Museums: Beginning and Evolution
Museums tend to be things we take for granted today. They are where you see valuable, exciting, and funky stuff. They are where you take the girlfriend or boyfriend or the family on the weekend or some holiday outing. They are what you visit when you go to cities like Paris, Madrid, London or New York.
But the idea of a commons of people having cheap access to priceless paintings almost every day of the year is a relatively new thing. It begins with the rise of the middle classes and with more democratic access to institutions. Before that, the idea of collecting began together with global trade from around the fifteenth century when a wide variety of fascinating and new things started to flood into ports and peoples’ homes. It launched a growing desire to amass more curious and precious objects, and then the need to classify and preserve them.
Today, museums are so ubiquitous that they have become one of the blue-chip briefs for an architect. In some cases, a museum's architecture has been on par or even overshadowed in attention to the collection it houses. I call these ‘hypermuseums’.
AFP Photo Philippe Huguen (Photo credit should read Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images). People visit the Louvre-Lens Museum on December 3, 2012 in the French northern city of Lens. https://www.meinhardt.com.au/news/exhibitionists-top-tips-for-museum-design/
Museums: Good or Bad?
‘I don’t like museums much’ wrote a disenchanted Paul Valéry (1871-1945), in 1923. Now that museums are a way of life and new ones are being designed and built every year, it is a complaint that may sound overly shrill, but it is still resonant today.
After his opening strike, he states,
There is much that is admirable about them, but nothing delightful. Ideas of order, conservation and public utility, exact and clear as they may be, have little to do with delight.[…]Upon my first step toward the things of beauty, a hand takes my cane, a notice tells me not to smoke.Already numbed by authority and feeling constricted, I make my way into a room full of sculpture where reigns but cold confusion. […] I am within a tumult of frozen creatures, each of which requires but is not afforded, the inexistence of the other.
For Valéry, museums are modern vales of death. Rather than offering a satisfying aesthetic experience, the artworks, wrenched from their roots, lovelessly satisfy a purpose foreign to the circumstances of their creation.
Edification, learning, has won out over contemplation—instruction over pleasure, the museum ‘makes scholars of us’.
With shades of George Eliot’s haggard Casaubon from Middlemarch whose erudition was just a loveless compensation for his inadequacy with the world—
In matters of art, erudition is a kind of defeat: it clarifies to the detriment of delicacy, renders the inessential profound. It substitutes sensations for hypotheses, the spirit of wonder for prodigious memory, annexing a limitless library into the museum. Venus is transformed into a document.
Valéry's thoughts lend themselves to anyone who has been jostled by someone walking backward with an audioguide affixed to the ear, or whose private contemplation had been shattered by a voice on the intercom telling visitors of a lecture about to take place in the museum auditorium.
Or who has been witness to viewers stooping to read the didactic panels, pausing all too briefly at the paintings to it corroborates what they have read?
It is an example of what Paul Virilio has called the degradation of vision: the outside world of advertising has anesthetised us to experiences that require contemplation for their own sake since everything in a world run by the media is sensationalised out of proportion and requires moral or monetary validation.
It is now a truism to say that the context in which a work of art is seen is critical to what you get out of it. There are many like Valéry, for whom museums sap works of art of their authentic context.
For them, the art in museums is always a dish served cold. The counterclaim is that museums are havens for visitors who wish to free themselves temporarily from the travails of the world outside.
However, it is a delusion to think that museums are free of ideologies and agendas; on the contrary, they are rife with them. And while detractors may have real grounds for resentment, there are no escaping museums in the foreseeable future.
The grandly designed museums that have been built in the last three or so decades, and the others that continue to be planned, are part of a phenomenon reminiscent of the seventeenth century of magnificent, resource-sapping architectural feats that shout the glories of high culture.
