it was a clearer marker of colonial grandiosity. The casts’ reception in Cape Town and their display showed that their presence was ambiguous. Together with libraries and the South African Museum, spaces such as national art galleries were intended to cultivate the colonial government’s concept of an “imag‑

22 Ibid., p. 78. 23 Monuments such as the Cecil John Rhodes Monument on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town opened in 1910. It reinforced the associations between the British colonists and the Classical world. A copy of a Greek temple, the monument claims an unchanged continuity between Greek cul‑ ture as the fountainhead of civilization and the British Empire as the custodian of civility. 24 According to Tietze, casts were an unavoidable part of museum life at this time, and the fact that they were copies did not detract from their educational value. Tietze 1998 (as in note 9), pp. 70–90, p. 77. 25 This “annex” simply consisted of two rooms at the back of the South African Museum. See Select and Summary Guide to the Permanent Collection Excluding Prints and Drawings 1958 (as in note 14), p. 13. 26 Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission appointed in connection with the S. A. Art Gallery Cape Town, Stratford Report, Pretoria: Government Printer, 1947, Annexture C. 27 Ibid.



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Fig. 2: Interior door of the South African National Gallery showing a cast from the Beit Collection c. 1930.

ined” British colonial city.28 Beit’s gift was intended as a celebration of the suprem‑ acy of the British Empire. History shows that this fundamental message was not as clearly conveyed as the administration might have hoped. Factions at the museum saw contemporary art as more progressive and, on a practical level, the lack of a suit‑ able space hindered monumental display of the casts. What is of importance none‑ theless is that the Beit gift shows that the South African National Gallery was part of a conscious movement toward the realization of the image of the city as envisioned by the influential and wealthy colonial classes and empire builders. They hoped that, once established in the city, the museum would help to shape Cape Town into a place where British ideologies concerning culture and learning were made concrete. But the practical implementation of these ideas was not straightforward. In the first twenty years of their presence in Cape Town, the plaster casts appeared to be more a confu‑ sion of the spoils of war displayed in‑between the stuffed animals of the South African Museum than the grand inspirational gift envisioned by Kipling and his associates.

28 Worden, et al., 1998 (as in note 2), p. 155.

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The Aesthetics of Union and the South African National Gallery Opens: 1910 to 1930 In 1910 the Union government came into power.29 The provinces of South Africa for‑ mally ruled by either British or Afrikaner republics were now governed by a sovereign central “unified” parliament located in Cape Town. It was only after unification that the government finally allotted money for the building of the new art museum.30 The years after 1910 were a period of memorialization for the fledgling nation. Bickford-Smith and co‑authors suggest that key memorials in Cape Town were sym‑ bolic tributes to the city’s imperial heritage.31 For many white South Africans, English, and Afrikaans, national identity was interwoven with a pride in their Cape heritage and an interest in preserving it. The preservation of Cape Town heritage took many forms.32 It included the erection of monuments, the publication of historical documents, and the restoration of buildings.33 Founded in 1905, the South African National Society was established to protect historical artefacts. Dorothea Fairbridge, founder of the society and prolific colonial author, saw the Western Cape as Mediterranean in aspiration rather than African, while Cape Dutch architecture represented European settlement. She saw the potential of this mixed heritage to act as a bridge between the British and the Afrikaner, creating a “new ameliorative South African identity.”34 Peter Merrington (1995) proposes that Fairbridge and her circle, which included artists, architects, and writers (such as herself) developed an aesthetics of Union or a Cape Imperial aesthetics.35 He suggests that Fairbridge’s fascination with the Med‑ iterranean was imaginatively adopted not only because of its climatic similarity to the Cape but more importantly because it afforded a strategic role for Britain’s cul‑

29 Nigel Worden, A Concise Dictionary of South African History, Cape Town: Francolin, 1998, p. 157. 30 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26). 31 One example was the newly erected monument to Cecil John Rhodes on the slopes of Table Moun‑ tain, which opened in 1912. Another was the statue of Jan van Riebeek, commissioned by Rhodes, which was conceived as “a statement about Europe’s conquest of savage Africa”. It also served to shape a collective settler identity that was being forged though heritage practices of various kinds. Vivian Bickford-Smith, Elizabeth Van Hyningen, Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century. An Illustrated Social Guide, Cape Town: New Africa Books, 1999, p. 76. 32 The South African National Society and the Van Riebeek Society worked at preserving a local Cape Town heritage within the context of a new South African settler identity. The Van Riebeek Society, es‑ tablished in 1918, also attempted to create a South African identity out of local Cape heritage through the publishing of historically significant South African manuscripts. Most of its early publications were associated with Dutch heritage in the Western Cape. Worden et al., 1998 (as in note 2), p. 76. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Merrington 1995 (as in note 6).



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tural focus in terms of Greco-Roman antiquity, Etruscan “primitivism,” and Egyptol‑ ogy. This allowed for a civilizational narrative for South Africa, including an array of images of the exotic particularly familiar to the European-informed gaze. Altogether, the image of Africa was thereby inserted into the perceptive framework of a heroic Mediterranean past narrative, including its orientalising aspects. The Egyptian past also included the celebration of the myth of Rhodes’s Cape to Cairo railway, which popularised Egyptology in Cape Town and was seen in architecture in the city, such as the Egyptian Building of the University of Cape Town.36 Allegorical representations that drew on Greco-Roman or biblical themes were more common as was the imperial iconography of Britannia figures, classical goddesses, torchbearers, and the empha‑ sis on the “pageant” of history.37 Merrington suggests that the mixture of historical myth and enthusiastic invention was used to construct a new national culture, or an imperial identity, by means of reinterpreting and appropriating the past.38 Building a new local Cape Town heritage project projected the aesthetics of Union. This would reinforce the British colonial legacy and show an inclination to shape a new collective white identity, which included the supremacy of both Afrikan‑ ers and British. As part of a broader network of cultural institutions, the South African National Gallery had the potential to become an arena for these efforts and for the aesthetics of Union rule. In 1912 the South African National Gallery’s Board of Trustees lobbied the gov‑ ernment for funding for the new museum building, as well as for support for other amateur societies.39 In 1913 the government gave money for plans to be drawn up by the Public Works Department.40 A contract was entered into in 1914 for building the foundations of the museum.41 Building began that same year but stopped due to the start of the First World War (1914–1918). Construction was only resumed in 1924, and the museum was finally completed in 1930 (fig. 3). It was opened by the Earl of Athlone, Governor General of the Union of South Africa.42

36 Peter Merrington, A Staggered Orientalism. The Cape to Cairo Imaginary, in: Poetics Today 22 (Summer 2001), pp. 323–365. 37 Merrington 1995 (as in note 6), p. 648. 38 Ibid. 39 Dolby 1981 (as in note 13), p. 42. 40 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26). 41 Ibid. 42 A team of architects were selected, with Franklin Kendall as the architect from Cape Town. Sir Her‑ bert Baker acted as advisor. Baker’s architecture, such as the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town, and the New Delhi Secretariat showed that imperial architecture drew on the classical to create a new “nobility” and serve a political purpose. Thomas R. Metcalf, Architecture and Empire, in History Today 30.12 (1980), pp. 7–12.

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Fig. 3: The South African National Gallery c. 1930, Cape Town, South Africa.

The South African National Gallery was heralded in the Cape Times as South Afri‑ ca’s “Royal Academy,” recalling the seminal article of De Smit in 1871.43 The building was described as a monumental artwork, essentially South African, but with Euro‑ pean traces. A relief of a classical goddess, flanked by gesturing admirers, stands high in the parapet above its entrance, putti brace sandstone brackets sit above the door, and large stone urns, wreathed in garlands, sit balanced on either side of the build‑ ing. Cape Dutch style windows flank the building’s fluted Tuscan pillars, recalling Rudyard Kipling’s sentiments in a letter of 1900 to architect Sir Herbert Baker that the use of two pillars signify strength and beauty as “the two races, Dutch and English, rise side by side from a common and solid foundation.”44 As a displaced form manifested in the vernacular, the art museum was a comfort‑ able fit for the country’s white minorities.45 Interior aspects of the museum further

43 South Africa’s Royal Academy. The New Art Gallery to Be Opened on Monday, Cape Times (1 No‑ vember 1930). 44 Kipling in Merrington 1995 (as in note 6), p. 648. 45 Emphasis was placed on the museum’s scale and beautiful finishes. The “broad steps and plat‑ forms on either side, with massive fluted columns framing the opening” were enhanced by the colour of the walls and the “gold and silver of the mouldings”. “Ladybrand stone” was used in the entrance



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reinforced this. The carved wooden reliefs and doors tell the allegorical story of South Africa using biblical metaphor. In this way the entitlement of European settlement in South Africa was given a mythological significance as it was coupled with religious iconography. The contrast between the depiction of slaves and indigenous people on the one hand and white minorities on the other is clear. The guidebook to the perma‑ nent collection (1958) describes the iconography as: “the wandering Jews on their way to South Africa”, “the Israelites building Egypt”, and “the daughter of Zion slain by the Romans.”46 The door panels however, represent the “land of milk and honey” with indigenous people depicted as curiosities or as symbolic of material abundance: “a native girl stands beside a maize plant”, “a Malay boy carries fish and grapes”, and “a native warrior leans on his shield.”47 The museum’s location in central Cape Town aligned it with other architectural displays of government, and it became an important part of the colonial cultural scene. Although smaller in scale than European national art museums, it was built in the Public Gardens, close to the Parliament buildings, the South African Museum, and the South African Library. The spatial relationship between these buildings created a visual unity and a space of regulated public behaviour where existing racial and social divides could be ratified. In 1932 the museum was incorporated as the South African National Gallery, a state-aided institution with a nine-member Board of Trustees.48 The directors of Michaelis, the University of Cape Town’s School of Fine Art, were appointed as parttime honorary directors of the gallery. From 1930 to 1940 Professor John Wheatley held the position of honorary director.49 The Depression years saw little development at the museum. In 1940 Professor Edward Roworth took over from Wheatley.50 In light of later developments, it is important to note that the directorship was an honorary, not an official position. The aesthetics of union receded, and did not really gain ground at the museum while Roworth ushered in a conservative British stance.

and “Free State stone” was used as paving and the courtyard. The “feature” fountain was carved from “Warmbath stone.” Cape Times 1930 (as in note 43). 46 National Gallery 1958 (as in note 14). 47 Ibid, p. 4. 48 Dolby 1981 (as in note 13), p. 42. 49 Ibid. 50 UCT Libraries, Hiddingh Hall. South African National Gallery Annual Report 1948/1949, p. 1.

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Conservative Rhetoric and a Dissident Voice in the Cape Town Art World: 1940–1947 The period spanning the Second World War (1939–1945) was a turbulent time in Cape Town, which highlighted existing political divisions.51 Loyalties associated with the war found resonances in the local art scene and brought about a crisis in the relation‑ ship between the art establishment and a group of artists called the New Group. The New Group were active in Cape Town from 1938 to 1954. Although they did not adhere to a specific style, many of the members either worked in a “romantic realist” style or in a style that was influenced by Modern European art movements such as Expres‑ sionism and Cubism. They aimed to raise the standard of South African art and, by organizing exhibitions and sales, hoped to increase public awareness and develop a public understanding of modern art. The New Group aimed to foster and encourage a uniquely South African art and were at odds with the art establishment.52 They were to become a considerable force in the South African art world, as they reduced the local resistance to innovation in art and broke the monopoly of traditional taste in the country.53 Sculptor and painter Lippy Lipshitz was a key figure in this group. Lipshitz studied art in Cape Town but rejected the academic discipline of plaster cast drawing. Instead he discovered modern art in books and in local public libraries. The time he spent studying and working in Paris from 1928 to 1932 was influential in his development, and he came into direct contact with Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. His professional career spanned six decades, and he later became known as one of the foremost sculptors and teachers of sculpture in South Africa.54

51 South Africa was not obliged to enter the war and fight on the side of Britain, and the debate over entry split the Fusion government. The Fusion government was a coalition between the South African Party (under Smuts who had British Sympathies) and the National Party (under Hertzog who repre‑ sented Afrikaner interests and policies). Smuts had a particular concern for Europe and the threat of Hitler, while Hertzog called for neutrality. Herzog lost the war debate, and South Africa entered the war to fight on the side of Britain. Many Afrikaners opposed South Africa’s support of the Allied forces while English-speaking Capetonians felt that the war reinforced imperial ties. Understandably, this division emphasized the tension caused by a growing Afrikaner nationalism. Worden, et al., 1998 (as in note 2), p. 164. 52 Julia Kukard, A Critical History of the New Group, Unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 8. 53 This was according to Bruce Arnott, who became the deputy director of the South National Gallery in 1970. Bruce Arnott, Lippy Lipshitz. A Biographical Commmentary and Documentation of the Years 1903–1968, Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1969. 54 Ibid.



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When Lipshitz returned from Paris to Cape Town in 1938, however, he joined the New Group like other artists who returned from studying abroad and sought to find an alternative to the conservative art establishment in Cape Town. It was in this context that he spread the tenets of modern art, which he felt embodied freedom and intellec‑ tual sophistication, with what some critics called a “missionary zeal.”55 Edward Roworth was the strongest influence at the South African National Gallery at the time and represented the conservative faction of the art establish‑ ment.56 Roworth was an academic at the Michealis School of Fine Art and an artist.57 His tenure at the museum was marked by two critical events. His conservative and rigid views on modern art led to a historic, public controversy, and secondly, and more importantly, he instigated unregulated sales from the permanent collection, which left a lasting void in the museum’s holdings. Although it was not modern art that was sold, the sales recalled the recent art purges in Germany.58 For members of the New Group such as Lipshitz, Roworth’s rhetoric drew clear battle lines, with parallels to official censorship of modern art in Nazi Germany and the opening of the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition on 30 June 1937 in Munich. Throughout his career Roworth was very vocal about what constituted ‘good’ art and he voiced his ideas in local publications and public lectures. His parochial ideas would shape the national collection throughout his tenure. As early as 1910, Roworth wrote that art had to be beautiful and based on ‘truth’, which allowed it to give rise to pleasurable emotions.59 Art should have formal, harmonious qualities such as line, colour, and perspective, through which the viewer could ascertain its worth. Art should be safely grounded in tradition and built on the legacy of the great masters.60 The academic style of painting favoured by Roworth was easy on the eye and required little intellectual engagement by the viewer. Modern art was marked by a departure from these traditional values, and Roworth expressed his contempt for it early in his

55 Ibid., p. 18. 56 Roworth was born in 1880 in the English village of Heaton Mersey, Lancashire, and studied art at the Manchester Art Academy. He came to South Africa in 1902. He acknowledged the formative influ‑ ence of his art training at the Slade and the exhibitions he saw as a youth in England. As early as 1910 he published an article on the national collection at the South African National Gallery. From 1940, after taking up the position as director of the South African National Gallery, he published various articles on his background, influences, and ideological perspective on art. Edward Roworth, Student Days in England, in: The Monitor (8 November 1946), p. 12. 57 Roworth was simultaneously director of the South African National Gallery (1940–1949) and dean of the University of Cape Town’s art school, Michaelis (1937–1953). Dolby 1981 (as in note 13), p. 42. 58 Artist Lippy Lipshitz complained that the museum appeared to be under the autocratic “dictator‑ ship” of Roworth. Lippy Lipshitz, A Considered Reply to Prof. Roworth, in: Trek (7 November 1940), pp. 20–24. 59 Edward Roworth, The South African Art Gallery, in: Cape Times Annual (1910), p. 8. 60 Ibid., p. 9.

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career. According to Roworth, art for art’s sake was self-indulgent and backward, and could be seen “only in the earliest ages of mankind.”61 It is of interest that, at this time, the earliest examples of South African indige‑ nous art, especially rock art and engravings, were treated as ethnographic specimens and housed in the South African Museum – the natural history museum. A similar classification existed in European institutions at the time. In Britain and in Europe artefacts of indigenous people were collected first as curiosities and then as objects of ethnological interest. In the South African context this distinction helped to dif‑ ferentiate the colonizer from the colonized.62 Aligned to this classification was the art/artefact distinction, which served to put western and non-western societies on a graded or hierarchical scale, where western art was perceived as spiritually rich and deserving of contemplation in the setting of the art museum.63 Non-western artefacts, however, were best examined in museums of natural history as anthropological or ethnographic collections to be studied as scientific specimens.64 Scientific systems of observation, description, and classification at the South African Museum, estab‑ lished in the mid-nineteenth century, were intended to convey a sense of ordered knowledge that was neutral and objective. However, in the South African context this process was implicated in reinforcing difference and helped to “naturalize” racially based political authority.65 It is not surprising that political authority was questioned during the Second World War. In this environment, when South African white identities were increas‑ ingly polarized towards the political right and the political left, Roworth delivered a public lecture in which he positioned national art as uniquely important and posi‑ tioned himself as the authoritative voice of the establishment. Drawing strongly on the political context of the war, Roworth stated that national art was “the most vital manifestation of the life of a nation.”66 He screened a dozen samples of French modern art to illustrate his view of the type of art that degraded a nation and resulted from

61 Ibid., p. 8. 62 This differentiation was formally institutionalized in the 1960’s when the national ethnographic collection was divided along racial lines. White culture was represented at the South African Cultural History Museum, while black culture was coupled with natural history at the South African Museum. Elizabeth Davison, Recoding the Canon. Towards Greater Representivity in South African Art Galler‑ ies, in: Social Dynamics. A Journal of African Studies (1995), pp. 56–90, p. 61. 63 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 5. 64 Ibid. 65 Patricia Davison, Museums and the Reshaping of Memory, in: Sarah Nuttal and Carli Coetzee (eds.), Negotiating the Past. The Making of Memory in South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 143–160, p. 146. 66 Prof. Roworth Attacks Modern Art. Work of Michaelis Praised, in: Cape Times (25 September 1940).



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“mental anarchy.” This “intellectual chaos” was, according to Roworth, the direct result of the lack of a recognized standard of art and was produced by “madmen.”67 Although Roworth’s ideas reflected those held by the South African art estab‑ lishment at the time, public opinion was by no means unanimous. In the wartime context emotions ran high, and much of the public took issue with Roworth’s stance. For artists such as Lippy Lipshitz, supporting modern art was a liberal political alle‑ giance that expressed an anti-German sentiment. For Lipshitz, modern art was “toler‑ ant and progressive” whereas the art Roworth and the Nazis advocated was “shallow and unimaginative.”68 According to Bruce Arnott (1969), in terms of the art-political struggle in Cape Town, and in the face of wartime animosity toward Nazism and the sympathy for the predicament of European Jews, Roworth made a grave tactical error. Lipshitz there‑ fore won widespread sympathy and support for the cause of freedom in art in South Africa. He exposed the reactionary sympathies of Roworth and discredited the tradi‑ tional attitudes he represented. This debate as well as the resulting art sales caused a more liberal acceptance of experimental art in the Cape, and this trend was strength‑ ened by returning South African servicemen, who had been exposed to a wider variety of art in Europe.69

The Art Sales and the Commission of Enquiry: 1944–1947 The end of the Second World War was a low period for British imperialism, marked by a sense of imperial decline and an upsurge of Afrikaner Nationalism in South Africa. In the local Cape Town art scene there was an active public movement away from the conservative art establishment and toward the freedom and experimentation embod‑ ied by the New Group. Roworth’s Nazi sympathies, expressed during the war, led to more critical public engagement with the institution. Jillian Carman considers this period at the museum tragically pathetic, due to the “monumental ineptness and bombastic arrogance” of Roworth. In a serious abuse of professional power, Roworth sold off parts of the earliest collections and so destroyed a valuable visual archive.70 Roworth seems to have acted almost alone, with no or little oversight from the Board of Trustees, in selling off 140 works of art between

67 Ibid. 68 Lipshitz 1940 (as in note 58), p. 24. 69 Arnott 1969 (as in note 53), p. 22. 70 Jillian Carman, Introduction, in: Jillian Carman (ed.), Visual Century. South African Art in Context, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011, p. 21.

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1944 and 1947. Carman considers this pivotal event part of the widespread neglect and institutional mismanagement of art museums in the country at the time.71 1947 marked a critical turning point in the history of the South African National Gallery. A public outcry in the city’s newspapers brought the sales to the attention of Parliament, and in an unprecedented step it appointed a Commission of Enquiry, headed by James Stratford, a British lawyer. The crisis was of such proportions that, along with the circumstances of the sales, the broader conditions at the museum were also investigated. What emerged from Stratford’s report were not only details of the sales but also the more general functioning of a national art museum entrusted with public assets.72 One other aspect of the report was taken up forcefully by Afri‑ kaner members of Parliament: that the museum’s collections failed to represent a national identity inclusive of Afrikaners. This was, therefore, the first time the idea of a national art museum catering to a broader public was ever really considered in South Africa.73 This was also a time when Afrikaner nationalism started to act as a forceful counter-narrative to British pre-eminence at the museum.74 The principal reason for selling the art works, in Roworth’s opinion, was that they were not of sufficient merit to be hung in the museum. While writing about the early collection, Roworth had expressed the opinion that the collection contained canvases bequeathed in the years gone by that could be removed from the walls and be “con‑ signed to oblivion.”75 While reiterating these views he stated that the visitor to the

71 Carman suggests that there was a serious discrepancy between the South African Museum and the South African National Gallery. Whereas the former had become a respected center of learning and scientific research, with sufficient funds for curation and preservation, art museums such as the South African National Gallery were of less interest to local and international visitors. The fact that good art was considered to be European and especially British also created a false premise that local art lacked the quality necessary for museum display. Carman 2011 (as in note 70), p. 23. 72 Stratford recommended that the sale of art should only take place under exceptional circum‑ stances and that the selection of work should not be left entirely to the director. However, the greatest weakness of the museum was a lack of clearly defined policy with respect to the aims and functions of an art museum. Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 5. 73 Important to note, however, is that this was neither an egalitarian nor a democratic impulse, but it was one that would continue to privilege and reinforce white rule in South Africa. The exception was that Afrikaners would be included as part of the story of South African art at the museum. 74 At the South African National Gallery, the Dutch-descended Afrikaners were presumed to be un‑ able to identify with collections that were not seventeenth-century Dutch. This was a premise that issued from the British sector of Cape Town society. The first bequest of Dutch and Flemish seven‑ teenth-century paintings was made to the Union government in 1913 by a British citizen, Max Michae‑ lis, and not someone of Dutch descent. Despite the nationality of the patron, it is noteworthy that this collection was not housed at the South African National Gallery but in a separate building, the Old Town House, which speaks to the deep divisions existing within the ranks of the European settlers at the time. 75 Roworth 1910 (as in note 59).



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museum only noticed a few good works among the “mass” of inferior paintings.76 During the Stratford investigations, however, it emerged that, besides Roworth’s per‑ sonal motives, another reason for the sales was to make room for the Abe Bailey col‑ lection that was to arrive at the museum shortly (see below). Starting in 1944, Roworth drew the attention of the trustees to a number of paint‑ ings that were stored in the basement, which in his opinion were not of sufficient merit to be hung in an art gallery.77 He pointed out that the trustees were empowered by the State Aided Institutions Act of 1932 to sell any work that was not subject to a prohibition against alienation. The trustees asked Roworth to make a personal selec‑ tion of the paintings and arrange their sale. Roworth then negotiated the sale of for‑ ty-seven paintings to Mr. Monnickendam, a dealer in Johannesburg. In 1945 Roworth sold another sixteen paintings from the collection to another auctioneer, Mr. Ter Beek, without consulting the trustees. Roworth considered that the resolution taken by the board the previous year gave him the necessary authority to conduct the sale without the authorization of the trustees.78 In 1946 Roworth himself bought a painting.79 The trustees were unaware of both these sales. The Stratford Report makes mention that works of considerable value were included in these sales. One painting was attributed to Reynolds, while another was rumoured to be attributed to Rubens.80 Following the sales the works were impossible to trace, so it was impossible to prove that they were the “rubbish” Roworth professed them to be. Importantly, however, seven of the paintings sold to Monnickendam (in 1944) and two of those sold to Ter Beek (in 1945) came from the Michaelis collection.81 Also included were two works from the 1871 Bayley bequest and one work from the South African Fine Arts Association. Although Roworth claimed that these facts could not be ascertained from the available records at the time of the sale, these sales were illegal under the act that Roworth himself quoted as grounds for the sales. As the works were never retrieved, their absence resulted in the breaking up of seminal col‑ lections.82 The largest sale took place in 1947 (fig. 4), when a collection of eighty-six oil paintings and fifty-five pastels and watercolours were sold by public auction, which finally brought the art sales at the museum into the public arena. The sale had its genesis in 1946 when Cecil Sibbett, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, stated that at various times a gallery was obliged to accept works that were not considered to be suitable to hang on its walls and that consequently there were always “some pictures

76 Ibid. 77 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 2. 78 Ibid., p. 2. 79 UCT Libraries, Hiddingh Hall. South African National Library Annual Repport 1946/1947. 80 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 4. 81 Ibid., p. 3; Duncan 1995 (as in note 63). 82 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 4.

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Fig. 4: Art sale from the South African National Gallery, 1947.

in the basement.”83 As Roworth had previously conducted a sale, it was agreed that he would decide which works should be sold and which could be donated to insti‑ tutions in other municipalities that were trying to establish their own collections.84 In January 1947, Roworth handed a report over to the trustees listing the works to be sold and, following their approval, he invited dealers to inspect the works. Roworth made special conditions attached to the purchase of the works: that they be cash on delivery and that the “purchaser not advertise that the pictures emanated from the National Gallery.”85 After inspecting the work, a dealer named Lezard, trying to capi‑ talize on the works’ provenance, advised that the works be advertised as “being reluc‑ tantly disposed of under direct instructions from the trustees of the National Gallery in order to make room for the huge collection of pictures bequeathed by the late Sir Abe Bailey.”86 He also requested that the director sign slips and attach them to the

83 Ibid., p. 3. 84 It is unclear from the available documentation whether these donations were ever made. 85 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 4 86 Ibid., p. 5.



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back of unsigned paintings. The collection, however, went to the dealer Krook, who outbid Lezard, and bought the collection for twelve hundred pounds. Following the sales, a public outcry had been raised because it was feared that the works had been carelessly “thrown on the market and that many of them had a far greater value than was first imagined.”87 The collection auctioned by Krook eventually fetched the sum of 5,227 pounds, giving the dealer a handsome profit. The South African Fine Arts Association was outraged, since paintings bequeathed by its members had been amongst those sold. Cape Town’s City Council suspended its annual grant due to the controversy, which amounted to a quarter of the museum’s annual funds.88 The Stratford Commission found that the museum had sold a total of 140 paint‑ ings at public auctions and through private sales, all at very low prices.89 At least forty South African paintings were sold, including artists who were key to the western tradition of South African art.90 The sales had major financial ramifications for the museum. Not only did the museum have to spend large sums of money attempting to retrieve sold works, but only twenty-five works were retrieved, and at much higher prices than they were sold for. Given that the Cape Town City Council also withdrew its funding, the sale plunged the museum into financial crisis. The primary reason for the sale, in Stratford’s view, was a lack of funds. Stratford recommended that the sale of art works should only take place under exceptional cir‑ cumstances and that the selection of works should not be left entirely to the director. The report proposed that the State increase the museum’s annual allowance and also hire a full-time paid director and an assistant director.91 The full impact of the Stratford Report can only be fully understood in light of subsequent changes brought about at the museum. Since Stratford used European art museums as his benchmark, many of his recommendations were idealistic and ill suited to a South African context, where funding had always been problematic. Understandably, however, the report’s suggestion that South African art become the focus of the South African National Gallery was vigorously taken up by the new Nationalist administration. While the Stratford Report does not explicitly blame any one person, it became clear that Roworth and Board members had acted beyond their authority as custo‑ dians of a public institution. While no legal actions ensued, Roworth had resigned from his position as director of the museum by the end of 1947. Following Roworth’s

87 Ibid., p. 6. 88 UCT Libraries, Hiddingh Hall. South African National Gallery Annual Report 1947/1948. 89 Ibid., p. 2. 90 This included works by J. E. A Volschenk, Frans Oeder, Robert Gwelo Goodman, Jan Juta, and Gregoire Boonzaier. Carman 2011 (as in note 70), p. 21. 91 UCT Libraries 1947/1948 (as in note 88), p. 1.

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resignation, the museum decided that works were not to be sold from the collection under any circumstances – although this policy was later refined, by the mid-1950’s, to give the trustees the right to refuse works not “worthy” of having a place in the national collection. Members of Parliament claimed that the sales were shrouded in secrecy, and they also criticized the low prices of the artworks, as well as Roworth’s ideas on modern art. The most emphatic criticism, however, came from Afrikaner Nationalist MP Brink who claimed that the museum was not a National Gallery but an “Imperial Gallery.”92 He noted that there were too few South African works in the museum and that the bias was very strongly British. Brink declared that the greatest scandal was that South African art was sold to make room for the Bailey bequest (see below), which was imported from abroad and which had no appeal to South Africans. What was even more deplorable was that three rooms were being set aside for the bequest and South African works were being taken down or sold. The museum’s strategy was a “studious de‑nationalisation” with the “object of promoting Anglicization.” With the inclusion of the three hundred paintings of the Bailey bequest, the museum would be made “even more foreign in character.”93 Given the inflammatory nature of the aftermath of the sales, Parliament decided that there should be more direct government control at the museum. Following from Stratford’s recommendations, a full-time museum professional was hired to take up the position of director, rather than an artist and academic. The new director was brought under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education and had to abide by new government legislation.94

The Modern Art Debate Revisited by the Head of the Board of Trustees: 1947 Hot on the heels of the Stratford Report, and perhaps in a conscious effort to deflect attention from the report’s critical findings and Parliamentary criticism of the muse‑ um’s British imperial bias, an article appeared in the local press that again set the Cape Town art world ablaze. “Against the Cult of the Ugly” was written by Cecil Sibbett, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and it reignited a vociferous debate on modern art. As if echoing ideas from 1930’s Nazi Germany, much like Roworth had done in his

92 Union of South Africa 1947 (as in note 26), p. 2. 93 Ibid., p. 35. 94 The museum was brought under the control of the Union Department of Education whereas pre‑ viously it fell under the Department of Interior. UCT Libraries, Hiddingh Hall. South African National Gallery Annual Report 1959/1960, p. 1.



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lecture of 1940, Sibbett reiterated that all modern art was “degenerate,” produced by mad men incited by lunacy.95 “Against the Cult of the Ugly” was first published in The Outspan in March 1947, then circulated privately among Members of Parliament and artists, and repub‑ lished in the Cape Times on 29 September 1947. The article criticized modern art as “debased,” “degenerate,” and “debauched.”96 Sibbett supported Roworth’s views, especially regarding the kind of art “deserving” to be in the museum. The high-handed style of the pair angered the art community and provoked criticism and inflammatory responses in the Cape Town press. Sibbett’s article also echoed many of the senti‑ ments of Roworth’s controversial public lecture on modern art of 1940.97 Sibbett declared that all cultural forms had been debased by the “cult of the ugly,” which he defined as a modernist ideology sweeping the world. Sibbett declared that all modern art forms (not only fine art) were debauched and decadent. He equated traditional values in art with the high ideals of religion, while modern art was akin to “"primeval savagery”.98 As a powerful antidote to the destructive influence of modernist thought, Sibbett wrote that a sober collection of art was about to arrive at the museum – the Abe Bailey collection. According to Sibbett, the Bailey collection’s British origins would bring culture and taste to the South African public. This collection was beautiful and uplift‑

95 Sibbett was part of Cape Town’s elite as a successful businessman, and he was also actively in‑ volved in Cape Town civic life. He had strong British political affiliations having served under Rhodes after the First World War. Born in Belfast, he immigrated to South Africa in 1897 and “threw himself into the corporate life of his adopted country”. James Sibbett, in: The Monitor (17 January 1947), p. 18. During the First World War he was appointed war correspondent for five South African newspapers. After the war he was appointed assistant political secretary under Rhodes. In 1927 he retired and took up various positions in civic affairs. He was chairman of the 1820’s Settlers’ Association, a Trustee of the South African Museum and a Trustee of the South African Library. Sibbett was on the South Afri‑ can National Gallery’s Board of Trustees throughout the 1940’s. In 1947 he succeeded Sir Carruthers Beattie and became chairman. Cecil James Sibbett, in: The Monitor (17 January 1947), p. 18; Cecil J. Sib‑ bett, Against the Cult of the Ugly, in: Cape Times (27 September 1947). 96 In his article Sibbett was drawing on a long anti-modern art tradition that found its extreme ex‑ pression in the Nazi art purges. The term “degeneracy” was used early on. In 1893, Max Nordau pub‑ lished Entartung (Degeneracy), which declared all modern art to be pathological. New York newspa‑ pers picked up the phrase and described art exhibited at the Armory show in 1913 as degenerate. In the same year, art critics described the artist Kandisky as “insane,” someone who could not be held responsible for his actions. In the 1920’s, Nordau’s theories of degeneracy were built on by a group of German art “philosophers” who produced the outlines of the future Nazi art creed. Hinz describes their work as confused fulminations about art that were highly radicalized: Berthold Hinz, Degener‑ ate and Authentic. Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich, in: Dawn Ades (ed.), Art and Power. Europe under the Dictators 1930–1945, London: SBC Hayward Gallery, 1995, p. 331. 97 Cape Times 1940 (as in note 66). 98 Sibbett 1947 (as in note 95).

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ing, socially useful and would inspire the viewer to greater humanist aspirations.99 Like Roworth, Sibbett was sympathetic to the banning of modern art in Nazi Germany, some of which he saw on exhibition in London and which prompted him to confess to sharing the Nazi antagonism to modern art.100 Sibbett’s and Roworth’s comments were not simply free-floating conservative declarations. These views were expressed by men wielding power in the art commu‑ nity. They controlled the country’s national art museum and they were determined to fix the nation’s art standards. But they were also troubled men whose power and reputations were threatened by the Stratford Commission of Enquiry. It was highly likely that Sibbett’s article was intended to define the purpose of the South African National Gallery in this context, to safeguard its image as a serious institution, even to deflect attention away from the seriousness of the sales. Sibbett also clearly sought the support of friends in high places by handing over his article to members of Par‑ liament.

Good, Decent, and Uplifting: The Bailey Collection101 (1947) “Against the Cult of the Ugly” implored the public to “cultivate” its taste by visiting the South African National Gallery and viewing the paintings of the Bailey collection.102 Sibbett’s eager support of the Bailey collection emphasized that British art was still being privileged at the South African National Gallery in 1947, when Afrikaner nation‑ alism was a rising political influence elsewhere. The collection is a memorial to Bailey’s particular passions: horses, fox hunting, and pheasant shooting. As a collection, the works speak to the leisure interests of a South African self-made mining magnate with a desire to imitate the British aristoc‑

99 Roworth 1910 (as in note 59), pp. 8–13. 100 “I do not think that even my worst enemy would accuse me of being a Hitlerite. Well, I was one for a full hour one morning in London in 1938 at the ‘Banned Art from Germany’ exhibition. There was not a single picture that one could make head or tail of. It would not have made any difference how they were hung – upside down or sideways.” Sibbett 1947 (as in note 95). 101 Abe Bailey was one of the chief mining magnates of the Witwatersrand. He was active in politics and, like Sibbett, had sympathy for Rhodes’s ideals. He was a Member of Parliament from 1902 to 1908 and represented Krugersdorp in the first elections of the Transvaal Parliament. Bailey held the political view that common ground should be found between British and Afrikaner. To this end, he sponsored the Union Club movement and its journal, The State. This political ideal did not manifest in his collections. Bailey was unequivocally British in his artistic taste. Hayden R. Proud, Introduction, in: Anna Tietze (ed.), The Abe Bailey Bequest. A Reappraisal, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: Iziko Museums of Cape Town, 2001, p. 2. 102 Sibbett 1947 (as in note 95).



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racy and express the social mobility his wealth afforded him.103 Art historian Anna Tietze has argued that Bailey thought his collection was suitable for South African audiences because the Cape was still orientated culturally towards the “mother country” and was struggling to conceive of itself as part of a larger South Africa.104 This view, however, was not shared by contemporary Afrikaner politicians who felt that the presence of the collection in the national art museum only exacerbated that division. While commenting on the collection in Parliament, Nationalist MP Brink stated that “English racing and fox hunting has no meaning, as far as we are con‑ cerned.”105 The Abe Bailey collection remains the largest collection received by the South African National Gallery.106 It contains over four hundred items, which include paint‑ ings (sporting and portraits) and prints. The sporting paintings make up the bulk of the collection (paintings that celebrate the rural sports of hunting, game shooting, horse racing, and horse drawn sport).107 Bailey’s large collection of sporting paintings was one of the most extensive private collections of its kind. By giving precedence to this collection, Sibbett suggested that British art was of the highest order and that the English speaking South African public, far removed from the metropolis, would do well to cultivate their taste on even modest forms of British painting, rather than on local art. As Linda Nochlin has written, the Abe Bailey collection is a “memento of Colonialism’s contribution to the great Western tradition in South Africa. This group of tenth-rate fox hunting scenes is just a reminder that the Western tradition is not always so great.”108 Curator of painting and sculpture at the South African National Gallery, Hayden Proud, wrote in 2001 that when the Bailey collection arrived in 1947 it was “greatly welcomed.”109 However, as seen in the Parliamentary debate of April  1947 and in newspaper reports,110 the arrival of the collection was not unanimously welcomed in Cape Town. In a context of growing Afrikaner Nationalism it was considered incon‑ gruous with nationalist objectives, especially since its arrival was cited as a reason for the art sale of 1947.111 Besides its imperial connotations, it was also considered dull and repetitive. The art critic for The Argus haughtily observed that visitors to the

103 Proud 2001 (as in note 101), p. 2. 104 Ibid. 105 Parliament of South Africa, Hansard 29 April 1947, Cape Town: Government Printer, 1947, col 3507. 106 Proud 2001 (as in note 101), p. 1. 107 Ibid., p. 6. 108 As quoted in Ibid., p. 1. 109 Ibid., p. 1. 110 The Art Critic, Too Many Long Faces in Art Galleries, in: The Argus (19 June 1947). 111 Parliament of South Africa, Hansard 29 April 1947, Cape Town: Government Printer, 1947, col 3507.

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Bailey collection were “gloomy,” and this was probably because “racehorses as a subject for painting becomes rather tedious after the first 50‑odd pictures.”112

Conclusion The early educational roots of the South African National Gallery were eclipsed by a larger imperial project with the arrival of the Beit gift of plaster casts of classical statu‑ ary in 1908. The museum opened in 1930 and was informed by an aesthetics of Union that reinforced this imperial project. Although early collection policies favoured contemporary British art, which aligned the colony with ideas of industrialization and progress, the domineering figure of Edward Roworth attempted to impose his conservative ideas of grand masters on the collection. Roworth went as far as insti‑ gating a multitude of art sales from the collection to make room for more ‘uplifting’ art. The presence of dissident voices, however, such as Lippy Lipshitz from the New Group opposed Roworth’s autocratic dominance and showed that a more experimen‑ tal leaning was starting to be accepted in public discourse. The changing political context and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism pushed the museum to consider new ways to represent a ‘national’ art, inclusive of both factions of white settlers, British, and Afrikaners. The modern art debate, the art sales, and the arrival of the Abe Bailey Collection thrust the museum repeatedly into the limelight and revealed the large-scale public disapproval over its direction and activities. The fallout from these events, combined with a fast-changing political context, repositioned the institution in the decades to come. This period of change and controversy demonstrates the unique position of the South African National Gallery at this time and its changing and evolving public image.

