Friday, November 18, 2022 – HOW MUSEUMS STARTED AROUND THE WORLD
FROM THE ARCHIVES
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2022
THE 837th EDITION
Arguments About American
Museums
Stephen Blank
Frontispiece depicting Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities, from Museum Wormianum, 1655 (Smithsonian Libraries). Ole Worm was a Danish physician and natural historian. Engravings of his collection were published in a volume after his death. www.khanacademy.org/humanities/approaches-to-art-history/tools-for-understanding-museums/museums-in-history/a/a-brief-history-of-the-art-museum-edit#
| Arguments about American Museums Stephen Blank I’m reading a recent book about the struggle to win American interest in Picasso and other modern artists – Picasso’s War by Hugh Eakin. Made me think about museums, art museums, collecting… The Romans had something like pop-up museums where they laid out the booty from a victorious battle for folks to see. Churches showed off relics – sort of religious museums. Later, in the age of exploration as the world grew smaller, curious and wealthy types created Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders. These were collections of the odd, the rare and newly found, which were the early cousins to museums. As Europe was extending its reach into “new” continents and cultures, Wunderkammern were places to gather, interpret, and show off the riches of the world. |
Wunderkammern were playgrounds of the wealthy elite, open only to the collector, his immediate circle, and the occasional visitor who was properly furnished with a letter of introduction. This intimacy meant that objects could be taken from shelves, handled, juxtaposed, and discussed before being returned to storage, often out of sight. Wunderkammern were more like private study collections than the art museums most of us know today. (This is quite topical for me. On Monday, I gave a talk in Bard Graduate Study Center, a close cousin to the Wunderkammern. Lenore and I donated more than 80 glass, ceramic and wood items we had collected in our travels to the Study Center.) Travel, organized exploration, and intellectual fermentation produced a new kind of institution. One that not only collected and displayed wonders of the world but sought to understand deeper histories and patterns of relationships. The British Museum, founded in 1750, embodies these objectives – not just exotic objects revealed but a greater sense of what they were, where they came from and how they were used by the societies in which they were found. The British Museum – and soon, similar collections in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere – also represented (and glorified) colonial empires. At the same time, specialized collections, such as botanical and zoological museums, begin to emerge –and, as well, museums devoted only to art. Kustmuseum Basel is seen as the first art museum. Descended from the Amerbach-Cabinet, a Wunderkammern, purchased in 1661 by the city of Basel. It became the first municipally owned museum. Kustmuseum Basel opened publicly in 1671 followed by other art museums — the Capitoline (Rome, 1734), the Louvre (Paris, 1793), and the Alte Pinakothek (Munich, 1836). Britain’s National gallery was founded in 1824 when the government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts. Running through these newly public institutions was a deeply didactic structure, and a community, it was felt, to public edification. |
| Kustmuseum Basel https://kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/2018/fuseli |
What about the US?
Of course, there’s a uniquely American story here. On one side, different institutions claim to be the first American museum.
Founded in 1773, the Charleston Museum is widely regarded as “America’s First Museum.” It was inspired by the creation of the British Museum and established by the Charleston Library Society on the eve of the American Revolution
10 Must-See Museums in Charleston
Charles Wilson Peale opened a portrait gallery in his home studio in 1782, near the war’s official end, where he displayed his portraits of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. Here where he opened the first public museum — called the Philadelphia Museum — in 1786. The Charleston Museum opened earlier but did not open to the public until 1824. So, the Philadelphia Museum was the nation’s “first successful public museum.”
Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection/item/artist-his-museum
In 1825, a group of New York artists conceived of the National Academy of Design, one of the nation’s first fine arts institutions. They were students of the American Academy of the Fine Arts who were critical of the academy ‘s commitment to teaching. Samuel Morse, one of the leaders, had been a student at the Royal Academy in London and emulated its structure and goals for the National Academy of Design. The mission of the academy, from its foundation, was to “promote the fine arts in America through exhibition and education.”
A few years later, in 1842, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford was founded with a vision for infusing art into the American experience. The Atheneum is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States, opening its doors to the public in 1844.