The Guggenheim Bilbao. Designed by Canadian American architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao building represents a magnificent example of the most groundbreaking 20th-century architecture. With 24,000 m2, of which 9.000 are dedicated to exhibition space, the Museum represents an architectural landmark of audacious configuration and innovating design, providing a seductive backdrop for the art exhibited in it. https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/the-building
The Jewish History Museum in Berlin, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Los Angeles Art Museum, the Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Musée Guimet and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris are just some of what are alternately monstrosities or wonders which quite often overshadow in brilliance the objects they hold.
Paris’ Musee du quai Branly Jacques Chirac. A lesser-known museum in the city compared to major ones like Musée du Louvre and Musée d’Orsay but this fact just makes the museum even more special. https://insidr.co/musee-du-quai-branly/
Not only is sight obscured by architectural sublimity, but we are also simply lost for words.
The First Museums
Ironically enough, conversation, social intercourse, and visual wonder were among the sources for the museum's first manifestation, the Wunderkammer, the wonder closet or cabinet of curiosities, also known as the studiolo or Kunstkabinett.
Originating in the 1500s, when sea travel flushed Europe with a profuse variety of objects, these proto-museums were not devoted to art as such.
Far from it, they were a diverse conglomerate of cultural and biological rarities, with anything from the foetus of a rare animal species to a narwhal horn to an exquisite musical instrument to an artifact from a distant 'primitive' tribe.
Daily Art Magazine. Ferrante Imperato, Room of curiosities, 1559, Naples, Italy, Source: Kunst und Wunderkammern. https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/cabinets-of-curiosities/
Oddities of idiosyncratic interest rubbed shoulders with articles of real value, such as antiquaries and jewels. Paintings and statues were there too, augmenting the anecdotal rapport of the objects, such as offering the picture of a place whence something came. Such collections were valued for their diversity.
While it is true that collections of art and artifacts had always existed in the collections of kings and grandees since the Roman Empire and before, these are to be seen as part of the symbolic formation of dynastical wealth and power if they were to be viewed by others, it was by a select few. Indeed the Pharaohs took their treasures with them to their tomb.
It is also true that all levels of gentleman amateurs collected paintings and sculptures during the same time of the Wunderkammer, but what I wish to highlight is the anthropological and pseudo-scientific ambitions that went into such pursuits.
The Wunderkammer was a collection of objects assembled not solely for the sake of displaying wealth but also for intellectual curiosity, a notion that carries over into today’s art museums whose acquisitions are supposed to be justified not on quality and monetary value alone, but on interest and how they complement other items in the collection.
Like many state art museums, the Wunderkammer aspired to something like a physical encyclopedia, albeit a lot more erratic and idiosyncratic: each object has some metonymic relation to a time, place, or idea. The concept of historical contiguity would not be instituted until the mid-eighteenth century.
An Example of an Early Museum
A famous example of one such curious plethora in England at the very end of the sixteenth century was Whitehall.
As a commentator on William Shakespeare vividly recreates it:
Shakespeare would have appreciated the extent to which Whitehall was ultimately about competing, contesting histories. Allusions to the Virgin Mary kept company with portraits of Reformation worthies. Fantasies of distant worlds—like the Ethiop astride a rhinoceros—fought for attention with state-of-the-art maps and globes for extending the reach of English trade and colonisation. Sundials shared space with the latest in Continental clock technology. The riches contained in the palace were distantly related to those found in that sixteenth-century phenomenon called the Wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet. An ancestor of the modern museum, the wonder-cabinet was usually a room set aside to display exotic objects. The finest of these in London probably belonged to Walter Cope, merchant-adventurer and a member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. During his London visit in 1599, Thomas Platter visited Cope's wonder-cabinet 'stiffed with queer foreign objects in every corner': an African charm made of teeth, the bauble and bell of Henry VIII's fool, and Indian stone and axe and canoe, a chain mad of monkey teeth, a Madonna constructed of Indian feather, a unicorn's tail, and shoes from around the globe. In another unnamed house of curios on London Bridge, Platter even saw 'a large live camel'.