112 The Art Critic 1947 (as in note 110).

Deepti Mulgund

Imaginaries of the Art Museum: Banaras and Aundh in Colonial India In this paper, I consider the emergence of two art museums in the early decades of the twentieth century in the British colony of India: the Bharat Kala Bhavan of Banaras, founded by Rai Krishnadas in 1920, and the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya in the princely state of Aundh, built by its last ruler, Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi, in 1938. As two of the earliest museums devoted to the arts, these endeavours distinguish them‑ selves not only due to their establishment by Indians but also for their insistence on the category of the art museum. This insistence on the art museum deviated from the prevalent model of ency‑ clopaedic museum making, that aggregated materials under the rubric of Indian resources. The paper discusses this shift away from the encyclopaedic, to aesthetic judgement as exercised by these museum founders, in the light of the nationalist impulse. In foregrounding the relationship between art, nationalism, and institutional histories, the paper will unpack a range of questions: What did it mean for Indians to establish an art museum? How did the space of the museum suggest itself to Indians who were yet colonial subjects? Or is the alliance between an art museum and an incipient nation only natural? If so, how is the art museum envisioned and deployed by colonial subjects, and how does it relate to their claims for self-rule? In exploring this relationship between the art museum and the colony, the paper focuses on the image of the art museum as was envisioned by these collectors in India’s colonial period through the narratives of connoisseurship and patronage. Making collections with an eye to the nation that was yet to come, these collectors created diverse collec‑ tions and chose to address this new nation and its citizen populace. Foregrounding the role of collecting in institution formation, the paper will reflect on the processes and discourses of connoisseurship, aesthetic agency, and social transformation that undergird the collections of the two museums at Banaras and Aundh. In the initial section, the paper considers the relationship between the art museum and the nation-state, in the light of the coming of the museum to the British colony of India; this will bring into relief the valence of creating an art museum in colonial India. Next, it delves into the institutional history of the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Banaras and the biography of its founder. Here the paper will lay out the highart tradition that was being deployed by Rai Krishnadas in Banaras to present one articulation of a nationalist art history. The next section of the paper throws light on the collection at the Aundh museum, particularly its engagements with the western academic style, its collection of casts and copies, and draws attention to the politi‑ cal changes and gestures of self-rule that were taking place in the small principality. In detailing these institutional histories, the paper will present two articulations of nationalism in the realm of aesthetics in the period before Indian independence. The

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imaginary of the incipient nation and what its citizenry may be is varied, as each insti‑ tution’s history and its collection will reveal. Thus, the paper aims to contribute to the histories of the art museum in India and to the discourse around the relationship between the art museum and the nation, drawing on narratives from colonial history.

Situating the Art Museum in the Colony Ever since the Louvre redefined royal collections as national patrimony, the art museum has been read alongside discourses of nationalist art histories. It has been understood as a place for the constitution of art publics, and through them, a cultured citizenry.1 But the logic of colonialism that was at work in India was one based on the construction of difference – between the rulers and the ruled.2 By extension, India’s British rulers did not turn to the idea of an art museum either to showcase the artistic heritage of India, or as the site for the cultivation of a certain kind of citizenry. Instead, as the history of the first museum on the subcontinent shows us, this collect‑ ing model had encyclopaedic ambitions with regards to India.3 This early museum came to be formed under the aegis of the Royal Asiatic Society (1784), a body of schol‑ ars whose membership included amateur Orientalists of the East India Company. In 1814, they established the Imperial Museum (later known as the Indian Museum) in Calcutta; its collections comprised of antiquities including manuscripts, inscrip‑ tions, and objects of archaeological interest, architectural fragments, and sculptures along with geological, natural history, and mineral specimens as well as oddities. This collection, which sought to accommodate India’s past and present through its natural resources, man-made products, and historical artefacts, was to set the mould for colonial collecting.4 Where objects we may today understand as pre-modern art

1 See Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, New York: Routledge, 1995; and Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 2 Thomas Metcalf has noted that by the late Victorian period, this difference was articulated in terms of race, rather than environmental or cultural terms. Further, he notes: “As the effects of racial degen‑ eration could never be eradicated, India’s peoples, even though Aryan in origin, had now to remain forever distinct, different, and inevitably inferior.” See Thomas Metcalf, The New Cambridge History of India. Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 90. 3 Bernard Cohn notes how “For many Europeans India was a vast museum, its countryside filled with ruins, its people representing past ages – biblical, classical and feudal; it was a source of collectibles and curiosities to fill European museums, botanical gardens, zoos, and country houses.” See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 9. 4 The coming of the museum in the colony has been discussed in some length by Bernard Cohn and Tapati Guha-Thakurta. Cohn’s work points to the ‘modalities’ of colonialism of which he identified the



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found a space, it was under the umbrella term of antiquities5rather than the cate‑ gory of fine art, as distinct from the decorative or industrial arts.6 Indeed, antiqui‑ ties, suggesting artefacts rather than art, seemed to be a more enduring category in the context of the colony. As Kavita Singh has noted, Indian art, along with Indian independence, seemed to be visibly endorsed by the western academy and Britain through a celebratory exhibition of Indian masterpieces, Arts of India and Pakistan, held at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 1947 to 1948; the Exhibition was thus a masterstroke that acknowledged the sovereignty of the Indian (and Pakistani) nation and their art.7 But the museums under discussion here began the assembling of Indian collections in advance, perhaps even in anticipation, of this moment; they were influenced by a group of scholars, art historians, archaeologists, artists, ped‑ agogues, and nationalists who had been committed to the idea of identifying, pre‑ serving, and theorizing a great Indian artistic tradition since the last decades of the nineteenth century. They included philosopher, ideologue, and collector Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, E. B. Havell, the principal of the government art school at Calcutta, theosophist and nationalist Sister Nivedita, and the artist Abanindranath Tagore, among others. An enduring legacy of this period of scholarship was its insistence on the difference of Indian art from the western canon of art, thus turning difference into an ascription of value. If Indian art was derided for its absence of naturalism,

museological modality, meaning that everything in the colony offered itself to the space of the met‑ ropolitan museum and the larger colonial knowledge-gathering project. Guha-Thakurta has tracked the history of the Indian Museum as part of her investigation into the genealogies of modern fields of knowledge and their institutions in India. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 76–105. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories. Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, New York: Colum‑ bia University Press, 2004, pp. 43–84. For a detailed study of the deployment of India’s material past into frameworks of colonial justification, see Metcalf 2008 (as in note 2), pp. 66–159. 5 Guha-Thakurta notes that antiquities could mean “an all-encompassing denomination (includ‑ ing everything from whole monuments to the smallest architectural fragments, from manuscripts to sculptures, coins, and inscribed slabs), the concept […] becomes a marker of the period’s persistent bid for complete, comprehensive knowledge – knowledge that would thereafter allow the concept to be superseded, refined, particularized.” See Guha-Thakurta 2004 (as in note 4), pp. 3–4. 6 The discourse around the decorative arts developed in close relation to the category of fine arts. The idea that pervaded the colonial establishment was that Indians excelled at the decorative arts while lacking the ability for fine arts. For more on the development of Indian decorative arts or industrial arts as they were known in the colonial period, see Deepali Dewan, Crafting Knowledge and Knowledge of Crafts. Art Education, Colonialism and the Madras School of Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century South Asia, (Ph.D diss) University of Minnesota, 2001; Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty. Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility, New York: Routledge, 2006; Saloni Mathur, India By Design. Colonial History and Cultural Display, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007; Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 7 See Kavita Singh, The Museum Is National, in: India International Quarterly 29 (2002), pp. 176–196, p. 192.

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Coomaraswamy and his cohorts urged for a different vision with which to see Indian art and insisted that Indian art had to be judged by parameters independent of the western canon. In shifting the terms of the debate, new ground was created for Indian art. The ambition of Rai Krishnadas and Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi to found a fine arts museum in the pre-independence period was, therefore, a considered choice within a contested field. If the exhibits sought to substantiate the idea of Indian art, the found‑ ing of these institutions by Indian gentlemen connoisseurs suggested Indians’ ability to exercise aesthetic judgement and taste and was reflective of civilizational values.8 In the early part of the century the nationalist movement had entered what is known as the ‘Gandhian’ phase.9 Having tested some modes of public protest and mass politics for political agitation in South Africa, by 1919 Gandhi sought to strate‑ gically deploy ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (commonly defined as passive resistance), hartal (strike), and civil disobedience against British laws on a nation‑ wide scale, striking at the heart of the colonial state’s sovereignty.10 With this, Gandhi seemed to shift the terms of debate between Indians as colonial subjects and the colo‑

8 Partha Mitter offers a rich historical analysis of how Indian visual material posed a challenge in terms of its meaning and form within the conceptual schemas of European thought and the resultant European responses to Indian art, from the earliest moments of contact. By the Victorian period the trope of conjoining the moral state of society with its artistic practice and race was well in place, all of which contributed to the ideas of the degraded state of Indian society and its arts. See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters. A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, Chicago: University of Chi‑ cago Press, 2nd edition, 1992. 9 The Gandhian phase within the nationalist movement is usually understood as starting in April 1919 when Gandhi gave a call for a nationwide hartal (strike) to be accompanied by fasting and prayer in response to oppressive legislation such as the Rowlatt Act of 1919, which severely curtailed civil liberties in the name of controlling terrorist violence. This was called off by April 18 after the Jalli‑ anwala Bagh massacre on April 13 by General Dyer, where people attending a public meeting were shot inside a walled enclosure without any warning, killing over three hundred. By 1920, the growing discontent against oppressive British policies led Gandhi to declare the Non-Co-Operation Movement in August. As Bipan Chandra and others note: “The programme of non-cooperation included within its ambit the surrender of titles and honours, boycott of government affiliated schools and colleges, law courts, foreign cloth, and could be extended to include resignation from government service and mass civil disobedience including the nonpayment of taxes. National schools and colleges were to be set up, panchayats were to be established for settling disputes, handspinning and weaving was to be encouraged and people were asked to maintain Hindu-Muslim unity, give up untouchability and observe strict non-violence.” For a lucid account of the nationalist movement and Gandhi’s shaping of it, see Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee et al., India’s Struggle for Independence 1857–1947, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1989, chapters 14 and 15, pp. 170–196. 10 Gandhi’s tools of mass politics were cannily calculated to challenge British sovereignty through a controlled use of the disruption of order discussed above. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted,“break‑ ing the law was central to Gandhian nationalism” and both violent and non-violent methods of po‑ litical agitation were means of challenging the sovereignty of the colonial British state. Chakrabarty, in citing Foucault’s discussion of sovereignty, notes that the acquired sovereignty of British rulers was revealed to be an unstable structure once it was confronted by nationalism or even feelings of



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nial state in addition to bringing together different strands of Indian society under a common cause.11 As Uma Kalpagam notes, through Gandhi’s ethical imagination, the basis of citizenship and the public sphere in the colony shifted from one based in liberal ideology to the concept of ‘pure’ public opinion based on morality – his call for non-violence and non-cooperation was addressed to journalists, peasants, Harijans, women, and all. Indians were thus recast as autonomous and rational agents.12 This call for individual action also suggested a broader community and marked a shift from narratives of ‘civilizational infantilism’.13 It is in this charged period of challeng‑ ing, negotiating, and redefining ideas of what it would mean to be an Indian citizen that we need to place the above mentioned museums and their founders. The two museums under discussion, established by Indians, were also partici‑ pating in addressing the new Indian citizen as an autonomous agent, affirming her cultural sovereignty and equality. This was no coincidence either. Common to both collectors – Rai Krishnadas and Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi – was their association with Gandhi. Rai Krishnadas remained associated with the Indian National Congress and its leaders all his life. Balasaheb Pant Pratindhi, in his capacity as a ruler of a small princely state, Aundh, was responsible for experimenting with ideas of village­ republics, in consultation with Gandhi. In the following sections on the individual institutional histories and biographies, the differing responses and paths taken under the rubric of nationalism will be examined.

anti-colonialism. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘In the Name of Politics’: Sovereignty, Democracy and the Multitude in India, in Economic and Political Weekly 40 (2005), pp. 3293–3301, p. 3296. 11 Partha Chatterjee, commenting on the achievement of Gandhian thought and strategies, notes: “its ability to open up the possibility for achieving perhaps the most important historical task for a successful national revolution in a country like India viz. the political appropriation of the subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for hegemony in the new nation-state. In the Indian case, the largest popular element of the nation was the peasantry. And it was the Gandhian ideology which opened up the historical possibility for its appropriation into the evolving political structures of the Indian state.” See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Discourse, Lon‑ don: Zed Books, 1986, p. 100. 12 Uma Kalpagam, using earlier scholarship on liberalism and colonialism, has discussed the con‑ tradiction of the liberal ideology in the context of colonialism. The project of colonialism was one based on the assumption of “civilizational infantilism”, i.e. the inability of colonial subjects to govern themselves unless educated and reformed, which in turn would negate the need for foreign rulers. See Uma Kalpagam, Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere in India, in: Journal of Historical Sociology 15 (2002), pp. 35–58, p. 53. 13 Ibid., p. 37.

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Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras: A Robust Indian Canon The history of the Bharat Kala Bhavan is interwoven with the biography of its founder, Rai Krishnadas and his association with the nationalist movement. Rai Krishnadas’s engagement with the many cultural discourses of the time – mainly in literature and art – was a long-standing one. At least some part of this had to do with his position as one of the wealthy, cultured families from Banaras, associated with the Mughal court. Their location in Banaras meant that he would inherit the unique cosmopolitanism of Banarasis called Banarsipan, which included distinctive forms of social, cultural, and community life as well as attitudes towards life and leisure.14 His home in Banaras served as a salon, where a lively scene of exchange prevailed between local and vis‑ iting writers, scholars, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. In 1920, Rai Krishnadas established the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Banaras as a museum dedicated to Indian fine arts, crafts, textiles, archaeology, and numismatics. His efforts found broader support through an organization called the Bharat Kala Parishad, which aimed to promote public interest in the arts through a number of measures and comprised of local nota‑ bles in the fields of literature, music, and culture. Interestingly, despite this sustained involvement within the sphere of culture, his explanation about the moment and milieu that led to the emergence of the Bharat Kala Bhavan is instead tied to the Non-Cooperation Movement that was launched by Gandhi. He remarks: “[…] a new era began for India on 6 April 1919 when ‘Bapu’ (Gandhi) gave the call for a countrywide strike or hartal. And it is this age of trans‑ formation that made every aspect of the nation’s life throb and pulse – the Bharat Kala Bhavan was also a part of this moment of awakening.”15But an earlier formative moment also appears in the originary discourses of the Bharat Kala Bhavan.16 The young Rai Krishnadas met the renowned scholar of Indian art Ananda Coomaras‑ wamy in 1910.17 The meeting with Coomaraswamy obviously left an imprint on the collecting of the Rai Krishnadas.

14 Sandria Freitag, Culture and Power in Banaras. Community, Performance and Environment 1800– 1900, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992, p. 166. 15 Hargovind Gupta (ed.), Kalanidhi Kaustubh. Rai Krishnadas, Delhi: Jagat Ram and Sons, 1994, p. 159. 16 See T. K. Biswas, Bharat Kala Bhavan, in: Bulletin of Museums and Archaeology in Uttar Pradesh Rai Krishnadasa Commemorative Volume 19–20 (1977), pp. 13–22, p. 13. 17 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy had been invited by the British government to head the art section of the United Provinces Exhibition of 1910 to 1911 to be held in Allahabad. This gave Coomaraswamy a chance to go on a “hunting trip” through Rajasthan and Punjab, collecting a wealth of material, particularly paintings, bringing into the lexicon and discourse of Indian art history terms such as ‘Ra‑ jput’ and ‘Pahari’ painting. See Giles Tillotson (ed.), A Passionate Eye. Textiles, Paintings and Sculptures from the Bharany Collections, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2014, p. 19. Coomaraswamy is known to have proposed a national museum to be located in Banaras, which would contain representative samples of different schools of Indian painting; these forays and the wealth of material they revealed



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These narratives of inspiration and influence aside, what is clear is that by the 1920s, Rai Krishnadas seemed to have embarked on a programme of collecting guided by his aesthetic sensibilities, with an eye towards setting up an institution. This collection (described below) was premised on the idea of recovering and studying archaeological artefacts under the rubric of art rather than archaeology. Thus, temple sculptures, loose pieces from pre-modern architectural sites, and paintings emerging from numerous small courts as well as some imperial Mughal paintings formed Krish‑ nadas’s collection. Sources are thin about when particular works were added, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Rai Krishnadas’s aesthetic sensibilities were as alive to folk objects as to sculpture and painting. And his sources, as eclectic as the objects he collected, included dealers, friends, and other collectors from whom he solicited pieces, and archaeological finds. The collection and his efforts were acknowledged by a host of nationalist leaders. Select objects from the collection were displayed at the Kanpur session of the Congress in 1925. In 1929, Gandhi published an appeal in his weekly, Young India, supporting the call for contributions of money or antiquities.18 This growing acknowledgement and praise for the collection contributed to raising its profile as a collection for the Indian nation that was yet to come. Rai Krishnadas’s efforts at nurturing this collection of Indian art and his determi‑ nation to institutionalize it ensured its transition into independent India. As a collec‑ tion begun with the imagination of a free Indian nation, claiming a veritable artistic and aesthetic legacy, Bharat Kala Bhavan’s moment seemed to have arrived in inde‑ pendent India. The Bharat Kala Bhavan found a permanent home through the initia‑ tive of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) when the university renewed an earlier offer to permanently house the collection in 1949. In 1951, honouring Rai Krishnadas’s request, the first Prime Minister of indepen‑ dent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, laid the foundation stone for a dedicated building for the museum within the premises of this university; the museum eventually opened in 1962, a decade after the National Museum opened in Delhi.19 In its foundation were placed the newly minted coins of independent India that were yet to pass into circulation, specially sent by the Prime Minister’s office on the museum’s request.20 The BHU was started by Madan Mohan Malviya in 1916, after an extensive campaign with appeals to the Hindu community and a number of Indian rulers. The establish‑ ment of the university marked a moment when Indian elites sought to adapt western

certainly seemed to provide enough material to make such a mission possible. Coomaraswamy’s plan, however, came to fruition eventually only at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 18 Biswas 1977 (as in note 16), p.16. 19 Unlike the Bharat Kala Bhavan, which was the result of sustained collecting, the National Museum at Delhi was formed from the exhibition of art held at the Royal Academy in London in 1947 to 1948. For a detailed discussion of the formation of the National Museum, see Guha-Thakurta 2004 (as in note 4), pp. 175–204 and Singh 2002 (as in note 7), pp. 176–196. 20 Rai Krishnadas, Jawaharbhai. Unki Atmiyata aur Sahrudayata, Jhansi: Setu Prakashan, 1965, p. 66.

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Fig. 1: Exterior view of the Bharat Kala Bhavan. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

institutions and systems like university education to Indian ideals. BHU’s distinctive architecture became the means through which the unique vision of the Bharat Kala Bhavan was incorporated within the university campus. The Bharat Kala Bhavan is consonant with the rest of the academic buildings of the BHU, which resemble temple spires and feature architectural elements such as the porches, balconies, and chhatris (fig. 1). Of the colours, Leah Renold notes that cream and maroon were con‑ sidered to be distinctly Hindu colours, and were meant to symbolize the self-restraint and renunciation of monks and nuns. The qualities of renunciation, pious study, and celibacy were meant to inspire the students of the university.21In the case of the Kala Bhavan, these values may not be amiss, except the object of devotion is art. This devotion towards art and its collecting as it was embodied by Rai Krishnadas is dis‑ cussed below. It was Rai Krishnadas’s role as a literary organizer that allowed for his burgeoning collection to find its first home on the premises of the Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha (1893), a body dedicated to the standardization and spread of the dialect of Khari Boli, which gave rise to the modern-day language of Hindi. This endeavour was accompa‑ nied by moves towards using a classicized, standardized Hindi within socio-politi‑ cal arenas. By the early decades of the twentieth century, influential writers in Rai

21 Leah Renold, A Hindu Education. Early Years of the Banaras Hindu University, Oxford: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press, 2005, p. 150.



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Krishnadas’s circle were beginning to posit it as the national language.22 However, the idea of a ‘national’ language – allowing for new forms of collectivity on the basis of language – took on an urgency and attractiveness in the charged decade of the 1920s. As a member of this milieu engaged in the activities of the Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Rai Krishnadas’s efforts seem to have been directed towards paralleling the attempts at addressing this imagined community through the positing of Indian art as collective artistic heritage. What is interesting about this endeavour of collecting the nation’s heritage, however, is the solitary connoisseur’s eye which sifts, sorts, and exercises aesthetic judgement. Thus, Rai Krishnadas’s engagements with language worked towards creating collective values and discourses, while his art collecting enabled him to speak for the community. In this way, two pictures emerge from Rai Krishnadas’s biography – the committed Gandhian nationalist and a refined collector and connoisseur. Stories abound of him actively soliciting donations of artworks. Having seen a fragment of a large sculpture, a pair of feet from a female figure reportedly dated to the Gupta period, Krishnadas was determined to bring this fragment to the Museum. His friend and government official, Brijmohan Vyas, was also in the process of collecting pre-modern art for Allahabad’s Museum. However, Krishnadas, with much persuasion and wordplay, convinced him to part with it. The idea of creating a collection comprising of ‘schools’ of art, as in western art history, which systematically demonstrated the idea of progression in Indian art undergirded Rai Krishnadas’s collecting. The Gupta period fragment would be significant for this project given that the Gupta period was considered the apogee of Indian art and culture.23 But this doggedness was not merely a didactic exercise for Rai Krishnadas. Anecdotal evidence suggests a connoisseur’s ‘eye’ for aesthetic merit that extends to the pursuit of all objects of beauty, rather than being confined to sculp‑ ture and painting. His friends recount that once convinced of a certain object that he believed would add to the collection, he could go to great lengths to procure it. When shown certain rock crystal and jade hilts brought in by a dealer, Rai Krishnadas report‑

22 This dialect, Khari Boli,had a distinct advantage over others of the region due to its written script, but this was at the expense of earlier multilingual usage and also court languages such as Persian and Urdu. Francesca Orsini’s work on the Hindi public sphere has mapped the process by which the language of Hindi acquired its seemingly ‘national’ character by concerted efforts towards the stan‑ dardization of more local dialects and the resistance and tensions that marked this process. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere. 1920–1940, Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 2009, pp. 1–175. 23 About the anointing of the Gupta period as the apogee of Indian art and culture, Kavita Singh, in paraphrasing Romila Thapar, notes that it was “to some degree motivated by a desire to locate one, suitably early period, as ‘classical’ in which purely ‘Indian’ aesthetic is achieved. As Romila Thapar has shown, the Guptas became the centerpiece of Indian history (not just art history) because they provided a desirable ancestor for the modern Indian nation. The Gupta empire was prosperous and extensive, but it was also the period in which Buddhism declined and Brahmanism gained ground.” See Singh 2003 (as in note 7), p. 195, fn. 6.

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edly told him that he could not let him leave the house with these objects and, despite the lack of funds, found ways of retaining the hilts; to let go of beautiful objects, he said, was a sin.24Though he was a cosmopolitan scholar and connoisseur, the urgency of his mission seems guided by the idea that aesthetically pleasing objects from India’s past needed to be recovered and to enter the institution of the art museum, signalling an investment in the institution and its role in the nation to come. How do these narratives of connoisseurship sit alongside the onerous task of col‑ lecting for the nation? How far can the honed eye of the aesthete collect in the name of the nation, and what are the limits of this collecting? The art historian Dr. Moti‑ chandra was the director of the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India in Bombay (now Mumbai) and a friend of Rai Krishnadas. While Dr. Motichandra worked within institutional constraints like budgets, Rai Krishnadas’s collecting was another matter altogether. In the post-Independence period, Motichandra once chided him about buying art despite being in an indebted state and harangued by debtors. With the government unable to provide the funds that Rai Krishnadas was constantly request‑ ing, he advised him to buy only that which he could afford. Rai Krishnadas took out his Gandhi-cap in a gesture of humility and said: “Hit me if you like but what can I do, I am helpless. My eyes which thirst for artistic beauty force me to commit this crime repeatedly.”25Motichandra’s irate comments clearly reveal the tensions between Rai Krishnadas’s connoisseurship and his stated mandate of building a collection for the nation, for which he was requesting government funds. His response foregrounds the individualized narrative of collecting, connoisseurship, and love for art rather than a collection for the nation. Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The System of Collecting” has noted that the col‑ lector partakes of the sublime not by virtue of the thing he collects but by virtue of his fanaticism.26 In the case of Rai Krishnadas and his collecting for the Kala Bhavan, his energies were directed towards the making of the art historical canon for the Indian nation. Rai Krishnadas’s fanaticism was one that spoke in the name of the nation, even as it was guided by his connoisseurship. At the moment when the nation is being thought anew, individual proclivities are synthesized in the name of the nation. But these tensions are brought to the fore once the independent nation comes about. In addition to collecting for the Kala Bhavan, the honed eye was now directed as a part of the various museum committees that Rai Krishnadas was a member of in the post-In‑ dependence period.

24 When unable to procure objects for the Kala Bhavan, Rai Krishnadas used his position on the committees of various museums, such as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India and even the National Museum, to ensure that high quality objects entered public collections. See Gupta 1994 (as in note 15), p. 151. 25 Ibid., p. 147. 26 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Collecting, in: John Elsner, Roger Cardinal (eds.), The Cultures of Collecting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 9.



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Outlined below are a few observations about the museum’s layout based on the museum’s present display, which, however, allows us to reflect on how the Museum was conceptualized.27 The scope and breadth of the Bharat Kala Bhavan collection is vast, and it is housed in an equally imposing building, whose wide corridors and massive galleries can often produce a sense of alienating, forlorn grandeur. The fine arts of painting and sculpture have received a special emphasis. This choice is signifi‑ cant. For Rai Krishnadas and for writers of nationalist art historical scholarship of the period such as Coomaraswamy and others discussed above, it was precisely through the forms of art acknowledged by the western academy, i.e. painting and sculpture rather than folk art or textiles, for example, that it became important to show the refinement of Indian art, and to chart its genealogy through the ages. It became imperative to create a discourse around Indian ‘fine art’ through choice specimens of high art forms like painting and sculpture. Consequently, the sculpture and painting galleries of the museum serve as bookends to the entire collection. Their arrangement has also been made according to various schools of art, identified by the ruling dynas‑ ties of the area and the period, such as the Gupta and Maurya dynasties. This concep‑ tion of Indian art through the ages draws on the model of western art history, with its ‘schools’ of painting and sculpture, denoting chronology and the attendant value system, including the cycle of the birth, flowering, and decay of artistic styles. There‑ fore, Rai Krishnadas’s endeavour seems to have been to find the finest specimens he could find within each ‘school’ of painting and sculpture to put to rest any doubts about the Indian fine art tradition. Thus, he was furthering the project of Coomar‑ swamy and others, in demonstrating an Indian fine arts tradition and populating it with choice examples. Coomaraswamy, and, after him, Rai Krishnadas was seeking a specificity in Indian art that was categorically based on categories of art, such as sculpture and painting, that were in line with the categories of the western canon. The sculpture gallery of the museum showcases Indian sculpture and its various schools from the third century B.C.E to the fourteenth century C.E. But it is partic‑ ularly strong in works of the Kushana and Gupta period. Of the Kushana period, the museum owns a number of Buddhist works of art, including some exquisite Buddha heads such as the fasting Buddha (fig. 2/pl. X) and Boddhisatva figures.28 The Gupta period is well represented with a number of examples. A monumental sculpture of

27 These observations are based on fieldwork conducted in June 2013. At the time of writing this essay, the museum is in the process of renovation, with an update of its lighting systems and display, though no structural changes are being carried out. 28 The elevation of Kushana sculpture rested to a large extent on the rejection of the Gandharan school of Buddhist sculpture, which was believed to have been influenced by the Indo-Greek culture. Guha-Thakurta notes: “With Coomaraswamy, in particular, the Kushana Mathura school of sculpture of a roughly contemporary period emerged as a powerful alternative to the Gandhara school, displac‑ ing it as the core of an indigenous Buddhist art form and as the main bridge that linked the Maurya and Gupta imperial epochs.” See Guha-Thakurta 2004 (as in note 4), p. 186.

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Fig. 2: Fasting Buddha, Kushana period, 1st–3rd century C.E. Grey schist. Sculpture gallery, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.

Fig. 3: Krishna Bearing the Mountain Govardhan (far left in the background), Gupta period, 4th–6th century C.E. Sandstone. Central hall, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.

the god Krishna marks the entrance to the sculpture gallery (fig. 3). Architectural frag‑ ments – loose stones, pillars, capitals, lintels, and stray figures – can be found in the verandah outside this tightly structured gallery, showing us parts that could not be accommodated by the tidy narrative that unfolds within. Enfolded within the sculp‑ ture gallery is the Nidhi gallery – a safe room that holds the museum’s most valuable and rare objects. These include gold coins from the Gupta period, miniature terra‑ cotta figures from the excavation of the nearby pre-historic site of Rajghat, and jade cups belonging to the Mughal emperor Jahangir and his ancestor Ulugh Beg, among other objects. This gallery showcases the work of the connoisseur Rai Krishnadas in its emphasis on that which is unique, precious, and rare, sought by the keen eye of the aesthete; it stands in contrast to the ordered unfolding of art historical time as marked by specimens of different schools of painting or sculpture (fig. 4). However, despite the antiquated pattern of chronological placement, the superior quality of the works shines through. This becomes especially creditable if one registers the fact that at the time when Rai Krishnadas was collecting, Indian art history and its contours



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Fig. 4: Interior view of sculpture gallery, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.

were not fully shaped and a taste for it not yet developed. Therefore, in assembling this fine collection, Rai Krishnadas through his discerning eye was helping create the canon of Indian art. Made up of choice examples meant to reflect the diversity and richness of the various schools of Indian painting, the painting collection has been a crucial resource for scholars of Indian art. It begins with palm-leaf illustrations of a Jain manuscript of the twelfth century, the Pancharaksha Sutra, from eastern India. Weaving its way through regional styles, the many centres of Rajput and Pahari painting, and some refined examples of Mughal miniatures, this chronology comes to an end at the twen‑ tieth century, with a representation of artists of the Bengal school.29 If the solidity of stone allows the sculpture gallery to demonstrate the antiquity of Indian art, the painting gallery with its modern works and revivalist styles is made to reflect the new vitality of Indian art.30 The antiquity of the subcontinent’s civilization is amply demonstrated by the expansive terracotta collection of the museum, which begins with animal and human figures from the Indus Valley civilization. The decorative arts, numismatics, and textiles are other significant parts of the collection. Rai Krishnadas’s collection was made with the aim of establishing an art museum for the new Indian nation. The collection of sculptures, paintings, folkarts, and tex‑ tiles was one that most closely reflected the styles, aesthetic values, and hierarchies that emerged in the art history that was written through the early decades of the twen‑ tieth-century period. It is the high quality of the collection that attests to Rai Krish‑ nadas’s role as a connoisseur-collector at the time when the canon of Indian art was being formed. It was in this moment when the new Indian nation was being imagined

29 Indian miniature painting is typically classified under the broad typology of three schools – Mu‑ ghal, Rajput, and Pahari – referring to the courts under which they flourished, and it is further frag‑ mented according to regional variations. 30 As Kavita Singh has noted in the context of the National Museum, stone sculpture serves a useful function in the construction of an art historical timeline given its durable quality and also for its superficial resemblance to the stone sculpture of Greek and Roman antiquity. See Singh 2003 (as in note 7), p. 178.

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that Rai Krishnadas’s dual role as a Gandhian nationalist and a connoisseur-collector were synthesized. The collection’s value needs to be understood as constitutive of the moment when the cultural legacy of the Indian nation was being shared with future citizens through institutions like the art museum. This means that Rai Krishna‑ das’s collection of great aesthetic value was made in a period when the new standards in aesthetics were still being formulated – and that these standards were perhaps even formed by the exemplars found in the collection. Rai Krishnadas therefore used emerging scholarship and his own networks of influence to collect what may have been loose sculptures or folios. If it is the eye of the connoisseur that stands between the apotheosis of an artwork and obscurity or indifference, Rai Krishnadas was vigi‑ lantly performing his role.

Aundh’s Museum and Experiments with Self-Rule31 The next museum discussed in this essay, the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya, is located in a nondescript village in the southwestern part of the present-day Indian state of Maharashtra. The village of Aundh was the capital of a small principality of the same name, and the museum was founded by its last ruler. Unlike the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Aundh’s art museum does not find space within the discourses of Indian art history, except in marginalized ways. A work by the modernist sculptor Henry Moore, Mother and Child (1931), is the only known work by the artist to be found in India, serving as the museum’s most prestigious link to the wider world beyond Aundh. Its collections offer little by way of the grand unfolding of nationalist art history, which would represent various schools of painting as well as sculptural originals coming from a range of sites. Instead, the collections highlight the work of artists of the region and are heavily populated by casts and copies – in most cases of paintings and classi‑ cal sculpture by Renaissance masters (figs. 5/pl. XI, 6). Is it perhaps the ratio of originals to copies that leaves Aundh’s museum on the margins? Or is it the very presence of the casts and copies that marks the museum as a dated institution? If so, how does one understand a cast collection in rural, pre-In‑ dependence India? Michael Falser has noted that the motivational history of cast col‑ lections (as opposed to collections of original objects) provides us with greater insight into the evolution and contested discourse of the field of art history, taken within its specific national-political context, than it does into the displayed art pieces them‑

31 This section of the paper is drawn from my M.Phil dissertation, Experiments in Art and Self-Rule. The Museum at Aundh, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2012, supervised by Dr. Kavita Singh.



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Fig. 5: View of the gallery of western artists. Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya, Aundh. Paintings in view include, from left to right copies of, The Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist (1507) by Raphael and Mona Lisa (1503–1506) by Leonardo da Vinci (both in the Louvre Museum); Madonna of the Gold Finch (1505–1506) by Raphael, (Galleria degli Uffizi); The Reader by Jean-Jacques Henner (Musée d’Orsay).

Fig. 6: Winged Mercury (foreground), copy of a sculpture by Giambologna, 1609 C.E. Bronze. Original at the Louvre, Paris. In the background, some important casts of classical Greek sculpture including, left to right: 2nd figure: Venus de Medici, original in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Three Graces by Antonia Canova (1814–1817), original in the Hermitage Museum; extreme right, Callipygian Venus, original in Museo Nazionale, Naples.

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selves.32 In contextualizing the collection of casts and copies at Aundh’s Museum, this section aims to demonstrate how Aundh’s art museum, through a strategic cita‑ tion of western art, worked to demonstrate the parity of local artistic ability and, by extension, a larger Indian acumen for fine arts. Simultaneously, it participated in the citizen-making project that was being followed more directly in the polity. A treaty enforced by the British in the early nineteenth century meant that the small state of Aundh came under the paramountcy of the British. Balasaheb was the chosen candidate of the British administration for ruling the state in 1909, once his nephew was deposed on grounds of misconduct. For one whose own political agency was curtailed, Balasaheb is remembered for the “gift” he gave his people in 1938, during the traditional court he held on his seventieth birthday. On this day, he renounced all his powers in favour of his subjects, addressing them as “my children who are now capable of managing their own affairs.”33 This declaration was followed up by the adoption of a Swaraj (self-rule) Constitution in January 1939, formulated in consultation with Gandhi.34 For Gandhi, Aundh’s small, rural base suggested the pos‑ sibilities of testing his cherished idea of gram-rajya or village republics; broadly, this idea entailed treating the village as an autonomous and self-sufficient administrative and economic unit. But, to what extent could self-rule be given under colonialism? In his adoption of this Gandhian blueprint, Balasaheb, as the ruler of a treaty state, was giving to his people a gift that was not his to give. Balasaheb exercised his sovereignty with greater latitude to carry out his paternalistic schemes for his populace through another institution, which paralleled Aundh’s shifts in polity – the Shri Bhavani Chi‑ trasangrahalaya (art museum), which also opened in 1938. The museum, a long-cher‑ ished project for Balasaheb, helped him negotiate the many facets of his public and private life – namely his position as a native ruler in British India, an amateur paint‑ er,a collector, and a traditional patron of the arts. A self-taught painter, Balasaheb ordered instruction manuals and supplies for painting from firms abroad and was particularly enamoured by the medium of oil and its ability to capture likeness. When, from 1892 to 1893, the famed Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma was in Bombay, Balasaheb had a chance to observe him at work. Varma has been credited with bringing Indian mythic figures to life by adapting the visual vocabulary of western academic painting. Though Balasaheb received no men‑ toring from the senior artist, he was greatly inspired by the latter’s dedication to the

32 Michael Falser, Krishna and the Plaster Cast. Translating the Cambodian Temple of Angkor Wat in the French Colonial Period, in: Transcultural Studies 2 (2011), pp. 6–50, esp. p. 11. 33 Apa Pant, An Unusual Raja. Mahatma Gandhi and the Aundh Experiment, Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1989, p. 37. 34 Indira Rothermund, in her book on the Aundh Experiment details the gradual changes to Aundh’s administrative structure preceding and after the adoption of the Swaraj Constitution. See Indira Ro‑ thermund, The Aundh Experiment. A Gandhian Grassroots Democracy, Bombay: Somaiya Publica‑ tions, 1983.



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craft.35 Though the museum possesses only three paintings by Varma, his influence is palpable through the many copies of his works by other artists. Balasaheb’s own oeuvre, which comprised entirely of religious and historical themes, suggests that he strongly identified with Varma’s project. While living away from Aundh he embarked on the Chitra-Ramayana (Picture-Ramayana) project by rigorously studying different versions of the ancient epic the Ramayana. Balasaheb’s effort with the Ramayana was directed towards creating what he termed as an “authentic” version of the text by depicting the appropriate costumes, body types, and mannerisms.36 In this, he differed from his inspiration, Varma, who, as Balasaheb noted, painted even ancient characters in modern garb.37 In addition to these engagements with the genre of painting historical and myth‑ ological scenes, popularized by Raja Ravi Varma, Balasaheb had an enduring interest in the western academic style. He extended his patronage of contemporary produc‑ tion, especially of work by artists from western India associated with the Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art. This school, set up in 1857 through the largesse of an Indian industrialist of the same name, trained students in the methods of western academic art. Parallely, he acquired works by artists of the Bengal School, a revivalist style of Indian painting, adding small works by Abanindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, and Sharada and Ranada Ukil, among others. The Aundh Museum’s collection includes several galleries dedicated to painting and sculpture. Balasaheb also seems to have attempted building a collection of pre-modern Indian painting, on a modest scale; this includes mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century miniatures of the Rajput,Pa‑ hari, and Deccan schools, and a small number of works in the late Mughal style. As mentioned above, these collections of Indian art sit alongside the museum’s numer‑ ous casts and copies of western classical works. Below, I consider the valence of a scaled-down copy of the Apollo Belvedere in this collection and what this suggests about Balasaheb’s vision for the museum. By the nineteenth century, imperial networks enabled the dispersal of casts of classical sculpture to museums, art schools, private collections, and individual col‑ lections in the colonies. The British colony of India was integrated within this circuit of travelling casts and copies, and their role within art education was considered sig‑ nificant. With their ability to be rearranged and harnessed to education they proved attractive to public and to educational institutions at the time that could not afford original objects. The South Kensington model of art education as it was carried out in India strongly relied on casts and copies as a means of instruction. Mahrukh Tarapor notes:

35 Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi, Atmacharitra, 2 vols., Aundh State: D.T. Joshi, 1946, vol. 1, p. 472. 36 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 438. 37 Ibid.

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Antique casts, Gothic mouldings, Greek statuary, and a mediocre assortment of European pain‑ tings were imported from South Kensington to form the basis of the native craftsman’s training, and the Bombay School [Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art] by 1896 could boast that its equip‑ ment represented ‘the best collection of casts of Greek and Greco-Roman sculpture that exists on this side of Suez, and no student can go in and out of the place without seeing them’.38

In addition to forming the teaching corpus of colonial art schools, for students they seemed to represent a grasp over exactly those techniques and skills due to which western artists claimed superiority over their Indian counterparts. Indeed, the casts may have represented a clearer standard of artistic excellence than the confused pol‑ icies of the colonial art schools.39 A telling example of finding inspiration from the collection of casts comes from the Bombay art school that Tarapor mentions. Ganpatrao Kashinath Mhatre was a student enrolled in the painting department of the school. In 1896 he stunned his teachers at the school and the Bombay artworld with his sculpture, To the Temple, a life-size figure of a native woman, bedecked on her visit to the temple. Mhatre’s feat was remarkable since he had received no training in sculpture and had executed the figure with no assistance from his European teachers. Instead, Mhatre had turned to observing the casts that populated the art school to create his masterpiece. His work stood as vindication of “[…] the Indian ability to master Greco-Roman precepts pain‑ lessly”, a seemingly tall order for the novitiate artist.40 Michael Camille, in examining the relationship between the art historical canon and casts, notes that “a canon is not made up of the actual objects but only of repre‑ sentations of those objects [...]. Whether their bias be nationalist, formalist, or icono‑ graphic, canons are created not so much out of a series of worthy objects as out of the possibilities of their reproduction.”41 These possibilities of reproduction serve as nodes of relay for artistic practice, as seen in the example above. Thus, cast collections have been valued for at least two distinct but related possibilities that they engender – their didactic potential, i.e. as a tool of learning for artists and others – and their role in the restaging of the art historical canon, a task indexed to power. These pos‑ sibilities can empower the owner “[…] to translate and circulate exact, licensed, and valuable copies of the object in any desired place, context, time frame, function, and

38 Mahrukh Tarapor, John Lockwood Kipling and the Arts and Crafts Movement in India, in: AA Files 3 (1983), pp. 12–21, p. 14. 39 On colonial art schools in India and their policies, see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India. 1850–1922 – Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 29–62. 40 Ibid., p. 103; Similarly, Mahadev Vishwanath Dhurandhar, an alumnus of the school who rose to become its first Indian superintendent was, in fact, inspired to become an artist by looking at the antique casts of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art, ibid., p. 90. 41 Michael Camille, Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters, in: The Art Bulletin 78 (1996), pp. 198–201, p. 198.