Notwithstanding these early efforts, art museums were an unusual luxury in the United States until the later decades of the nineteenth century when wealthy patrons in rapidly expanding American cities began to emulate European models. This is why so many historic American museums resemble their European counterparts (temple-fronted facades over a grand staircase), echo their collecting habits (classical sculpture, Renaissance painting, etc.), and mimic their approach to layout and installation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the second most visited art museum in the world, largest in the United States and third largest in the world. It was founded in 1870 and opened for public February 20, 1872. It was founded by local businessmen and financiers, leading artists and thinkers. It is originally located on Fifth Avenue but it was later moved to on the eastern edge of Central Park.
The Brooklyn Museum opened in 1905 and the Newark Museum was founded in 1909. Its charter states the purpose was “to establish in the City of Newark, New Jersey, a museum for the reception and exhibition of articles of art, science, history and technology, and for the encouragement of the study of the arts and sciences.” Many others soon followed – in Boston and Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Kansas City among many more.
These museums were all based on the European model. They were built, in many ways, as “temples to art”. Organized along clear and strict historical and modal lines, interaction with viewers was one way. Museum experts decided what visitors would see. These museums represented the ideas, values and interests of the American financial elite of the late 19th century whose purchases of classic European art became legendary and who offered their friends the opportunity to view these works in private salons. These were the leaders of the movement to create new art museums, now open to the public – at least on a limited basis. As kids, when we made a class visit to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, there were two strict rules: “Don’t talk” and Don’t touch.”
Some historians argued, however, that these weren’t the first museums in America, and that the European model did not really represent the American cultural reality.
Other museums had existed in American cities – for example, just in New York where the “American Museum” was founded in 1791 by John Pintard under the patronage of the Tammany Society. That became Scudder’s American Museum in 1810 which ran until 1841, when it was purchased by P.T. Barnum and transformed into the very successful Barnum’s American Museum.
“Museum” may seem an inappropriate title for these operations. The early collection from the Tammany years included an American bison, an 18-foot yellow snake of South American origin, a lamb with two-heads, wax figures, pieces of Indian, African, and Chinese origin. And surely Barnum was best known for his collection of “freaks” like the Fee/Jee mermaid and General Tom Thumb. They offered what one historian described as a “a chance assemblage of curiosities … rather [than] a series of objects selected with reference to their value to investigators, or their possibilities for public enlightenment.” Museum professionals said these American “museums” consisted of spectacular or bizarre objects with no scientific or educational value; in short, they were sideshows aimed at public gratification.
But there was an argument on the other side: That museum staffs had so closely imitated elitist European models that museums soon became little more than isolated segments of European culture set in a hostile environment. These criticisms hold that museums have long been unresponsive to the needs of the public, instead serving the desires of elitists drawn from the ranks of such groups as highly educated historians and scientists, or those with unusually acute aesthetic sensibilities, such as artists. At best, say the critics, the museums have failed to take steps to attract the people; at worst they have actually discouraged the public from attending. Realizing just how invidious this antiegalitarianism is in a free country, curators have taken care to disguise their exclusivity as necessary scholarship or efficient professionalism. But they never deceived the public, who understood that they were not welcome in the preserves of the plutocrats.
These are both extreme positions and it’s clear that most contemporary arts institutions do seek to reply to both sides. Still, it isn’t difficult to see the continued tension embedded in our arts and cultural institutions over identify and role in society. And I have wandered a far from where I set out to go. Ah, the dangers of research and the (wonderful) constraints of 1500 words. I promise to return to the reception of Picasso and other modern artists in New York.
For now, thanks for reading and Happy Fall.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
September 20, 2022
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THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
CENTRAL NURSES RESIDENCE ON THE SITE OF THE NOW 475 MAIN STREET. WITH 600 SINGLE ROOMS THE BUILDING HOUSED NURSING STUDENTS, GRADUATE NURSES AND STAFFS FROM 1939 TO THE 1960’S.
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PHOTO M. FRANK
| Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff |
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
STEPHEN BLANK
Sources
https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/support-us/about-the-museum/
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/03/americas-first-museum-charles-willson-peales-novel-idea-stuck/
https://www.thewadsworth.org/about/
http://www.historyofmuseums.com/museum-history/history-of-art-museums/
https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2000/art-and-the-empire-city-new-york-18251861
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/approaches-to-art-history/tools-for-understanding-museums/museums-in-history/a/a-brief-history-of-the-art-museum-edit#
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/thirteen-crucial-years-for-art-in-downtown-new-york
Stephen Blank, “P.T. Barnum: New York’s Famous Entertainment Entrepreneurs” RIHS (2022)
Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870 (2011)
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