The proud assembler of the Wunderkammer was typically a gentlemen merchant, intellectual, and scientist, being of a time when all three could coexist in one person and when science and art were not yet as categorically divided.
It was also a period when ‘taste’ (and then subsequently, the role of connoisseurship) was only beginning to be identified as a method of discrimination. The more curious the cabinet of curiosities, the more likely its owner would attract visitors, locally and abroad, who would come to exchange ideas and make their own verbal contributions of things they had seen in their travels or rival collections.
As Stephen Bann remarks, pilgrimage played a significant role in the early museums, such that visiting a shrine and collecting notes became mixed-up together. The particular air or presence of the collection/shrine went a long way in its overall appeal.
Historically speaking, Wunderkammern appear in the age at the cusp of the Renaissance and the Baroque, between the era when the nobleman as artistic patron had relatively strong control over his social circle, and the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Salon whose prestige was commonly measured according to the caliber of person it could attract.
This early form of the museum was as essential to early scientific inquiry as to the most unscientific forays into the imagination. There is a contemporary equivalent.
Taking a cue from the Surrealist celebration of incongruity, many installation artists working with mixed media bring together various objects, using their love of juxtaposition to expose prejudice, prize out new perspectives, or express their astonishment at the vastness of the world.
The First Exhibitions
Although we associate the commercial exhibition with the open market and the public museum in the spirit of democracy, the first step toward this kind of public display pertinent to the modern museum began with an autocracy.
Cardinal Mazarin (1602-61), Louis XIV’s chief minister at the time of 1648, founded the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, which served as the benchmark for the others that followed: sciences (1666), architecture (1671), and music (1672). In 1673 the recently founded art academy held its first exhibition, the purpose of which was not just to impart knowledge, but centralisation, to be maintained by something resembling objective standards, upheld strenuously by the first of the redoubtable academy’s masters, Charles Le Brun.
The French Salon. 1648. Reference TBC
By making the artists compete for honours in the annual Salon, by appealing to what Napoleon would later refer to as every man’s love of ‘shining baubles’, the state was more assured of attracting able young artists who then could be assigned public commissions.
Ancient Rome had always fostered the spirit of competition to exert its control over the bureaucracy and the military, but never in the arts. Given that egos are worn so close to the sleeve in the arts, peer group pressure works wonders and is the mainstay of art's most enduring vulgarisation, the competition.
It is worth remembering that the Venice Biennale hands out medals. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Paris Salon was the single most significant event for art and had the same topicality as any Dokumenta in Kassel or Whitney Biennial in New York.
From 1725, the Salon was held in the Louvre, and in 1737, it came into its own when it opened to the public. The rights of ownership to taste, thereby expanding, the work of art became the locus of public discussion and dissent. On the heels of the French, the British Royal Academy was set up in 1768 thanks to the dauntless urging of Joshua Reynolds.
In contrast to the French Salon, one had to pay entry to the Royal Academy Exhibition, which is not state-financed. But there were other motivations. Unlike the capacious Louvre, space in Somerset House, the Royal Academy's home from 1771- 1836, was restricted, and an entry-fee vetted the hoi-poloi. A throng of powdered and spotty toffs perspiring against one another was enough.
In 1769 the Royal Academy ushered in a set of rules to which artists had to comply if they were considered for exhibition (e.g., 'No Picture to be received without a Frame'.) Similar criteria governing originality, media, size and subject matter, and the like are still enforced by competitions today.
The need for such logistical rules was indicative of an institution whose purpose was to make a concrete sense of a wide range of outside activity through an exhibition and an organised competition.
Competitions tout themselves as a gauge of current talents and trends, and institutional rules are supposed to ensure accuracy of measure. The diversity of art in the present climate means that standards and diverse and mixed. Claims to objectivity are rhetorical at best. Let it be said that competitions are conservative by definition, and many are marred by discrete agendas and bogus annual themes.