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for an audience and political intention determined by the representatives of power.”42 Balasaheb seemed to have grasped this potential of casts and used the site of the museum to rewrite some narratives of power and subjectivity in the context of artistic production and art viewing. In the guidebook to the museum written by him in 1943, Balasaheb mentions a room of “Copies of Great Western Artists.” It included copies of works by Raphael – Madonna of the Goldfinch, Madonna of the Chair, Madonna and the Child, of portraits by Elisabeth Louise Vegee Le Brun, a self-portrait by Rembrandt (with a gold chain), and of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, among others. In terms of sculpture, Bal‑ asaheb seems to have accumulated Pompeiian casts on his travels to Europe; these included Drunken Silenus, Dancing Faunus/Bacchus, and Listening Narcissus, Seated Mercury, and Winged Mercury. The museum also displays scaled down marble copies of works that are understood as constituting the ‘canon’ of western art based on Greek and Roman examples.43 These include: the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de Medici, Crouching Venus (most probably modelled on the Lely Venus at the British Museum), Michaelangelo’s David, the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna, and The Wrestlers – a Roman copy of the Greek original, also called the Pancrastinae, Cupid and Psyche from the Louvre, where Cupid seems to have lost his wings. Against the background of the ubiquity of casts in colonial India, Balasaheb’s acquisition of casts and copies seems to echo prevalent tastes and carries a deriva‑ tive charge. However, when seen in relation to some of the works commissioned by him, the role of these casts and copies in the museum, as envisioned by Balasaheb, becomes clear. Beyond his personal taste for classical art, the casts and copies need to be read in the context of Balasaheb’s role as a patron to a number of contemporary artists, and as a means of acquainting the general populace with High Classicism. For Balasaheb the amateur artist and for the artists patronized by him, the casts and copies would have served as an educational resource. Their status as masterpieces of western art aside, for Aundh’s rural public, which was greatly removed from the metropolitan centre of Bombay, the effect of these nude men, women, and gods within the visual universe of Aundh would have been tremen‑

42 Falser 2011 (as in note 32), p. 10. 43 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny note that “the taking of plaster casts from an original was an essential step in spreading world-wide appreciation of the most esteemed antique statues […]”. It was the Italian artist Primaticcio at the court of Francis I (1494–1547) who undertook the large-scale copying of antique statuary through a revived ancient process, to be displayed at the king’s villa at Fontainbleu in 1543. Through this dispersal, Primaticcio’s project had the effect that “[…] from now on the values of antiquity were to be used north as well as south of the Alps as a criterion of artistic judgement.” Francis Haskell,Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 3–5.

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dous.44 With their devoted delineation of the human body, these sculptures differed from the clothed and bedecked figures of gods and goddesses depicted by fine artists like Raja Ravi Varma and the popular prints that were available. In offering the frame‑ work of classical art through which to view these nude figures, Balasaheb seemed to cast his subjects in the role of aesthetes and therefore, as modern subjects. Aundh’s art museum was invested in the idea of the art museum as a space for the creation of the modern subject and citizen. Through this, Aundh’s populace appears no different in its ability to exercise aesthetic judgement and imbibe the values of classical form from the European citizens who strolled in their public galleries and museums, often populated with these casts, laying collective claim to the artistic heritage on display. Through this familiarization with the knowledge of the western canon of art, Bala‑ saheb seems to insist on a parity – of the imbibing of the values of classical art and its attendant effects in the creation of cultured citizenry, none of which, he posits, is beyond the capabilities of Aundh’s populace. Why, then, should self-rule seem like an impossibility? A dialogue develops between the collection of classical sculpture casts and the sculpture of Aundh, with a play of location, medium, and genre. Mahadev Patharvat was a local sculptor whose family had traditionally carved idols for worship. Balasa‑ heb encouraged Patharvat and his family to experiment with realist sculpture by com‑ missioning them to carve Indian gods in the western academic style, leading to an output that included marble portraits of members of the Pant Pratinidhi family and busts of historical figures. But the most ambitious set of works seems to be Balasa‑ heb’s commission of a set of six sculptures in marble, mounted individually on pedes‑ tals that show female personifications of Indian seasons, made for the museum’s col‑ lection (fig. 7/pl. XII). The pedestals contain verses in praise of the depicted seasons by a respected Marathi poet. These marble sculptures were modelled on Balasaheb’s daughters and were executed under Balasaheb’s direction; where they were installed in the museum originally is not known. They draw on the concept of Horae, the Greek goddesses associated with the portioning of time and seasons. It is the medium of marble and Balasaheb’s familiarity and inclination towards classical western art that prompts us to think of the parallels with Horae, more than with Indian representa‑ tions of the seasons or time, such as the Baramasa.45 With his commissioning of these sculptures, Balasaheb seems keen on engaging in a dialogue with western classical art, using the medium of marble with figures drawn from Indian thought and exe‑

44 Pamela Born notes that suppliers of these casts and copies all provided an adjustable fig leaf, sug‑ gesting that viewers in the west would have also been shocked by the flagrant nudity of these figures. Pamela Born, The Canon Is Cast. Plaster Casts in American Museum and University Collections, in: Art Documentation. Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 21 (2002), pp. 8–13, p.11. 45 The Baramasa, or twelve months, refers to the depictions of the twelve months of the Hindu cal‑ endar in Indian painting and literature, typically featuring divine lovers like the god Krishna and his consort Radha.



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Fig. 7: Indian Seasons, personified by female figures, from left to right, Vasant (Spring), Grishma (Summer), Varsha (Monsoon), attributed to Mahadev Patharvat. Cast of the bust of Apollo.

cuted locally. In referencing the medium and theme of western classicism yet rework‑ ing its content, Balasaheb, through his patronage, was offering a local response and engaging in a dialogue with western art and civilization. Donald Preziosi has remarked on “the totalizing notion of art […] one of the most remarkable of modern European inventions […] one of the most effective ideological instruments for the retroactive rewriting of the history of human societies.”46 Bala‑ saheb’s self-conscious forms work with the idea of this mode of using art as history, and they destabilize any easy understanding of the nature of the ideological project of this remarkable European invention. They are meant to create a sense of continu‑ ity with the past and a measure of civilization, albeit on terms set by colonial power relations. Simultaneously, the museum provided its rural visitors with a picture of regional pride, given the artist, patron, and model’s own location, while referring to Indian civilizational thought. The museum served as the site for these aesthetic experiments, participating within the larger paradigm shift that was taking place in Aundh and suggesting the possibility of Indian citizenship in advance of Indian inde‑ pendence; it is the space where rural subjects are addressed to not only engage with

46 See Donald Preziosi, Collecting/Museums, in: Robert. S. Nelson, Robert Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 409.

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classical western art but also reflect on the ability, however limited, of local artists to respond in kind, drawing on Indian culture. In citing and inhabiting the methods and materials of western academic art, the works commissioned by Balasaheb aimed to demonstrate parity with western art in terms of a dialogic exchange; they aim to speak within the medium of classical art – marble – while articulating Indian subjects and tropes from Indian thought. Balasaheb in his position as a “reformist” ruler in colonial India took to citing western classical art and the western institution of the art museum while empowering local artists and creating a space for art viewing for his rural subjects. If the Aundh Experiment, with its adoption of the self-rule constitution that ran parallel to the establishment of this museum, stood as gesture marking time for self-rule, the art museum in this principality is posited as a marker of the readiness of Aundh’s populace for aesthetic appreciation and thereby suggests their parity with modern subjects in the metropole and elsewhere. In its deployment of the category of art and the institution of the art museum, it seeks to overturn the narratives of civili‑ zational infantilism that mark the colonial project.

Art Museums and the Anticipation of Nationhood This paper examined the figures of two collectors who established art museums in India before Indian independence. In their very insistence on the category of art museums, they were breaking from the prevalent model of museum making, which attempted to be encyclopaedic in its scope. Through the choice of founding art museums, each of these collectors attempted to demonstrate the ability of Indian art and artists to match those of the west in terms of pre-modern and modern art. If art has been viewed as the Esperanto of Europeanization,47 these museum histories demonstrate an engagement with the institution of the art museum that foregrounds colonial subjectivities and the discourse of colonial citizenship and an anticipation of self-rule. The discussion around their collecting and its institutionalization brings together the narratives, practices and imaginaries that were at play in the making an art museum. The Bharat Kala Bhavan was the lifelong project of Rai Krishnadas. His passion for collecting and his role as a connoisseur was in constant tension with his stated objective of collecting in the name of the nation. This tension, I argue, is a productive one: marking the moment when the nation is yet to be born, a passionate engagement by one connoisseur allows for the emergence of an institution that boldly articulates the Indian canon of art, as it was imagined in the period. Of the many possibilities engendered by the moment, the ruler of Aundh, Balasaheb Pant Prati‑ nidhi, embarked on a daring socio-political experiment in his small state, anticipat‑

47 Ibid., p. 416.



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ing democracy before Indian independence even as he maintained his paternal role as a ruler. The museum that he established at the same time was the site of many more dialogic exercises and experiments with western art and civilization. This conveyed the possibility of self-governance and parity with western civilization to its rural visi‑ tors. Taken together, these institutions were articulating in different terms the artistic past that could be claimed by the Indian citizen. In this, they were presenting images of the nation and its citizens, even as the nation itself was yet to come.

Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi

When El Greco (Re)Became Theotocopoulos: Policies and Political Discourse of the National Gallery of Athens I […] place myself soldier-like before the general, and make my Report to Greco. For Greco is kneaded from the same Cretan soil as I, and is able to understand me better than all the strivers of the past and the present. Did he not leave the same red track upon the stones?1 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 1961

Introduction In our days most of the cultural theorists suggest that museums are agencies that maintain longstanding and central roles in the articulation of identity. Already since their  –  almost simultaneous  – emergence in the late eighteenth century, public museums and nation states have been closely linked together. Benedict Anderson has argued that the construction of the nation state was built upon the envisaging of oneself as part of a certain national public. Tied up in what Anderson calls “imagined community,” these millions of people, most of whom one would never meet, share feelings of belonging and brotherhood, which are not based on experienced social relations but on cultural representations, rituals, and symbolisms.2 As public institu‑ tions, museums have been among the agencies that brought together regulation and sentiments of belonging, profoundly shaping the way in which the state imagined its dominion, namely the nature of the human beings it governed, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.3 In this context, this chapter is preoccupied with the ‘images’ of Greece’s fictive ethnicity that Athens National Gallery, the country’s main art institution, has created through the discourses it developed in relation to three major temporary exhibitions on El Greco (born Domenicos Theotocopoulos) organized in the 1990s. Examining the official discourse developed by the National Gallery through the El Greco shows and the shows’ reception in the press of the era, the chapter seeks to outline the image the institution sought to build for El Greco in an attempt to establish its own national brand. In this process, El Greco emerges as a symbol that strengthens national iden‑

1 Nikos Kazantzakis, Introduction, in: Report to Greco, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, p. 15. 2 The paper owes a lot to Benedict Anderson’s analysis of imagined communities. Benedict Ander‑ son, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 2006. pp. 5–7. 3 Ibid., p. 168

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tity, a persona that, added to the Hellenic Pantheon of ‘glorious’ ancestors, cements the “imagined community” of the Greeks in the 1990s.

El Greco and his Disputed Identity El Greco is an iconic painter. Born Domenicos Theotocopoulos in sixteenth-century Venetian-ruled Candia (today’s Iraklion), he traveled to Italy and then to Spain in search of a better fortune and was to become one of the most esteemed artists in our time. El Greco’s reception was a quite peculiar case in the history of art. His work was a point of reference from the day of his death, but the outlook varied significantly from period to period. Hence, his work was treated with much skepticism after his death, not only because of his anti-classicism but also because of the increasing intro‑ version that had been developing in Spain at the same time and the gradual intoler‑ ance towards foreigners.4 This stance was to change entirely in the mid-nineteenth century, when El Greco started to be considered among the main representatives of Spanish art, a precursor of Velázquez, the national painter of Spain. As the century passed by, El Greco’s art received numerous interpretations, sometimes as an early expression of Romanticism, at other times as an original articulation of Spanish Realism, and at others as a forerunner of Modernism; his work was related to the art of Delacroix, Fuseli, Turner, or Manet.5 Both El Greco’s idiosyncratic personal life and the stylistic singularity of his work have made him a kind of curiosity in art history. As a result, during the last four cen‑ turies, the most incredible legends have emerged, the most extravagant and contra‑ dictory fashions have appeared. Along the centuries, El Greco and his work have been claimed by two nations, Greece and Spain. These claims have been expressed in dif‑ ferent ways and at different rates, but both with the sole intention to appropriate the great master for themselves.6 In Spain the first study dedicated to the work of El Greco appeared in 1907 by the Spaniard Manuel Cossío,7 an educator without any other publications in art his‑

4 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, El Greco Invested with National Ideologies, in: José Álvarez Lopera (ed.), El Greco, Identity and Transformation. Crete, Italy, Spain, Milan: Skira, 1999, pp. 58–59. 5 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 6 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Domenicos Theotocopoulos, 450 years later, in: El Greco of Crete. Exhibition on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of his birth, Chamber of Commerce, Basilica of Saint-Marc, 1 September – 10 October 1990, Municipality of Iraklion, 1990, p. 65. 7 Manuel B. Cossío, El Greco, 2 vols., Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1972 [1908]. José Álvarez Lopera summarizes Cossío’s contribution as follows: “[…] [it] was the result of over two decades of patient investigation and signified an enormous leap in our knowledge of the painter. Throughout more than six hundred pages, Cossío traced a coherent outline of the painter’s evolution; he studied his most important works, defined the essential elements of his aesthetic and compiled the first catalogue of



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tory.8 Cossío emerged as the main advocator of El Greco’s hispanidad,9 arguing that the painter, despite his Byzantine apprenticeship and his deep knowledge of Italian art, had been assimilated by the Castilian milieu to the point of becoming its most profound interpreter.10 Cossío’s study summarizes the claiming of El Greco by the Spanish discourse on art, which had started earlier in late 19th century with the pub‑ lications of Francisco Giner de los Rios11 and continued with the work of Francisco de Borja de San Román.12 Cossío’s interpretation of El Greco’s art was criticized as nationalist. By contrast, Catalan researchers chose to highlight El Greco’s foreign descent and to argue that the singularity of his painting was a result of the variety of his influences – not only the post-Byzantine, Cretan painting but also the time he had spent in Venice and Rome.13 In Greece the “discovery” of El Greco took place after the country’s independence from the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent foundation of the modern Greek state (1830). The first studies dedicated to El Greco appeared in the second half of the nine‑ teenth century; they are related to the development of the Great Idea (Megali Idea in Greek), an irredentist concept that aspired to revive the Byzantine Empire in the form of a modern Greek state that would include mostly the former Byzantine lands. This visionary nationalist aspiration was to dominate foreign policy of the Greek state for over a century (1840–1922). The interest that European researchers showed towards El Greco led the Greeks “imagine” El Greco, a compatriot of theirs from the recent and

his production. Its influence was enormous. For decades it was the book on El Greco, and even today it is necessary to return to it over and over again when we are studying his oeuvre.” José Álvarez Lopera, The Construction of a Painter. A Century of Searching For and Interpreting El Greco, in: José Álvarez Lopera (ed.), El Greco, Identity and Transformation. Crete, Italy, Spain, Milan: Skira, 1999, p. 24. 8 Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), p. 61. 9 Cossío 1972 (as in note 7), pp. 509–511. See Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), pp. 61–62, Francisco Giner de los Rios (1839–1915) see Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), p. 60, note 35. 10 Álvarez Lopera 1999 (as in note 7), p. 25. 11 In a series of articles Francisco Giner de los Rios, intellectual and educator, praised the unique‑ ness of the Spanish landscape, as this was represented in the art of Greco and Velasquez: “[…] the two painters who best represent this character and poetic way of being of what could be called the back‑ bone of Spain.” See Jose Álvarez Lopera, De Cean a Cossio. La Fortuna critica del Greco en el siglo XIX, Madrid: Fundacion Universitaria Espanola, 1987, pp. 314–315, p. 366, quoted in Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), pp. 60–61. According to Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Giner was not a systematic researcher of Greco, however his presence in the cultural life of Spain was decisive in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cossio is said to have had a close relationship with him when writing his study on Greco. 12 Francisco de Borja de San Román, El Greco en Toledo o Nuevas Investigaciones acerca de la vida y obras di Domingo Theotocopuli, Madrid: V. Suárez, 1910; De la vida del Greco. Nueva serie de doc‑ umentos inéditos, in: Archivos Espanol, de Arte y Arqueología, Madrid, 1927, both quoted in Álvarez Lopera 1999 (as in note 7), p. 23, pp. 26–27. 13 Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), pp. 65–69.

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not the distant classical past, as their own “famous” artist who had spread his artistic practices in the West.14 El Greco’s claim by the Greek writers of nineteenth and early twentieth century mobilizes several different aspects that sought to solidify El Greco’s Hellenic identity, such as his training in Byzantine art, his Cretan origin, etc. Hence, El Greco’s Byzan‑ tinism was a key issue that appeared in the Greek writings of the first decades of the twentieth century, a turn that, according to Nicos Hadjinicolaou at least, should be related to the appraisals of El Greco’s art by Catalan researchers.15 In the aftermath of the defeat in the Greek-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the subsequent Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922), several Greek art historians, in search for national empowerment, asserted that El Greco’s unique art can be explained through its relation to the Byz‑ antine tradition.16 This discourse continued in the 1930s but also in the period after World War II.17 Another element that is particularly accentuated by El Greco’s researchers in Greece is El Greco’s “Cretan-ness” – namely, his Cretan descent. These texts mostly attribute the exceptionality of El Greco’s painting to his native land and more specifi‑ cally to the Cretan landscape.18 El Greco’s Cretan-ness is revealed in the work of Nikos Kazantzakis, among the leading writers of Greece. In his autobiographical novel enti‑

14 This seems very closely related to the concept of “imagined communities” as developed by Ander‑ son 2006 (as in note 2). 15 Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), pp. 65–69. 16 Greek art historians that had supported El Greco’s Byzantinism are Angelos Prokopiou, Achilleas Kyrou, Pantelis Prevelakis. See Angelos Prokopiou, Στο φως της διαλεχτικής. ο Greco και η εποχή του [In the light of dialectics. Greco and his era], Athens: Govostis Publications, 1931; Angelos Prokop‑ iou, El Greco and Cretan Painting, in: The Burlington Magazine 94, No. 588 (March 1952), pp. 74–80; Achilleas Kyrou, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Κρης [Domenicos Theotocopoulos, the Cretan], Athens: Dimitrakos Publications, 1932; Achilleas Kyrou, Ο Θεοτοκόπουλος. Έλλην και Βυζαντινός [Domenicos Theotocopoulos. Hellene and Byzantine], University of Thessaloniki Press, 1935; Pantelis Prevelakis, Ο Greco στη Ρώμη [Greco in Rome], Athens: Aetos Publications, 1941. 17 Fotis Kontoglou, Η μελαγχολία των Παλαιολόγων [The Melancholy of the Paleaologans], in: Techni (20 February 1938), p. 2; Fotis Kontoglou, Περί ζωγραφικής [On painting], in: Philologiki Protochronia, (1948), p. 42; Fotis Kontoglou, Έργα [Works], vol. 3, Athens: Astir Publications, 1963, p. 42; August L. Mayer, El Greco. An Oriental Artist, in: The Art Bulletin 11 (1929), pp. 146–152; Robert Byron, Greco. The Epilogue to Byzantine Culture, in: The Burlington Magazine 55 (1929), pp. 160–176; Philipp Schwein‑ furt, Greco und die italo-kretische Schule, in: Byzantinische Zeitschrift 30 (1929–1930), pp. 612–619; Pál Kelemen, El Greco Revisited. Candia, Venice, Toledo, New York: Macmillan, 1961. 18 According to Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Achilleas Kyrou compared the landscape of Crete to the one of Toledo; he highlighted the similarities in the flora (olive trees, vegetation) and the clear atmosphere of the plateau; thus, he concluded that in Toledo, a place away from the central artistic scene, the painter had the opportunity to complete what he had started back in his native land of Crete: an au‑ dacious personal painting style that distinguished him from his contemporaries and legitimized the haughty stance towards his patrons, who hardly comprehended his art. See Hadjinicolaou 1990 (as in note 6), p. 69.



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tled Report to Greco, Kazantzakis identifies himself with the great painter: he dedi‑ cates the novel to the Cretan-born painter and both the introduction and the epilogue to him.19 By contrast to the nationalist reclamations of El Greco, there were also Greek researchers who saw him as a very skillful mannerist painter capable of creatively assimilating all the influences of his time.20 Nevertheless, despite the solidity of their arguments, these views were never popular and largely remained a minor discourse among the researchers of El Greco. Although during recent decades, the nationalist overtones seem to have been unaccented, the discovery of the Dormition of the Virgin – an authentic and signed work from the painter’s “Cretan period”  – on the island of Syros in 1983 caused researchers to reassess the importance of the painter’s Byzantine roots.21 It is in this framework that Marina Lambraki-Plaka, director of the National Gallery of Athens, and others revive El Greco’s “Byzantine memories” theory,22 a theory first developed in the 1930s. Of course, several other thinkers, both foreign and Greek, denounced these theories. On the other hand, there is also the restrained, scholarly position of Hadjinicolaou. According to this view, El Greco is a prominent international artist, whose art is Greek when the painter works in Greece, Italian when in Italy, and Spanish when in Spain.23 Apart from the researchers’ discourse, El Greco enjoys a high popularity as a persona among the Greeks. Quite typical of this is the popularity that Yannis Smarag‑ dis’s 2007 El Greco film enjoyed, ranking second in the Greek box office the year of its release. Based on the fictionalized biographical novel El Greco: The Painter of God, by

19 Kazantzakis 1973 (as in note 1), p. 496. 20 Manolis Chatzidakis, Ο Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος και η Κρητική Ζωγραφική [Domenicos Theoto‑ copoulos and the Cretan painting], in: Cretan Chronicles, vol. 4 (1950), pp. 371–440; Yannis Miliadis, Nea Estia, January 1933, book review for Achilleas Kyrou’s book Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Κρης [Do‑ menicos Theotocopoulos, the Cretan]; Yannis Miliadis, Simera (Nov. and Dec. 1933); Marinos Kalligas, Nea Estia (1 August 1941), book review for Pantelis Prevelakis’s book, Ο Greco στη Ρώμη [El Greco in Rome]. See also Hadjinicolaou 1990 (as in note 6), p. 67. 21 Manolis Chatzidakis, Δομήνικου Θεοτοκόπουλου. Η Κοίμησις της Θεοτόκου [Domenicos Theotoco‑ poulos. The Dormition of the Virgin], in: Catalogue, Exhibition for 100 years of the Christian Archaeo­ logical Society (1884–1984), Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens: 6 October 1984–30 July 1985, [n. d.], p. 34. The icon of the Dormition of the Virgin was discovered in the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Ermoupolis, Syros by Georgios Mastoropoulos, curator of Byzantine Monuments, (Ένα άγνωστο έργο του Θεοτοκόπουλου, in: 3rd Symposium of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Archaeology and Art, Athens: 1983 [abstracts], p. 53). Quoted in Nikolaos M. Panagiotakes, The Cretan Years, trans. by John C. Davies, London: Ashgate 2009, p. 30, note 11. 22 The Byzantine memories theory was in a way revived by Prof. David Davies. See for example David Davies, The Byzantine Legacy in the Art of El Greco, in: Nicos Hadjinicolaou (ed.), El Greco of Crete, Proceedings of the International Symposium – Iraklion Crete, 1–5 September 1990, Iraklion: Municipal‑ ity of Iraklion, 1995, pp. 425–445. 23 N. Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), p. 76.

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Dimitris Siatopoulos, the film is an epic tale of the Cretan-born painter. Smaragdis’s El Greco is an uncompromising character who sets off from his homeland Crete to Venice and finally to Toledo in search of freedom and love. Despite the cast featuring promi‑ nent contemporary Greek actors, the rich funding by the state-run Greek Film Center and private sponsors, Smaragdis’s opulent production is full of historical inaccura‑ cies.24 Smaragdis’s film summarized a general and popularized view of El Greco in Greece, a narrative that treats him as the great Greek Renaissance painter in a country where Renaissance never took place, at least in its original form.

The El Greco Exhibitions at the National Gallery Despite the long and intense scholarly debates on El Greco in Greece, until the early 1990s the Greek public had not the opportunity to see many works by the great artist. El Greco’s representation in Greek public and private collections was very limited, while the cost of borrowing works from abroad was quite prohibitive, especially in a country that was desperately trying to recover from World War II, a devastating Civil War, and several decades of political instability that culminated in a seven-year mil‑ itary dictatorship in 1967.25 Organized by the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutzos Museum during the 1990s, the blockbuster exhibitions that this essay seeks to shed light on, namely From El Greco to Cézanne. Masterpieces of European Painting (1992), El Greco in Italy and Italian Art (1995), and El Greco: Identity and Transformation (1999), were the first occasions where the Greek public got acquainted with a signif‑ icant number of El Greco works. Founded in 1900, the National Gallery is undoubt‑ edly Greece’s main public art institution. Despite its status, it remained a nomad until 1976, when its current building was inaugurated. Its collection, established mostly by donations made by generous members of the Greek elite, is pretty much a panorama of the Greek art of the past two centuries. The collection of Western European Art, a separate department within the National Gallery, includes works from the Renais‑ sance to Modernism. With no actual budget for artwork acquisitions, no special col‑ lecting focus, and based on the generosity of private donations, the collection is char‑ acterized by its holdings of minor painters of all periods and an obvious fragmentary character. Examining the National Gallery’s official discourse on El Greco in paral‑ lel with the reception the exhibitions in the press of the era, we will attempt in the pages that follow to shed light on the image of the national brand that the institution

24 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Ο Γκρέκο στη μεγάλη οθόνη [El Greco in Cinema], Athens: Agra Publications, 2008, pp. 10–11. 25 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 120– 144, pp. 162–168; Thomas W. Gallant, Modern Greece, London: Arnold Publishers, 2001, pp. 160–177, pp. 197–203.



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chose to build in relation to El Greco, uncovering thus the processes under which the “imagined community” of the Greeks, in Anderson’s now classic terminology, was constructed in the 1990s.26

From El Greco to Cézanne: Masterpieces of European Painting (1992) From El Greco to Cézanne: Masterpieces of European Painting was an exhibition realized in 1992 within the framework of a cultural exchange between Greece and the United States on the occasion of the celebration of the birth of democracy in Athens 2,500 years after the fact. Thus, the exhibition The Greek Miracle presented fifth-century sculptures in the National Gallery of Washington and later the Metro‑ politan Museum of New York. In return, the National Gallery of Athens hosted seven‑ ty-two paintings from these two American museums representing three centuries of European painting. This unprecedented cultural exchange was intensely commented on in the rich catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. For Prime Minister Constantin Mitsotakis, the event constituted an “important new bridge of friendship and good will linking Greece and the United States,” an exchange that connected the “birth of Democracy in Athens” with “the country were Democracy was reborn in its modern form.”27 In the same tone, Anna Psarouda-Benaki, Minister of Culture at the time, argued that the Renaissance is “the basis of modern Western art” and “by definition the legitimate and genuine child of Antiquity.”28 What is mobilized here by the political discourse of the era is a well-known scheme, the ideological myth of the “Rebirth of Hellenic Culture,” as art historian Eugenios Mat‑ thiopoulos acutely puts it.29 Initiated in the early nineteenth century by the intellectu‑ als of the Greek Enlightenment to support the establishment of the newly founded Hel‑ lenic state (1830), the Rebirth myth argued that modern Greece was the actual ‘rebirth’

26 Anderson 2006 (as in note 2) p. 6. 27 Constantin Mitsotakis, Greeting, in: From El Greco to Cézanne. Masterpieces of European Art, ­Athens: National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1992, p. 8. 28 Anna Psarouda-Benaki, Greeting, in: From El Greco to Cézanne 1992 (as in note 27) p. 10. 29 Eugenios Matthiopoulos, Η Ιστορία της τέχνης στα όρια του Έθνους [Art History within the frame‑ work of the Nation] in: Eugenios Matthiopoulos, Nicos Hadjinikolaou (eds.), Η Ιστορία της Τέχνης στην Ελλάδα [Art History in Greece], Iraklion: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2003, pp. 429–436. Mat‑ thiopoulos distinguishes three myths that have successively dominated national ideology, namely the “Rebirth” and the “Uninterrupted Continuity” of Hellenic culture and “Europeanism.” Matthiopoulos bases his analysis of the relation between myth and ideology on Plamenatz. See John Plamenatz, Ideology, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.

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 Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi

of ancient Greece. The myth expressed the uncertainty, fragility, and insecurity of the geographically restricted Hellenic state. Its employment by the political discourse of the 1990s sought to legitimize the exchange between Greece and the United States, revealing “its own inner justice and harmony,” to quote Anna Psarouda-Benaki, as “the works which make up the exhibition From El Greco to Cézanne can be viewed as distant descendants of the ancient masterpieces which are now in the US.”30 This scheme was shared by Marina Lambraki-Plaka, Director of the National Gallery of Athens.31 Having to justify the choice of the paintings made, she introduces the concept of the ‘masterpiece’, to which she gives no further interpretation. To fully appreciate this particular museological position, at this point a definition of the term ‘masterpiece’ should be given. According to Hans Belting, originally the term des‑ ignated the piece of work that qualified a craftsman’s admittance to the guild as a master. Later, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it reappeared as the free creation of a genius, signifying the ‘ideal’ artwork, the artwork that summarized the artist’s attempt to achieve absolute or ultimate art.32 Belting relates the concept of the unique masterpiece to the establishment of the first public art museums, where works of ‘star quality’ were mobilized to justify the existence of the ‘temples of art’. In the new art appreciation that was established, the masterpiece became the vehicle to apprehend art’s nature, namely a ‘miracle’ that could no longer be explained by means of rules and that transformed the creative act into a profound mystery. These remarks shed light on the central concept of the National Gallery’s exhibition, which seems to be informed by a view of art in terms of absolutes, a view that defies any clear definition.33 And yet they are related to the director’s introduction of André Malraux’s eclectic scheme of the musée imaginaire.34 Drawn from the well-known photographic essay Malraux first initiated in 1947, the musée imaginaire, or the “museum without walls” as it is known in the English-speaking realm,35 is also based on the notion of

30 Psarouda-Benaki 1992 (as in note 28), p. 10. 31 Marina Lambraki-Plaka, From El Greco to Cézanne. An Imaginary Museum with Masterpieces of Three Centuries, in: From El Greco to Cézanne 1992 (as in note 27), p. 12. 32 Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, London: Reaktion Books, 2001, p. 17. 33 Ibid., pp. 27–28. For an explicit example of how the concept of masterpiece has defined exhibi‑ tions, see Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Regarding the exhibition. The Munich exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art (1910) and its scholarly position, in: Journal of Art Historiography 6 (June 2012), pp. 9–10. 34 Apogevmatini, 20 December 1992; Athinorama, 25 December 1992; Eleftherotypia, 11 January 1993; To Vima tis Kyriakis, 17 January 1993. 35 According to Rosalind Krauss: “André Malraux’s musée imaginaire moved westward into English translation to become the ‘museum without walls’. Bowing to the English language’s appetite for demonstration, for the concrete instance, for the visualizable example – for the image, in short – the translator made free with the book’s title and therefore with its conceptual underpinnings as well.” See Rosalind Krauss, Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls, in: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Fergu‑ son, and Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking about Exhibitions, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 341.



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the ‘masterpiece’, celebrating the concept of the art museum as one of the places that give the highest idea of man.36 As Douglas Crimp has correctly pointed out, in Malraux’s enterprise art emerges as ontological essence “created not by men in their historical contingencies, but by Man in his very being.”37 For Lambraki-Plaka, the eclecticism implied by Malraux’s imaginary museum is well justified for “a country with such a rich artistic tradition, but poor in collections and museums of modern European art.” What is accentuated is the exhibition’s educational character, “an event of inestimable aesthetic and educational significance.”38 In reality, the concept of the imaginary museum here seems to be mobilized in order to cover any lack of exhibition narrative. It appears that one cannot trace an explicit museological proposal neither in the exhibition texts nor in the director’s many interviews. The exhibition constituted undoubtedly the first blockbuster show of the National Gallery and the fact that it was organized during her term was consid‑ ered a personal success, an element that established the museum’s director among the Athenian public. Lambraki-Plaka has built a close personal relationship with the National Gallery’s public for twenty-three years after her appointment as director, a bond she tries to strengthen with the regular guided tours of the temporary exhibi‑ tions she has curated. First introduced by Lambraki-Plaka and obviously highlighting the persona of the curator,39 these tours were an innovative practice in the Greek art world. In a sense the Director’s contact with the public is reminiscent of Yannis Hami‑ lakis’s notion of the “archaeologist as shaman,” paraphrased in this case as “curator as shaman.” Seeking to interpret the case of Manolis Andronikos, prominent archae‑ ologist and excavator of the Macedonian tombs of Vergina, Hamilakis uses Mircea Eli‑ ade’s observations on shamanism, according to which shamans possess abilities that allow them to mediate between different worlds, to participate in realms inaccessible to most people.40 In Hamilakis’s critical appreciation of the ‘shamanic’ presentation of the Vergina tombs, Andronikos, following the ideological myth of the uninterrupted continuity of Hellenism dominant already since mid-nineteenth century, “wrote the script, produced, stage-managed, and played a protagonistic role in the drama that would re‑enact the symbolic, material incorporation of Macedonia and northern Greece into the national imagination and psyche.”41 Lambraki-Plaka’s public profile in relation to the Gallery’s

36 André Malraux, Les voix du silence. Le Musée Imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1965, p. 10. 37 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000, p. 56. 38 Lambraki-Plaka 1992 (as in note 31), p. 12. 39 Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur, in: Greenberg et al. 2002 (as in note 35), pp. 237–238. 40 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 51 and passim, quoted in: Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and its Ruins. Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 162. 41 Ibid., p. 164.

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exhibitions has a lot to share with Andronikos’s ‘shamanic’ presentation of the tombs. Just as Andronikos emerges as a ‘bridge’ between yesterday and today developing empathy and emotional attachment with the people of the past and their material cul‑ ture,42 Lambraki-Plaka, giving guided tours and even lending her own voice for the Gallery’s advertisement spots, assumes this same mediating role. What she promises to the visitors is a sensory reception of art of the past, along with a kind of a ritual, a ‘sha‑ manic’ ceremony of initiation to the secrets of the art museum, where artworks – ‘mas‑ terpieces’ – are viewed in terms of absolutes, lacking any further interpretation. Her highly ‘personalized’ but also arbitrary approach alludes to a general museum tendency of the last decades. As Deborah Meijers pointed out already in 1992, museum directors and freelance exhibition designers have acquired an unassailable, guru-like status, justifying their artistic choices as intuitive and guaranteeing thus their omnipotence.43 The exhibition narrative that was adopted was criticized by the critics of the era for not presenting any theoretical approach. In reality, the National Gallery of Athens received all the works the two American museums had consented to lend; the concept of the imaginary museum of masterpieces came later, in order to grant the event a maximum of publicity and to provide a convincing excuse for letting such rare antiq‑ uities out of the country. According to this rationale a special place was reserved for the work of El Greco, despite the fact that only three works of his were presented in Athens, namely the Met’s Portrait of a Man (1590), the Adoration of the Shepherds (1612–1614), and the Vision of Saint John (1608–1614). Hence, From El Greco to Cézanne, the title of the exhibition, was inspired by a famous statement by Picasso: “Cézanne is the father and Greco is the mother of my painting,”44 and these two painters con‑ stituted the limits of this extremely eclectic exhibition. Furthermore, the emphasis given to El Greco and his work by both press and curators was paradigmatic. He is the sole painter mentioned in the greeting of the Prime Minister Mitsotakis. For the Gal‑ lery’s Director, on the other hand, “Domenicos Theotocopoulos […] realized the Greek ideal Renaissance, the one that thwarted by the Turkish conquest.” She attributes El Greco’s idiosyncratic representations to Neo-Platonism, found not in its Renaissance education, which is obvious, but in the painter’s long experience of Byzantine art. She bases this view on the theory of David Davies, who emphasizes “the spiritual origins of [the painter’s] Greek-Christian education, […] his recollections and experi‑ ence of the liturgical and ceremonial aspects of the Greek-Orthodox Church.”45

42 Ibid., p. 147. 43 Debora Meijers, The Museum and the ‘Ahistorical’ Exhibition, in: Greenberg et al. 2002 (as in note 35), p. 10. 44 David Douglas Duncan, Les Picassos de Picasso, Paris: La bibliothèque des Arts, [n. d.], p. 52. ­Picasso’s apostrophe was mentioned by Marina Lambraki-Plaka in the press conference she gave on the occasion of the exhibition. Apogevmatini, 20 December 1992. 45 Lambraki-Plaka 1992 (as in note 31), pp. 12–14.



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From El Greco to Cézanne was the first major show to be realized in the National Gallery of Athens. To quote a recent interview of Marina Lambraki-Plaka, it was the exhibition that made the first explosion, a show that the Greek art-loving public was determined to wait hours in order to visit it. She believes that the show has estab‑ lished a “horizon of expectations” for the Gallery’s public. Widely advertised, the event made headlines in daily newspapers in Athens and gathered more than 600,000 visitors in the four months that it was on view.46 The exhibition played a decisive role in establishing the brand of the long-ne‑ glected National Gallery of Greece, placing it in the map of institutions of international status. For the first time, the Gallery collaborated with institutions with worldwide prestige, and its activities were mentioned in international art guides and magazines. In this framework, El Greco emerges as a most important persona for the imagined community of the Greeks, as the Western great master, the Renaissance painter that Greece never had.

El Greco in Italy and Italian Art (1995) In El Greco in Italy and Italian Art (1995), the National Gallery collaborated with Nicos Hadjinicolaou and the “Domenicos Theotocopoulos Centre” of the Institute for Medi‑ terranean Studies, an institution that also organized an international symposium on the ten-year Italian period of the painter. The exhibition presented fifty-two paint‑ ings by sixteenth-century Italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Francesco Bassano. Among the fifteen works by El Greco was the well-known Fable (1580), apparently a work of the artist’s Spanish period but a theme that he had developed while in Italy (1567–1577). A Panhellenic campaign of the National Gallery for the purchase of Saint Peter (1600–1607) (fig. 1/pl. XIII) had preceded the exhibition, proving, in the words of Lam‑ braki-Plaka “the undiminished interest of the Greek public in the great Cretan paint‑ er.”47 For her, the acquisition of Saint Peter, a work of El Greco’s late Spanish period, moved all the Greeks; different backgrounds were united towards a common cause,

46 Eleftheros Typos, 18  December 1992; I Avgi, 29  December 1992; Eleftherotypia, 3  January 1993; Eleftheros Typos, 5 January 1993; Ta Nea, 5 January 1993; Apogevmatini, 10 January 1993; Mesimvrini, 19 January 1993; Macedonia, 21 February 1993; Ikones, 3 March 1993; Eleftherotypia, 9 March 1993; Ta Nea, 6 March 1993; Ta Nea, 9  March 1993; Tiletheatis, 20  March 1993; Apogevmatini, 10 April  1993; Ta Nea, 12 April, 1993; Eleftherotypia, 12 April 1993; I Niki, 13 April 1993; Apogevmatini tis Kyriakis, 17 April 1993; Ethnos, 29 May 1993. 47 Marina Lambraki-Plaka, Greeting, in: El Greco in Italy and Italian Art, exh. cat., Athens: National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1995, p. 10.