By the nineteenth century, the Salon was an annual state-sponsored event, the exhibition fully juried and the opening with full pomp by a national dignitary, usually the king. By the middle of the century, a schism opened between academically sanctioned and more public-oriented, Realist artists, such as Courbet and the Barbizon school.
In 1863, the Salon rejected an excessive number of paintings, inciting uproar, which Napoleon III tried to mollify by establishing a satellite exhibition, the Salon des refusés. In 1874 came the first Impressionist exhibition.
Salon Des Refusees 1874. Reference TBC.
From then on, the ubiquity of the Salon gradually began to pale, hearing its death-knell when the state withdrew funding in 1881. In 1903, Renoir (1841-1919) and Rodin (1840-1917), by the pillars of the French establishment, founded the Salon d’Automne, named after the season during which the exhibition was held.
The First Public Art Museums
The Louvre needs to be singled out not just because it is the most prominent art museum in the world, but because of its role in the major public gallery's evolution. The first such venue in France was the Luxembourg Gallery that opened in 1750, which displayed the royal collection, but even then, display was limited (Wednesdays and Saturdays for three hours), and it closed in 1779.
Although the state was planning a more extensive gallery, and the Grand Hall had been open for temporary exhibits, the Louvre only opened to the public in earnest in the summer of 1793, when the Revolution was at its bloody height. It was proclaimed that the collection was no longer that the state, but of the people.
The Revolution had ‘liberated’ the palace and returned the works of art—which also included a handsome booty of plundered works from private houses—to their ‘rightful’ owners. Common property is a standard of state nominalism today, but when we consider that most of Europe were still mostly feudal at the end of the eighteenth century, for treasures to be in the hands of the ordinary person, at least in name, was a staggering idea.
The repercussions of this cannot be underestimated. Not only did everyday people have the opportunity for an autodidactic cultural education, but artists could be exposed to the masters of the Renaissance and their recent past.
A chief teaching method was copying; paintings and engravings of this time inside the Louvre will invariably show more than one person busy at an easel. This daily practice is evident in this painting of the Louvre's Grand Hall by Hubert Robert, who was also one of the museum's first curators of painting.
View of the Grand Galery of the Louvre. By Hubert Robert (1733 1808). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hubert_Robert_-_Die_Grand_Galerie_des_Louvre.jpg
It was this freedom that later led Delacroix to declare in his journal that the best teacher was the Louvre.
The next phase in the history of the Louvre came in 1799 with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The man leading the cultural side of Napoleon's incursion, Vivant Denon (1747-1825), later became the museum's director. As Napoleon’s European campaigns wore on, faced with an ever-expanding stockpile of loot, Denon found himself in the position of having to categorise and order. The modern curator was born.
Louvre. Alexandre Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments. https://www.louvre.fr/en/expositions/revolutionary-museumalexandre-lenoir-s-museum-french-monuments
Another important figure was Alexandre Lenoir (1761-1839), who was the main force behind the other great initiative of the Revolution, the Museum of French Monuments, officiated in 1795. Spurred by the Revolutionary need to rewrite the past, the collection consisted of sculpture and architectural masonry since the Middle Ages.
Since Lenoir’s collection was not as diverse as that of the Louvre, whose ordering was according to cultural type and genre, he resorted to chronology. These efforts mark the beginnings of the sequence that art history as a developing doctrine inherited.
Seen in these terms, what is seldom emphasised is that art history's beginnings are not solely theoretical. They begin with early museology: making sense of the objects themselves in relation to one another.
Lenoir's collection was also plundered, but this time from within France itself, supposedly to safeguard what had been housed within churches and chateaux from what the Revolution called covert 'superstition' and 'debauchery'. Viewing such objects was now proclaimed a right: people we encouraged to see the things that exemplified their national caste.