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 Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi

Fig. 1: Domenicos Theotocopoulos, Saint Peter, c. 1600–1607, Athens, National Gallery. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 53 cm.

ranging from important donors, such as the Lilian Voudouri Foundation, the Prime Minister’s wife, to the anonymous man in the street. Lambraki-Plaka compares Theotocopoulos to the mythical persona of Ulysses. By associating the painter with this “archetypal figure of the race,” she mobilizes what historian Antonis Liakos calls the “self-mirroring myth in Greece,” a myth that brings to mind migration and diaspora, constant features of Greek history.48 Hence, for the Greek imagined community at least, El Greco is often identified with Ulysses, whose journey in the case of the painter is combined with knowledge, the overcoming of obstacles, and eventual success. The Homeric myth ends with repatriation, which, in the case of El Greco, was never realized. However, at least for a part of the press, this “repatriation” was realized through the 1995 acquisition of Theotocopoulos’s Saint Peter by Greece’s chief national art institution. According to the Gallery’s official institutional discourse, when Domenicos Theo‑ tocopoulos left his birthplace, mostly probably in 1567, he was already a mature man of twenty-six years and a recognized painter in both alla greca and alla latina style.49 The acceptance of a strong Byzantine heritage in El Greco by itself leads one to the

48 Antonis Liakos, Historical Time and National Space in Modern Greece, in: Hayashi Tadayuki and Hiroshi Fukuda (eds.), Regions in Central and Eastern Europe. Past and Present, Sapporo, Slavic Euro‑ asian Studies 15 (2007), p. 216. 49 Lambraki-Plaka 1995, (as in note 47), p. 10.



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assumption that his early apprenticeship should have played a decisive role in the formation of his mature style. Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s approach, though, differs a lot from the Gallery’s institu‑ tional take. His main focus is to justify the need for such an exhibition, a show that examines “the decade of El Greco’s stay in Italy.” According to Hadjinicolaou, schol‑ arly research on this period has given rise to controversies among specialists. The lack of systematic study of El Greco’s Italian period has been the reason for the organiza‑ tion of the El Greco in Italy and the Italian Art exhibition and of the accompanying symposium in Rethymno, Crete. According to Hadjinicolaou, there is another dimension the exhibition offers regarding Venetian painting as such. The show would give the public the opportunity to see paintings by the Venetian masters of the sixteenth century, something that is quite new for both the Athenian and the Greek public in general. In his view, regard‑ less of aesthetic preferences, the institutions should seek to promote a closer contact with important moments of the history of European art and of that of other continents and cultures as well, as this is greatly needed in a country like Greece. Doubtless, for the Greek scholar, El Greco’s painting is a solid part of European art history.50 The conflict in these two discourses can be easily traced. On the one hand, Had‑ jinicolaou adopts a more restrained, scholarly position, sharing the viewpoints of his colleagues, the international El Greco scholars. On the other, Lambraki-Plaka rep‑ resents the institutional discourse of the Athens National Gallery and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture that claims El Greco as the Greek contribution to the history of the Renaissance, a discourse that serves the ideological myth of the nation’s “Unin‑ terrupted Continuity,”51 a powerful cohesive force of the imagined community of the Greeks. El Greco’s connection with the Renaissance is quite contradictory though, as for more than a century several scholars have been highlighting El Greco’s anti‑ classicism, seeing in him a precursor of twentieth-century European Modernism.52 El Greco’s association with Modernism is an issue of undiminished interest for the scholars. In 2012, the El Greco and Modernism exhibition that took place in Düsseldorf presented El Greco’s works in dialogue with modernist paintings by Picasso, Cézanne, German expressionists, etc.53

50 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Greeting, in: El Greco in Italy 1995 (as in note 47), p. 20. 51 Matthiopoulos 2003 (as in note 29), pp. 439–441. 52 Already in 1910 German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe in his book Spanische Reise distinguished Greco as the precursor of Modernism, due to his singular, anticlassical and mannerist forms, the au‑ dacious structure of his works, the abstract way of representing nature. Meier-Graefe has also sig‑ nalled out Greco’s personality, a painter that had been strongly claiming for himself a social status and freedom of the creator, demands that were unthinkable in the conservative milieu of sixteenth century Spain. See Álvarez Lopera 1999 (as in note 7), p. 31. 53 El Greco and Modernism, exh. cat., Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast, Hatje Cantz, 2012.

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 Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi

In conclusion, one has to highlight the scholarly character of this present exhi‑ bition in comparison to From El Greco to Cézanne. The ‘obsession’ with the concept of the masterpiece disappears along with any other excessiveness in the exhibition narrative. Focusing on a specific and not so well-known period of the artist, the exhi‑ bition manages to make a substantial contribution to the research on El Greco’s art.

El Greco: Identity and Transformation (1999) The exhibition El Greco: Identity and Transformation took place in 1999. It was a col‑ laboration of the National Gallery of Athens with Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and was held under the auspices of the Ministries of Culture of all three countries. The exhibition presented ninety-three paintings by El Greco that covered all three periods of his oeuvre (Cretan, Italian, and Spanish), among them the National Gallery’s Saint Peter (1600–1607) and the Entombment of Christ (1567–1570) (fig. 2) that was to be acquired by the National Gallery of Athens in 2000. Aiming at highlighting his Byzantine background, nine post-Byzantine icons were also displayed, coming mainly from the collection of the Museum of the Hellenic Institute in Venice, other public and private collections in Greece, and the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos. The show was greeted as an exceptional event, an event that surpassed every other El Greco exhibition organized in the past. As mentioned in the curators’ note, the exhi‑ bition sought to trace El Greco’s route, which is considered one of the most fascinating cases of transformation in the history of European art. The curators enumerate the stops in Theotocopoulos’s life journey. According to them, what made this present exhibition exceptional is without doubt the focus on Theotocopoulos’s early works, an element that was missing from previous shows but a choice that was also followed in the 1990 exhibition in Iraklion entitled Domenicos Theotokopoulos of Crete.54 Although not explicitly expressed, the narrative of the exhibition was influenced by theories that highlight El Greco’s references to Byzantine heritage. The curators’ attempt was to mount a single-artist show, treating equally all the periods in El Greco’s art. Subsequently, seeking to reconstitute El Greco’s journey in space, from Candia (Iraklion) to Toledo, following chronological order was a prerequisite. Accord‑ ing to Hadjinicolaou, the chronological arrangement was self-evident, as in El Greco’s case the different periods correspond to his travels and subsequent changes in his painting style.55

54 Fernando Checa, Tomas Llorens, Claudio Strinati, Marina Lambraki-Plaka, Curators’ Note , in: Álvarez Lopez 1999 (as in note 4), n. p. and also To Vima tis Kyriakis, 17 October 1999; To Vima tis Kyriakis, 24 October 1999; To Vima tis Kyriakis, 12 October 1999. 55 Eleftherotypia, 27 December 1999.



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Fig. 2: Domenicos Theotocopoulos, Entombment of Christ, Athens, National Gallery. Oil on canvas, 51.5 × 42,9 cm.

Of great interest are the welcome texts signed by the three Ministers of Culture. Elisavet Papazoi, Greek Minister of Culture, calls up a familiar scheme that compares El Greco to the archetypal Greek character of Ulysses, while his journey is characterized as a source of knowledge, wisdom, and self-knowledge. Papazoi highlights the route this travel exhibition made, being presented first in Spain, then in Italy, and last in Greece. Thus, the event makes, in a way, “the reverse route of the artist, taking the character of a homecoming in his birthplace.” What is of exceptional importance for Papazoi is the time when the event takes place, the fact that the Greeks “welcome the new millennium with Theotocopoulos, the El Greco, a great Greek and European artist.”56 Interestingly enough, the English version of the catalogue features a different welcome text, signed by Evangelos Venizelos, who preceded Papazoi in the Ministry of Culture. This change should be attributed to a government reshuffle that took place in the meantime. El Greco’s Hellenic identity is among the central points of Venize‑ los’s greeting. He bases the painter’s Greekness on his extensive education, which was uncommon for an artist of the time. A special reference is made to his extensive library, in which, according to Venizelos, the ancient Greeks – tragedians and philos‑

56 Elisavet Papazoi, Greeting, in: Ελ Γκρέκο, Ταυτότητα και Μεταμόρφωση. Κρήτη, Ιταλία, Ισπανία [El Greco, Identity and Transformation. Crete, Italy, Spain] 1999, Greek edition (as in note 4).

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ophers – coexisted with neo-platonic authors, fathers of the orthodox church, Italian and Spanish thinkers, and the theoretical texts of the Renaissance.57 Apart from El Greco’s Greekness, Venizelos highlights his identity as a “citizen of Europe.” In his view, the initiative that the Hellenic Ministry of Culture launched, together with its counterparts in Spain and Italy bonds what he calls as the “South of Europe”, an association that “takes on the significance of the European Cultural Centre, the womb of European Culture.”58 Hence, Venizelos distinguishes the Medi‑ terranean from the rest of Europe, but only to intensify its truly European character. The same tone is adopted by all the politicians who greet the international event. Esperanza Aguirre, the Spanish Minister of Education and Culture, underlines the Mediterranean common identity of the three countries that hosted the great painter. According to her, Greco is seen as a chance to contribute to a cultural exchange, which could be a point of reference for future collaborations.59 Aguirre’s comments partly mobilize a quite widespread discourse on the Mediterranean. Not by chance, it is in this same period that cultural repertories such as the ‘oldest cradle of civilizations’, the ‘homeland of the three monotheist religions’, and the ‘Mare Nostrum’ are used, all with the sole intention of reinventing the so‑called Mediterranean myth. The excep‑ tional significance of similar cultural exchanges and joint research projects is also the main point that Giovanna Melandri, the Italian Minister of Heritage and Cultural Activities, makes. In her view, these initatives create “a sense of identity and a sense of belonging within a wider international community.”60 But is the international com‑ munity that the Italian minister refers to the countries of the Mediterranean Basin? It is true that in the 1990s the Mediterranean became once more fashionable, as it was to play a significant role in the construction of the European identity. Since the end of the Cold War and the antagonism with the ‘East’, Europe had to provide itself with a new counter-image. Thus, this ‘identity frontier’ passed progressively from the east to the south: the new vision of Europe proposed a virtual demarcation along the Medi‑ terranean, a line that would separate the European countries and the countries south and east of the Mediterranean.61 In the welcome texts of the Ministers of Culture, what is mirrored is the European Union’s Mediterranean policy, which, according to Isabel Schäfer, has been attempting since the middle of the 1990s to revalorize this geographical region and invent a common Euro-Mediterranean identity; at the same time, this policy has been seeking to delimitate the area, in which the south and the

57 Evangelos Venizelos, El Greco. A Citizen of Europe, in: Álvarez Lopez 1999 (as in note 4), n. p. 58 Ibid. 59 Esperanza Aguirre, Greeting , in: Álvarez Lopez 1999 (as in note 4), n. p. 60 Giovanna Melandri, Greeting , in: Álvarez Lopez 1999 (as in note 4), n. p. 61 Jean-Robert Henry, La Méditerranée: nouvelle frontière européenne, in: Sciences Humaines 15, (1996), pp. 46–48, quoted in: Isabel Schäfer, The Cultural Dimension of the Euro-Mediterranean Part‑ nership, in: History and Anthropology 18.3 (2007), pp. 333–352.



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east of the Mediterranean would be an antechamber to Europe, on which a protecting hand is placed and which is deemed globally dependent.62 The political overtones are not limited to the welcome texts of the Ministers of Culture. Of great interest is the introduction of Hadjinicolaou’s contribution. There, in order to define his stance, he seeked to balance between the different approaches of El Greco’s art: thus, he denounced Benedict Anderson’s views on imagined com‑ munities, but although he accepted the notion of the “nation” he did not espouse nationalist claims. For Hadjinicolaou, the only balanced way is the one proposed by the European Union: cultural exchanges among the nations, which maintain their identity but at the same time are in constant dialogue with other nations.63 This intro‑ duction, written on the eve of the country’s integration into the European Monetary Union, is not coincidental; it seems to serve a prominent need in the Greek political cycles for the enforcement of a common European cultural identity, an identity that was to be questioned a few years later as a result of the severe economic crisis. The exhibition was marked by unprecedented success for a single-artist show, gathering more than 600,000 visitors in a period of three months. Huge lines formed outside the National Gallery of Athens, while the press dedicated several reviews and articles to this blockbuster exhibition.64

A “Quintessential Greek Painter” Although during the recent decades the nationalist overtones seem to have been unaccented, what is quite clear in the texts examined is the discourse that reclaims El Greco as a “quintessential Greek painter,” to quote New York Times reviewer Michael Kimmelman.65 What does El Greco’s repatriation really mean? On a first level, El Greco’s appropriation by the Greeks should be examined in relation to the National Gallery’s institutional history. It is in the early 1990s, and especially with Marina Lambraki-Plaka at the head, that Greece’s major art museum sought to shake off its long-established peripheral character. Within this policy of extroversion we have to include all three blockbuster El Greco shows along with the acquisitions of Saint Peter in 1995 and the Entombment of Christ in 2000, both by the same painter.66 Two new acquisitions by a great master in such a short period is

62 Schäfer 2007 (as in note 61), pp. 333–352. 63 Hadjinicolaou 1999 (as in note 4), pp. 55–56. 64 To Vima tis Kyriakis, 2 January 2000; To Vima tis Kyriakis, 18 January 2000; I Kathimerini, 18 Jan‑ uary 2000. 65 Michael Kimmelman, El Greco. Bearer Of Many Gifts, in: New York Times, 3 October 2003, http://www. nytimes.com/2003/10/03/arts/art-review‑el-greco-bearer‑of-many-gifts.‌html (accessed 10 March 2014). 66 Ta Nea, 3 November 2006.

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undoubtedly an exceptional fact for the Gallery, especially if one takes into account its extremely limited European paintings collection. Within this framework, El Greco emerges as a key figure, as the painter whose reclaimed Greek identity could ‘legit‑ imize’ the National Gallery as a significant institution of the international museum world. On a second level, El Greco’s institutional repatriation may hint at the broader polit‑ ical discourse of the 1990s. In From El Greco to Cézanne, the result of a cultural exchange between Greece and the United States, Constantin Mitsotakis, Greece’s Prime Minister at the time, highlights the special bond created between Greece as the cradle of democracy and the United States, the country where democracy was reborn. The event is further contextualized within the crucial period of the time, a period characterized, according to Minister Psarouda-Benaki, by “the irrationality and the dangers of nationalistic out‑ burst which are threatening to drag us into annihilation.”67 What she hints at is most probably the Yugoslav Wars, which since 1991 had been tormenting the entire Balkan Peninsula. As well as being a clear condemnation of nationalism, this quote could be read as a precaution against the dangers the Yugoslav secessionist movements entailed for Greece, and more specifically the dangers of the independence of the former Yugo‑ slav Republic of Macedonia, which caused an unsolved dispute with Greece about its name.68 In this framework, art emerges as the bond that links Greece with the rational West, in this case the United States. El Greco’s art, a protagonist in this venture, acquires a symbolic dimension as a bridge between ancient Greece and the West.69 Although obviously less ambitious and grandiloquent, the El Greco in Italy and the Italian Art show seems to support El Greco’s repatriation discourse. El Greco’s art

67 Psarouda-Benaki 1992 (as in note 28), p. 10. 68 The so‑called Macedonian question dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the national‑ ist movements of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians were intensified. These struggles led to the creation of independent nation-states (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece), which by 1912 finally formed a political and military coalition and, in the 1912–1913 Balkan wars, were able to defeat the Ottoman forces and to partition Ottoman Macedonia among them. To date, each nation-state involved in the “Macedonian question” attempted to articulate a separate national narrative pursuing homogeniza‑ tion policies and attempting to transform their citizens into members of their respective nations. After World War II the Greek state seemed quite nervous about the small country on its northern borders calling itself the Republic of Macedonia, part of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, it was not until the breakup of Yugoslavia that the issue was revealed in the international political arena; it was felt that the international recognition of a state under the name of Macedonia would appear as an irredentist threat to the Greek province with the same name. See Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity and Ethnic Conflict. Greece, Bulgaria and the Macedonian Question, Westpost: Praeger Publishers 2002, pp. 18–20. See also Kate Hudson, Breaking the South Slav Dream. The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, London: Pluto Press, 2003; Misha Glenny, The Balkans. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–2012, London: Granta Publications, 2012. 69 In response to the emergence of FYROM, Greece turned to the European Union and the United States, bringing forward an issue of FYROM’s territorial claims that could even lead to war. See Rou‑ dometof 2002, (as in note 68), pp. 30–32.



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becomes a vehicle that connects Byzantium with Western art and on a second level contemporary Greece with its Western ‘allies’. This particular discourse is intensified in the case of the last exhibition El Greco: Transformation and Identity. Realized at the threshold of the new millennium, the exhibition echoes the institutional discourse of the new, monetarily united European Union, then in the final stages of its construction. As the exhibition recollects the route of the great painter across Spain, Italy, and Greece, the artist’s identity emerges as primarily European. The El Greco shows seem to summarize the country’s attempt to keep pace with the neoliberal West, a ‘West’ that at a later stage became epitomized by the European Union. ‘Modernization’ constituted Greece’s official national narrative in the 1990s. In order to complete its admittance into the economic and monetary union, the Euro‑ zone, Greece had to overcome its chronic economy problems and converge with other EU members. Modernization emerged as the idea that extensive public investment and work on infrastructure as well as economic and labor reforms would help the country achieve its goal. The texts of the exhibition sponsors  –  local and international banking groups as well as multinational corporations – are telling. Iain Watt of Philip Morris Inter‑ national, sponsor of the From El Greco to Cézanne exhibition, highlights his cor‑ poration’s dedication to encourage “cultural projects and institutions which open channels of communication and foster the exchange of ideas among nations.”70 Pan‑ ayotis Korliras, General Director of the Ionian Bank, state-run at that time, praises the bank’s cultural projects, stressing their international character.71 Finally, Antοnis Hasiotis, the General Director of Barclay’s Greece, exclusive sponsor of the El Greco: Identity and Transformation exhibition points out that they are proud to sponsor an exhibition that “emphasizes the unity of Europe,” highlighting the special signifi‑ cance of “welcoming the new millennium, with Greco in Greece, the cradle of Euro‑ pean culture.”72 The National Gallery’s pursuit of worldwide acclaim as seen in the El Greco block‑ buster shows should be treated as a cultural metaphor of the ‘progressive’ image the governments of the era sought to adopt for themselves. It is not the first nor the last time that culture is used to speak politics. Greece in the 1990s sought to anchor its position on the international map, mainly through facing the challenges of Greece’s integration first into the European Union and then the Eurozone. El Greco, Greece’s

70 Iain C. Watt, Greeting in: From El Greco to Cézanne 1992 (as in note 27), p. 28. 71 Panayotis Korliras, Greeting in: El Greco in Italy 1995 (as in note 47), p. 18. 72 Antοnis Hasiotis, Greeting, in: Ελ Γκρέκο, Ταυτότητα και Μεταμόρφωση, (as in note 56), n. p.

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“imagined” contribution to the international pantheon of great masters, emerged as its suitable representative.

Conclusion: The ‘National Pride’ Narrative The theoretical discourse developed within the framework of the three El Greco exhi‑ bitions in the 1990s, their promotion in the press, and their reception by the public, prove that the National Gallery of Athens, in both its institutional and its educational role, opted for a ‘national pride’ narrative. The critiques that denounced the ‘social event’ character that was given to the exhibition along with the ‘shallow’ discourse adopted by the directorship were not enough to inhibit El Greco’s presentation as the quintessential Greek painter of the Renaissance, the Cretan that stood out due to his unique ‘Byzantine’ idiom. Even the left-wing press chose to emphasize the national identity of the artist and to highlight the National Gallery’s contribution to creating systematic bonds with its public; any reference to interpretations that could shed light on different aspects of the artist is missing.73 On the occasion of the fourth centenary of El Greco’s death, both Spain and Greece celebrated 2014 as El Greco Year. Exhibitions, conferences, and other events took place in both countries for this anniversary. In Athens, major exhibitions were organized by both public and private museums such as the Byzantine and Christian Museum, the National Gallery, the Benaki Museum, and the Museum of Cycladic Art to celebrate the El Greco Year. All the exhibitions were supported by the then Greekled presidency of the Council of the European Union and were co‑funded by European Union’s National Strategic Reference Framework. The entire project was coordinated by Nikos Hadjinicolaou, professor emeritus at the University of Crete, in collabora‑ tion with a team of researchers from the University of Crete and partner museums. The limited financial resources resulted in the presentation of very few original works by El Greco, as there was actually no possibility of borrowing works from major museums abroad. The financial difficulties along with Hadjinicolaou’s scholarly viewpoint led to exhibitions that pondered contextualization over the original works on display. Hence, most of El Greco’s works featured in these exhibitions were photo‑ graphic reproductions in high resolution, while the majority of the original artworks on display belonged to minor artists of the painter’s broader circle. On the other hand, the overabundance of biographical information was mobilized to compensate for the lack of original artworks. In this same spirit, the National Gallery was limited to a digital presentation of the major El Greco works. In the narrative that was adopted, the morphological features of the painter’s work were exclusively highlighted, while con‑

73 Kyriakatikos Rizospastis, 14 March 1993.



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textualization and interpretation was lacking. Choosing once more to have the direc‑ tor lend her voice for the narration of the digital guided tour, the institution appeared to retain its highly personalized approach, presenting its head as an “arbiter of taste” seeking to initiate the public into the secrets of art. The exhibition-tributes of the El Greco year could have been a separate topic of research, which could be summarized by the imaginative title “Art Exhibitions without Artworks: Inventive Solutions in the Era of Economic Crisis or a Denial of Reality?”

Naomi Stead, Deborah van der Plaat, John Macarthur

Building Flagships: Regionalism, Place Branding, and Architecture as Image in the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane This paper will explore how the image of the contemporary art museum has been con‑ structed and represented through architecture.1 It will do so through a specific case: the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane, capital of the state of Queensland, Aus‑ tralia. GoMA offers a fascinating example of converging discourses of art and archi‑ tecture, state policy and identity, and the role of ‘place’ in constituting the museum as cultural landmark. Completed in 2006, commissioned by the Queensland state government, and designed by Kerry Clare, Lindsay Clare and James Jones of the architectural practice Architectus, in association with Davenport Campbell, the GoMA building effectively doubles the size and the program of the pre-existing Queensland Art Gallery, which, with other cultural facilities, occupies a prominent site on the riverfront in the city’s centre. Consistently framed as a ‘flagship’, the building is part of the museum collec‑ tion as much as it provides space for exhibition; it is equally the brand of the institu‑ tion and its container.2 Importantly, the building is also framed as part of an authen‑ tic local architectural tradition, supposedly responsive to the characteristics of the subtropical climate and manifesting this through architectural gestures such as an expressive verandah roof, filigree screening, and outdoor terraces. An architecture that seems to grow from the characteristics of a location, to both amplify and visualise them, seems to provide the perfect vehicle for place branding narratives. But leaving aside questions of ‘regionalist’ architectural style, the more significant questions for this paper are political, addressing how state support for

1 This chapter began its development as a paper presented by Naomi Stead at the conference Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, hosted by Kunsthisto­ risches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Florence, 26–28 September 2013. That was later de‑ veloped into a version presented by Naomi Stead as ‘The Brisbane Effect: GOMA and the Architectural Competition for a New Institutional Building,’ at Institutions: the 32nd annual conference of the Soci‑ ety of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, July 2015, pp. 627–639, http:// sahanz2015.be.unsw.edu.‌au/. This chapter has been considerably revised and expanded from that version, with the contributions of John Macarthur and Deborah van der Plaat, as part of the Austra‑ lian Research Council funded Discovery project The Cultural Logic of Queensland Architecture: Place, Taste and Economy DP110101711 (2011–2014), led by Macarthur in collaboration with Stead and van der Plaat, in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland. With thanks and acknowl‑ edgement to the ARC. 2 The institution has since rebranded as QAGOMA in recognition of the success of the new building. www.qagoma.qld.‌gov.‌au.

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the arts, and for architecture as an apparently autochthonous art form, might act in collaboration with other ‘soft power’ political aims, including international relations, economic development, and trade. Furthermore, an examination of key exhibitions mounted at GoMA in the past eight years reveals that these, too, achieve dual politi‑ cal imperatives: training the tastes of a more cultured and cultivated local populace while also importing new audiences, and at the same time building relationships and markets for the exports upon which the state’s wealth is based. This paper will place a significant piece of museum architecture in the larger context of cultural policy and political values, and will examine how the image of this particular art museum entangles ethical and aesthetic questions.

Architecture in and of its Place Queensland is one of the largest but less populated states of Australia, taking up much of the northeast quadrant of the island continent. The majority of the popu‑ lation lives in the southeast corner of the state, where the capital, Brisbane, a city of some two million people, is located. Queensland is geographically and climatically diverse, stretching from the subtropical southeast corner all the way up to Cape York, the wet tropics, and the Daintree rainforest of the north. If non-Australians have heard of Queensland at all, their mental associations are likely to include beaches, tropical rainforest, and the red desert wilderness of the outback. If they think of culture in relation to this, it’s likely to be the indigenous culture of the Australian Aboriginal people. These images – of both nature and culture – are the selected messages pro‑ jected by international tourist marketers, and in this we see the processes of ‘place branding’ at play. The concept of place branding, first named by Simon Anholt in 2001, calls for the definition of a place’s unique characteristics and their commodification as a selling point.3 Queensland does in fact also have an urban, contemporary, artistic culture of its own, but tourism bodies have not until recently judged it to be unique and compelling enough to ‘sell’. Beach and nature tourism are significant drivers of the Queensland economy, but only in the past decade or so have attempts to grow urban cultural tourism in Brisbane begun to bear fruit.4 And to the extent that the city of Bris‑

3 See Simon Anholt, Nation Brands. The Value of ‘Provenance’ in Branding, in: Nigel Morgan, An‑ nette Pritchard, and Roger Pride (eds.), Destination Branding. Creating the Unique Destination Proposition, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001, pp. 42–56. 4 Through the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University, under the leadership of Tony Bennett in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Brisbane was an early adopter of ideas that cultural policy could drive a creative economy. GoMA can be seen as the eventual success of strategies to move from poli‑ cies for the provision of culture to an active tool of government. This “governmentality” approach is



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Fig. 1: Night view of artificial beach at Southbank, central Brisbane, with fireworks. Image courtesy of Brisbane Marketing and the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Image is in the public domain by assertion of the BCEC. Used with thanks.

bane has had any tourist identity at all, it has very often been framed by images of the Southbank urban leisure precinct (fig. 1/pl. XIV), with its manicured gardens, endless festivals and entertainments, its fireworks, performances, promenades, arbours, and especially its extravagant artificial beach constructed for the World Expo that Brisbane hosted in 1988.5 This powerful image construction frequently confuses visitors into believing that Brisbane is located in a garden setting at the seaside, while in reality it is located on a muddy river some fifteen kilometres from the ocean. The gallery was founded and had been collecting since 1895, and there were numerous plans to build, but these had never been a priority for funding, and it was

implicit in Colin Mercer and Peter Taylor, A Cultural Development Strategy – Towards a Cultural Policy for Brisbane, Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University, 1991. The short history of this shift in administrative thinking is described in Stuart Glover, Revisiting the Cultural Policy Mo‑ ment. Queensland Cultural Policy from Goss to Bligh, in: Queensland Review 18.2 (2011), pp. 190–206. 5 John Macarthur, On Kodak Beach. Technical Developments in Imaging and Architecture, in: Transition. Discourse on Architecture 48 (1995), pp. 18–29.

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Fig. 2: Diagram of the relative locations and positions of buildings in the Southbank cultural precinct, from location map at the site. Photograph by authors.

housed in a succession of temporary premises until 1982.6 There had been a project to build the gallery near the Parliament for the 1959 centenary of the state’s found‑ ing.7 The government, however, showed its true nature by proposing that the building could also hold agricultural exhibitions, while the trustees in a panic proposed to sell the gallery’s Picasso (La Belle Hollandaise, 1905) to make up funding shortfalls. The director, Robert Haines, resigned, and the project collapsed in acrimony.8 A decade later, after considering numerous sites, the government determined to position the first dedicated building for the Queensland Art Gallery prominently on the south bank of the river opposite the central business district.9 This was a part of a wider reorgan‑ isation of the city with a new freeway and a new bridge connecting the city centre to expanding suburbs and making decayed docks and warehouses on the south bank of the river available for redevelopment. In 1973 Robin Gibson won the competition for the design of the art gallery, but after a disastrous flood necessitated wider reconstruction of the area, the government expanded Gibson’s brief to figure a cultural centre (fig. 2). In addition to the gallery (completed 1982), the expanded brief provided for the Performing Arts Centre (1985), the Queensland Museum (1986) and the State Library (1988). The flood allowed for

6 https://www.qagoma.qld.‌gov.au/about/our-story/timeline (accessed 22 May 2014). 7 Part of a scheme for the Parliament Precinct by Department of Works architect Frank Costello, Sep‑ tember 18, 1958, 1771, Queensland State Archives. Site plan by Stan Marquis-Kyle. 8 Daniel Thomas, An Elegant Man with an Unerring Eye: Robert Haines 1910–2005, in: The Sydney Morning Herald (22 October 2005). 9 On this process and the other sites considered see John Macarthur, Robert Riddel, and Donald Wat‑ son, Urban Visions for Brisbane, in: John Macarthur, Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye, and Andrew Wilson (eds.), Hot Modernism. Queensland Architecture 1945–1975, London: Artifice, 2015, pp. 232–233.



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Fig. 3: Queensland Art Gallery, Robin Gibson, 1982, showing the central ‘water mall’ space. Installation Ressort by Huang Yong Ping, 2012. Photograph by authors.

the resumption by the state of most of the south bank of the river, which in 1988 was the site of a World Expo, and subsequently a highly featured public park, restaurant, and entertainment zone with substantial commercial and residential developments.10 Gibson’s boldly monumental buildings in a soft Brutalist style (that owes much to Roche and Dinkeloo’s Oakland Museum of California of 1969) are significant in the modernist architectural history of the region, with the Queensland Art Gallery, or QAG (fig. 3), being probably the most successful in spatial and aesthetic terms, and the most well liked by the public to this day. All of the buildings are still in active use and retain their original building programme. In June 2015 the Cultural Centre was entered onto the Heritage Register of Queensland.11 But there has been a major addition to this remarkably coherent precinct of cul‑ tural infrastructure buildings. If we move right up to the northwestern end of the south bank, past the suite of Gibson buildings to where the river takes a sweeping curve to the left, and if we also spin forward in time some twenty years, we come to our main object: GoMA, the Gallery of Modern Art. Commissioned in 2002 and com‑ pleted in 2006 as part of the Millennium Arts Project (along with extensions of the State Library), GoMA has a confused identity in relation to its parent institution, the Queensland Art Gallery, with which it shares a director in a “two sites, one vision” arrangement. The success of GoMA has led to the institution being rebranded with the unfortunate acronym QAGOMA. The Millennium Arts Project also extended the adjoining State Library, and linked the two buildings with a new plaza and gardens.

10 Ibid. 11 https://environment.ehp.‌qld.gov.au/heritage-register/results/?q=​Queensland+Cultural+Centre (accessed 31 July 2015).

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This location means that there is a museum, an art gallery, and a gallery of modern art all within two hundred metres – a seemingly bizarre degree of repetition or redun‑ dancy, but one that is significant in itself, as we shall see.

The Bilbao Effect: Iconic Museum Architecture Now if the image described above seems familiar  –  of a shining new art museum perched on the bend of a river – then we evoke the association quite deliberately: in connection with another famous museum building, also on a river, although a world away – namely, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (fig. 4). At the time of the formal

Fig. 4: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Frank Gehry, 1997, photograph by authors.

public announcement that there would be a new gallery of modern art in Brisbane, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was the precedent on everyone’s mind, given that it had opened only three years previously. In light of this, it was perhaps not surpris‑ ing that a government might wish for an iconic museum building that attracts tourists and becomes a symbol and brand for its location.12 When the then premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, announced funding for the GoMA project in May of 2000, he was explicit: “I want it to be an icon. I want the gallery to be the best that we can have. I am tired of the fact that people look for cul‑ tural interests in other parts of Australia. We want to build the best, and that’s what we will do.”13 The local tabloid newspaper agreed, hoping “that the new building will be Brisbane’s answer to the Sydney Opera House or the Guggenheim.”14

12 See Joseba Zulaika, The Seduction of Bilbao, in: Architecture. The AIA Journal 86 (1997), p. 61; Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 – see in particular section two, on “Architecture”. 13 Sandra McLean, Gallery Design to Court Controversy, in: The Courier Mail (18 May 2000), p. 5. 14 Ibid.



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The Guggenheim Bilbao, described variously as “the building that made archi‑ tecture famous,”15 and “a postcard waiting to happen,”16 had in 2000, as a building, already been so successful in terms of publicity and visitation that it had left the realm of architecture and become a phenomenon. Thereafter, museum professionals, tourism agencies, and governments all over the world spoke openly, and enviously, of this “Bilbao effect,” where a rust belt, provincial city is rescued from financial decline by a work of visionary architecture that leads to international exposure and acclaim, leading in turn to the financial benefits of tourism, with the rewards returned to local citizens and governments.17 The idea was intoxicating: that a ‘blockbuster’ build‑ ing could itself be a museum’s largest, most expensive, and ideally its most popular exhibit. Proponents and critics alike have observed that there is a continuum between the museum shop, the blockbuster exhibition, and a museum architecture that forms the brand of the institution.18 Here architecture becomes part of a total cultural ‘package’, part of the so‑called experience economy. Brisbane was no different from many other cities throughout the world in its wish to cash in on the benefits of ‘iconic’ architecture, and these ideas played out, tellingly, in the local popular media. A few days after funding for the GoMA project was announced, in an article in the local Courier Mail newspaper, figures in the Bris‑ bane tourism industry debated the virtues of the idea. A representative of the con‑ vention centre described the gallery as Brisbane’s “best chance”: “Sydney has the Opera House, Melbourne has its cosmopolitan culture, we have the lifestyle and our Southbank precinct which we could develop into something sensational.”19 But the chairman of Brisbane Tourism, the city’s tourism agency, warned against “pinning our hopes” on any single building or project, saying, “I think it is fair to say we don’t have an icon and have been very successful without an icon.”20 Meanwhile the chief executive of Tourism Queensland was also sanguine, saying that “one of the ques‑ tions is whether the city needs an icon […] I don’t think it is essential to have an icon.

15 Joseph Giovannini, Experience Music Project, in: Architecture 89.8 (2000), p. 80. 16 Joseph Giovannini, Gehry’s Reign in Spain, in: Architecture. The AIA Journal 86 (1997), p. 66. 17 Charles Jencks has written that the Guggenheim Bilbao, which cost USD 124 million to build, paid for itself in two or three years via tourism, job creation, and taxes flowing to the local government. See Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism, Chichester: Wiley, 2011, p. 291. See also Leslie Craw‑ ford, The Museum that Saved a City, in: Financial Times (5  October 2007), available online http:// www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de652f06-70b5-11dc-98fc-0000779fd2ac.‌html#axzz3EHuVLHcn (accessed 22 May 2014). 18 Margot A. Wallace, Museum Branding. How to Create and Maintain Image, Loyalty, and Support, Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2006; Cf. David Joselit, After Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013; and Julian Stallabrass, The Branding of the Museum, in: Art History 47.1 (2013), pp. 148–165. 19 Christine Retschlag, Gallery ‘Our Ticket to the World’, in: The Courier Mail (20 May 2000), p. 14. 20 Ibid.

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We’ve got to stop comparing ourselves with other people. We are absolutely the best city to live and work in.”21 It may be that the lack of sophistication in this discussion has to do with the rudi‑ mentary questions of a tabloid journalist. But the simplified notion of the icon build‑ ing as attraction clearly intersects the disparate interests of economics, branding, and cultural infrastructure, and has much potency as both term and a concept. The idea of the building as lure or attractor  –  or as Premier Beattie put it, quite literally “a magnet” – is especially powerful.22 In the same Courier Mail article, the representative from the Brisbane Convention Centre was adamant: an icon was needed not for Bris‑ bane’s existing inhabitants, but to bring others. “We need an icon for marketability, not for ourselves.”23 This was remarkably congruent with the rhetoric of the govern‑ ment itself, which was also the commissioning and funding body for the museum. In announcing funding for the project back in 2000, then Queensland Arts minister Matt Foley explicitly underlined the link between art, flagship buildings, and cultural tourism, stating that “Queensland’s profile as a leader and cultural tourism desti‑ nation will now be enhanced through a world-class gallery rivalling the landmark galleries of Europe and America.”24 Of course, the idea of a “Bilbao effect” and the building that spawned it also opens a number of larger questions, including the role of the museum building itself as a kind of meta-artwork.25 While previously it was most common for art museum architecture to take a subservient role and merely provide appropriate spaces for the display of ‘real’ art, the ‘meta-artwork’ model has, since Bilbao, grown in popular‑ ity. The artist Richard Serra once made a scalding attack on this idea, saying that because architecture serves specifically functional needs, “architecture as a work of art is a contradiction in terms.”26 Nevertheless the popularity of this mode is still high, amongst governments, commissioning bodies, and architects, even if less so amongst artists and curators. But it is not without its difficulties. For one thing, it blithely brushes aside the numerous complexities about when, where, and how architecture is an art. Likewise, it’s not true that art museums are free of practical constraints – the servicing, security, and programmatic requirements for housing art are often far more complex than for housing people. But perhaps therein lies the key – the idea of the art museum building as ‘meta-artwork’ presumably demonstrates that architecture can not only fulfill practical requirements but also simultaneously transcend them in a late grab to recover for architecture the title of ‘mother of the arts’.

21 Ibid. 22 Jane Albert, Beattie Bets On a Modern Exhibition Space, in: The Australian (12 April 2002), p. 17. 23 Retschlag 2000 (as in note 19), p. 14. 24 Ibid. 25 Brian Hatton, The Biggest Way to Do Art, in: Lotus International 106 (2000), pp. 10–13. 26 Richard Serra, An Opinionated Museum Goer (Interview with Brenda Richardson), in: Richard Serra. Writings and Interviews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 104.



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The art museum has in the last decades made visible a wider issue of the relation of architecture, the visual arts, and the concept of the arts. In its longer history since the modern concept of art emerged in the eighteenth century, architecture has largely been classed as an art. It eschewed this categorization through most of the twentieth century in an attempt to define itself as a profession, but now art and architecture are rapidly converging.27 Hal Foster describes the conceptual interdependence of the “Art-Architecture complex”, and Jane Rendell observes the increasing crossovers as a new genre of “critical spatial practice.”28 This conceptual and historical intertwining lies behind what David Joselit has argued is a structural relation between the inter‑ nationalization of contemporary art and the increasing demand for art museums that are spectacular and fixed in place. Joselit argues that as artworks become increasingly expensive, extensively traded, and their audiences internationalized, the art world has become the epitome of a neoliberal view of economies both financial and cul‑ tural.29 The pressure that this put on older auratic accounts of the value of artworks in their place-based cultural origins is to some extent mitigated by the ‘placey-ness’ of the art museum. Thus we argue that GoMA’s place-specificity is not only a tool for attracting tourists and creating self-identity among the citizens of Brisbane, but a response to the demands of the art within. As contemporary art becomes more and more abstracted from any national context in its making or in representing a culture, it can only come fully into existence in meeting a specific population in a place that celebrates this encounter.

The Brisbane Effect: ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Local’ Museum Architecture But, of course, GoMA is no Guggenheim (fig. 5/pl. XV). In fact, the architecture itself is fairly pedestrian, even ‘ordinary.’ Wayne Goss, a politician who had been involved in the genesis of the project, later confessed that “I’ve got to be honest, I had my doubts when [the expert competition advisory panel] chose the [winning] design. It looked a bit ordinary,” he said.30 Goss would later accept that within the allotted budget,

27 John Macarthur, Andrew Leach, Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts. Considering the Issues, in: Andrew Leach, John Macarthur (eds.), Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts, Ghent, Belgium: A & S Books, 2009, pp. 7–15. 28 Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, London: Verso, 2011; Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture. A Place Between, London: I. B. Tauris, distributed in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 1. 29 Joselit 2013 (as in note 18). 30 Rosemary Sorensen, A City with Its Art in the Right Place, in: The Australian (25 November 2006), p. 21.

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Fig. 5: Queensland Gallery of Modern Art from Kurilpa Bridge, photograph by Kgbo, published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‑sa/3.0/deed.‌en, used with thanks.

“we weren’t going to get the Guggenheim,” and he now professes great enthusiasm for the completed building. Nevertheless, architects in Brisbane tend to prefer the State Library next door, a far more rich and idiosyncratic addition to Gibson’s library by Donovan Hill Architects, built at the same time as GoMA as part of the Millenium Arts reorganization of the site. Thus the contrast between GoMA and the Guggenheim becomes instructive here. While the Guggenheim is a glimmering, alien formalist object dropped as though from space, GoMA (at least nominally) is framed as having grown from its site, as a genuinely regionalist building that responds to local architec‑ tural traditions and the local climate. It’s fair to say that GoMA is revealing not for its brilliance as architecture but for what it reveals about the larger context in which museum buildings are briefed, commissioned, managed, and received, and more than this, how museums are branded through modes of architecture beyond the spectacular, starchitect mode – in a mode that celebrates the ordinary, local, and vernacular. The concept of place branding is again relevant here, since an architecture that appears to both visualise and amplify the characteristics of its location seems to offer a perfect vehicle. Even



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beyond issues of architectural expression and style, GoMA opens significant polit‑ ical questions about how state support for the arts, and for architecture as an art form, might act in collaboration with other ‘soft power’ political aims, and how all of these might work together to construct a positive image of a place, an institution, and a building. The reasons for such image construction might be more than simply positive – they might also seek to counteract a past negativity. Queensland has historically had an image problem, and continues to struggle with it to this day  – it is still seen as backwards: not sufficiently intellectual, too conservative, too philistine, too hot.31 The state has also has a peculiar political history, where politics was dominated for decades by highly conservative (and in some cases corrupt) governments actively resistant to art and culture. This meant there was a lower level of public understand‑ ing and appreciation for the arts than in the southern states, with corresponding effects on what kind of exhibitions could be mounted here, and a tendency towards populism and accessibility.32 So Queensland, long viewed as an uncultured regional backwater, with an adverse climate and an economy based almost entirely on agriculture and mining, is both cursed and blessed by its wealth of so‑called crops and rocks. In 2007, at the height of a mining boom driven primarily by exports to China, Queensland was the second-fastest growing region in the Western world, after Phoenix, Arizona.33 At that time, the role of the newly opened GoMA was quite clear: to legitimate Queensland’s cultural credentials on the national and international stage.34 A contemporary show‑ piece building also demonstrates the desire to align Queensland’s contemporary architecture with the fine or “higher” arts.

31 Dr. Barton, Lecture on Climate, in: The Moreton Bay Courier (30 August 1860), p. 4; Dr. Taylor, The Queensland Climate, Its Effects on Europeans, in: The Brisbane Courier (Monday 27 January 1896), p. 6; Climate and Character, in: The Brisbane Courier (8 February 1896), p. 4; William Hardy Wilson, A Dawn of a New Civilization, London: Palmer, 1929, chapter 9. For a discussion of this debate see Debo‑ rah van der Plaat, Climatic Crisis. Place, Taste and Race in Hardy Wilson’s ‘Dawn of a New Civilization’ (1929), in: Architectural Histories 1.1 (2013), p. 22, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ah.‌aw (accessed 22 May 2014); Deborah van der Plaat, Architecture of Sun and Soil. European Architecture in Tropical Australia, in: Michela Rosso (ed.), Investigating and Writing Architectural History. Subjects, Methodologies and Frontiers. Papers from the third EAHN International Meeting July 2014, Turin: Politecnico di Torino, 2014, pp. 1119–1129. 32 Raymond Evans, Disruptive Influences, in: Griffith Review. Hidden Queensland 21 (2008), pp. 11–41. 33 Mike O’Connor, Brand New Vision, in: The Courier Mail (29 August 2007), p. 34. 34 John Macarthur, State of the Arts. What Makes a Public Building?, in: Architecture Australia 96.2 (March/April 2007), pp. 52–53.

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Architectural Intentions at GoMA The GoMA design was arrived at through a two-stage architectural competition. It was advertised internationally, clearly with the aim to attract the “best in the world,” as numerous politicians said at the time, and with an initial field of 174 entrants from 24 countries there was certainly a strong response.35 For this reason, there was some amazement and perhaps consternation when the final winners were announced  – Architectus was a decidedly local winner, since the Clares were key proponents of the ‘Sunshine Coast school’ of architecture, and were most well known at the time for the design of houses, a fact which is not incidental, and to which we will return.36 The building is large – covering more than twenty-five thousand square metres, over five levels. In addition to its ‘white box’ galleries (which range between 10–20 spaces, according to circumstance), the public spaces of the building include two ‘black box’ cinemas with associated exhibition space, a shop, a café, a restaurant, edu‑ cation facilities, and a rooftop-level deck open to the river that is used for events. The building has a dedicated children’s art centre, a designated gallery space that moves well beyond the ‘art cart’ model of children’s art appreciation that holds in many other galleries. Many of the back‑of-house functions of the museum are disguised cleverly within the wall cavities, so circulation and installation occurs with minimal crossing or disruption of the public spaces. Staff offices are stacked against the western edge, with views of the adjoining riverside park, and storage for the collection is on the very top level, just under the roof – a necessary expedient for a building beside a river that floods relatively frequently. Originally allocated a budget of 94.4 million Australian dollars, the building had a final cost of around 107 million dollars and was thus very cheap for its size. At an actual cost of around four thousand dollars per square metre it sustained a remarkably modest budget for a major public building. The Clares’s concept was for a “lightweight, open riverside pavilion” based on a cruciform plan. The orientation of the building is thus important – the architects had won the architectural competition despite breaking the rules, by tilting their building off the shared axis of all the other buildings on the south bank and turning its face to address the curve of the river. Designed to respond “through its form, materials and disposition to its location, climate, site and use,” the architects described as “critical” the building’s “response to the site, its natural topography, existing patterns of urban generation and the river.”37 In this sense, the idea of the building’s being ‘open’ is doubled: it was intended to be open both to environmental elements – notably natural

35 Albert 2002 (as in note 22), p. 17. 36 While Lindsay and Kerry Clare were widely acclaimed as the ‘authors’ of the design, the compe‑ tition entry was submitted and won in partnership with Sydney-based practice Davenport Campbell. 37 GoMA Architects statement, http://www.qagoma.qld.‌gov.au/about_us/history/architecture (ac‑ cessed 22 May 2014).



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light  – and also to human movement, such that visitors could wander freely from the city, through the parks and gardens of the south bank, and could amble without obstruction into the space of the gallery – which is, importantly, also free of charge. Connecting the institution to the atmosphere and life of the city, both natural and culturally constructed, the building would be a kind of permeable, ambient mediator. As Lindsay Clare said at the time of the building’s opening, “It’s a building connected to its place. The brief called for these big spaces and we wanted people to move freely into the building without being interrupted or challenged […]. When you get to the centre of the foyer, you can read the clarity of the building.”38 In the architects‘ own rhetoric, a special place was given to the local quality of light and to a particular roof form that would control and mediate that. Lindsay Clare noted, “We had to be aware of the light, how to introduce it into the building, to control it and balance it. Queensland light can be harsh and strong, so to reinforce the idea of the building connected to its place, we created lightness around the edges of the building with […] a roof to economically bring light in and overhanging the edge of the building to form verandahs.”39

Reception in the Popular and Professional Media Perhaps following the architects’ lead, the design was widely described in the popular press as having been inspired by the Queensland verandah (fig. 6).40 One commen‑ tator discussed the building’s timber interior and exterior finishes as lending it the “shipshape feel” of an “arty beach house,”41 while another described the building as seeking to “‘look like it belonged’, as a subtropical design for a river city with its face turned towards Asia”.42 Writing in The Courier Mail, prominent local commentator Des Houghton took the rhetoric to a new level of populist jingoism. On the day of GoMA’s opening, Houghton began his regular opinion column with the assertion that “[t]he thing I like best about Brisbane’s new art gallery is its unrelenting Queensland‑ ness. Gaze at it across the muddy river and it looks a bit like a Noosa beach house on steroids.”43 In an article peppered with references to an architectural “Queensland vocabulary”, “Queensland vernacular”, and “Queensland dialect”, Houghton cele‑

38 Sorensen 2006 (as in note 30), p. 21. 39 Ibid. 40 Rosemary Odgers, Gallery Design Plays It Smart – Project to Draw On Local Talent, in: The Courier Mail (9 April 2002), p. 3. 41 Sandra McLean, Cost of Drawing People Priceless, in: The Courier Mail (20 September 2006), p. 21. 42 Sorensen 2006 (as in note 30), p. 21. 43 Noosa is a beach resort on the Sunshine Coast, to the north of Brisbane. Des Houghton, It’s Classic Queensland, in: The Courier Mail (2 December 2006), p. 30.

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Fig. 6: Lisboy, a wooden Queenslander house surrounded by verandahs, New Farm, 1910. Photograph by L. C. Ball. Held by The John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. Image in the public domain, used with thanks.

brates the building’s transparency, its use of timber (“wooden screens are quintes‑ sentially Queensland”), and its opening to its own “backyard” in the riverside park beyond. “GoMA is itself a work of art,” he writes, “as Queensland as an over-ripe mango and as laid back as a squatter’s chair.”44 Within the specialist architectural media, in the professional journals, commen‑ tators were a little more circumspect. Davina Jackson, writing in Architecture Australia – the instrument of the Australian Institute of Architects and the national journal of record in the field – found that the building “is elaborated externally by a range of sun-responsive devices and materials – metal panels, timber slatting, projecting balconies, and a timber-decked dining terrace,” and therefore that “GoMA strongly alludes, at a much larger scale, to the Clares’s and many other Queensland houses.”45 Describing such buildings as being “characterised by light, open edges intended for occupancy,” Jackson finds that the GoMA building, too, incorporates “many thoughtful devices that allow flexible interactions between the architecture and its atmospheric conditions.”46 Ultimately Jackson finds the building to be a response to a typically Queensland “preference for practical achievements” rather than “cranial pretensions.” It is largely not, she argues, in the mode of a building as “artistic state‑ ment.”47

44 Ibid., p. 30. 45 Davina Jackson, GoMA, in: Architecture Australia 96.2 (2007), pp. 54–63. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. This distinction between the practical and the artistic has a long history in writings on Queensland architecture. See for example: Jennifer Taylor, Australian Architecture since 1960, Can‑ berra: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 1990, p. 116; Hardy Wilson 1929 (as in note 31), chapter 9; A. B. Wilson, Domestic Architecture for Tropical and Subtropical Australia, in: Volume of Proceedings of the Second Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition, Brisbane: Govt. Printer, 1918, pp. 143–146; William Coote, The Influence of Climate on Our Domestic Architecture, Paper Read at the



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Andrew Leach, writing in Architecture New Zealand, is more critical. Describing the use of timber batten screening as “decorative,” he finds that the building, while alluding to traditional Queensland houses, “refuses to adapt the precedent” to a civic scale, and hence ends as “neither properly domestic nor monumental.”48 He finds that “[t]he building regularly out-scales both art and visitors with the giganticist ten‑ dencies of its larger interior spaces, while the ‘homely’ devices that the architects have used […] are at best rhetorical, even when the building can transcend its domes‑ tic precedent.”49 In contrast, the very ‘ordinariness’ of the building was recast by Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper, writing in UME magazine, as a virtue, whereby “grandeur and hauteur are exchanged for ideas of accessibility and the ordinary; and at the same time these experiences are refined and made beautiful and extraordinary.”50 Of all the architec‑ tural commentators, Beck and Cooper were perhaps the most outspoken supporters of the idea that the GoMA building was place specific, a response to local traditions, conditions, and climate raised to a metaphysical level of artistry. Framing the building as an “architectural interpretation of what it is to be present in Brisbane, on the river, at the edge of the city, in the subtropical climate, in a contemporary public space,” the authors describe it as a poetic transcendence of functional or budget constraints. Furthermore, they find that “[w]ith its large overhanging roof, open verandahs and timber batten screening, the building conveys a typical, familiar and regional expres‑ sion of subtropical informality at a civic scale.”51

Rhetoric without Reality: GoMA as (not) a Vernacular House Now while none of this discussion might seem remarkable, there are four things that make such rhetoric significant. The first thing is the fact that it stands at odds with reality, as we will demonstrate briefly below. The second thing, which is related to and partly explains the first, is that it builds directly upon a long-running narrative about climate-responsive architecture in Queensland. Third, it frames Australia as being oriented towards Asia – a more radical proposition than it might first appear;

Monthly Meeting of the Queensland Philosophical Society, Brisbane, 4 November 1862, in: Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Queensland, vol. 1 (1859–1872), pp. 1–7. 48 Andrew Leach, Too Bold to Be Faithful, in: Architecture New Zealand 2 (March 2007), pp. 54–61, p. 58. 49 Ibid. 50 Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper, GoMA. Spirit of Place, in: UME 21 (2007), p. 11. 51 Ibid.

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Fig. 7: Gallery of Modern Art, looking northwest, showing large roof overhang.

and fourth, it orients the Queensland Art Gallery towards the contemporary: both in art and life. First, then, the rhetoric that surrounds the GoMA building, positioning it as a kind of scaled‑up Queensland vernacular house, simply does not stand up to scrutiny. The large flying roof does not slope downward to create a low shaded edge, in the way that every Queenslander verandah does (fig. 7). If anything, it is closer to a modernist flat roof, or the pavilion roofs of some Southeast Asian temple buildings, and in fact it is closest of all to a contemporary building – Jean Nouvel’s Lucerne Cultural and Congress Centre, as one of us, amongst others, have observed.52 Likewise the edges of the building are not feathered into a gradient of habitation between fully enclosed and fully outdoor, as Queenslander houses tend to be, and as the rhetoric of the build‑ ing would have us believe. The demands of a contemporary art gallery simply do not allow the unfettered flow of light and air. It is true that this is an art museum with unusually high levels of natural light in its public spaces, and a few of the non-gallery spaces – for instance the functions deck and cafés – are truly open to the outside and connect to their surroundings and environment. But the architects’ original intention that the glass cladding which encases much of the museum would provide a space for digital interactive artworks has not often been realised – leaving what is usually a blank, opaque glass wall on the southern façade, facing the main approach. Likewise the first-floor outdoor walkway running the length of this wall is rarely used. Taken altogether GoMA is actually quite generic in its materiality and its spaces: it’s a large, sealed, secure, air-conditioned box, with something of the feel of a con‑ temporary high-end shopping centre. The idea that this is some kind of light, per‑ meable, timber vernacular building, something like a scaled‑up house, is simply not true, as even the most cursory inspection will reveal. Nevertheless, while we can see that the arguments for GoMA as a mode of vernac‑ ular architecture are flimsy, they built on a much older and very powerful narrative,

52 Macarthur 2007 (as in note 34), pp. 52–53.



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which frames the ‘regional’ architecture of Queensland as place specific and climate responsive. This then is the second reason why the rhetoric surrounding GoMA is sig‑ nificant: because it grows from and reinforces a larger myth.

The Tradition of Queensland Architecture as Climate Responsive Historians have typically framed Queensland’s architecture as a response to the region’s subtropical climate. Brisbane is viewed as a place of warm, humid sensuality, with an architecture to match, while the cooler south – Melbourne, for example – is viewed as a city of objective, dry intellect with a corresponding (capital C) Culture of architecture. In the early days of the colony, settlers from England and mainland Europe were dismayed by the heat, humidity, and apparent lack of culture in the colony. Architecture was seen as one possible remedy to act against such an apparently ‘degenerative’ climate.53 Discourses of race and taste intersected – would white set‑ tlers be able to remain healthy and control their physical urges in a place of sweat and miasma and luxurious tropical growth? Would they be able to maintain a sophisti‑ cated and moral society and a ‘civilised’ European taste for art and culture, or would they degenerate into languor, unproductiveness, and sensual pleasure?54 It should

53 Ideas of improvement underpin many of the early writings on Queensland’s tropical housing. These include William Coote, “The Influence of Climate on our Domestic Architecture, Paper read at the Monthly meeting of the Queensland Philosophical Society, Brisbane, November 4th, 1862,” Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Queensland, vol. 1, 1859–1872, 1–7 and Wilson, A. B. (1918). Domestic Architecture for Tropical and Subtropical Australia. Volume of Proceedings of the Second Aus‑ tralian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition, Brisbane. It is continued post-war by Karl Langer’s focus on the ‘fatigue’ of the Queensland housewife in Karl Langer, Sub-Tropical Housing (Brisbane: The University of Queensland, 1944). Such concerns have their origin in the European discourse of civilisation, which positioned the world’s tropical and subtropical regions as sites of degeneration and enervation for white communities (Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 3 vols., London: Grant Richards, 1903–1904 [1857]; Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain, London: Macmillan, 1868; William Hardy Wilson, A Dawn of a New Civilization. London: self published printed by Cecil Palmer, 1929, which described Queensland as demonstrating the “dangers” of the sub/tropics to the “white race,” demonstrates the continuity of such ideas into the twentieth century. This text in turn can be set against Raphael. W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics with Especial Reference to Australia and it Dependencies (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia Department of Health, 1925), which argued for continuing settlement of Australia’s tropics by the “white man.” Coote 1859–1872 (as in note 47), pp. 1–7; A. B. Wilson 1918 (as in note 47), pp. 143–146; Karl Langer, Sub-Tropical Housing, Brisbane: The University of Queensland, 1944; Wilson 1929 (as in note 31), chap‑ ter 9. 54 Climate and Character, in: The Brisbane Courier, (8 February 1896), p. 4; Wilson 1929 (as in note 31).

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not be necessary to point out the racism of such ideas – in fact Australian Indigenous people had a highly sophisticated culture stretching back some forty thousand years. But Aborigines were framed at this time as being part of nature, not culture, and their ephemeral, nomadic architectures were not sufficiently monumental to be valued by a Eurocentric eye. Questions of contemporary image building in and through museum architecture can thus be linked back to a much longer history of colonialism, including theories of race. An important aspect of the climate debate in the nineteenth century is its overlap or collision with the Victorian “reinvention” of race. Locating racial difference in biological attributes that were identified as innate and fixed (and thus unaffected by external influences), the Victorian theorist of race contested earlier constructs in which racial difference was attributed to environmental factors such as geography, climate, or food availability.55 A biological proposition of race was initially based on the idea that that there were multiple origins of humankind – a thesis that was even‑ tually contested and replaced by Darwin’s thesis of natural selection. The identifi‑ cation of racial difference with environmental rather than biological determinants was, however, also problematic for the colonial project, in that it suggested a para‑ digm that was dynamic and open to continuing change. Just as the French naturalist Georges Louis le Clerc believed “Negroes” would lose most of their distinguishing characteristics if removed to a colder climate, it was also assumed that the European in the tropics would succumb to its degenerative influences and ultimately lose those characteristics that were believed to distinguish the white race.56 The idea of accli‑ matisation and colonial settlement, the adaptation to new and foreign climates, was thus complicated by an additional concern for racial integrity and its maintenance.57

55 See Buckle 1857 and Dilke 1868 (as in note 53). 56 Later, in twentieth-century Queensland, such an environmental thesis of race and climate was challenged by Cilento 1925 (as in footnote 53). Cilento argued that the gradual adaptation and accli‑ matisation of the European body to the northern tropics had generated a new racial type or “North Queenslander” which he suggested offered a viable example of a “tropical born [white] Australian” (pp. 73–74). The evolution of the tropical Australian was for Cilento “one of natural selection” (p. 72). While the European male had thrived in the context of north Queensland, others, he suggested, had not. The “resident native race” or Australian Aborigine was largely “absent” within Cilento’s scheme (p. 5). (In reality they were not absent but displaced, now grouped in camps or missions.) Cilento attributed this absence to the Australian Aborigine’s continuing susceptibility to the degenerative influences of his or her climatic context, an influence (due to fixed racial differences) to which the white man was not susceptible. See Deborah van der Plaat, Architecture of Sun and Soil. European Architecture in Tropical Australia, in: Michela Rosso (ed.), Investigating and Writing Architectural History. Subjects, Methodologies and Frontiers. Papers from the third EAHN International Meeting July 2014, Turin: Politecnico di Torino, 2014, pp. 1119–1129. 57 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions. Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 11–13.



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In light of the above, and in the context of the early settlements in Queensland, much hope was pinned on architecture as a civilising influence, which could elevate and edify the populace into a cultured aesthetic sensibility.58 In an economy seen to be overly dominated by agriculture and mining, architecture also provided the useful service of money laundering: turning dirty profits into clean art. With culture always at risk of being overwhelmed by nature, the very viability of white settlement in the northern subtropical colonies was openly questioned, but architecture stood as a bastion against its disintegration. The colonies thus had a very particular interest in defining architecture as art, and specifically a local art – one that advanced a genu‑ inely local culture rather than always relying on imported styles and ideas. Art and architecture thus played a key role in the representation of the colonies as cultured, both to themselves and the world. This was particularly pronounced in houses, where the role of architecture was powerful, acting as protection from the ‘savageness’ of an intense landscape and climate, helping to maintain a civilised and ordered domestic realm. The timber Queensland house, with its wide verandahs and deep shade, elevated high above ground to avoid floods and assist in cross-ventilation, became the emblem of archi‑ tecture as amelioration, making it possible for white people to live in the tropics and stay decent, productive, and most importantly, cultured. Of course today, most of this ideology of climate has entirely reversed. What was once seen as an adversely or even dangerously hot climate is now a huge draw‑ card, attracting local and international tourists, as well as internal migrants moving north from other parts of Australia, and from elsewhere in the world. It’s true that old ideologies die hard, and there are many who still say that while a short holiday might be desirable in such a hot place, it is not conducive to everyday living, nor to work, and certainly not to a cerebral, cultural, or intellectual life of the mind. But on the whole, the heat is now seen as both manageable and beneficial, and traditional Queenslander houses are now highly desirable dwellings, seen as equally authentic and distinctive. Queensland’s architecture is still framed as climate responsive, but this is now seen as a positive attribute – amplifying and representing ‘place’, which

58 A draft Report on Tropical Housing (1943) had argued that the quality of housing in Australia’s tropics was “working strongly against the physical and mental well-being and efficiency of [the] peo‑ ple.” A widespread “lack of […] modern features which improve home-life […] labour saving devices, refrigeration, attractive and efficient kitchens, improved ventilation, and social amenities of various kinds” had collectively contributed to a lack of “household pride” and “fostered discontent, poor morale and neurasthenia” throughout tropical Australia. Suggesting the tropical house should work to “improve” its residents the committee recommended the future development of guidelines and designs suited to the various climates of Queensland. Raphael Cilento, Colin Clark, Douglas H. K. Lee, L. P. D. O’Connor, E. J. A. ​Weller and R. P. Cummings, Draft Report on Tropical Housing, 1943, in: Sir Raphael Cilento Papers, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland, UQFL44, Box 29, item 219, p. 5, pp. 7–8.

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is a catchall term seen to encompass heat and humidity, subtropical nature, and local cultures, all recast as highly valued assets.59 Climate-responsive architecture is quickly entangled with a range of other terms and concepts: it is frequently also described as a regionalist and hence authentic ver‑ nacular, mingling into ideas of a landscape-oriented, naturalistic, humanist, sensual, phenomenological mode of building. Tuned closely to national identity, the image also helps to ‘sell’ a particular mode of architecture, and it is no accident that the only world-famous Australian architect is Glenn Murcutt, whose buildings exactly corre‑ spond to such ideas: beautiful, sustainable houses in pristine landscapes. Of course, such a fetishisation of ‘place’ in architecture is not without its critics. The architectural theorist Karen Burns, for instance, has specifically criticised the work of Lindsay Clare, one of the architects of the GoMA building, as “championing […] the vernacular as our home-grown style”.60 She contends that “[t]he continued ascendency of the landscape myth [in Australian architecture] is […] [best] understood within the context of patronage, politics, taste and the vicissitudes of the international tourist market rather than as a return to an authentic Australian architecture.”61 Like‑ wise, Paul Walker has criticised theories of critical regionalism in architecture and their valorisation of ‘place’, arguing that “the sharpest differences between any two architectural cultures […] are not to be explained by climate or topography or any genius loci but rather through their different institutional and political contexts, their different social and cultural histories, their different fictional landscapes.”62 It is exactly such fictional landscapes which are manifest in the GoMA building, framed as part of an authentic local architectural tradition, responsive to the charac‑ teristics of the subtropical climate, and itself a work of high art. Architecture provides the perfect vehicle for constructing institutional images, since it is both material – a visible and habitable fictional landscape  – and also abstract enough to conjure a range of allusions, visual metaphors, associations, ideas, and ideologies. The image of the art museum springs not only from what it looks like, but what it stands for; it is symbolic as well as concrete, and architecture has a powerful ability to straddle both of these realms.

59 Modern Line Taken in These City Homes. It’s Called ‘Twentieth Century Sub-Tropical’, in: Brisbane Mail (Sunday 9 May 1948), p. 5; E. J. A. ​Weller (ed.), Buildings of Queensland, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959, p. 2; John Dalton, Houses in the Hot Humid Zones, in: Architecture in Australia (March 1963), p. 73; Louise Noble, A Sub-tropical Architecture, in: Shane Thompson. Making a Sub-tropical Architecture, Milan: l’Aeca Edizione, 2003, pp. 7–10; Miranda Wallace, Sarah Stutchbury (eds.), Place Makers. Contemporary Queensland Architects, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2008. 60 Karen Burns, Architectural Polemics, in: Transition 26 (1988), pp. 93–94, p. 94. 61 Ibid., p. 93. 62 Paul Walker, Kenneth Frampton and the Fiction of Place, in: Andrew Leach, Anthony Moulis, Ni‑ cole Sully (eds.), Shifting Views, Brisbane: UQP, 2008, p. 80.



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Oriented Towards the Asia Pacific So we have now discussed two reasons why the rhetoric and image-construction around GoMA’s architecture can be seen as significant. This brings us to the third point of argument: that the building was a rhetorical device to open links to Asia, not only culturally but also economically – to build relationships with trading partners. At the time when Architectus were first announced as the architects of the GoMA building, Lindsay Clare had said that their scheme was “designed to reflect the cul‑ tural connection with the Asia-Pacific region and its lightness.”63 But it is no coin‑ cidence that Australia’s major trading partners, in 2006 as today, are primarily in Asia. Australia’s top three export customers that year were China, Japan, and South Korea.64 And the raw materials of this trade are overwhelmingly mineral – the coal and iron ore embedded in the Australian landscape dug up wholesale and shipped overseas, in a notably less celebrated commodification of place and landscape than we see in tourism and place branding. GoMA was to become the largest exhibition space for modern art in Australia, dou‑ bling the space available to show the gallery’s collection of contemporary, indigenous, and Asia-Pacific art.65 This emphasis on both contemporary and Asian art, marks the orientation of the gallery away from a Eurocentric ‘old masters from the old world’ model and is central to the strategy of the new institution. Doug Hall, who was the director of the Queensland Art Gallery from 1987 to 2007 and oversaw the development of the GoMA project, has been frank in setting out the gallery’s strategy: having opened in 1895 and thus being relatively young by Australian standards, the gallery recognised that it would never have the depth of Australian and European art held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales or the National Gallery of Victoria, let alone the great galleries of Europe. In this context, the gallery recognised that it would be futile to attempt to compete on these grounds, to “aspire to become a faded mirror of other great historical collections in Australia and a limp marker of lesser achievement at the expense of other opportu‑

63 Albert 2002 (as in note 22), p. 17. 64 The Australian Bureau of Statistics notes the remarkable shift that has occurred across the hun‑ dred years in which it has been collecting data on Australian imports, exports, and trade: “The UK was Australia’s major trading partner in 1906, accounting for 59 % of imports and 49 % of exports. From 2006 to 2007, the UK accounts for just 4 percent of both imports and exports. The focus of trade has shifted to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries, which account for 72 percent of Australia’s trade from 2006 to 2007. The main sources of Australia’s imports are now China (15 per‑ cent), the USA (14 percent), and Japan (10 percent). Australian exports are primarily destined for the ports of Japan (19  percent), China (14  percent) and the Republic of Korea (8  percent).” Australian Bureau of Statistics, “100 years of international trade statistics”, http://www.abs.‌gov.au/AUSSTATS/ [email protected]/0/618AFF5416C64078CA2573E9001016FE?OpenDocument (accessed 21 May 2014). 65 Odgers 2002 (as in note 40), p. 3.

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nities.”66 These other opportunities were contemporary and modern art, and the art of the Asia-Pacific region, and the gallery turned explicitly, in the 1980’s, to collecting from these fields. It was this decision that would eventually, and directly, lead to both the GoMA building and its flagship exhibition, the Asia Pacific Triennial, or APT. In first pitching the idea of an APT, Hall envisioned that, “It [would become] a very important regional and cultural hub in terms of profiling Asian art.”67 And so it has indeed become. The Asia Pacific Triennial began in 1993 and is “the only major series of exhibitions in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, including Australia.”68 The inaugural exhibition in the new GoMA building was APT5, the fifth in the series, which featured amongst other works a major site-specific installation by Ai Weiwei, a film retrospective of the work of Jackie Chan, and a selection of works from the personal collection of Anish Kapoor.69 Today a well-entrenched and hugely successful series, the development of the APT was in many ways ahead of its time – entering the field of contemporary Asian art before many of the Western world’s galleries and museums acknowledged its significance, or found a way to access it. In this sense GoMA has also been remarkably canny in establishing its ‘point of difference’ and marking out its niche in the national and international art world. As Felicity Fenner noted in her review of both the new GoMA building and its inaugural exhibition, the APT5, in Art in America, the intention was “not just to establish Brisbane as Oceania’s gateway to the art of the Asia Pacific region, but to cultivate a global awareness and acceptance of its cultural practices while facilitating forums for critical dialogue and artistic exchange.”70 In this, she continues, “the APT has been a remarkable success.”71 In GoMA’s Asian orientation, we see that the culture industry and mining industry are closer than they might first appear. It represents a remarkable coherence of archi‑ tectural strategy, curatorial strategy, exhibition strategy, and government interests, in both the cultural and economic spheres. And this brings us, finally, to the fourth significance of GoMA as a rhetoric of place-making and localism: its orientation to the contemporary and everyday.

66 Doug Hall, Making Brisbane Modern, in: Peter Hyatt, Art House. Gallery of Modern Art Queensland, Queensland: Thames and Hudson, Fisherman’s Bend, 2008, pp. 6–13, p. 7. 67 Doug Hall interviewed by Debra Aldred, Change of Art, in: The Courier Mail (23 January 2003), p. 19. 68 Big On Art. Australia’s Largest Art Gallery, in: The Courier Mail (12 December 2006), p. 44. 69 Ibid. While it could be said that these ‘big names’ represent a Westernised perspective on Asia, a kind of exotic mainstream, the APT also commissions international Asian curators as part of its programme – who might be expected to have more of an insider’s vision. Likewise, the APT is a col‑ lecting exhibition, so QAGOMA’s early engagement with Chinese and other Asian art means that it now has a very powerful and impressive collection of the work of artists who subsequently became internationally known. 70 Felicity Fenner, Report from Brisbane. Preserving the Local, in: Art in America 95.10 (Novem‑ ber 2007), pp. 74–79, p. 75. 71 Ibid.



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The Contemporary, Accessible and Populist: The New Queensland While the Asia-Pacific focus of the gallery is significant, so is its focus on the contem‑ porary – both in terms of new art and the present day life of its own city. Hall describes how the gallery “has become a very animated, activated social space of cultural learn‑ ing, and a lot of that’s fun as well. Everyone, regardless of whatever stratification of audiences, finds this […] gallery appealing, and there are a lot of first-time visitors.”72 All of this could be only rhetoric, but in fact it is true  – GoMA is a hugely popular and well-subscribed museum. Events like Art After Hours and the Cinémathèque pro‑ gramme run from GoMA’s two cinemas bring patrons into the museum around the clock. Its children’s art program, where major contemporary artists are commissioned to make interactive art specifically for children, is world leading and is certainly very well used by the children of the city. The gallery is explicit in its intentions to connect with children at an early age in order to develop future audiences, to “create a foun‑ dation for a lifelong engagement with the arts.”73 Described in the local popular press as “the biggest playground in town”74 (which is both free and air-conditioned – not an insignificant fact in this climate), the gallery is clearly a place of popular leisure and entertainment as well as edification. What might in a less sympathetic reading be called populism is here celebrated as accessibility and engagement, breaking down social barriers to art.75 Thus the museum (and by extension the city, and the state) are framed as vibrant and youthful, cultured yet accessible, local yet cosmopolitan, focused on the future, and looking outward towards the new world Asia-Pacific region, rather than the old world of Europe. GoMA is clearly not elitist, but it is certainly ambitious – Premier Beattie, when opening the museum in 2006, announced that it “was one of the top ten galleries in the world,” which would leave visitors “gobsmacked.” But he also said, revealingly, that “[w]hen I grew up in Queensland, education was not valued, the arts were not valued, acknowledging traditional owners [that is, acknowledging the original Aboriginal occupants prior to white settlement] would never have happened. But this is the new Queensland.”76

72 Doug Hall quoted after: Aldred, 2003 (as in note 67), p. 19. 73 Courier Mail, 2006 (as in note 68), p. 44. 74 Rodney Chester, Arts Has the Kids’ Interest Licked, The Courier Mail (4 December 2006), p. 7. 75 This apparent accessibility is not universally acclaimed. Indeed some critics argue that the gal‑ lery is overly populist and “childish”. See Katherine Feeney, GoMA Accused of Being Childish on Fifth Birthday, in: The Sydney Morning Herald (November 24 2011), available online at http://www. smh.‌com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/goma-accused‑of-being-childish‑on-fifth-birthday20111123-1nury.‌html. 76 Sandra McLean and Amanda Horswill, A Jewel in Our State’s Crown, in: The Courier Mail (2 De‑ cember 2006), p. 44.

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We can see, then, that GoMA is the flagship of a “new Queensland,” and of efforts by the state at active social engineering, reinforcing the value of the arts, educa‑ tion, and social justice, and communicating these to the public. Premier Beattie at another time even claimed that in addition to providing jobs and boosting cultural tourism, such projects were “the best way in the long term to deal with drugs and unemployment.”77 Here we see the arts, and architecture as cultural infrastructure, being explicitly framed as an instrument of social engineering, a civilising and edify‑ ing force. The government of the day saw the project as serving a much wider range of purposes than simply supporting the arts; indeed, it was seen to achieve multiple ends at the same time – training the tastes of a local populace to be more cultured and cultivated, whilst also importing new audiences and building relationships and markets for the exports upon which the state’s wealth is based. Of course, this kind of instrumentalisation of art as a civilising, edifying, and didactic force is hardly new in the history of museums.78 What marks this out as a fas‑ cinating new instance of the museum’s old role is the way it draws upon place-identity to build its image.79 Thus in order to really understand the “new Queensland” Beattie described, it is necessary to have a better sense of the old Queensland, and this brings us neatly back to landscape, climate, art, and architecture, and to the final moments of our argument here, via Placemakers, a GoMA exhibition held in June 2008.

Conclusions: Placemakers and HEAT Placemakers. Contemporary Queensland Architects was the “largest exhibition of con‑ temporary architecture ever staged in an Australian art museum,” and it was greeted with great excitement in an architectural community delighted that the government and public had finally recognized that architecture was more than just a branch of real estate

77 Odgers 2002 (as in note 40), p. 3. 78 See for example the work of Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, 1995; Carol Duncan, Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship, in: Ivan Karp, Steven Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, DC: Smith‑ sonian Institution Press, 1991, pp. 88–103. 79 To understand this effect further, it is useful to draw upon the literature of critical tourism stud‑ ies. See for example Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren, Donald V. L. Macleod (eds.), Tourists and Tourism. Identifying with People and Places, Oxford: Berg, 1997; Shelley Hornstein, Curating Place. Maps, Starchitecture and Museums-Without-Borders, in: Martin Prochazk, Ondrej Pilny (eds.), Time Reconfigured. Myths, Foundation Texts and Imagined Communities, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005, pp. 190–204; Bella Dicks, Culture on Display. The Production of Contemporary Visitability, Maiden‑ head: Open University Press, 2003.



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Fig. 8: Gallery of Modern Art, ­Place­makers exhibition, 2008.

(fig. 8).80 To exhibit architecture in a contemporary art gallery legitimated it as art, and Placemakers thus formally aligned local architectural practice with the allied arts of sculpture, painting, film, and theatre.81 The vast majority of the buildings exhibited at Placemakers were houses, and the customary narratives – of place, climate, and land‑ scape – were all clearly on display. The exhibition particularly underscored subtropical architecture as enabling a desirable lifestyle – a languid, pleasurable life in the sun. There are two elements of the Placemakers exhibition that are revealing, and that will work for us here as a kind of conclusion. First, the exhibition was opened by then state premier, Anna Bligh. This was curious, since although the exhibition was significant in the eyes of the local architecture profession, it was nothing on the size and prestige of the other blockbuster exhibitions around it – at the same time as Placemakers, a major Picasso show was drawing much larger crowds. Why then was the leader of the state opening this relatively modest exhibition of local architecture? The explanation is that the Queensland government, through its Department of Tourism, Regional Development and Industry, was the major sponsor of the exhibi‑ tion. Of course the gallery, too, is almost entirely funded by the state government. So the state had its own interests and motivations for supporting an exhibition of archi‑ tecture and, significantly, for doing so within a gallery of modern art. Specifically, it used the occasion to launch a new industry development and export program – tell‑ ingly titled HEAT. HEAT had been developed by the Creative Industries Unit within government and aimed to raise the international profile of Queensland architecture, using the world media to educate potential clients as to its virtues, to sell architec‑ tural services as an export commodity, and to frame Queensland as a cultured and desirable location to live and do business.

80 Tony Ellwood, Foreword, in: Miranda Wallace, Sarah Stutchbury (eds.), Place Makers. Contemporary Queensland Architects, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2008. Catalogue to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2 August‑23 November 2008. 81 See Naomi Stead, Place Makers. Exhibition review, in: Architecture Australia 97.6 (2008), pp. 31–34.

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Using the GoMA building as one of its flagships, HEAT’s ‘key message’ was that “Queensland architects are environmentally responsive and responsible”.82 Here we see the old discourse of climate responsiveness reinvented as sustainability. The aim to export Queensland’s architectural services across Asia, and to a wider world made increasingly hot by global warming, was serviced by harnessing the cultural capital of the art museum. And this brings us to the final point, at which this story culminates. For within the Placemakers exhibition, the GoMA building itself was one of the exhibits. The museum container was literally also contained. In the magnificently casual nominalist gesture of exhibiting architecture in an art museum all the intricate disciplinary difficulties about when and where and how architecture is an art have been swept away. It must be art because it’s in an art gallery; that solves that dilemma. Likewise, in this case it matters little that the apparent climate responsiveness of the building is in the end really only image – it is after all a heavily air-conditioned sealed box with a big roof and some decorative timber screening. The very superficiality of this image, in the end, only proves the power of a state machine that can construct, support, and maintain it. This paper has attempted to place a significant piece of museum architecture in the larger context of cultural policy and values and to examine how the image of this particular art museum entangles political and aesthetic questions. In discussing the GoMA project, it has addressed the role of its architecture in constructing an image of the institution, and its entanglement with larger issues of place branding and govern‑ ment cultural policy as a form of soft power. We have attempted to demonstrate how such an image might be circulated through the popular and professional media, and how it might be constructed in practical terms – through key exhibitions like the Asia Pacific Triennial and Placemakers, through engagement methods like Art After Hours and the children’s art centre, and above all through architecture, with all of its fictional narratives and rhetorical flourishes, its supposed place specificity, its exceptionalism, and its ordinariness. But above all of this, it is clear that the shape and agenda of this art museum, its image and its architec‑ ture, is dictated by government policy – not only cultural but also by economic policy. Architecture, perhaps uniquely amongst the arts, has always straddled both art and industry, culture and economics – its status as culture has always been entangled with its materialisation of economic development. The image of this art museum thus sits at the heart of a nested series of visions, building tourist and local identities for the city, the state, the region – each of them carefully constructed to be coherent and consistent, to include what is attractive and marketable, and to exclude less desirable realities. The image of this art museum, constructed through architecture, is in fact a mise en abyme.

82 Julie McGlone, Heat: Queensland's New Wave of Environmental Architects, Brisbane: Creative In‑ dustries Unit, Department of Tourism, Regional Development and Industry, 2008, p. 1.