Despite Napoleon’s extraction of art from their foreign homes, the domestic rhetoric was adamant about the need to preserve national treasures for posterity, as evidenced in a text from 1803 by the sculptor Louis-Pierre Deseiné:
Artistic monuments are comparable to certain indigenous plants that will not endure transplanting. All monuments derive their appeal from the place they are displayed. They cannot be removed without killing them or stripping them of all historical, moral, and historical relevance. It is the destination of a monument that gives it beauty and where it must be appreciated: only there can the historian enter into a dialogue with it and discover the causes of its production; only there will that monument make known to posterity the state of the arts and the spirit of the age in which it was made.
Although more than two hundred years old, the passage holds arguments regarding public collections, display, and museums, that continue to be debated: context as a factor in meaning; the problems entailed when an object is removed from its place of origin; the cultural specificity of beauty; the importance of posterity; art as indicative of its time. These arguments are still on the lips of contemporary curators and spokespeople who defend cultures whose art and artifacts have been stolen from them.
Against the Museum: Duchamp
The one-person exhibition had its origin in the growth of the commercial gallery at the close of the nineteenth century. By the First World War, commerce swiftly became seen as taint on art's brush. Since for many intellectuals, the war was a culmination of imperial self-interest and the final sign of the redundancy of the ruling classes. They were devout on reorienting artistic concerns away from those who once patronised them. (Such diversions rarely last long.)
Although he was never as interested in his peers' political agitation because of his legacy, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) had an unequivocally lasting effect on how art has been made, displayed, and evaluated. His readymade (his word) cast the relationship between art, value, talent, and skill into a state of unrest.
Although not his first, the inverted urinal of 1917 that he signed ‘R. Mutt’ is by far the most famous and is indispensable to any overview of the twentieth century.
artsy.net. Image of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917, via Wikimedia Commons.
In April 1917, Duchamp submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists of Grand Central Palace, New York. It was 'scandalously' rejected since all members were entitled to a showing. Ironically the exhibition’s fame owes itself to the one object it refused to display.
The rejection was followed up by an anonymous pamphlet by Duchamp and his friends, with the sardonic title Blind Man, which took issue with the whole affair, treating it as ‘The R. Mutt Case’. For all its faux-earnestness, it contains the emblematic statement that was to change art forever: ‘Whether or not Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object’.
Duchamp’s gesture had seismic repercussions for artists and curators. He had distilled the idea that art is not just an object but an effect of an indefinable, yet thickly present, matrix of choices culminating in priorities.
When Duchamp performed his stunt, he did so as a relatively well-known artist in the still-fledgling New York art scene, having excited great interest with his Nude Descending a Staircase (1911) when it was exhibited in 1913 in the historical Armory Show, which essentially introduced European (French) modernism to American shores.
So, Duchamp did what he did in the capacity of a recognised artist. He denatured (’created a new thought’) for the object on several counts: by inverting it, by calling it art, and by placing it into a gallery setting.
Most probably, Duchamp did not know the full consequences of his act. But the effect of his readymades (and it is now customary to refer to 'the Duchamp effect') was to draw attention to the fact that placement of an object within a gallery endows it with credentials of 'artness'.
Certainly, Duchamp monopolised on the fall-out from his works—and he would continue to toy in his laconic way with the museum, refusing to exhibit for a time while still happy to act the artist.
After that, he re-editioned little maquettes of former readymades, placing them in a custom-designed case, the Boîte-en-valise a suitcase-cum-mini-art gallery. Always one for the last laugh, the artist who introduced 'context' into the evaluation of the art object was contextualising his work by curating his work into a 'gallery' that could be taken anywhere.
Image of Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, 1935-41, via Wikimedia Commons.
Duchamp played scurrilous havoc with the sanctity of the art object and in his more constructed works (such as his last great work, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau/2. Le Gaz d'éclairage that went on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in June 1969) tantalised the viewer with enigmas designed never to be solved. He made it conscious—and many are still unable to handle the fact, just ask a devotee of figurative oil painting—that artistic value is a linguistic relation with its own set of rules and that the gallery is like a shrine that sanctifies the objects within it.