Intermedialities, Shifting Images

Norbert M. Schmitz

Scottie Sees Beauty: Representations of the Museum in Classic Cinema For Prof. Dr. Irene Markowitz, Düsseldorf-Museum, Schloss Benrath

Two Contradictory Dispositifs: The Museum and the Movies When Woody Allen explains why he prefers to visit the Metropolitan Museum rather than the MoMA – namely because the Metropolitan attracts the prettier female vis‑ itors – it is a typical New York party joke. If, however, a teenager explains that she prefers films with Johnny Depp to ones with Brad Pitt, we think it is appropriate: this is the decorum of cinema. However, reflecting on this pleasant joke by a New York intellectual leads directly into the theme of the relationship between two media: i.e., the museum and the cinema. For the sake of the point of this narrow frame, the follow‑ ing is limited to the hitherto hardly researched perspective of the former, the temple of the muses. This point of view seems to be the correct one, however, in order to provide an article on the self-reflection of museology as a film scholar. Cinema, namely, shows a view of the museum system from the outside; it implies the unspoken discourse of a part of society about the alien nature of the holy grail of high art. It is the unspoken that in the above-mentioned joke allows us a Freudian laugh, one that does not occur in the question of our cinematic preferences. When we observe both film and the museum as media and wish to place them in a relationship to each other, it is first necessary to determine their medial differences. Whereas film – as film theory, the ultimate source of media theory – has become the epitome of the general understanding of media, we only call the museum a medium explicitly within the framework of a younger universalisation of the term “media.” To this, we can add the systems theory reflections of Luhmann and his suc‑ cessors. Doing so would introduce the most diverse points of comparison, i.e., the material differences of each “medium,” that of the architecture, the exhibition design, the light direction, etc. on the one hand, and the materiality of the celluloid and of the monitors, etc., on the other. Already, this crude assembly of different features shows that this is not a promising methodology. So let us choose another point of access. Instead of working with an undeter‑ mined media term, there is a need to contrast two dispositifs, each describing the conventions of society and the attitudes of expectation that occur in the communi‑ cative process in both media. Dispositif in the sense of Baudry here does not imply a

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formal definition1 but is used as a “reversed term” in the sense of Karl Mannheim.2 Consequently, it concerns a particular ensemble of technical, economic, and social conditions that are mirrored in the social reception and self-evident expectation of the audience. Cinema is then a solitary immersion into a soft chair in a darkened room, alongside the joyful expectation of more or less sophisticated entertainment and empathy. What is expected is a sort of dramatization of normal everyday life as a cathartic experience “much bigger than life.” The museum, on the other hand, is a much more concrete social space in whose defined public sphere the visitor not only exposes him-/herself to the exhibited artefacts but also rehearses a specific, precisely distant-reflexive attitude to perception. As a collectively held understanding, this per‑ ception shapes the museum visit even when the viewer stands alone in front of works of art; namely that the framing in the decorum of the museum architecture and exhi‑ bition presents a clear order.3 Let us remember our last visit to the Louvre and the most impressive cinema visit of last year! We shall see that since the moving image as a monitor or projection has long been integrated into the classic temple of the muses, the most important differ‑ ence at times is perhaps the social space in which the aesthetic artefacts are presented and which correspondingly pre-defines our reception of them. For this reason, it is the classical style that is the focus of this essay that is the great entertainment cinema or the TV movie since its very beginning. Just consider the trivial genre movie The Egyptian Mummy (1914) by Lee Beggs, or, for a more recent example, Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill of 1980 or Jannik Johansen’s Danish thriller Stealing Rembrandt of 2013. In these examples of classical entertainment cinema, the museum always occurs as a somehow strange location the symbolic significance of which reaches far beyond the places of ordinary life. Thus it is no wonder that the museum occasionally becomes subject to ridicule as in Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawks (1938), or that in 1988 Hollywood made fun of the cultural aura of High Art in The Moderns, Alan Rudolph’s smart comedy about an art forger. But the issue here is the ideal case of the representation of one medium within another by suddenly encountering their different symbolic social reputation, like that of the neoclassical

1 Jean-Louis Baudry, Das Dispositiv. Metapsychologische Betrachtungen des Realitätseindrucks, in: Psyche 48.11, (1994), pp. 1047–1074. 2 Cf.: Karl Mannheim, Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation, in: Dagobert Frey, Hans Tietze (eds.), Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte des kunsthistorischen Instituts des Bundesdenkmalamts, Vienna: Österreichische Verlagsgesellschaft Eduard Hölzel, vol. 1, Yr. 15, 1921/22, pp. 236–274. 3 Cf.: Alste Horn-Oncken, Über das Schickliche. Studien zur Architekturtheorie I. Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, 3rd edition, no. 70 , Göttingen; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967. Anne Röver, Bienséance – Zur ästhetischen Situation im Ancien Régime, dargestellt an Beispielen der Pariser Privatarchitektur, Hildesheim: Olms 1977. The decorum theory of Pochat is decisive here, in: Götz Pochat, Geschichte der Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie. Von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Cologne: DuMont, 1986, in particular pp. 280–289.



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Palace of Fine Arts in a conventionally though nevertheless elaborately narrated Hol‑ lywood thriller: Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. This universally known movie is to serve as an example. As mentioned above, we are concerned here with the perspectives of cinema and film studies that would like to reflect the meeting of two worlds. What happens then when the one reception attitude observes the other? Or in concrete terms: How is the museum represented in classic films? One can also turn the ques‑ tion around: Namely, how is cinema represented in the museum? As suggested above, when concentrating on the first perspective, one should at least mention that in the sense of Baudry’s dispositif cinema cannot actually be an object of the museum. If at all, film is shown only as experimental film or as a purely didactic presentation on a monitor or a projector. Every experienced museumgoer knows that the screening of classical film in an exhibition like the two hour film Lust for Life by Vincente Minelli about Van Gogh only makes limited sense. Experimental cinema, whose home is rep‑ resented by the museum or the museum-like presentations of the local art cinema, thematises now and then the mainstream cinema, but not to adapt its aesthetic of empathy but to reflect this alien function. Douglas Gordon’s Hitchcock Reflexion in 24  Hour Psycho from 1993 is perhaps the most well known example; however, one should mention Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son from 1969. For cinema itself as a dispositif with its inherent narrative, the museum and its own conditions of recep‑ tion contrarily remain a non-transparent factum brutum.

An Example of Different Receptions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo Furthermore, we are concerned with the standard of museum presentation and its dramaturgical function, however not in the sense of a comprehensive history of the motif.4 Instead, the situation indicated will be demonstrated in the following by a renowned and rather typical example – Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo5 (1958), which was based on the novella D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac.6 The film tells the story of the police reporter Scottie who has been suspended from duty after the horrible death of a colleague. Scottie, played by James Stewart, had almost lost his own life in a pursuit that spanned the roofs of the town. We meet him again in

4 On research of film motifs: Christine N. Brinckmann, Britta Hartmann, Ludger Kaczmarek (eds.), Motive des Films. Ein kasuistischer Fischzug. Festschrift für Hans J. Wulff, Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 5 On the filming: Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius. The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, Boston: Little Brown, 1983, and John Russel Taylor, Hitch. The Life and Work of Alfred Hitchcock, Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press, 1978. 6 The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.

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the apartment of his pretty friend Midge, a designer acted by Barbara Bel Geddes, who obviously has been interested in him for a long time. For him this friendship is a platonic one, and they both interact rather familarly and amicably. But then he experiences an encounter with a different mysterious woman: Scottie is asked by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine on her rather strange tour of San Francisco. This path leads from their splendid hotel via various points around San Francisco to the museum (fig. 1). For the museum, Hitchcock chose the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District, with its abstract pseudo-classical elements including a domed hall and a peristyle, which was built in 1915 by the arts and crafts architect Bernard Maybeck. After Scottie gets out of his car, he follows the fascinating woman as inconspicuously as possible into the museum with all its classic pomp. We see the truly monumental, pseudo-classical museum archi‑ tecture of a column-framed forecourt with an imposing stairway in order to then view the peristyle, an obvious copy from ancient Rome. Inside, the camera acting as the sub‑ jective perspective of the protagonist finds the object of his multiple desires sitting on a bench in front of a painting of a woman from the nineteenth century. The camera pans across the painting and focuses on the detail of a bouquet of flowers on the lap of the woman portrayed. A close-up shows a similar bouquet, which Madeleine, played by Kim Novak, has placed next to herself on the bench. An idiosyncratic coil in the hairstyle of the sitter is mirrored in Madeleine’s unusual hairstyle. Shot and counter-shot show Scottie’s obsessive gaze and its object. The camera then retreats from the hero and turns around, discretely crossing the room, passing a number of European paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, to which Scottie devotes rather casual atten‑ tion. He plays the interested art-lover more than being really fascinated by the paintings. Before Scottie leaves the building, he asks an attendant in the dark-columned atrium of the exhibition hall about the painting while once again directing his gaze back into the sky-lit room where Madeleine is still sitting motionless like a statue, gazing at it. He receives his answer; it is Carlotta. The catalogue in his hand should provide further information. At the end of the sequence, we see again the stairs and the portico, now with Scottie in front of it in his car, which leads us away from the auratic world of the museum. In what follows, the well-known movie bears out an almost confusing plot concerning a hushed-up crime and a female lookalike, who is of no further importance for our subject matter. What should be emphasized is solely the narrative function of the museum’s aura, which underlines the aura of this more ideal than real woman who belongs to a different world almost unintelligible to Scottie. It is just this aspect that marks her mysterious attraction, an attraction boisterous Midge will never achieve. The paintings in the film are probably the originals hanging in the museum at the time. What is noticeable is the qualitative contrast of the portrait seen in close-up to the other paintings.7 The quality of the painting, which reminds us more of depart‑

7 This again takes up the spiral motif (Vertigo) which introduces this film about dizziness and over‑ coming it as an abstract sign in the opening credits by Saul Bass.



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ment store kitsch than of English and American portrait paintings in the lineage of Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Lawrence, appears to have been unimportant to the director, and one should ask whether the difference was even noticed at all by the general public. The important thing for Hitchcock was the dramaturgical function of using the painting to visually introduce the figure of the woman with whom Mad‑ eleine identifies. Hitchcock here creates an auratic atmosphere that separates the “high altar” of art from the rest of the world. The fact that Madeleine moves in this realm comfortably and almost as if at home increases the feeling of the unattainable, otherworldly, secret object of desire for the figure of identification, i.e., our down-toearth hero. This “goddess” is a projection of Scottie’s; she is more an unreal phantasm than a woman made of flesh and blood. In this masterly production, all this is inte‑ grated into the wider, more generally well-known plot of the classic film. The path into the museum perhaps represents the climax of the characterisation of the two central figures in the entire film. And it shows in a nutshell the classic dramaturgical function of the museum in classical cinema. Not just through particular content but also as a cultural space, as the epitome of the sphere of high art, the museum defines the characters via their relationship to it. Thus the museum is not only a setting or a safe for artefacts to which society concedes special, in this case artificial, importance; it is itself a symbolic form that coerces the beholder into aesthetic distance and deference. And this instruction of perception here fostered contrasts with that of the entertainment cinema. Thus the museum can become the subject of a completely different communication as we know it, for example, from Hollywood. Expressed in terms of systems theory: The subsystem of art is at this place subject to the selectionary orders of the system of mass communi‑ cation. Therefore the beholder indeed doesn’t need any kind of special knowledge of the exhibited works of high art; the mere awareness of their cultural value as part of the diegesis of, for example, a movie like Vertigo is absolutely sufficient. It is also surely not a coincidence that Hitchcock chose a museum of the nine‑ teeth century; it’s an architecture that exemplifies an idealistic aesthetic and defines itself by its sublime distance to the world of the commonplace. Everything from the stairway to the exhibition hall forces Scottie into a particular habitus, which he plays more than internalises – since he enters the building not with artistic interest at all but with detective interests. If one sees conventional film in the form of the classical style of cinema8 as a genuine, aesthetic form of the twentieth century, then it becomes obvious that the type of museum preferred in cinema is, as cited here, the museum

8 With regard to the history of form of the “découpage classique” and the “Classical Style” see David Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema. Narrational Principles and Procedures, in: Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 17–34; and Walter Dadek, Das Filmmedium. Zur Begründung einer allgemeinen Filmtheorie, Mu‑ nich/Basel: Rhein­hardt, 1968, p. 108.

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Fig. 1: Hitchcock’s Vertigo, museum sequence



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of the nineteenth century – an awe-inspiring Temple of the Muses – which seemingly pays homage to the aesthetic of a long-gone past. I used “seemingly” in a relative manner here, since at first sight my argument appears to confirm a common cultur‑ al-critical reservation against popular mass media, according to which these would be the trivialised form of long-revised aesthetic paradigms.9 It is exactly this view, however, that mistakes the significance of essential displacements of aesthetic norms in the contemporaneousness of non-contemporaneousness in a medially differenti‑ ated industrial culture. The visitor’s corresponding attitude of reverence emphasises this to the point of caricature, as one can observe in the humble and amazed mimicry of Carl Raddatz and Gustav Knuth in their roles as two simple river boatmen who enter the realm of the fine arts for the first time in Helmut Käutner’s Unter den Brücken from 1944/45. They are looking for the same lover, a decent girl, who they naively hope to find in a museum. They have heard that in the conflict of this three-way relationship she has taken cover as a painter’s model in the den of iniquity of the city. And the voluptuous images of Flemish paintings seduce their innocent minds. However, the image of the museum in this film in the sense of Bourdieu is illegit‑ imate and incorrect for classic museology,10 as is the amazement of the protagonists at the topless ladies in the “pantheon” of Munich’s Alte Pinakothek in this boatmen’s drama.11 However, Bourdieu’s view is not the main point here; at best smiling at the awkwardness of the otherwise very likeable heroes could however cure us of the usual prejudices. What is decisive here, moreover, is the observation of the artistically ambi‑ tious transformation of one aesthetic ensemble – as I would like to call the classical museum here – into another, as well as (and here there is a link with the well-known ideas of Marshall McLuhan) the presentation of an old medium as a new one. Käut‑ ner’s wonderful miniature only used the naive relationship to high culture and its rules of propriety for a gentle joke; in the Hitchcock film, the function of the museum motif is much more complex, as has been mentioned already.12 However, a film like Vertigo must not necessarily be a selection and re-interpretation of the aesthetic of one dispositif via the logic of the other. The idea that the museum as such represents a metahistorical, so to speak ontic, substance must be dismissed; moreover, it is known to have a variety of functions within modern society, which in turn have external and

9 The relevant denunciations in the history of film and photography with regard to “pictoralism”, “film d’art” or “film impressionism” are in my opinion based on similar prejudices. 10 Cf.: Pierre Bourdieu, Elemente zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Kunstwahrnehmung, in: Pierre Bourdieu, Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1994, pp. 159–202. 11 Inner-diegetically the film takes place in Berlin, but due to the bombings the film team had to revert to filming in Munich. 12 Käutner himself was a dandyish aesthete, who after the war as the most important representative of German film visited seminars on art history at the university (friendly information provided by Prof. Dr. Irene Markowitz).



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internal perspectives. One of them, in addition to the spheres of economics or politics, is that of the mass media. I would like to cite Hans Zitko: One and the same object can be perceived and commented on in different ways under changing media conditions. Art does not have fixed, unchangeable and identifiable substances in chan‑ ging contexts. Neither does it offer the space for a particularly well-defined type of perception, of which it has been accused in aesthetics in many different ways. Moreover, it provides an open field for different applications of media which make possible different sensual phenomena and experiences.13

In addition to the inner-diegetic function of the identification of the supposed heroine with her ancestor in the portrait, the aspect selected by Hitchcock’s cinema in Vertigo is mainly the confrontation of everyday life – the horizon of which the more downto-earth Scottie has never questioned – with another “higher” and “special” sphere which shows itself in the externality of an almost aristocratic beauty. On the one hand, Scottie desires her beauty as concretely as Kant’s Iroquois desired the rich offerings of the street stand during his first visit to Paris. On the other hand, Scottie is drawn to this women by the prestige of her pure disinterested pleasure in art, her interesseloses Wohlgefallen. As such, Hitchcock’s film condenses the essence of the idealistic-bour‑ geois museum culture as the kingdom of beauty – it is also architecturally subliminal, separated from the space of normal experience.14 This tension provides the suspense of Vertigo.

The Museum Inside the Mass-Media It’s exactly here that the import of the previous observations for museology resides. For, the de facto negotiation of the museum in the external field of the mass media shows that contrary to the discourse of openness often demanded by the avant-garde, it is exactly the difference between high and popular art which remains not only irre‑ versible, but also sensible and fruitful. The view of the museum in cinema shows that it is not the collection of artefacts as such that makes a museum what it is, but, as mentioned above, it is the complex ordering of a dispositif that encompasses society’s conventionalised attitudes of reception like in the cinema. The ideas that this can be reversed by the developments of the twentieth century have all not only failed but they potentiate the social difference even more. One can perceive this in particular in modern museum architecture and its ideas of a demo‑

13 Hans Zitko, Kunstwelt. Mediale und systemische Konstellationen, Hamburg: Philo & Philo Fine Arts, 2012, p. 32. 14 An overview in: Hildegard Vieregg, Museumswissenschaften. Eine Einführung, Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2006.

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cratic aesthetic above and beyond decorum. When classical indices such as columns and portals, etc., are removed and only the concrete cubes of the parking garage remain, it does not mean that the object becomes “free” and that it does not require a specific habitus of aesthetic perception. The Woody Allen quote from Manhattan at the beginning, by the way, uses this museum iconography when the slightly hys‑ terical intellectual played by Diane Keaton grumbles at the existential negativity of a non-objective sculpture in the museum’s white cube. Modern galleries and loft studios are part of the fashionable iconography of many films, not only Allen’s, that center on the intelligentsia. Historical museum architecture would not provide the same effect. If the museum loses its symbolic forms, it becomes disproportionately difficult to recognise the correct reception habitus or to differentiate the object of art as such from all the others.15 The plain, former police journalist and the now simple private detective Scottie had an easier task of recognising a pseudo-classical, magnif‑ icent location as the extraordinary particularity of art. Someone who hasn’t received an upper-class socialization will find it more difficult to appreciate abstract, even mundane forms like Warhol’s Brillo detergent boxes as a kind of art than a painting of Titian presented in a golden frame. What applies for the works also defines the museum. The allegedly open, modern museum actually cements social borders as its architectural forms, for example the absence of columns, etc., increases the diffi‑ culty of distinguishing it from other kinds of rooms. It is just this uncertainty, namely the inability of the working-class public to experience open, technically plain, but mere theoretical and conceptual works as art in general, that cements the museum as a bourgeois institution. It is simply tragic that the deconstruction of the classical museum as a form of bourgeois iconography initially aimed at the contrary, namely its emancipation from elitism. Norbert Elias has shown how it is part of the dynamic of the European culture of taste that each group of elites has been forced to continuously refine its advanced aes‑ thetic in order to remain one step ahead of the competitors, who are always trying to emulate their habitus.16 The “more invisible” the signs of the bon goût were, the more unremarkable and seemingly “natural” the subtleties of a superior habitus became, the more difficult it was for the advancing “lower classes” to acquire it. The museum of modern times, following the art of classic avant-garde, thus became the subtle loca‑ tion of aesthetic-social differentiation. Elias also determined that it is part of the strat‑ egy of a modern aristocracy that its signs of advancement – i.e., its “good and secure taste” – can be read as proof of its superior nature, whereas the necessity of a pro‑

15 Ultimately these structures are the basis for the so subtly studied aesthetics of Las Vegas by Ven‑ turi and Scott Brown. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. 16 Cf.: Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1969.



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tracted socialization to acquire this taste is denied. The blasé reservation about any museum didactics – known from particularly subtle representatives of “pure mod‑ ernism” – has documented this involuntarily. Pierre Bourdieu has investigated this view less historically but systematically as it applies to the bourgeois culture of postwar societies of Western functional democracies.17 And this, on the other hand, could be applied to the situation of the present and to the self-evident truth of modernist museology: it’s precisely this supposedly “immediate aesthetic experience” without any framing signification that exercises the subtlest form of aesthetic power practices that cement social distinction systems in their claim of humanist universality and the claims to power which accompany them.18 From here we move back to the Hitchcock film. When I mentioned above that cinema presents the classical museum of the nineteenth century, I noted that this is apparently a reversion of the ideology of the modern museum as a place of eman‑ cipation. For, indeed, the museum as an institution cannot shake off its framing as such but can at best modify its symbolic forms as characterised by many contempo‑ rary “postmodern” museum buildings. And this is an ideological myth entirely in the sense of Roland Barthes.19 One does not need to convince anybody that Hollywood is also an ideology factory. Another quality of this popular art, however, lies in the fact that it, more than any other medium gave the societies of the twentieth century their symbolic form.20 In the face of the psychological depth and dramaturgical finesse and aesthetic quality of a Hitchcock, this ambivalence between Hollywood’s progressive and conservative aspects is obvious. In contrast to the museum, however, there is no doubt about the complex social structuring, the norms of viewing, etc., in the cinema, whereas the museum as the heir to an idealistic aesthetic often indulges in illusions

17 Cf.: Pierre Bourdieu, Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft, Frank‑ furt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1987. 18 In this sense, one should consider the radicalism of Foucault’s analysis. Contrary to the utopia of critical theory, power practices are always given, and art is not a refuge for them either. The “art dis‑ positif” in the sense of Bourdieu is not above and beyond these power practices either. Of course, this notion is problematic at least for further stretches of Foucault’s work, since the aesthetic discourse for him is precisely the excess of discursive practices of power. See: Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung des Dis­kurses, Munich: Hanser, 1974, p. 77. Similarly: Peter Bürger and Christa Bürger (eds.), Alltag, Allegorie und Avantgarde, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1987, p. 119. Pertaining to Bourdieu’s criticism on the discourse theorist see Joseph Jurt, Das literarische Feld. Das Konzept Pierre Bourdieus in Theorie und Praxis, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. We are not concerned with deconstructing the aesthetic due to its necessary entanglement, but with the comprehension of such necessities of art, of the conditions of possibilities of its freedom. Similarly “the negative aesthetic” implies a domination-free space as lost. Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. 19 Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1964 [Paris 1957]. 20 Cf.: Erwin Panofsky, Stil und Medium des Films, in: Die ideologischen Vorläufer des Rolls-RoyceKühlers & Stil und Medium des Films [1936/1947], Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1999.

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about its conditionality and the limits of its own possibilities. The traditional museum as idealistic aesthetics turned to stone appealed to the public in general and oversaw the historical and social contingency of its own existence. Even when it expanded the boundaries of art with regard to content and redefined these again and again in revolutionary fashion, it still remained within this framework and had to marginal‑ ise other routes of access. Its conception was too much geared toward aesthetically refined middle-class citizens who were conceived as whole persons and not toward society’s necessarily different reception groups or even the different aspects of recep‑ tion of each individual actor. Occasionally, cinema tells the museum-makers some‑ thing about these forms of reception beyond its own discourse horizon like stories from another planet.

Walter Grasskamp

The Museum in Print: André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire and André Vigneau’s Photographic Encyclopaedia of Art The photograph of André Malraux posing with the double pages of a book spread out on the floor, as if he had art history at his feet, is an icon of late twentieth-century art history. Notoriously misdated in 1947, it is mostly accompanied by captions stating that it shows Malraux working at his musée imaginaire – which is never quite wrong, but never quite right, either (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Maurice Jarnoux, André Malraux 1954

The notion of the musée imaginaire stands for books with reproductions of photo‑ graphs showing artworks that are scattered worldwide over different museums, but comfortably at hand for the reader. The loss of the haptic and spatial presence of the unique artwork (you might call it its aura) is compensated in Malraux’s view by the possibility to arrange the reproductions in any context imaginable (hence the name, at least partly), independently of wherever in the world the artworks may be fixed or whatever cultural and historical context they may come from. Malraux saw it as the central privilege of his musée imaginaire to establish radical optical discourses in reproductions, independent from the actual size, material, or where‑ abouts of the artworks, a discourse to be arranged deliberately in the illustrated art book, which is, in fact, the material substrate of the musée imaginaire. For over thirty years Malraux used this notion for books that were very different in conception and range,

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Fig. 2: The Book on the Floor: Cover of Grottes sacrées.

though. This is a severe complication rarely dealt with by authors who fancy the musée imaginaire as an airy institution of the mind or a licence for any art historical speculation. Thus the different types of books behind the notion are seldom scrutinized in detail. This is one of the reasons that Henri Zerner, Louise Merzeau, Alban Cerisier, and, recently, also Georges Didi-Huberman – have pleaded for a new view on Malraux’s musée imaginaire.1 Rather than situating it within the history of ideas, Zerner and Merzeau pointed out that the musée imaginaire belongs to the history of media. In their view, the typographical and editorial differences between the various book ver‑ sions of the musée imaginaire become crucial – and this is one of the reasons that in this essay I am only speaking about the book on the floor, which gives a very specific version of Malraux’s imaginary museum that cannot be generalised. It is called Des Bas-reliefs aux grottes sacrées, and is the second volume of Malraux’s second trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, published by Gallimard between 1952 and 1954 (fig. 2). In fact, it was the spring of 1954 when Malraux was photographed for a personal profile to appear in Paris Match. In opposition to Malraux’s first and – in terms of typography – rather conven‑ tionally illustrated art book Le musée imaginaire from 1947, the 1950s trilogy called

1 Henri Zerner, André Malraux ou les pouvoirs de l’image photographique, in: Henri Zerner, Ecrire l’histoire de l’art. Figures d’une discipline, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 145–156. (English version: Malraux and the Power of Photography, in: Geraldine A. Johnson (ed.), Sculpture and Photography. Envisioning the Third Dimension, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 116–130); Louise Merzeau, Malraux metteur en page, in: Jeanyves Guerin, Julien Dieudonné (ed.): Les écrits sur l’art d’André Malraux, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2006, pp. 65–82; Alban Cerisier, L’univers des formes (1955–1997). Livres d’art et pratiques éditoriales, in: Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, vol. 158, 1st delivery (2000), pp. 247–271; Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Album de l’art à l’époque du ‘Musée imaginaire’, Paris: Hazan/Musée du Louvre, 2013. See also Musées imaginaires, in: Revue de l’art 182 (2013–2014), ed. by Ségolène Le Men.



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Le  Musée imagi­naire de la sculpture mondiale was strikingly dominated by plates. Never before nor ever after has Malraux preferred plates so obviously to commentary: the book on the floor contains five hundred pages with plates, in contrast to only eighteen pages of introduction and some fifty pages of small-printed commentaries at the book’s end; the captions are also rather laconic. That gives the plates a clear overbalance, which makes the theme of technical reproductions of art more crucial than elsewhere in Malraux’s very different versions of his musée imaginaire.

Benjamin, Valéry Up to today the leading theory of reproduction is still attributed to Walter Benjamin, who is even regarded by some authors as the true pioneer of the musée imaginaire. It was Georges Duthuit who in 1955 first regarded Malraux as a profiteer of Benjamin’s ideas, and it was Benjamin’s lifelong friend, Gershom Scholem, who affirmed this reproach in 1965 in the Anglo-Saxon world.2 They were followed by George Steiner in 1968 and by Hal Foster und Rosalind Krauss in 1989, to name but the prominent ones, as well as by the author himself.3 Malraux, who met Benjamin at least once, never disputed, by the way, that he knew and appreciated the latter’s essay: as an author who practically never quoted any colleagues and largely avoided footnotes, Malraux gave Benjamin the exceptional honour of two footnotes in two early publications (though never, as far as I can see, in one of the books that later were branded as musée imaginaire). But while Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro‑ duction” concentrated on photography and cinema in a political context, the musée imaginaire definitely is a book affair – with stress to be laid on typography, persuasive comparisons on double pages, and capitalising on reproductions of art on the book market ­– themes Benjamin did not even touch upon. Even if Benjamin’s essay from 1936 had been an inspiration for Malraux’s musée imaginaire, it was not the only and definitely not the decisive influence – given that both, Benjamin and Malraux, were most certainly familiar with Paul Valéry’s essay “La conquête de l’ubiquité” from

2 Georges Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable, 3 volumes, Paris: Corti, 1956; Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, in: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book X, London: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 117–136. 3 George Steiner, André Malraux. A Gaul for All Seasons, in: Life 64.21 (24 May 1968), pp. 91–100; Walter Grasskamp, Das imaginäre Museum und sein Medium. Museale und fotografische Serien, in: Walter Grasskamp (ed.), Das Neue Kolonialmuseum. Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers, exhibition catalogue, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster; Neue Galerie-Sammlung Ludwig Aachen; Museum Bochum Kunstsammlung, Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1977, pp. 37–41; Rosalind Krauss, The Ministry of Fate, in: Dennis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature, Cambridge, MA: Har‑ vard University Press 1989, pp. 1000–1006; Hal Foster, Archives of Modern Art, in: October 99 (2002), pp. 81–95.

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1928. Valéry’s essay on the industrial reproducibility and ubiquitous availability of music definitely was a central inspiration for Benjamin, who put an extensive quota‑ tion right at the beginning of his German version. I cannot present comparable evidence that Malraux ever referred to Valéry’s essay as pointedly as Benjamin did. But being a friend and editor of Valéry, Malraux should have been familiar with his small but groundbreaking essay, too. In any case, I do think that Valéry’s essay inspired Malraux and Benjamin independently, before they had even heard of each other, and that Malraux was a pioneer of the new culture of reproduction as well as its diagnostician in his own right. That gives him a very special position in the media history of art mediation. Therefore, I agree with Peter Geimer, who rehabilitated Malraux as a theorist of media in his own right a few years ago.4 Instead of as a profiteer, for a change Malraux could be regarded as one of the rare persons who immediately understood what Benjamin was dealing with in his rather complicated and disputable essay. Besides, regarding Malraux as a mere usurper of Benjamin’s ideas amounts to a parody of the very history of ideas that Benjamin wanted to demolish with his materialistic approach to history. Malraux could have even thought of Benjamin’s ideas as being not especially original, as only transferring Valéry’s diagnosis of music’s technical reproducibility to the visual arts. And certainly Malraux did not care for the loss of what Benjamin called – more confusingly than enlighteningly – the aura of an artwork. To Malraux, photography might have taken the artwork’s aura, but in return it received a medial ubiquity and therefore a universal importance never known before. In a lucid essay on Valéry and Benjamin, the late Werner Hofmann therefore proposed in 1988 to regard the medial ubiquity of the artwork as its new aura, one more powerful than whatever Benjamin might have thought of.5

Alfred Salmony But neither Valéry nor Benjamin were the decisive influences that led Malraux to understand the new possibilities that photography posed for mediating art in repro‑ ductions. He had learnt this lesson already as early as 1923, aged twenty-two, when the German curator Alfred Salmony visited Malraux and his wife in their Paris apart‑ ment. In her memoirs, Le Bruit de nos pas, Clara Malraux depicted this meeting, to which Malraux himself never later referred. I quote the literally eye-opening passage in the official English translation of Clara Malraux’s memoir:

4 Peter Geimer, The Art of Resurrection. Malraux’s Musée imaginaire, in: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Foto­ grafie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009, pp. 77–89. 5 Werner Hofmann, Die Allgegenwart des Kunstwerkes. Kritische Anmerkungen zu Valéry und Benja‑ min, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, supplement “Bilder und Zeiten”, (7 May 1988).



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Fig. 3: Double page of Salmony’s book.

I think it was at the beginning of 1923 that Alfred Salmony came to see us; he had a job at the Cologne museum – perhaps he was the curator – and his mind had been moulded by archaeo‑ logy and Expressionism. […] At the time he was preparing an exhibition of comparative art, not at all like those we had been accustomed to up until that time, which were concerned almost solely with the Mediterranean basin, but one that used strange shortcuts to bring together all the forms of art to which we might react. He leaned a briefcase against a chair, brought out a bundle of pho‑ tographs which he handled with the dexterity of a cashier, and then, when they were spread out on the table, he arranged them according to a subtle scheme of his own. This was the first time I was ever confronted with a piece of Thai sculpture. Then there came the marriage of two heads, the one Han and the other Romanesque. We were overwhelmed: we stood there before these new complicities, these alliances that were entirely fresh to us, wondering whether the minds that had given rise to these works were aiming at the same area of sensitivity, or whether on the other hand their relationship, their likenesses, were confined to their outward shapes alone. Salmony went away, leaving some of his precious photographs with us, and leaving – but inside us this time – the intuition of a new way of grasping the world.6

To me that sounds like the musée imaginaire’s genuine founding date in 1923. Salmo‑ ny’s per­formance taught the Malrauxs the possibilities photography provided for a strictly visual discourse on art, which became the very core of the musée imaginaire in terms of media history. Salmony had already made use of these possibilities in his

6 For the original French version, see Clara Malraux, Nos vingt ans (1966), Paris: Grasset, 1992 [1966], pp. 88­–89.

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dissertation, comparing Japanese and European sculptures (fig. 3). His dissertation included – unusual for his time – forty full-page illustrations and was published in 1922. Thus, it is possible that these were among the photographs Salmony presented to the Malrauxs one year later. Salmony himself owed his pioneer media competence to his studies at Vienna University with one of the first theorists of “world art,” Josef Strzy­gowski, who probably was the first one, as well, to establish a large collection of black-and-white prints in the field for purposes of research and instruction.7

Le Musée de Sculpture Comparée In French the passage of Clara Malraux’s memoir of course reads much better. There we learn that the “exhibition of comparative art” Salmony is reported to have planned (the German translator made the same mistake) was “une exposition d’art comparé” – a “comparative exhibition of art,” that is. The difference is important, because Clara Malraux’s expression “une exposition d’art comparé” obviously alludes to the popular Musée de Sculpture comparée that Viollet-le-Duc had founded in Paris in 1879 (today the Musée des Monuments francais at the Palais de Chaillot). The Musée de Sculpture comparée, the history of which has recently been published by Susanne Mersmann, could be regarded as an early version of a musée imaginaire – not in photographs, but in plaster casts.8 I am not the first to consider this influence; the German Malraux expert Claudia Bahmer already did in 2009, and Sven Lütticken recently in 2012.9 The Musée de Sculpture comparée may have made Malraux (who studied neither art history nor anything else) familiar with the comparative art history of his time rather than books of Heinrich Wölfflin and the like. In their combination, both models – Salmony’s per‑ formance as well as the Musée de Sculpture comparée – would suffice to mark the beginnings of the musée imaginaire, for which Benjamin’s essay delivered a theoreti‑ cal reference only a decade later.

7 Karl With, Autobiography of Ideas. Memoirs of an Extraordinary Art Scholar, ed. by Roland Jaeger, Berlin, 1997. I thank Rainer Stamm (Oldenburg) for this reference. 8 Susanne Mersmann, Die Musées du Trocadéro. Viollet-le-Duc und der Kanondiskurs im Paris des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Reimer, 2012. 9 Claudia Bahmer, Fotos für alle. André Malraux (1901-1976), in: Jörg Probst and Jost Phillipp Klen‑ ner (eds.), Ideengeschichte der Bildwissenschaft. Siebzehn Portraits, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009, pp. 179–191; Sven Lütticken, Das imaginäre Museum der Gipsabgüsse, in: Bart van der Heide (ed.), The Imaginary Museum, Munich: Kunstverein, 2012, pp. 3–21.



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André Vigneau If Malraux should not be seen as a mere profiteer of Benjamin’s ideas, that does not mean he would not have copied other authors. In fact his musée imaginaire did follow models already established on the book market. This can be shown especially for the book on the floor: The trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale had its direct model, whose crucial importance for Malraux has never been acknowl‑ edged, in a series of illustrated art books that today are more or less forgotten, even in France.10 This project was called Encyclopédie photographique de l’art and was made by the also more or less forgotten André Vigneau (fig. 4), an academy-trained sculp‑ tor and painter and self-trained photographer, and, by the way, a very interesting

Fig. 4: Micheline Kowaliski, André Vigneau, 1930’s, in front of one of his installations with neon.

10 As far as I can see, Christiane Moatti is the only author to ever have noticed this striking con‑ nection, albeit in a footnote: “La photographie d’art était déjà courante. Malraux a conservé dans sa bibliothèque les trois volumes de l’Encyclopédie photo­graphique de l’art, Musée du Louvre, ‘Tel’, 1935–1938 (no. 966), qu’il a annotés et découpés, entre autres, pour les antiquités égyptiennes, l’art neo-sumérien, assyrien.” Christiane Moatti, Les Voix du silence, Notice, in: André Malraux: Oeuvres complètes, Volume IV, Écrits sur l’art, Volume I, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, Paris: Gallimard, 2004, pp. 1287–1366, p. 1343, footnote 7. Georges Didi-Huberman refers to this footnote in a footnote, mistak‑ ing the Encyclopédie photographique de l’art as a publication by the Louvre: Didi-Huberman 2013 (as in note 1), p. 77.

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Fig. 5: Single booklet of Vigneau’s Encyclopédie.

Fig. 6: Single booklet in collection box.

artistic personality.11 It was in May 1935 that the first copy of Vigneau’s Encyclopédie photographique de l’art was published in Paris – twelve years before Malraux branded his in many ways comparable enterprise as a musée imaginaire, and exactly one year before Benjamin, who lived in Paris at the time, published his famous essay. Malraux later generally dated the beginnings of his thoughts about the musée imaginaire to 1935, which might make you think he wanted to be ahead of Benjamin’s publication by one year, but meanwhile I am sure that this was a (probably involuntary) hint at the year when the Encyclopédie photographique de l’art started to be published. In the years to come, Vigneau’s encyclopaedia was planned to combine in many volumes “toutes les oeuvres d’art remarquables des collections et musées du monde.” The lavishly illustrated publication in a high format of thirty-two by twenty-five centi‑ metres was dedicated to the main epochs of Mediterranean art history and archaeol‑ ogy, beginning with Mesopotamia and Egypt to be continued with Greece and Rome to be followed by the European Middle Ages. In a multi-channelled marketing, Vigneau’s encyclopaedia could be subscribed to in separate magazines of thirty-two pages that appeared monthly (fig. 5). After ten deliveries, a box set was offered to collect the fas‑ cicules on the bookshelf (figs. 6, 7). The other possibility was to buy a ready-made book when the subscription of ten magazines was finished; these books could also be sub‑ scribed to on their own if you did not want to collect the fascicules first (fig. 8). That was a pioneer enterprise on the market of art reproductions that I unfortunately do

11 For an extensive portrait of André Vigneau, see the catalogue Pierre Jahan, Paris 1933–1943. André Vigneau, l’essor de la photographie dans l’entre-deux-guerres, Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, Paris: La Bibliothéque, 1986.



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Fig. 7: Collection box, backside.

Fig. 8: Cover of the book version of Vigneau’s Encyclopédie.

not have the time to characterise in detail, so I will generally refer to my book, André Malraux und das imaginäre Museum. Die Weltkunst im Salon, which compares the two enterprises in detail.12 Five book editions of the Encyclopédie photographique de l’art appeared altogether, the second, as planned, in 1936; the third, with considerable

12 Walter Grasskamp, André Malraux und das imaginäre Museum. Die Weltkunst im Salon, Munich: Beck, 2014; the english version The Book on the Floor. André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum was published in october 2016 with Getty Publications, Los Angeles.

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delay, in 1938; the fourth – due to World War II – in 1948; the fifth and last in 1949; Vigneau was working on a sixth volume that failed to be accomplished.13 Not the commercial, long-distance success expected by the editors and the photographer, the books are still very impressive and singular examples of a pro‑ fessional photography of art under the sign of New Sobriety and Bauhaus aesthet‑ ics, which Vigneau was familiar with. Thus, he certainly belongs to the history of how sculpture was photographed as one of the most profiled, scrupulous, and gifted exponents, but he is not even mentioned, let alone prized, in any of the dozen or so books that have dealt in the last two decades with the question of how sculpture has been photographed.14 If anybody wants to learn how to vanish, here is a good example.