The Power of Museums on Our Opinions
Let me pose an airy example. Your next-door neighbour paints pictures. You find them execrable. Many years later, you see one of his paintings hanging in MoMA with a solemn, erudite dedication on the didactic panel beside it. What of that?
Even if your opinion is unchanged, you are forced to think twice, if only for an instant. Duchamp’s readymade causes such a reevaluation but in reverse, because it has (or had) nothing at the time that associated itself with ‘Fine Art’.
Were one to see said painting at a school fete, one wouldn’t think twice; but its presence at MoMA means that it has institutional ratification.
Like a party whose fashionability depends on how many celebrities it can attract, an art collection is judged by the proportion of important works. For an artist's work to be rubbing shoulders with Picassos or Matisses is to force the inference that it is of equal importance.
What is more, if an artist's work is held in a collection of some consequence, it is a drawcard for any dealer whose job it is to convince prospective buyers that they are buying prudently.
Coming full circle, Duchamp’s readymades (in editions), and subsequent works by numerous other artists that are, say, composed of found and prefabricated objects now command high prices. What is considered ‘fine’ is now based on an intricate network of critical consensus and reputation, and, it is hoped, how it stimulates the viewer.
White Walls
When referring to a gallery space, ‘the white cube’ is jargon for the ideal modernist paradigm of spare and symmetrical features that afford a seemingly unbiased appraisal of the art inside.
e-architect.com. White Cube Gallery Bermondsey, London. https://www.e-architect.com/london/white-cube-gallery
It is still a default position for galleries (although in recent decades, curators of extensive collections have selectively reverted to specific nineteenth-century approaches such as coloured walls, although not sharing the Salon penchant for jamming pictures together like an irregular patchwork).
The implication of this experience is that we view the work of art in an environment unmolested by stagecraft. It assumes that no extraneous presumptions about the work of art are imposed upon us, except what is imminent within the work itself.
Wikipedia. An image of the Peacock Room featuring the Princess in the Land of Porcelain painting by James McNeill Whistler. Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Peacock_Room.jpg
One of the white wall pioneers was James McNeill Whistler—also responsible for the Peacock Room (1876-7), the obverse of simplicity: one of the most successfully opulent marriages of interior decoration and painting in the nineteenth century.
Recoiling against Victorian clutter, in gallery settings, Whistler spaced his works out against a neutral ground, dispensing with distractions to enable the viewer to see the work of art as in and for itself, a different experience, disconnected from the world. It is curious, however, that the same avoidance of the natural in favour of artifice and imagination, and the same priority given to judicious spacing occurs in the Peacock Room.
The white cube takes the Renaissance metaphor that the picture is a window literally and attempts to free the work from the burden of contextual concerns.
But this kind of display has fairly specific expectations of the viewer who is comfortable with seeing works of art as individual specimens of genius rather than as operating out of a more diverse historical soup.
Curators have more recently returned to the view that, where possible, works of art should not be seen in isolation, but as comprising of family relations. The eighteenth-century is a prime example where paintings were intended for a particular place, usually an interior.
The court painter of Louis XV, François Boucher (1703-70) designed interiors, fabrics, tapestries, upholstery, ceramics and plate, which would have kept company with his painting (a visit to the former house of the collector of all things eighteenth century, Cognac-Jay in Paris gives a rounded impression of such cross-relationships between fine and decorative art).
Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau (en.parisinfo.com), Musée Cognacq-Jay building. https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71087/Musee-Cognacq-Jay-Le-gout-du-XVIIIe
Or take an entirely different aesthetic, society, and philosophy such as the Bauhaus, which prided itself on all art and design output levels: from teapots to tables to wall decoration to the buildings that housed them.