Le Musée Imaginaire de la Sculpture Mondiale Malraux knew the Encyclopédie photographique de l’art very well before he started his own musée imaginaire, and he made use of it for his own art books from the beginning, without mentioning Vigneau’s name, though, or the title of the latter’s encyclopaedia. Only in the second volume of Malraux’s trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale – you remember: the book on the floor – is Vigneau finally accredited as the author of forty-seven photographs with his name. But moreover – and in a very telling detail – in small letters it is added that seventy-three reproductions in the first volume had also been made by Vigneau. As the author of a growing number of illustrations for five of Malraux’s already printed books, Vigneau had obviously gotten fed up with

13 “Vigneau projetait pour les éditions ‘Tel’ une cinquième volume sur le musée du Louvre, présen‑ tant la sculpture de la Renaissance au XVIIIe siècle. Des listes de la main du photographe indiquent pour chaque page de l’ouvrage projeté le detail des photographies prevues”, Jahan 1986 (as in note 11), p. 68. 14 For instance: Pygmalion photographe. La Sculpture devant la caméra 1844–1936, exhibition cata‑ logue, Geneva: Cabinet des Estampes. Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, 1985; The Kiss of Apollo. Photography & Sculpture 1845 to the Present, San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 1991, with an essay by Eugenia Parry Janis; Michel Frizot/Dominique Païni (eds.), Sculpter Photographier, actes du col‑ loque organisé au Louvre, Paris, 1993; Helene E. Roberts (ed.), Art History Through The Camera’s Lens, London: Routledge, 1995; Erika Billeter (ed.), Skulptur im Lichte der Fotografie. Von Bayard bis Mapple­thorpe, Bern: Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, 1997; Geraldine A. Johnson (ed.): Sculpture and Photo­graphy. Envisioning the Third Dimension, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Roxana Marcoci, Die originale Kopie. Die Fotografie der Skulptur 1839 bis heute, in: Geoffrey Batchen and Tobia Bezzola (eds.), FotoSkulptur, exhibition catalogue, Zurich: Museum of Modern Art/Kunsthaus Zurich, 2010–11, pp. 12–19; Costanza Caraffa (ed.): Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011.



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Fig. 9: Detail of picture credits in Grottes sacrées.

not being mentioned and had taken care that this was altered (fig. 9). The retrospective clarification was small, but important. Vigneau might have been fed up, as well, with Malraux’s habit of altering Vigneau’s photographs just as he felt they fitted into his typographical concept. Malraux cut them at the sides, sometimes to a large extent, retouched them, point‑ edly enlarged a detail, even reversed them like in a mirror, because he obviously was obsessed with having the heads looking symmetrically to the middle of the book (figs. 10–12). Most of all, of course, it might have enraged Vigneau that Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale copied the typographical concept of Vigneau’s encyclopaedia very neatly: besides 150 photographs of Vigneau’s, five of the encyclopaedia’s double pages were taken over more or less completely for the Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale – one of them in exact proportions (figs. 13, 14). In terms of copyright and scientific practice, this was illegitimate, but it was legal. Already in 1937, Malraux’s publishing house, Gallimard, had become an associate of Vigneau’s publisher, Éditions TEL, and in 1949 Gallimard had taken over the erst‑ while competitor completely. Thus the archive of Éditions TEL went to Gallimard, a publishing house formerly more interested in literature, where Malraux now estab‑

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Fig. 10: Double page Vigneau.

Fig. 11: Double page Malraux.



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 313

Fig. 12: Both in comparison.

lished an increasingly important branch with illustrated art books that made Galli‑ mard the flagship store of art book publishing in post-war Europe. It may have been legal, but certainly it was not legitimate to use the pictures and the typographical pre-work of a photographer who twenty years earlier had begun a similar visual enterprise with his encyclopaedia, and to only give it a new branding as Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale without mentioning the photographer’s name nor the title of his groundbreaking project. Not having been mentioned in this context is one reason why Vigneau and his encyclopaedia have become the phantom, not of the opera, of art photogra­phy and media history. Let me stress that with 150 images Malraux only took a handful of Vigneau’s pho‑ tographs for the trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, in comparison to the hundreds of photographs he took from many other sources. Malraux was not interested in any homogeneity of a photographic handwriting throughout his books, which in contrast is the most striking quality of the Encyclopédie photographique de l’art (which was – with only a small exception – completely shaped by Vigneau for over fifteen years). Vigneau knew much more about reproducing sculpture than Malraux would ever learn. Trained as a sculptor, he sometimes dedicated several double pages to a single sculpture, knowing very well – and, by the way, better than Heinrich Wölf‑ flin did – that there is no such thing as a single unique angle from which a sculpture

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Fig. 13: Double page Vigneau.

Fig. 14: Double page Malraux.

Fig. 15: Double page Vigneau: Venus.

definitely has to be seen (figs. 15, 16). Malraux, in contrast, very seldom presented more than a single reproduction that was thus frozen in one perspective. And if he did dedicate more than one reproduction to a work of art, he loved to dramatize the confrontation in dubious ways. But obviously Malraux was better in branding: The notion of a musée imag‑ inaire combines the illustrated book and the museum in an elusive metaphor of great commercial potential. In contrast to that, the notion of encyclopaedia seemed outdated.



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Fig. 16: Double page Vigneau: Venus.

Coda If Malraux owed more to Vigneau’s encyclopaedia than he ever felt inclined to mention – as did, I have good reasons to believe, Walter Benjamin as well15 – then Malraux sur‑ passed Vigneau’s concept in a decisive way: You may remember Clara Malraux’s hint that before the visit of Salmony the Malrauxs were only used to comparative exhibi‑ tions of art “which were concerned almost solely with the Mediterranean basin” (an important annotation missing in the German translation, by the way), and which had been Vigneau’s topography of art as well. Malraux’s musée imaginaire, however, went far beyond that range by adopting the then fashionable notion of “world art,” obviously also picked up during Salmo‑ ny’s visit, which became a key feature of the musée imaginaire. This notion dom‑ inates, as the title already promised, the trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculp-

15 In the very year when he started writing his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote an unpublished but typewritten critique of André Vigneau’s entry “Les besoins collectifs et la photographie” to the Encyclopédie Française, which Lucien Febvre and Gaston Berger edited. The typoscript has been published for the first time in Walter Benjamin: Kritiken und Rezensionen, ed. Heinrich Kau­len, Vols. 13.1 and 13.2, in: Walter Benjamin: Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 885–886, pp. 899–900. I owe this hint to Detlev Schöttker.

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Fig. 17: Dennis Adams, Malraux’s Shoes, 2012, film still.

ture mondiale. By combining the musée imaginaire with an explicitly global claim, Malraux ingeniously married two magic slogans, one he invented and one he picked up from discussions that had begun around the turn of the twentieth century and that has enchanted the art world ever since. But the authority or dubiousness of the notion of “world art” or “global art” belongs to a different lecture and a different conference, and so I finish my look at the book on the floor with a still of the marvellous film Malraux’s Shoes, made recently by the American artist Dennis Adams, presenting a revitalised Malraux dancing – on the very book that is on the floor (fig. 17).16

16 Dennis Adams’s film is available on vimeo: Adams, Malraux’s Shoes, https://vimeo.com/75153260 (accessed 20 November 2016).

Hubertus Kohle

The Museum Goes Collaborative: On the Digital Escapades of an Analogue Medium The Museum as Compensation We like to think of museums as places of refuge from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, as opportunities to focus on essentials away from our constant multitasking at work and home, and as moments of truthfulness in contrast to the simulation that is unavoidable in today’s world of electronic media. The notion that art and culture are forms of compensation for the acceleration of modern life is a fundamental premise of an influential cultural theory as expounded by the so‑called Ritter School.1 Those who share such views will wonder in astonishment why we should now be introduc‑ ing a digital dimension into the museum of all places. Yet we have been doing just that for years – and not just in esoteric technophile circles. In one form or another, electronic media are already found in the museum, too. Why?2 What is proper and what is not is something that changes – like all such oppo‑ sitions – over the course of time. The fact that genuine wisdom was communicated through manuscripts, for example, was reiterated all the more emphatically at the moment when the printed book became a threatening alternative. It was similarly felt that true connoisseurship of art could only be conveyed via the original, or if need be through a print reproduction. When slides began to be used in art history lectures in the late nineteenth century, many people considered it a betrayal of art. Today we are dealing with a particularly dramatic change, namely the ever-greater displace‑ ment of the analogue by the digital. It is understandable that, at this point in time, the substantial, tangible quality of the analogue should seem to us right and proper in contrast to the digital, whose nature as fleeting illusion renders it almost morally dubious. In this constellation, the printed book, once an agent of corruption, becomes a lifeline, and the slide suddenly a quasi-original, although when it first appeared it was perceived as the very opposite. If reality itself is changing at a great speed, the memory of what it once was should be preserved in the temples of our museums, at least. The problem, however:

1 See e. g. Hermann Lübbe, Zeit-Verhältnisse. Über die veränderte Gegenwart von Zukunft und Ver‑ gangenheit, in: Zeitphänomen Musealisierung. Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung, Essen: Klartext, 1990, pp. 40–50. 2 I wish to thank Dr. Christian Gries, the real expert on computer science in the context of the mu‑ seum, for his input into this paper. I have already had the pleasure of discussing with him the topics addressed here on numerous occasions in seminars at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

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for today’s twenty-year-olds, whose lives are already profoundly pervaded by new media, this conflict between analogue and digital is no longer as acute. And for those born today, it will perhaps no longer even exist, because for them, looking at ana‑ logue objects will have become the exception in a thoroughly virtualized present. The still accelerating pace of change means that the future holds challenges and fears even for members of the young generation. Given that their present has been imbued for so long with new forms of digital communication, however, we can confidently assume that these will be what they perceive as valid and proper and what they seek to uphold in the face of what may be coming next. In this respect, it is by no means necessary to reject the theses of the Ritter School, but rather historically to adapt them, as it were.

Tired Museums? In Germany, the success of museums is phenomenal. It is happily emphasized that more visitors make the pilgrimage to museums than to football stadiums to watch German national league games. In 2012 the total was 113 million people.3 But every museumgoer cannot help but notice that, among these visitors, most fall into an older age group, with younger visitors rather fewer in number. If we except museums typ‑ ically visited by tourists and fancifully designed and promoted special exhibitions, younger visitors are clearly in the minority. Following on from what we suggested at the beginning, this situation may also be connected with the fact that museums are perceived by young people as too far behind the times; in other words, a quality savoured by older visitors is considered boring by the upcoming generation. Pub‑ lications such as Müde Museen (Tired Museums) by Daniel Tyradellis may be seen as symptomatic of this.4 Why not therefore accept digital media as an intrinsic part of daily life for younger people and incorporate them into what goes on inside the museum? The question is simply: How?5

3 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Institut für Museumforschung (ed.), Statistische Gesamterhebung an den Museen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für das Jahr 2012, vol. 67, Ber‑ lin: Institut für Museumsforschung, 2013, p. 7. 4 Daniel Tyradellis, Müde Museen. Oder: Wie Ausstellungen unser Denken verändern könnten, Ham‑ burg: Ed. Körber Stiftung, 2014. 5 See in general on this subject G. Wayne Clough, Best of Both Worlds. Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age, Smithsonian Institution 2013, http://www.si.edu/content/gwc/Bestof‑ BothWorldsSmithsonian.‌pdf (accessed 11  February 2015); Herminia Din, Phyllis Hecht, The Digital Museum. A Think Guide, Washington DC: American Association of Museums, 2007; and Werner Schwei­benz, Vom traditionellen zum virtuellen Museum. Die Erweiterung des Museums in den digitalen Raum des Internets, Frankfurt/M.: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informationswissen und Information‑ spraxis e. V., 2008.



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The Museum Going Digital According to common definition, a museum collects, documents, researches, con‑ serves, and presents.6 The digital has already made its entry into all these areas of activity. Collectors in museums, firstly, can no longer get around the fact that auctions in the early twenty-first century are usually accompanied by online catalogues and indeed in many cases take place entirely over the Internet.7 Meanwhile, the possibility of targeted searches on the Internet makes the hunt for suitable new acquisitions sig‑ nificantly easier, not least since many of the commercial auction houses have online catalogues of excellent quality. Secondly, museums document and inventory their holdings if at all possible in the form of digital databases, if only because these can be made to serve a very wide range of purposes – right up to preparation as a printed publication. The digital sphere as a research medium, thirdly, currently still plays a subsidiary role, but the potential of electronic-based direct image addressing seems immense.8 It goes without saying that the search for information, as a core element of research processes, is today conducted by computer almost as a matter of routine. In the area of art conservation, fourthly, the fact that the most minute surface changes can be detected and documented with the aid of high-resolution digital imaging tech‑ niques (to cite but one example) is of enormous significance.9 This can have political as well as practical consequences. And in the case of presentation, fifthly, the Internet undoubtedly plays a crucial role, since it is able to take us past the (in places still very high) walls that enclose museums, or can at least provide easily accessible practical information for visitors, which is why there are few museums today without their own Internet presence. It is this last area that I wish to focus on in particular detail.

The Activation of the Museum Visitor We may start by making the general point that digitally-based results from the areas of collecting, documentation, research, and conservation can also be used in presen‑ tation, since they can be converted without great effort into a customized external display. Thus digital inventories can be easily transformed into an Internet presen‑ tation and thereby adapted in such a way that sensitive data for internal use only,

6 Hans Lochmann (ed.), Standards für Museen, Kassel: Deutscher Museumsbund e. V. together with ICOM-Deutschland, 2006. 7 An example is auctionata, an online auction house based in Berlin that has recently attracted much attention. See www.auctionata.‌com. 8 See e. g. the works of Lev Manovich, http://manovich.‌net/(accessed 11 February 2015). 9 Andreas Burmester, Manfred Müller, The Registration of Transportation Damage Using Digital Image Processing, in: Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 6 (1992), pp. 335–345.

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for example, can be hidden. A fundamental rule with regard to working with digital media can be seen right here: the fact that it can be converted into all possible formats means that, if you are interested in making efficient use of your resources, databases should be the primary material from which you start.10 As long as paper remains the dominant medium of distribution, all discussions about an electronic-based art history focus upon the issue of conversion into digital. Strictly speaking, however, it should of course be the other way round: the digital file as the most universal medium ought to stand at the head of the value chain. To stick with our chosen example: in my Internet presentation, let us say that I add a low- to medium-resolution reproduction to my dataset and hide everything else relating to the internal use of a work, such as the number of times it has been loaned and the corresponding dates. On another occasion, however, I return to the same material but use it in a different way: this time I am compiling a scholarly catalogue of the collection or an individual artist, and so I include the information about the loans. In the case of an exhibition catalogue, I might add a series of essays focusing on the subject of the show – and so on. Instead of having to start all over again each time, as more often than not is probably still the case right now, large parts of the work can be based on existing material that simply needs to be formatted and combined in new ways. It is important to note here that, in order to re‑use data in this fashion, the electronic files need to have been created according to proper data entry standards, since otherwise technical problems will repeatedly occur upon conversion. All such standards must be understood at this point as aids to the subsequent ease of handling the data and not as a restriction upon individuality. From this it is also clear, however, that a museum needs to develop and hold internal discussions on a professional digital strategy. The days of the prolifer‑ ation of individual solutions provided by solitary computing enthusiasts should be firmly behind us. A very interesting use of electronic museum inventories is presented by Mia Ridge, who has applied big data analytics to the data of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York (fig. 1).11 Rather than searching the database for an individual dataset, as we do when we look for a specific picture that interests us within a large digital image library, big data analyses take the entire contents of a database and interrogate the information for its inner logic. The process has been a regular topic of debate for several years and makes most contemporaries uneasy, since with unregulated use it goes far beyond anything envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 and could destroy all forms of privacy. From an academic point of view, however, big data analytics has huge potential. In the case of the Cooper-Hewitt, for example, Ridge was able to date peaks

10 Even conservative scholars who would never think of considering digital media an essential area of academic production today write their texts on a computer as a matter of course. 11 Mia Ridge Explores the Shape of Cooper-Hewitt Collections, http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/ exploring-shape-collections-draft/(accessed 11 February 2015).



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Fig. 1: Visualization of object sources by country, from Ridge 2012 (as in note 11).

in collecting activity with great precision and illustrate shifts in the prioritisation of particular genres by correlating acquisition date and type of object. The advantages of such big data analyses are naturally most evident in the realm of big numbers, where more conventional tools quickly reach their computational limits. When it comes to visualizing results, moreover, large databases of this kind offer advantages that imply a fundamental change in the relationship between provider and user under digital conditions  – including in the museum context. Thus the parameters of a big data analysis of the kind described here can be set by users themselves. Assuming that the corresponding data are available, users interested only in carpets can limit their analysis to these and can narrow it down even further to solely the years 1930 to 1940. By systematically exploiting this digital tool, users thus become active participants instead of passive recipients. This seems to me a shift whose significance cannot be overestimated and which perhaps causes some of those working in a museum envi‑ ronment to feel threatened. It indicates a coming change in the role of the museum curator, namely from the status of unassailable preceptor to the position of modera‑ tor, engaging with increasingly emancipated users.

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Ridge’s shrewd account of her experiences at the Cooper-Hewitt also underscores the importance of standardisation in data entry. Databases have their own history and are built up over time by very different individuals. Where these latter have added annotations of their own according to personal fancy (or cultural make‑up), these entries need to be cleaned up in order for the computer to be able to analyse them. While sceptics are quick to denounce such smoothing processes as an erasure of the past, it is precisely here that another fundamental advantage of the digital sphere comes into play, albeit one frequently not taken into account. The practically unlim‑ ited volume of memory at our disposal means that it is always possible to save modi‑ fications to primary products as a separate version, rather than overwrite the original and so destroy it. In this respect, seen in the long term, a historicization is possible at two levels: that of the annotated objects and that of the annotators. History and the history of science in this way overlap. It is no coincidence that my next example, in which I analyse electronically pre‑ sented museum inventories for their added value, also concerns an American museum. Rather, it reflects the fact that the museums in the Anglosphere are considerably more advanced in terms of their digitization. The Brooklyn Museum, likewise housed in New York, is one of the largest universal museums in the world, even if it is substantially less well known than its neighbour, the Metropolitan Museum. For several years now the Brooklyn Museum has been pursuing a highly innovative strategy with regard above all to presentation, one that systematically focuses not only on the representation of its holdings but on incorporating the reader and potential visitor in a productive manner – very similar to the case of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum mentioned above. Here, too, the idea is that the reader/visitor should no longer remain a purely passive consumer, but become a producer. This becomes clear at a series of levels. On the ‘Collections’ page introducing the online collection, readers are invited to contact the museum, via an active link, with any information they may have in connection with any of the objects they see on the website, while on the individual ‘Object’ pages, the completeness of the record is given as a percentage.12 We should namely not rely all too greatly on the accuracy and completeness of the data entry, something not alto‑ gether surprising given that there are over one hundred thousand objects in the online collection. The same applies just as much to a printed catalogue, but Internet data is especially fluid, incomplete and always part of a work in progress – precisely because it is so easy to modify and bring in line with the latest state of knowledge.13 In the

12 Collections page: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/; example of an ‘Object’ page: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/4674/The_Equestrienne_LA‑ mazone (accessed 11 February 2015). 13 See Hubertus Kohle, Social Tagging in the Humanities and the Nature of the Internet Work Flow, in: Kunstgeschichte Open Peer Reviewed Journal (2011), http://www.kunstgeschichte-ejournal.net/229/ (accessed 12 December 2014).



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Fig. 2: URL to the crowd-­ curated exhibition Click! at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

framework of an experiment (now finished) at the Brooklyn Museum on social tagging, visitors were also invited to tag art works, with a view to facilitating future searches for them. The idea behind this application was that visitors themselves are probably most likely to know what other visitors are looking for. And last but not least, visitors can even get involved in creating entire exhibitions, as is the case of Click!, an exhibition of contemporary Brooklyn photography (fig. 2).14 Here, too, it is true to say that museum specialists are losing their status as sole decision-makers and are assuming the role of mediators who take into account the views of the public.

Frankfurt’s Städel as a Paradigm As already stated, German museums have been somewhat reticent when it comes to making bold use of digital media.15 Among the few exceptions are the Städel, the Schirn, and the Liebieghaus museums, all in Frankfurt and, until very recently, all under the direction of Max Hollein.16 In what is overall a very conservative environ‑ ment in which technology is treated with suspicion and variously considered to signify unwarranted modernisation, a dumbing down, a form of exploitation, and a means

14 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/(accessed 11 February 2015). 15 Of interest in this context are the tables at http://www.museum-analytics.‌org, where German mu‑ seums rank among the “also rans” when it comes to social media presence. 16 This article was written in 2014. Max Hollein has left the Städel in 2016 and now works as the director of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts.

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Fig. 3: QR code for the 2011 Kienholz exhibition at the Schirn Museum, spray-painted on a Frankfurt pavement.

of estrangement, Hollein stands out, attracting disdainful glances at times with his relatively affirmative relationship to reality as it presents itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. His entire programme of digital initiatives is, however, based on thoroughly traditional values.17 He understands the museum first and foremost as an educational institution that must fulfil its mission on‑site – but not on‑site alone. And depending on where this mission becomes pertinent, he adapts the means accord‑ ingly. For the museum itself, this signifies concentrating on the original work and emphatically renouncing high-tech frills such as monitor images inside the gallery – in other words, in the direct vicinity of the art works. But this is also attended by bold‑ ness and a certain trust in the sometimes wacky possibilities offered by the Internet as a place of education and cultural production. We might mention in this context an action that even prompted a recourse claim (although this, too, was perhaps part of the publicity he wanted to generate). On the occasion of the 2011 Kienholz exhi‑ bition at the Schirn, Hollein had QR codes spray-painted on the streets of Frankfurt. When photographed with a mobile phone, the codes linked the viewer to the corre‑ sponding page of the museum’s website, but they could only be removed from the streets with a considerable degree of effort (fig. 3). The German tabloid BILD carried

17 See the press release On the Way to the Future – The Städel’s Digital Extension (2014), http://news‑ room.staedelmuseum.de/system/files_force/field/file/2015/st_press_digitale_extension_engl.‌pdf (accessed 11 February 2015).



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the headline “Illegal Guerrilla Graffiti. Schirn Sprays All Over Frankfurt” and sanc‑ timoniously asked what the museum thought it was doing. The answer is of course obvious and points to a thoroughly professional handling of today’s media society, in which organs such as BILD sadly also dominate.18 As an art historian who is also a business economist (less well-disposed critics put it the other way round), Hollein knows that the bait must taste good to the fish, not to the angler. He seems to have recognized at a very early stage that digital media can play a crucial role in precisely this regard. In 2015, the year in which the Städel Museum Foundation celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary, this strategy found expression through a concept of which not all individual components have been realised so far. These are impressive in themselves, however. They include online tutorials to accom‑ pany exhibitions, art-based computer games for children, access to the museum hold‑ ings via an entirely new digital platform, and participatory tools for online visitors as well as electronic-based merchandising products. These are joined by the full range of social media, which are here used to engage visitors in a particular virtuoso fashion.

Keeping the Museum in the Public Eye In the visual sphere, the consequences of digitalization are apparent above all in today’s breathtakingly fast and widespread proliferation of images, to which scholar‑ ship has reacted, for example, with the much discussed concept of the “iconic turn.”19 This process of acceleration is naturally linked with the ease with which images can now be duplicated with no loss of quality, something previously reserved for written documents. Where traditional museum managers focus on limiting the availability of such images so that visitors are obliged to come to the museum if they wish to see a particular artwork, digitally-conscious modernists prefer the opposite. They argue that a museum, as home to the original, need not fear that duplication will render its own existence superfluous but should actively exploit the possibilities it offers: only by spreading knowledge about an object can the museum fuel the desire in our mediabased society to experience the original firsthand. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has become a leader in this regard by inviting readers to download a high-resolution image of a work from its holdings and manipulate the image to effectively create a new artwork (fig. 4/pl. XVI).20 Attention: here, too, the user is empowered to assume an

18 Stefan Schlagenhaufer, Illegale Guerilla-Graffiti. Schirn sprüht Frankfurt voll, in Bild (Frank‑ furt/M.), 17 October, 2011 http://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/graffiti/schirn-sprueht-frankfurtvoll-20490338.bild.‌html (accessed 9 February 2015). 19 See e. g. Christa Maar (ed.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder, Cologne: DuMont, 2005. 20 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/instructions (accessed 9 February 2015) (“Start your own Rijksstudio”).

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Fig. 4: Rijksstudio portal on the Rijksmuseum website (“Start your own Rijksstudio”).

active role, and indeed one that is expressly artistic. Hollein is aiming at something similar (albeit without allowing for further image processing) by creating a print‑on-de‑ mand service in conjunction with the German drugstore chain dm‑drogerie markt (!), at whose stores the public can order reproductions of works from the Städel.21 The financial returns of such actions are perhaps less significant than the opportunity to keep the museum in the public eye, to establish it even more firmly as a brand, and to do everything possible to ensure that, when it comes to planning leisure activities, the Städel is firmly on the horizon. Such an intention falls wholly into the Frankfurt tradition of “culture for all,” as proclaimed in true Social Democratic fashion by Hilmar Hoffmann, the legendary city councillor for the arts. In this respect it lends an inter‑ esting twist to the venture, given that Hollein is usually suspected of being an ally of Frankfurt high finance. The very idea of carrying the museum into the world of commerce may seem like a sacrilege to some, although it is of course by no means a new one (and one not confined to printing posters, either). And it may certainly also be disputed whether the Städel’s dm‑drogerie markt action really has much in common with the emanci‑

21 http://www.dm.de/de_homepage/foto/443286/kunstwerke-fuer-zuhause.‌html#/uebersicht (accessed 11 February 2015).



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Fig. 5: Digitorial accompanying the Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition at the Schirn in Frankfurt, 2014.

patory aims of a cultural policy inspired by social democratic ideals. But it would be quite misleading to reduce Hollein to one such undertaking alone, since other digital projects at the Schirn and the Städel are aimed much more clearly at fulfilling the educational brief already mentioned. From a technological point of view, the online “digitorials”, as they are called, are relatively conventional (fig. 5). They are intended as a means of preparing for visits to exhibitions, with high-quality content that can be quickly absorbed. In terms of presentation, too, they are fairly sedate, even if the Schirn website talks about “an innovative form of storytelling.”22 The digitorial still available (as of February 2015) on the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck impresses with the professional quality of the illustrations but delivers a narrative that could conceivably be taken from the pages of a book – although this is not to detract from

22 http://schirn.de/en/DIGITORIAL.‌html (accessed 11 February 2015).

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the artist, truly an impressive new discovery in Germany. It remains to be seen how these digitorials evolve in the future. The new image database, in development over the past few years, is actually much more than that and essentially represents a complete multimedia platform. It takes a thoroughly original shape, having been conceived right from the start not just as a scholarly inventory but also to fulfil an educational purpose. This “digital exhibits platform” is not just a tool for searching the collections using the standard terminology of art history; it also allows visitors to make searches based on personal feelings.23 Artworks speak to contemporary viewers in the first place through their emotional dimension, even if their art-historical status does not necessarily match up to their popular appeal. The Städel is correspondingly endeavouring to make its holdings accessible from this angle, too. Fritz Böhle’s painting from the early twenti‑ eth century might thus be tagged not only as “Crucifixion” in accord with its correct iconographical description, but also as “grief,” the emotional state it visualizes so forcefully. Puvis de Chavannes’ imaginary portrait could likewise be tagged not only as “Mary Magdalene” as regards its subject and “vanitas” as regards its iconographical association, but perhaps with “goosebumps” – a feeling that the sight of a beautiful woman with a skull in her hand might produce in a young viewer perhaps no longer so well versed in the Bible. Even if the experiences in crowdsourcing platforms with regard to the naming of emotional qualities in artworks are not especially encourag‑ ing, we may nevertheless wonder why the Frankfurt museums are (only) letting paid professionals do the tagging and not (also) members of the lay public, at whom the whole project is ultimately aimed.24 This might be due to a certain fear at their own audacity or – more likely – time constraints, since the products were scheduled to be rolled out at a very specific date in 2015. Such efforts to adopt the latest tactics in bringing art up to date usually prompt experts to sound a note of caution and warn against trivialisation. In a slightly differ‑ ent form, however, the possibility I have already mentioned exists here, too, namely not to overwrite “older versions” with more recent findings but to keep both side by side. The scholarly, philologically precise designation of a picture is simply com‑ plemented, not irrevocably replaced by one that speaks more directly to the public. To put it another way: I can find Puvis des Chavannes’ St. Mary Magdalene in the Desert not only by searching under “goosebumps”, but also under “vanitas”. Such multi-perspectivity can be confidently seen as a key characteristic of digital media

23 This system has been tested for some time at the Städel in the shape of a media table – a huge touchscreen monitor on which visitors can find out more about the collection’s holdings. 24 This author knows from personal experience with the tagging game artigo (www.artigo.‌org) that fellow players are reluctant to tag artworks with emotional qualities. This does not mean, however, that they are not perhaps looking for such qualities. The games probably need to be structured more clearly so that they provoke the naming of feelings.



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and is ultimately always found where a multitude of different interests need to be served in a single place. This is precisely the objective that ought to form one of the central tasks of the museum as an educational institution.

Demystifying the Museum in Social Media The Städel has been running a blog since 2011. In comparison to other blogs and in particular those by museums, which are striking above all for the irregularity of their posts and the somewhat haphazard nature of their contents, the Städel blog follows a strict structure and a clear aim (fig. 6).25 In contrast to the reams of text found in other types of online blogs, too, the individual articles are richly illustrated. Most entries are categorized under the three epochs of art history represented in the Städel: Old Masters, Modernism, and Contemporary Art. Recommendations for books that are only loosely connected with the museum are offered under “Tipps” (Tips), indicating

Fig. 6: The Städel blog (published in German only).

25 http://blog.staedelmuseum.‌de/(accessed 10 February 2015).

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that here, too, the museum aims to serve a general educational purpose. The same is true of the pages devoted to “Veranstaltungen” (Events). “Hinter den Kulissen” (Behind the Scenes) is particularly interesting, as it humanizes the museum, as it were, by portraying it as a place where people work and less as a shrine. “Bewegte Bilder” (Moving Pictures) introduces short videos on exhibitions and new acquisi‑ tions, and “Ohne Schublade” (Without a Drawer) is the category for everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Regular discussions on the “Works of the Month” give the blog structure, and there are likewise regular interviews, often with the curators. It seems, for the moment at least, that the Städel has not managed to educate its cura‑ tors to become bloggers themselves, which should actually be the real aim. The blog is also used in cross-media fashion to refer to other channels, including web films that are evidently produced with considerable care and effort and which can be streamed via YouTube. Here, too, the atmospheric soundtrack, the systematic embrace of the latest forms of communication, and the wrapping of the educational experience in an enjoyable packaging will not please every traditional museumgoer. But this latter group will come anyway, and museums that want to appeal to new strata of visitors must also do so with new means. Twitter and Facebook are likewise media used by the Städel in skillful fashion and with great effectiveness.26 Although it is true that the museum’s almost ten thousand followers on Twitter and some twenty-five thousand likes on Facebook are modest compared to the numbers boasted by large American museums (the Metropolitan is slowly but surely approaching the millions on Twitter), they are still large when set against those of more conservative museums such as the Bayerische Staatsgemälde‑ sammlungen, whose Twitter followers have not yet reached two thousand (fig. 7). Fre‑ quently suspected by those operating in the cultural sector of being no more than a chat medium, Twitter undoubtedly offers considerable possibilities when intelli‑ gently used, including as a channel for up‑to-the-minute information. The Städel’s tweeters thereby use the full spectrum of opportunities, from announcing exhibitions and lectures and then accompanying them with intensive tweeting, to tweets from behind the scenes while exhibitions are being set up. The same is true of the muse‑ um’s Facebook posts. The formerly sacred site is here fundamentally demystified and becomes a place where culture is produced. But here too it should be stressed that all of this takes place with no intrusion upon the museum’s actual holdings. It is simply a matter of opening up additional channels of presentation whose reach goes beyond the museum. These levels might be said to converge most when visitors tweet during a guided tour of an exhibition, as in the case of a live tweetup, when the museum itself becomes a place of discovery through discourse – but that is what it is during a guided tour anyway. The Städel has already built up substantial experience with this

26 https://www.facebook.com/staedelmuseum; twitter: @staedelmuseum, @schirn, @liebieghaus (accessed 12 February 2015).



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Fig. 7: Invitation to a Twitter tweetup at the Dürer exhibition at the Städel in Frankfurt, 2013.

very new format, and at its tweetup in November 2013 during the Dürer exhibition, seven hundred tweets were sent by twenty-two twitterers.27 Bearing in mind that all these twitterers have their own followers, some of whom will re‑tweet and so widen the network yet further, it is not difficult to imagine the number of individuals that such media can reach and the publicity this generates – a factor that plays a major role in Hollein’s programme.28

27 http://blog.staedelmuseum.de/blick-hinter-die-kulissen/mit-smartphone-zum-tweetup‑in-diedurer-ausstellung (accessed 11 February 2015). As evident on this page, blog and tweet are media that can and should be used to cross-reference each other. 28 Websites such as http://tweetreach.‌com furthermore offer precise analyses of how far Twitter mes‑ sages travel.

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Conclusion I have here described two effects of digitalization in particular as being of conse‑ quence for museums. Firstly, walls that were previously very high between the insti‑ tution and the public are broken down. Secondly, visitors are placed in a new role of active participant from the moment they start using the electronic medium. What this means for the museum is that it must welcome visitors (also) as producers and no longer only as recipients. There is much to suggest that only such a change of heart will secure the role of the museum at the flourishing centre of cultural life.

Zehra Tonbul, Koen Van Synghel

Museum as Textum: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence is complemented by and essen‑ tially written for a real museum; the novel was published in 2008, and the museum opened in 2012.1 This paper aims to read into Pamuk’s collocation of the genres of the novel and the museum, by tracing corollaries of Pamuk’s pursuits as a novelist in the design of his museum – the building, the choice of objects, and their display.2 Pamuk interweaves the novel and the museum by designing the protagonist of The Museum of Innocence as an obsessive collector of objects that remind him of his love, and thus develops the text as a web of images and portrayals of places and objects that are associated with the affair. The text consequently points out to the importance of its remembrance, and includes a detailed account of it’s being worthy of a museum. The novel thence starts to transfigure as a museum: the text narrates its making, portrays its visit, and the object of the book literally becomes a ticket to the museum, through a drawing of a ticket in one of its pages, that is stamped with the logo of the museum during the visit. The museum is conceived in the manner of house museums and the museum building relatedly mimics the house in the novel, where initially the woman charac‑ ter, Füsun, lives with her family (fig. 1). The images and objects that recount the text are placed within cabinets that are numbered and positioned in correspondence with the chapters of the novel. Pamuk extends his quest into a museum catalogue, which includes a discussion of objects as well as design of the exhibition. The catalogue is titled The Innocence of Objects, and it ultimately includes Pamuk’s inquiry into the genre of the museum through a manifesto. Pamuk’s aims as a novelist thus inform his aims as a museum maker, and the manifesto presents the genre of the novel as a model for future museums.3 Yet aspects of Pamuk’s novel writing further qualify this relation.

1 Orhan Pamuk, Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely, London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap, New York: Abrams, 2012. 2 Pamuk’s treatise on novel writing, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, was suggestively pub‑ lished in 2010, soon after the writing of The Museum of Innocence. Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and The Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazım Dikbaş, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 3  Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141. “We can see that the transitions from palaces to national muse‑ ums, and from epics to novels, are parallel processes. Epics are like palaces, and speak of the heroics of old kings who lived in them. National museums, then, should be like novels; but they are not.”

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Fig. 1: The Museum Building.



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Interweaving A primary quality of Pamuk’s novels is their intertextuality. He refers to, reproduces, appropriates, and mimics other texts: the title of his 1994 novel, The New Life, is appro‑ priated from Dante’s La Vita Nuova; his 1990 novel Black Book refers to Rumi’s Mesnevi. They all develop as an interweaving of many texts.4 Analogously, the title of The Museum of Innocence resonates Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel Age of Innocence and recalls comparable aspects of bourgeoisie culture and its addiction to objects. The protagonist of The Museum of Innocence – Kemal – reminds one of Wharton’s Newland Archer. It is mainly however Pamuk’s previous novels that are woven into the text, so that the novel encompasses certain markers of autobiography. The main preoccupation of the interweaving of personal narrative is time and remembrance, and this approach recalls Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Walter Benjamin also reads in Proust an interweaving of recollections, and calls this a textum, which he discusses as the Latin word for the act of weaving.5 Pamuk does not only interweave texts and remembrances in the manner of Proust but he also transforms text into texture. The novel’s (claimed) handwritten form becomes an exhibition object, the book a ticket to the museum, the reader a visitor, and the visit reflects back into the text through a red stamp bearing the logo of the museum. Pamuk further includes the museum visit in the text and deems the reader a character of the novel (fig. 2). The character of the displays in the museum further expands on the idea of inter‑ weaving. Pamuk principally entwines the notion of the cabinet of curiosities in his textum, both through the designs of the display and the choice of objects. The genre aids him to exhibit daily objects in an analogous phantasmagorical and non-cate‑ gorical manner. He thus is able to express his ideas on remembrance as uninhibited recollection and on time as a subjective non-linear experience. Furthermore, similar to his referencing of other texts in the novels, in the museum Pamuk employs specific references to works of art. The museum starts with a cabinet in explicit mimicry of Damien Hirst’s Cigarette Cabinets in correspondence to chapter 68 titled “4,213  Cigarette Stubs” and in probable expression of the passing of time (fig. 3).6 Another prevailing reference is to “still life” paintings, as with cabinet 40, titled “Consolations of Life in a Yalı”, with grapes, drinks, fig, fish (fig. 4/pl. XVII). Yet, the appropriation of the genre in the three-dimensional space of the cabinet, as well

4 This approach has been evaluated as partial to postmodernist writing. An example would be Mahnaz M. Afridi, Modern Postcolonial Intersections. Hamid, Mahfouz and Pamuk, in: Mehnaz M. Afridi, David M. Buyze (eds.), Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk. Existentialism and Politics, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 5 Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, in: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 202. 6 Damien Hirst, Dead Ends Died Out, Examined, 1993.

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Fig. 2: The book as a ticket, stamped with a logo of the museum.

Fig. 3: Cabinet 68: “4213 Cigarette Stubs”.



Fig. 4: Cabinet 40: “Consolations of Life in a Yalı”.

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as the choice of objects – tea for a drink, for instance – is an appropriative process, which Pamuk undertakes in his interweaving. In this manner, cabinet number 11, titled “The Feast of the Sacrifice”, is an appropriation of images of sacrifice in Euro‑ pean art (Pamuk mentions in the novel Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac and Rem‑ brandt’s The Sacrifice of Abraham) with a Turkish film poster of the story of Abraham. The interweaving aids Pamuk’s desired expression of involuntary remembrance. Through the use of cabinets, Pamuk is able to merge the recollection of different objects in a single space-time, yet through imitations and reversals, and in a non-cat‑ egorical manner that outstrips time, history, and authorship.

Remembrance Pamuk’s Proustian quest for remembrance thus precedes and qualifies his work in the displays of The Museum of Innocence. In the museum, Pamuk wishes to actualize what he calls in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist the “subjective time” of the protagonist of the novel as versus the linear historical Aristotelian time. He empha‑ sises the difference through the use of a capital “T” when indicating the subjective time: “[…] time, as Aristotle describes in his Physics, is a straight line connecting dis‑ crete moments. This is objective time, known and agreed upon by all, and kept track of by means of calendars and clocks […] in novels, time is not the linear and objective time indicated by Aristotle, but the subjective time of the protagonists.”7 The museum provides an opportunity to embrace the novel’s subjective Time, in a way which the medium of the book is unable to undertake. Pamuk is able to deviate from the linear reading of the novel, not only through the unity of the space, but also through the placement of the cabinets that portrays Pamuk’s view on non-linear time. Although the cabinets seemingly aligned to correspond to the course of the novel, there are expressive deviations, particularly in the placement of cabinets number 66 to 72, which portray Pamuk’s prolonged visits to Füsun’s house. One of them, cabinet number 68 titled “4,213 Cigarette Stubs”, is furthermore the first cabinet of the museum. Pamuk’s preoccupation with subjective Time also appears as parodies within the displays. The banister of the galleried space of the museum contains an exhibition of watches and clocks in correspondence to chapter 54, titled “Time”; the cabinet for chapter 25, “The Agony of Waiting,” includes the exhibition of the mech‑ anism of a clock. An important aspect of Pamuk’s concept of subjective time is that it works through remembrance, in the Proustian manner, which Benjamin points out to be a weaving of memory: “For the important thing to the remembering author, is not what he expe‑

7 Pamuk 2010 (as in note 2), p. 41.



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rienced but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection [Eingeden‑ ken] or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting?”8 Pamuk weaves his museum in an echo of Benjamin’s “Penelope work of for‑ getting”: cabinets for chapters 24 and 48 are missing, while some cabinets remain closed.