So, when we see furniture displayed in any decorative arts museum, it is not unusual to feel a pang of disquiet at the sheer incongruity of the experience. We may even be overcome with intellectual disgust, such as that voiced by Adorno echoing the words of Valéry above:
The German word, ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than one phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art, they testify to the neutralisation of culture. Art treasures are hoarded in them, and their market value leaves no room for looking t them. Nevertheless, that pleasure is dependent on the existence of museums.
But conversely, were there no museums we may not have significant work preserved, and we would not have the opportunity to see them, more often than not at minimal or no cost.
The Hypermuseum
This brief discussion of Paris’ new anthropological museum allows for an entrée into the final part of this chapter on the contemporary lust for elaborately designed museums.
For the last three decades, museums have been the blue-chip designs for any architect, since it is no longer obligatory for them to conform to a classical template, typified by, say Schinkel's exquisite Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1869-76; restored 1949-2001).
The contemporary hypermuseum is characterised by a certain will-to-sculpture that is often to the expense of the works it is meant to house. The first example is with what is perhaps the first hypermuseum, Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim (1937) whose spectacular winding ramp has repeatedly proven inadequate to the successful display of paintings.
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 1968. Via Wikimedia Commons.
When on the opening of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968), a glass shell with the only opaque walls downstairs, the museum’s director asked ‘Where do I put the art?’, the architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) reputedly replied, ‘That is your problem’.
The Tate Modern, beloved to some, is best remembered for the so-called ‘turbine hall’ which doesn’t house any art; the galleries are begrudgingly boxy cubicles.
The Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum Berlin (Wikimedia Commons)
The Museum of Jewish History (1999) by Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946) was open empty to paying guests from 1999-2001 before it was filled with objects. So imposing is its design that the objects seem permanently out of place.
The same has often been said of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim (1997), which bullies the artwork within—yet it is undeniably an architectural masterpiece. It has singlehandedly caused tourism to the city to flourish. The Tate Modern's (2000) turbine hall, impressive as it is, is so dominant that the art ensconced on the upper levels seems like a begrudged obligation.
More successful is I. M. Pei’s solution of the glass pyramids (1989) that grace the entry of the Louvre which, like good architecture, is a place where people comfortably assemble. Like the Eiffel Tower, it was criticised at first but soon become accepted as integral to the urban architectural family.
Pyramid at the Grand Louvre in Paris, designed by I.M. Pei, photo by Irene Ledyaeva
References & Further Reading:
Badcock, Gregory, Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, New York, Dutton, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, trans. Kingsley Shorter, One-Way Street, London, New Left Books, 1979, 360.
Buchloch, Benjamin ed., Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1988.
Dunlop, Ian, Louis XIV, London, Chatto and Windus 1999.
Cooke, Lynne and Peter Wollen ed., Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, Seattle, Bay Press, 1995.
Geczy, Adam and Benjamin Genocchio eds., What is Installation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Installation Art, Sydney, Power Publications, 2002.
Goldin, Amy, ‘The Esthetic Ghetto: Some Thoughts About Public Art’, Art in America, 62, no. 3, May-June 1974.
Haskell, Francis, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, New Haven and London, Yale U.P., 2000.
Judd, Donald, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Yearbook, 8, 1965.
Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington and London, The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Art and the Expanded Field’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1985.
Malraux, André, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Princeton, Princeton U.P. 1978.
O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Santa Monica and San Francisco, Lapis Press, 1976.
Pevsner, Nikolas, Academies of Art, Past and Present, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P. 1940.
Putnam, James, Art and Artifact: Museum as Medium, London, Thames and Hudson, 2001.
Richards, Charles, Industrial Art and the Museum, New York, Macmillan, 1927.
Schildkrout, Enid and Curtis Keim eds., The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P. 1998.
Serota, Nicholas, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 2000.
Tilghman, Benjamin, But is it art?, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984.
Tomkins, Calvin, Duchamp, London, Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Virilio, Paul, La Procédure silence, Paris, Galilée, 2000.