Subjectivity The Museum of Innocence thus weaves time as well as plot in the web of the protago‑ nist’s remembrance. Yet this remembrance is not free of the author; on the contrary, The Museum of Innocence develops as an autobiographical work. Both the novel and the museum express the scope of Pamuk’s subjectivity. He exists in resonating forms: not just as the author and the curator, but also as a character in the novel as his own self-the novelist Orhan Pamuk who writes on the story of the museum, and further‑ more the protagonist himself exists as his reflection. In The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Pamuk declares novels to be second lives, and in The Museum of Innocence he has multiple lives. He weaves his protag‑ onist, Kemal, through his own autobiographical remembrances: Kemal’s parent’s house recalls Pamuk’s own childhood apartment, and the preoccupation with objects also resonates with Pamuk’s childhood recollections, which we primarily know from his memoirs. It is suggestive that Pamuk wrote his memoirs in between his writing of The Museum of Innocence, under the title Istanbul Memories and the City, and it seems to function as a reflection.9 This weaving of the autobiography of the author into the textum of his writing is in affinity again with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Gian Balsamo discusses Proust to be partial to a genre of writing that extends to Dante’s Commedia and Augustine’s Confessions, in which the fictional character is “the allegory of the author’s historical authenticity.”10 Pamuk makes a similar reference to Proust in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: “Whenever I read In Search of Lost Time, which describes the world

8 Walter Benjamin, On the Image of Proust, in: Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Har‑ vard University Press, 2001, p. 238. 9 Orhan Pamuk, İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir, Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları (YKY), 2003. Its English translation was published three years later: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul. Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely, New York: Vintage, 2006. 10 Gian Balsamo, The Fiction of Marcel Proust’s Autobiography, in: Poetics Today 28.4 (Winter 2007), pp. 573–606.

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of a man not unlike Proust, I too am curious to know which details and episodes the author actually lives, and to what extent.”11 In a related manner, the museum develops as an extension of Pamuk’s sub‑ jectivity. Furthermore, the mention in the novel of the inspiration from writer’s museums – Pamuk lists among these Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Spinoza, Tagore, Pirandello, Mario Praz, and Flaubert – is apt to present The Museum of Innocence as a museum for Pamuk himself. The novel further includes a reference to an affinity with Edgar Allen Poe’s house museum, through its similarity to the building of The Museum of Innocence: “Of all the museums I visited, it was this tiny four-story Baltimore Poe House and Museum, which now sits in the middle of a poor, outlying neighbourhood, that reminded me most of the Keskin household, its forlorn air, its rooms, and its shape.”12

Authenticity Pamuk’s subjectivity works through an uninhibited recollection of objects and images that extend beyond geographical and categorical boundaries. In the museum, his selec‑ tion of objects and the use of the cabinets help him to work through these boundaries. Similarly, in the novel, Pamuk observes a migratory nature to daily objects as they get surprisingly imitated and appropriated, thus deeming boundaries meaningless. All these objects  –  the saltshakers, china dogs, thimbles, pencils, barrettes, ashtrays  – had a way of migrating, like the flocks of storks that flew silently over Istanbul twice a year to every part of the world. In the flea markets of Athens and Rome I had seen lighters identical to one I had bought for Füsun – and there were others almost exactly like it in Paris and Beirut. […] To contemplate how this saltshaker had spread to the farthest reach of the globe suggested a great mystery, as great as the way migratory birds communicate among themselves, always taking the same routes every year.13

Pamuk questions authenticity, also in terms of genuineness and realism. In correspon‑ dence, the cabinets serve to form constellations of remembrance in the manner of the Proustian mémoire involontaire. Thus, for Pamuk, the act of recalling is not only an interweaving of texts through mimicry and appropriation, but it acknowledges what Benjamin in his reading of Proust calls the “surrealist face of existence.”14 It is through an appropriation of the genre of the cabinets that Pamuk is able to merge the every‑ dayness of the objects with aspects of wonder and proto-scientism. In the manner of

11 Pamuk 2010 (as in note 2), p. 41. 12 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), p. 704. 13 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), pp. 688–689. 14 Benjamin 2001 (as in note 8), p. 240.



Fig. 5: Cabinet 26: “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains”.

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Fig. 6: Cabinet 31: “The Streets That Reminded Me of Her”.

vanitas, life and death is constantly at issue in these displays of food, drink, fruits, and skulls – but Pamuk also plays games with their representational realism. While a piece of cheese is reproduced as a one‑to-one imitation, a bird is represented in an abstract fashion. Pamuk further engages the sense of reality through the design of the cabinets. Their three-dimensionality becomes indistinct, as their displays resonate between a still life and a cabinet. The game of perception is also sustained through the theatrical‑ ity created by the use of velvet crimson curtains to close off and disclose the cabinets. Some cabinets become stage sets, with cut out sceneries and light-shadow games. Pamuk also employs a deliberate scientific pretence in his quest to penetrate cate‑ gorical boundaries and reality. Cabinet 26, titled “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains,” pretends to be an advertisement of a pill (fig. 5). Cabinet 15, titled “A Few Unpalat‑ able Anthropological Truths,” is a parody of anthropology, with a collage of women from 1970s daily newspapers with black bands over their eyes to keep their identities undisclosed. Cabinet 32, titled “The Shadows and Ghosts I Mistook for Füsun,” uses tools of cartography and is a map of Istanbul on which the loci of Kemal’s illusions are indicated. There exists yet another map of Istanbul in cabinet 31, with the title “The Streets That Reminded Me of Her,” which merges fictional locales of Pamuk’s previous novels with historical events in Turkish history (fig. 6). In this uninhibited

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recalling, the city merges into the subjectivity of the protagonist, in which history and parody, real and fictional are interwoven.

Landscape Another aspect of The Museum of Innocence that enhances Pamuk’s pursuit in novels is the creation of a landscape with the space of the museum. Pamuk compares a novel to a landscape painting in his The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, arguing that a novel similarly holds an extension of the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings: “In a novel, objects, furniture, rooms, streets, landscapes, trees, the forest, the weather, the view outside the window – everything appears to us as a function of the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings, formed from the general landscape of the novel.”15 The space of the museum realizes this quest for a landscape, as the objects and cabinets at once integrate the novel in their simultaneous existence, and the galleried space provides access to it at all times. Pamuk thus is able to penetrate linear time and the linear reading of the novel through this simultaneity and museological existence. The subjective time of the protagonist becomes a landscape through the space of the museum (fig. 7/pl. XVIII): “Because all the objects in my museum – and with them, my entire story  – can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.”16 Furthermore, this “museographic” landscape is able to include Pamuk’s many existences, as artist, protagonist, curator, and writer, in a similar simultaneity. While the gallery spaces of the floors provide a museological outlook on the novel, the attic room of the museum redeems the architecture of the house, and it is here that Pamuk claims his many presences. The attic room is designed to mimic the room of the pro‑ tagonist at the time of the creation of the museum. It is also here that in the novel the protagonist is made to meet Pamuk, the author, to write “the story of objects.” The attic room thus embodies the creative process both of the novel and the museum. In extension, there exists in the room a vitrine that displays the process: the novel in its many translations, the manuscripts, and the design sketches for the cabinets (fig. 8).

15 Pamuk 2010 (as in note 2), p. 85. 16 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), pp. 714–715.

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Fig. 7: “Landscape” of Cabinets.

Fig. 8: The Attic.

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On the Phenomenology of the House Museum There is an expressive particularity to the landscape of the museum space, as it employs an adaptation of the space of a house, in relation to the quest into subjectiv‑ ity. The declared modesty of Pamuk’s manifesto on museums is partially based on this concept of a museum as a house with a human scale as the manifestation of human‑ ity, and through it Pamuk counters monumental national museums and their claims regarding human history: “We are sick and tired of museums that try to construct historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, people, company or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane and much more joyful than the stories of colossal cultures.”17 He further wishes to engage with a tradition of house museums like artists’ houses or the houses of writers, as evidenced in his assertion that a “museumificated” indi‑ vidual house is easier for the visitor to relate to. Pamuk’s modest manifesto is thus based on the equation between the house and the novel as complex structures that embody individual, subjective, and therefore human experience. This equation orientates Pamuk’s employment of a phenomenological approach to the house, and in this manner The Museum of Innocence differs from other house museums. Pamuk seems to have related to Gaston Bachelard’s “oneiric house” in The Poetics of Space, and he weaves his house as a space of daydream, not only through the objects of the cabinets but also through the museological adaptation of the house. It is through a common emphasis on daydreaming that Bachelard also seeks into “humanity in its depths”: “… the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.”18 Correspondingly, Pamuk appears to have employed Bachelard’s inquiry into spatial types, such as the attic, the cellar, the staircase, and the drawers, as holders of the phenomenology of the house. Recalling Bachelard’s discussion of the attic as a space of dreams, Pamuk places in the attic a bedroom, where the protagonist is made to dream of his remembrances. Relatedly, it is also in the attic that Pamuk’s drafting notebooks and sketches of the cabinet designs are placed in vitrines, as evidence of the creative process behind The Museum of Innocence. The cabinets, on the other hand, acutely parallel Bachelard’s discussion of wardrobes, shelves, drawers, and chests as caskets of memories: “The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our

17 Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141. 18 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1994, p. 6.



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treasures. Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what immemorial.”19 As it spirals around the recollections of the cabinets, the staircase, also in the manner of the phenomenological approach of Bachelard, serves to connect to our dreams of the attic. In The Museum of Innocence, it further embodies the time con‑ ception of the novel, as it directs the visitor around a gallery space. This feature of the spiral becomes part of the logo of the museum; is also drawn on the floor of the entrance and serves as a visual metaphor for Pamuk’s interpretation of time. As the spiral, starting from a central point, expands itself into growing circles, it recalls time of Kairos, referring to moments, and not seconds, in contrast to time of Chronos, which is quantitative and linear (fig. 9). Once the spectator starts to walk up the stairs, and the house is lived as a “prom‑ enade architecture,” the experience of time and space scatters in many impressions, and become part of Chronos’s time rule.20 The museum thus seems paradoxically capable of unifying the time of Chronos and Kairos in one space. But once the visitor has reached the attic and is obliged to step back in time and space in order to leave the house/museum, one is no longer part of the linear time of the novel. One does not read a novel backwards, but The Museum of Innocence forces the visitors to step back – to retrace his or her steps. This circulation also differentiates The Museum of Innocence from other museums and from their structuring of one-way flows. Pamuk’s employment of the phenomenology of the house as a museographic device further embodies theatrical aspects, and in its appropriation into a museum, the house itself is “denatured.” In mimicry of normalcy and authenticity, from the outside the museum looks like an ordinary renovation of a house on the corner of two streets, with plaster walls and conventional doors and windows. Only the red paint makes it outstanding. It shows no clear features of “museumification”. Even the box office is hidden behind a small window next to the entrance, and hence the integrity of the house is sustained. It is only when the visitor goes through the entrance door that it becomes clear that the interior of the house has been transformed. In the manner of Bachelard’s phenomenology, imagination is part of this mem‑ ory-space. In its “museumification,” the house itself is made into a cabinet, which does not communicate with the features and the specific living architecture of the rooms. The displays are located in front of the windows in order to open room for the museographic space that aspires to play on light and shadow. The house as a house is

19 Ibid., p. 84. 20 Le Corbusier employed the notion of “promenade architecturale” specifically when describing the experience of walking through two of his 1920’s houses, the Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret (1923) and the Villa Savoye (1929–31). “In this house [the Villa Savoye] we are presented with a real architectural promenade, offering prospects which are constantly changing and unexpected, even astonishing”. Le Corbusier, Œuvre Compléte 1929–1934, Basel: Birkhäuser Publishers, 1995, p. 24

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Fig. 9: The spiral of the staircase.

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 347

Fig. 10: The “museumificated” house.

thus denied by the organisation of the space, and with the Wunderkammer furniture, the house as a living structure is denatured. The size and character of a real house is thus evoked in a theatrical way, and the attic seems a theatre-like anomaly in the “museumificated” house (fig. 10).

On the Pride of the Museum Pamuk thus builds his idea of museums through the writing and implementing of The Museum of Innocence. The quest is included in the novel, portrayed in the museum, and also made a manifesto in the catalogue. He weaves the protagonist, Kemal, as an obsessive collector of objects. The protagonist is then made to be “a proud collector”, in Pamuk’s terms, as he decides to exhibit these objects in a museum. Pamuk thus praises the genre of museum as a proud and also a modern act. “This is what I observed while traveling the world, and wandering through Istanbul. There are two types of collectors: 1. The Proud Ones, those pleased to show their collections to the world (they predominate in the West). 2. The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).”21

21 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), p. 691.

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Pamuk wishes to redeem the subjects and objects of pride by undertaking to display the life of a person through a rich mode of recollection that uses imitation, mimicry, and appropriation, all in an uninhibited relation to the subconscious, to dreams, to history, to the city, and to the world. It is a pride comparable to or rather surpassing the pride of the state in exhibiting itself: “As I was viewing the playing cards, rings, necklaces, chess sets, and oil paintings of the State Museum of Württemberg, located in a tower of the old castle in Stuttgart, I was inspired by the belief that the Keskins’s possessions (like my love for Füsun) deserved display in comparable splendour.”22 Correspondingly, Pamuk, through his protagonist, voices how the museum shall serve to “teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live.”23 In his manifesto for future museums, he declares his stance against state representations and in favour of the recreation of “the world of single human beings”: “The aim of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to recreate the world of single human beings – the same human beings who have laboured under ruthless oppressions for hundreds of years.”24 On this basis, Pamuk particularly speaks from a non-Western outlook, as he seeks to urge non-Western museums to take pride in and exhibit their own stories: “I’ve travelled all over, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes: While the West takes pride in itself, most of the rest of the world lives in shame. But if the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum, they are immediately transformed into posses‑ sions in which to take pride.”25 Furthermore, Pamuk observes particularly emerging from non-Western nations a “modern disposition”: “Museums should explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new and modern man emerging especially from increasingly wealthy non-western nations.”26

On the Innocence of the Museum The Museum of Innocence claims innocence through avoiding the overpowering his‑ torical narratives of big Western state museums and instead exploring subjective time and the creative will of the individual in the manner of Nietzsche’s concept of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens), with which the title of the novel and the museum also resonates. In his manifesto, Pamuk terms the state museums to be non-innocent: “The aim of big, state-sponsored museums, on the other hand, is to

22 Ibid., p. 685. 23 Ibid., p. 711. 24 Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141. 25 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), p. 711. 26 Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141.



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represent the state. This is neither a good nor an innocent objective.”27 Comparably, Nietzsche dissolves teleological history in the Twilight of the Idols, where he discusses “the innocence of becoming” as free will, free from the ethics of accountability, judg‑ ment, and sin.28 Pamuk also mentions innocence in relation to his quest into sub‑ jective time through the recollection of the stories of objects: “Just as in Aristotle’s Physics, Time emerges when individual moments shrink into themselves, so when objects do the same, they lose their stories. It is at this point that the innocence of objects becomes apparent. Our museum has been built on the contradictory desires to tell the stories of objects and to demonstrate their timeless innocence.”29 Nietzsche’s discussion also involves the affirmation of the moment as an affirma‑ tion of all existence. In his The Will to Power, he pursues this affirmation through a moment of happiness: “If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only our‑ selves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event – and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”30 Curiously, Pamuk makes a similar affirmation at the beginning of his novel. His first sentence is an affirmation of a moment of happiness: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” His last sentence, on the other hand, is an affirmation of his whole life: “Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”

Conclusion In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk invents a condition and a model of a new modern cognizance. In Pamuk’s model, East and West, history and story, epic and novel, indi‑ vidual and state, fact and fiction are texts and “textualities” that merge in individ‑ ual perception. In this understanding of modernity, nothing is new and everything repeats, multiplies, merges, and fragments, through resonances and representations and what is present is flux. There exists not a linear time, history, map, or identity but a simultaneous landscape. Pamuk’s previous novels anticipate his inquiry into both the novel and the museum. Comparably, Ahmet Oktay reads Pamuk’s 1995 novel Yeni Hayat as a lab‑ yrinth in which the dualities of reading and writing, writing and creating, the origi‑

27 Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141. 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in: Walter Kaufmann (ed./trans.), The Portable Nietz­ sche, New York: Penguin, 1976, pp. 499–501. 29 Pamuk 2012 (as in note 1), p. 141. 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, pp. 532–533.

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nal and the copy, and the real and the fictional are problematized.31 Sibel Erol reads Pamuk’s Snow alongside Derrida’s concept of différance, in which the logic of the sign breaks down, defers meaning to an endless chain of signifiers, and puts things in constant flux.32 Gilloch reads in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City a strange symmetry of involuntary memory and aesthetic creativity, a co‑presence in the present – “in framing the new by the old, time and space are merged or spliced” and a weaving “of the optical, the temporal and the spatial”.33 For Gilloch, “Pamuk dreams, remembers and constructs.” Through the creative space of the museum, Pamuk weaves history, story, memory, and remembrance into a textum of objects and images. He applies his view of the sen‑ timental novel to what he calls the sentimental museum, adapting Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between the naive and sentimental poetry in “Über naïve und sentimen‑ talische Dichtung”: “The naive poet does not differentiate much between his percep‑ tion of the world and the world itself. But the modern, sentimental-reflective poet questions everything he perceives, even his very senses.”34 The museum thus serves to hold such a modern reflection, with its flux of per‑ ception. Pamuk’s museum is a space of imagination, individuality, relativity, parody, the non-encyclopaedic, and the non-archival. On this basis, Pamuk queries the very foundation of the museum, with its investment in representing the state through grand historical narratives. He extends his inquiry into a critique of museums with a manifesto, which he also builds from his perspective as a novelist. He considers the partnership between the museum and the novel not to have been sustained and claims that the museum has not been able to follow the richer course of its nine‑ teenth-century counterpart. Pamuk discusses how the novels were able to introduce ordinary speech, everyday language, and the natural passage of prosaic and random sensations in his The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: “It is difficult to imagine a novel without the power and persuasiveness of ordinary speech, because everyday language is the natural conduit for those prosaic moments and random sensations on which the world of the novel is based.”35 Consequently, Pamuk’s manifesto for future museums emphasises the signif‑ icance of “expression” rather than “representation” that tell stories of individuals

31 Orhan Pamuk, Yeni Hayat, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1995. Orhan Pamuk, The New Life, trans. Güneli Gün, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997; Ahmet Oktay, Yeni Hayat Üzerine, in: Engin Kılıç (ed.), Orhan Pamuk’u Anlamak, Istanbul: İletişim, 2006, 3rd edition, p. 231. 32 Sibel Erol, Orhan Pamuk’un Kar Romanında Metinlerarası Dolaşım, in: Nüket Esen, Engin Kılıç (eds.), Orhan Pamuk’un Edebi Dünyası, Istanbul: İletişim, 2008, p. 260. 33 Graeme Gilloch, Photographs and Phantoms. Orhan Pamuk’s Monochrome Memories, in: Nilgün Anadolu-Okur (ed.), Essays Interpreting the Writings of Novelist Orhan Pamuk, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009, p. 107. 34 Pamuk 2010 (as in Note 2), p. 16. 35 Ibid., pp. 131–132.



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rather than histories within houses rather than big museum buildings. The house becomes the locus of Pamuk’s inquiry into subjective time and individual story, through which the individual remembrance extends to history and merges the story of the individuals with the city. As with his memoirs, in which Istanbul partakes in the melancholy of Pamuk and discloses its history, in the Museum of Innocence Istanbul partakes in its protagonist’s dreams. Pamuk’s main message, however, addresses the vision for museums in non-West‑ ern countries that he views to have been increasingly investing in big museums in naive imitation of their European counterparts. Instead, Pamuk aspires to commu‑ nicate the existence and significance of a richer web of modern individualities. In this manner, The Museum of Innocence appears also as a parody of the Eurocen‑ tric museum, which Pamuk both imitates and reverses. The cabinets embody both mimicry of Wunderkammer and still life traditions of European art, but simultane‑ ously they are instruments for appropriation. His pretence of being an anthropologist (and at times a scientist) is a similar act of reversal: “Now the only way I could ever hope to make sense of those years was to display all that gathered together – the pots and pans, the trinkets, the clothes and the paintings  – just as that anthropologist might have done.”36 From Istanbul Pamuk reminds us of how our modern condition speaks of a liminal space where we are all part of imitation and mimicry, resemblances and differences, rather than established dualities. It is in this liminal space, where home transfigures as the city, life as death, fact as fiction, West as East, that individuality emerge, vis‑àvis the clear map of state, society, and history. Partialities, ambiguities, hesitations, hybridity, non-identifications, dislocations, slippage, excess, and missteps are part of this creative space, and also part of our innocence of becoming.

36 Pamuk 2009 (as in note 1), p. 681.

Authors Alison Boyd is a PhD candidate in art history at Northwestern University. She is cur‑ rently working on her dissertation on the Barnes Foundation entitled: “Modernism for America: African and other Primitivisms at the Barnes Foundation 1919–1951.” Her primary field of study is in modern European and American art with a focus on the African Diaspora and gender theory. She has worked on her dissertation with the support of a Warnock Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Wintherthur Research Fel‑ lowship, Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS American Art Dissertation Fellowship, and a Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Currently she is a fellow of the Max-Planck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cul‑ tural Lives of Things” at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. Lynn Catterson, originally trained in the sciences, received her PhD in art history at Columbia University in 2002. Her research stems from an interest in Italian Renais‑ sance sculpture with a focus on the marketplace and how fifteenth-century sculptors satisfied consumer demand for antiquities. Lately, she is working on the art market in nineteenth-century Florence from the point of view of production and social networks via its preeminent dealer, Stefano Bardini. Drawing upon material in the state archive of Bardini, this project has received support from the Frick Center for the History of Collecting, the American Philosophical Society, the SMB-PK in Berlin, and CASVA in Washington, DC. Kathryn M. Floyd is Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, the history of photography, and the arts of Africa. Her research is broadly concerned with twentieth-century German art, with a specific focus on the history and historiography of German art exhibitions and their mediation in catalogues, installation photographs, and film. She has conducted extensive research on the history of documenta (Kassel), the topic of her dissertation (The University of Iowa, 2006). Her current book project explores a set of installation photographs of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Expressionist sculpture Kneeling Woman (1911) taken at different modernist exhibitions in Germany and the United States between 1912 and 1955. She has also recently served as guest editor of a special issue of the journal Dada/Surrealism that examines the history of avant-garde art exhibitions. Martin Gaier is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation and Pro‑ fessorial Lecturer in Art History at the University of Basel. He received a Ph.D. in art history from Technische Universität Berlin and accomplished the habilitation in 2010 at University of Basel. His research focuses on arts, architecture and politics in Early Modern Venice and on painting and cultural criticism in 19th century Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Among his last book publications are Heinrich Ludwig und die

354 

 Authors

›ästhetischen Ketzer‹. Kulturpolitik, Kulturkritik und Wissenschaftsverständnis bei den Deutsch-Römern, Cologne: Böhlau, 2013; Similitudo – Konzepte der Ähnlichkeit in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Munich: Fink, 2012 (with Jeanette Kohl and Alberto Savi‑ ello); Vergleichendes Sehen, Munich 2010 (with Lena Bader and Falk Wolf). Walter Grasskamp, Prof. Dr., born 1950, is an art critic and held the chair in art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1995 to 2016, where he was deputy rector from 1999 to 2003. He is author of numerous essays and books dedicated to modern and contemporary art, museum and exhibition history (with a focus on documenta), art in the public realm as well as pop culture and consumerism. Iro Katsaridou is a curator at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Paris I – Pan‑ théon-Sorbonne and museum studies at the City University of New York. Her doc‑ toral dissertation (Aristotle University; 2010) treats the discourse on contemporary Greek photography. Recently she has curated, with I. Motsianos, the exhibition “On the Margins of War” on German photography during the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941–1944), and organized the international conference “Representations of the Nazi Occupation,” whose proceedings are forthcoming in late 2016. Her more recent publications include a chapter on photographic exhibitions on Cyprus (1950–1980), in Photography and Cyprus, L. Wells, T. Stylianou-Lambert, and N. Philippou (ed.) (I.B.Tauris 2014); a chapter on the Jewish Museum of Thessalon‑ iki in Museums and Photography: Displaying Death, E. Stylianou and T. StylianouLambert, (ed.) (Routledge 2016). Julia Kleinbeck studied art history and applied cultural history studies in Karlsruhe and Basel. From 2009 to 2012 she worked as a research assistant for the DFG project “sandrart.net” (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – MPI). In 2012 she was co-cura‑ tor of the exhibition Unter Minervas Schutz: Bildung durch Kunst in Joachim von Sandrarts Teutsche Academie at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. From 2013 to 2015 she worked for the ERC project “LexArt – Words for Art: 1600–1750” at the Uni‑ versité Paul Valéry-Montpellier III (France). At the present she teaches as associated lecturer at the School of Design of Pforzheim University. Her PhD thesis focuses on different types of beholders and reception of art in the nineteenth century. Hubertus Kohle was born in 1959, he studied in Bonn, Florence, and Paris, and was assistant professor in Bochum (1987–1996), university lecturer in Cologne (1997–1999), and then professor in Munich since 2000. He also served as guest professor at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris (2008) and did his research at the Getty research institute in Los Angeles (2015); he primarily writes on German and French art of the late eighteenth century up to Classic Modernism, and also on digital art history; his most recent book is Digitale Bildwissenschaft, 2013.



Authors  

 355

Anastasia Kontogiorgi is an art historian at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Athens, Greece. She has studied art history at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her doctoral dissertation (Aristotle University; 2006) treats the stage design of the ancient Greek tragedy in the Greek theatre of the twen­ tieth century. She worked as a curator for the re-display of the Museum-Library Stratis Eleftheriadis Tériade on Lesvos island, Greece and she organized the publication of the catalogue of the museum. Her most recent publication, with Iro Katsaridou, is: “Vers un ‘art prolétarien’. Propositions plastiques et questionnements dans les revues de gauche en Grèce, 1930–1936”, in: Artistes et partis, Esthétique et politique (1900–1945), Maria Stavrinaki and Maddalena Carli (eds.), Les presses du réel, 2011, pp. 147–172. Irina Koshoridze is Associate Professor of the Institute of Fine Arts, Department of the Humanities at Tbilisi State University and chief Curator of Oriental Collections at the Georgian National Museum. Since 2014, she is Director of Georgian State Museum of Folk and Applied Arts. She has various fellowships and training in museum man‑ agement and museum studies as well as long experience in museum work including curatorial, educational, and exhibition practice. As vice president of the Georgian Museum Association and board member of ICOM National Committee in Georgia she organized different local and international training for museum staff. From 2002 Koshoridze implemented the course of museology in Tbilisi State University at the bachelor degree level. She has participated in international conferences and meetings on museology and has published papers and books about new models of museum management. As Curator of Oriental Art Collections in the Georgian National Museum she works on various projects; her research and publication concentration is Islamic art and the cultural connections between Georgia and Iran in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A former fellow of New York University’s Department of Art History (2006–2009), she developed the curriculum in Islamic art for BA degree stu‑ dents and special seminars for MA students. In 2015 she was a senior fellow at RCAC Koç University. Qanita Lilla is a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University where she is working on an institutional critique of the South African National Gallery over the last hundred years. She has worked in both state-funded and vernacular museums, both in South Africa and internationally, most recently the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Her research interests lie in the history and politics of museums and the construction of canons of art history in colonial and postcolonial contexts. John Macarthur, Prof. (M.Des.St UQ, PhD Cambridge), is Director of the Architec‑ ture, Theory, Criticism, and History (ATCH) Research Centre at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the intellectual history of architecture, particu‑ larly its relation to other art disciplines and to aesthetics. His major work, The Pictur-

356 

 Authors

esque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, was published by Routledge in 2007. He has edited six books and published over 140 papers, including contributions to the journals Assemblage, Transition, Architecture Research Quarterly, Oase, and the Journal of Architecture. Andrea Meyer is research and teaching assistant in the Department of Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her fields of research are museum studies, recep‑ tion theory, the Berlin art world, and the visual arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After obtaining her MA from the Freie Universität Berlin, she participated in a research project on intercultural transfers between Germany and France (1999– 2001). She received her PhD with a dissertation on Germany and Millet in 2007. She is co-editor of the volume The Museum is Open. Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940 (2014) and of an anthology of source texts on museums (2010). Deepti Mulgund is a doctoral candidate at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawa‑ harlal Nehru University, where she is writing her dissertation on art reception and the development of art publics in colonial Bombay from 1850 to the 1930s. In 2015, she received a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship to spend a year of the doctoral study at the Humboldt University, Berlin. In her earlier research, which contributed towards her MPhil degree (2012), she focused on art institutions estab‑ lished by Indians in the pre-Independence period. Her research interests include museum studies, institutional history, exhibition history, art reception, modernism, and postcolonialism. Melania Savino is currently a research associate at the University of Basel. Her research, thus far, has largely concentrated on the history and development of museums and archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century in the larger Med‑ iterranean, especially in Turkey and Italy. She previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – Max-Planck-Institut. She holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the Univer‑ sity of London on the crucial role of antiquities in the establishment and construction of a Turkish national imagination after the establishment of the Republic. Norbert M. Schmitz is Professor of Aesthetics at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel. An art and media historian, he has taught at universities and art academies in Wuppertal, Bochum, Linz, Zurich, Siegen, and Salzburg. He has delivered international lectures at universities and academies in Chicago, Berkeley, New York, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Paris, Zurich, Bern, Salzburg, New Dehli, Lahore, Kathmandu, Seoul, and Hangzhou. His work focuses on iconology and intermediality between art and film, iconology of old and new media, discourse theory of the art system and global art. He is the author of the book Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeichen der Moderne (1994), and has published several articles and essays, including “Bewe‑



Authors  

 357

gung als symbolische Form” in Über Bilder Sprechen. Positionen und Perspektiven der Medienwissenschaften (2000); “Medialität als ästhetische Strategie der Moderne – Zur Diskursgeschichte der Medienkunst” in Formen interaktiver Medienkunst (2001); and “Interactivedesign – Design as Interaktion. On the emergency of design as an symbolic form of the modern communication” in Interactive Design (2005). Naomi Stead, Dr., is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland, where she is also Deputy Director of the Research Centre ATCH (Archi‑ tecture Theory Criticism History). Her research interests lie broadly within the critical and cultural studies of architecture, including the cultural politics of purpose-built museum buildings. Stead is editor of the book Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation and Criticism in Architecture (2012) and was from 2011 to 2014 co-editor of Architectural Theory Review. Stead’s publication record includes sixteen book chapters, twen‑ ty-eight journal articles, thirty-eight conference papers, and twelve industry reports. In addition, she is a widely published architecture critic, having been commissioned to write more than fifty articles in the Australasian professional architectural media, and is currently a columnist for both The Conversation and Places Journal. Zehra Tonbul studied architecture in Istanbul and completed an MPhil degree in History and Philosophy of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, where she investigated phenomenology in architecture. She worked as editor in architectural media in Turkey and is the writer of a book on the history of modernization of the first hospital buildings of Turkey. She is currently completing her PhD in history at Boğaziçi University and is also a guest student of Vienna University, where she is investigating, through the biography of Ernst Diez, confrontations of Viennese and German art historiography during the first half of the twentieth century. She has been a fellow of the Turkish Cultural Foundation and a Hanfmann-Mellink Scholar at the American Research Institute in Turkey with her doctoral studies. She has also been a lecturer in architecture and theory at Mardin Artuklu University. Eva-Maria Troelenberg heads the Max-Planck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. In 2010-11 she was a fellow in the research project “Connecting Art Histories in the Museum”, a joint project of the KHI Florenz and the National Museums in Berlin at the Museum für Islamische Kunst. She has taught Art History at the universities of Vienna and Heidelberg and held visiting professor‑ ships for Islamic and modern art history at LMU Munich and University of Zürich. Her teaching and research focuses on issues of transcultural museum theory and the historiography and perception of Islamic art. Deborah van der Plaat is a research fellow at the University of Queensland where she manages the ATCH (Architecture Theory Criticism History) Research Centre. Her

358 

 Authors

research explores intersections and interconnections of architecture, race, climate, place, and taste. With John Macarthur, Janina Gosseye, and Andrew Wilson, she most recently edited Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945–1975 (Artifice, 2015). Koen Van Synghel studied architecture and architectural history and theory. He works as an architect, scenographer, and critic. Currently he teaches architecture crit‑ icism at KU-Leuven and architecture theory at the University of Hasselt in Belgium. He curated and designed with anthropologist Filip De Boeck the exhibition Kinshasa, the Imaginary City, a multimedia exhibition for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Archi‑ tecture Biennale in 2004, which was awarded the Golden Lion. He has also curated Time Festival 2007 and Schets of Schim, an exhibition on architecture and intuition in Ghent. He published Young Architects in Flanders in 2001, Citybranding, Image Building & Building Images in 2002, and a monograph on Coussée & Goris in 2006. He is co-author of De gesproken Stad (2005) and The World according to Bylex (2009). In the last years he has designed exhibitions on architecture at the museums of fine arts in Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels. He is writing a PhD at the University of Hasselt on Implicit Architecture Criticism in contemporary art, based on the work of the Amer‑ ican artist Jimmie Durham.

Picture Credits Troelenberg Fig. 1: Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID MTM022, Fred Wilson; Fig. 2: © Ulmer Museum, Ulm, Image: Sabrina Stoppe, Ulm; Fig. 3: Archive Farms, New York; Figs. 4–6: bpk-images / Max Ittenbach; Fig. 7: © Thomas Struth; Fig. 8: Google Art Project, https://www.google.com/ culturalinstitute/beta/partner/azerbaijan-carpet-museum (accessed 9 August 2016). Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.

Catterson Figs. 1, 3–4, 8–9: Reproduced with the kind permission of the Archivio Fotografico Eredità Bardini (AFEB) della Soprintendente Polo Museale Toscano, Florence; Fig. 2: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Figs. 5, 7: Bode illustration, public domain, Google-digitized; Fig. 6: © Lynn Catterson.

Floyd Fig. 1: Courtesy of the Stadtmuseum Kassel; Figs. 2, 5: Roman März / © documenta Archive; Figs. 3–4: © documenta Archive.

Meyer Figs. 1–6, 8–9: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, PK; Fig. 7: Kavita Singh, Material Fantasy. The Museum in Colonial India, in: Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009, p. 49.

Savino Figs. 1, 3: Library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – MaxPlanck-Institut; Figs. 2, 4–8: UNESCO Archive, Paris.

Boyd Fig. 1: Image © 2014 The Barnes Foundation; Figs. 2, 5: Courtesy The Barnes Foundation; Fig. 3: Source: Black Classic Press. Courtesy The Barnes Foundation; Fig. 4: John and Lisa Pritzker Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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 Picture Credits

Kleinbeck Fig. 1: Photograph: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra on Flickr; for the artwork: © Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella; Figs. 2–3: Olafur Eliasson: Studio Olafur Eliasson. An Encyclopedia, ed. by Anna Engberg-Pedersen, Cologne: Taschen, 2008, pp. 115–122; Fig. 4: Screenshot Flickr, query: The Weather Project (Screenshot: Julia Kleinbeck); Fig. 5: James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project. Exhibition catalogue, edited by Markus Brüderlin et al., Ostfildern Ruit: Hatje Cantz: 2009, without page number; Fig. 6: © VG Bild Kunst; Fig. 7: © Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Fig. 8–9: © Double Robotics.

Koshoridze Figs. 1–11: © Copyright Georgian National Museum.

Lilla Fig. 1: Archive of the Author; Fig. 2: The Western Cape Archives and Records Service, AG6400/8; Fig. 3: The Western Cape Archives and Records Service, AG 6390/2; Fig. 4: National Library of South Africa, CTN Collection.

Mulgund Figs. 1–4: Dr. Ajay Singh, Director, Bharat Kala Bhavan / © Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University; Figs. 5–7: Ms. Ramya Swayamprakash / © Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya, Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Maharashtra.

Katsaridou / Kontogiorgi Figs. 1–2: © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutzos Museum (Photo: Stavros Psiroukis).

Stead / van der Plaat / Macarthur Fig. 1: Image is in the public domain by assertion of the BCEC; Figs. 2–4, 7–8: Archive of the Authors; Fig. 5: Photograph by Kgbo, published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en, used with thanks; Fig. 6: Photograph by L. C. Ball. Held by The John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. Image in the public domain, used with thanks.



Picture Credits  

 361

Schmitz Fig. 1: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), museum sequence. Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Hamburg: Universal Picture Germany, 2009.

Grasskamp Fig. 1: Getty Images; Figs. 2–3, 5–16: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (Photo: Stephan Vaura); Fig. 4: Estate of Paul and Micheline Kowaliski; Fig. 17: Kent Gallery New York.

Kohle Fig. 1: http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/exploring-shape-collections-draft/; Fig. 2: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/; Fig. 3: http://www.stadtkindfrankfurt.de/wp-content/ uploads/2011/10/qr-5.jpg; Fig. 4: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio?ii=0&p=0; Fig. 5: http://schirn.de/schjerfbeck/; Fig. 6: http://blog.staedelmuseum.de/; Fig. 7: http:// blog.staedelmuseum.de/blick-hinter-die-kulissen/ge­zwitscher-mit-durer-das-stadelladt-zum-tweetup (all last accessed 11.2.2014)

Tonbul / Van Synghel Figs. 1, 3–9: © Copyright Innocence Foundation and Refik Anadol; Fig. 2: From the seventh edition, İletişim Yayınları, 2011; Fig. 10: With the permission of İhsan Bilgin.

Plates

Plates 

 365

Plate I: Thomas Struth, Audience 07, Florence 2004, Cat. 8781, Chromogenic print, 179.5 × 289.5 cm, EXHIBITED: KHZ, MSP, © Thomas Struth.

Plate II: Google Art Project: screenshot from the page of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. Google Cultural Institute – Screenshot. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission.

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 Plates

1918 Bardini Auction

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

NY, Hyde Collection

Bardini Photograph, AFEB

Bardini plaster cast

Cleveland

Vienna

Washington

Boston

Sant’Andrea Bovezzano

Plate III: The many versions of the so-called Luca della Robbia Madonna of the Lilies.

Plates 

 367

Plate IV: The Brain in the rotunda of the Museum Fridericianum at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012. Photo: Roman März.

Plate V: Goshka Macuga, of what is. that it is. of what is not. that it is not, 1 (2012) installed in the Museum Fridericianum at dOCUMENTA (13), 2012.

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 Plates

Plate VI: Cover of the second issue of the new edition of the Museumskunde n.s. 2 (1930).

Plates 

Plate VII: Barnes Foundation, South Wall Ensemble, Room 22.

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 Plates

Plate VIII: Installation view on Flickr, Ragazza che fotografa (Girl Taking a Photograph), Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2013.

Plate IX: Screenshot from Flickr, query: The Weather Project.

Plates 

 371

Plate X: Fasting Buddha, Kushana period, 1st–3rd century C.E. Grey schist. Sculpture gallery, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi.

Plate XI: View of the gallery of western artists. Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya, Aundh. Paintings in view include, from left to right copies of, The Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist (1507) by Raphael and Mona Lisa (1503–1506) by Leonardo da Vinci (both in the Louvre Museum); Madonna of the Gold Finch (1505–1506) by Raphael, (Galleria degli Uffizi); The Reader by Jean-Jacques Henner (Musée d’Orsay).

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 Plates

Plate XII: Indian Seasons, personified by female figures, from left to right, Vasant (Spring), Grishma (Summer), Varsha (Monsoon), attributed to Mahadev Patharvat. Cast of the bust of Apollo.

Plate XIII: Domenicos Theotocopoulos, Saint Peter, c. 1600–1607, Athens, National Gallery. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 53 cm.

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 373

Plate XIV: Night view of artificial beach at Southbank, central Brisbane, with fireworks. Image courtesy of Brisbane Marketing and the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Image is in the public domain by assertion of the BCEC. Used with thanks.

Plate XV: Queensland Gallery of Modern Art from Kurilpa Bridge, photograph by Kgbo, published under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‑sa/3.0/deed.‌en, used with thanks.

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 Plates

Plate XVI: Rijksstudio portal on the Rijksmuseum website (“Start your own Rijksstudio”).

Plates 

Plate XVII: Museum of Innocence, cabinet 40: “Consolations of Life in a Yalı”.

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 Plates

Plate XVIII: Museum of Innocence, “Landscape” of Cabinets.