3 COLLECTING, CLASSIFICATION, AND DISPLAY

During the 1990s the conceptual-installation artist Fred Wilson mounted a series of brilliant temporary exhibitions, including Mining the Museum and The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, that had as a major theme the way museums organize their collections and highlight or suppress objects within them. Deeply informed by a postmodern awareness that all systems of classification are constructed, not neutral or natural, and that collections ordered in space tell stories that carry significant ideological implications, Wilson's exhibitions unmasked museological conventions that normally go unseen by the public and are taken for granted by museum professionals. I call them exhibitions, but interventions would be a more appropriate term, for Wilson inserts his “work” into the flow of a standing collection, relying on unexpected juxtapositions to create sudden moments of revelation in the beholder. In Mining the Museum, staged at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, Wilson mined the society's holdings in search of objects, some familiar to the public and some never before displayed, that could be combined in exhibition to create new ways of thinking about Maryland's history, the museum's role and responsibilities, and the public's own expectations as visitors.¹ On a primary level, startling contrasts, such as a set of slave shackles displayed alongside refined repoussé silver in a case labeled “Metalwork, 1723–1880” (fig. 63), a whipping post set among a selection of chairs in a display of “Cabinetmaking, 1820–1960,” or a Ku Klux Klan hood nestled in a perambulator, raised questions about America's racist past and the relationship between the lifestyle of the Maryland elite and the slaves who made it possible. How are African Americans represented at the Maryland Historical Society, except as the absent presence strapped to a whipping post or seen through the eyes of a Klan hood? But on another level, Wilson's installation prompted viewers to think about the choices institutions make—choices of objects and narratives—and the potential of possible alternatives. By clearly identifying himself as the author of the exhibition, Wilson left us to wonder: Who customarily chooses and arranges the objects we see in museums, and what story do they want to tell? What others stories might be told?

63. Fred Wilson, Metalwork, 1793–1880. Silver vessels in Baltimore repoussé style, 1830–80. Installation view from Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, 1992. Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. Photograph: Jeff Goldman. © Fred Wilson. Photo courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

A year later in The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, at the Seattle Art Museum, Wilson intervened more directly in the life of a museum, once again using the device of juxtaposition to disrupt normal visitor expectations.² Prior to Wilson's intervention, the Seattle museum employed a typical division of its collections, with a chronological arrangement of European and American high art on the fourth floor and nonchronological, contextual displays of other cultures—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, African, and Northwest Coast Native American—on the floor below. But how is our understanding of what constitutes “American art” affected when tribal carvings from the Northwest Coast are moved from their Native American home on the third floor to the nineteenth-century American galleries above and displayed next to contemporaneous works by Winslow Homer and William Merit Chase? What happens when the contextual trappings and interpretive materials normally reserved for non-European or American objects are exported to the galleries for modern Western painting? In the post-1945 gallery on the fourth floor, Wilson installed a “collector's living room” (fig. 64) in which Morris Louis's painting Overhang (1959–60) was framed by Barcelona chairs, an Oriental carpet, a coffee table, and two video monitors showing how modern art “functions” in two private collections in the Seattle area. To a display case of African robes, fabrics, and implements of power on the third floor, Wilson added a mannequin sporting a neat gray suit and reminded us in a wall label that notions of dress and power in Africa are not frozen in the “traditional” past usually favored by Western museums: “Certain elements of dress were used to designate one's rank in Africa's status-conscious capitals. A gray suit with conservatively patterned tie denotes a businessman or member of government. Costumes such as this are designed and tailored in Africa and worn throughout the continent.”³ Together with these and other reworked installations, Wilson selectively rewrote further wall texts and refocused spotlights on fire alarms and drinking fountains to create a charged environment in which a full panoply of curatorial strategies was itself on display and open to question. Familiar objects and ways of seeing were rendered temporarily strange.

64. Fred Wilson, Collector's Living Room. Various media. Installation view from The Museum: Mixed Metaphors, Seattle Art Museum, Washington, 1993. © Fred Wilson. Photo courtesy of Pace/Wildenstein, New York.

In effect Fred Wilson's work puts into practice a form of Foucauldian analysis, or “archeology,” of the museum, exploring and revealing the working parts and ideological foundations of the institution. For many artists, critics, and academics who came of age after the 1960s, Michel Foucault's penetrating critique of the contingency of the intellectual systems, hierarchies, and power relations naturalized in the institutions that structure our lives had the force of revelation—and nowhere more so than in our understanding that the categories, hierarchies, and canons museums use to order and explain their contents are culturally constructed. In the wonderful, oft-cited opening passage to his book The Order of Things (1966), Foucault undermined the epistemology of taxonomies we take for granted by encouraging us, momentarily, to think otherwise:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing that we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.⁴

The effect of Foucault's analysis of epistemological systems (followed by equally incisive studies of prisons, mental asylums, and human sexuality) is that we are now able to view our own modes of thought as if from the outside—if not as “other,” then at least as of our own making. The broad dissemination of his ideas has fueled within the museum a heightened self-consciousness of practice and recent, often controversial, experiments with internal organization (including the solicited interventions by Wilson), to which I will return. It also makes possible the writing of a history of collecting and display practices, which is the broad ambition of this chapter.

All museums rely on classification and display to give their contents coherence and meaning. Classification and arrangement are the lifeblood of any collection; collections differ from mere accumulations of objects by virtue of criteria of selection and a subsequent ordering of what is collected into meaningful categories and/or a sequence. Collecting is done with a purpose and usually entails a finite set or series of objects that one strives to complete (e.g., a complete set of Hummel figurines or prints by Hiroshige). Who collects what and following what criteria will vary according to personal interest, but at the same time it is important to recognize that such criteria are culturally determined (readers outside the United States may not know what Hummel figurines are; many within the United States will find the example appalling). On the one hand, psychology describes collecting as an extension of the self; we express ourselves through the things we own, and the more deliberate the process of acquisition and presentation, the more self-reflexive objects become.⁵ What we gather around us and subject to rational order serves as a buffer to the “otherness” of the world. The fine line separating order from chaos, desire from obsession, is a recurrent trope in the literature on collecting, beginning with La Bruyère's profile of the collector (1688) driven to the edge of madness in pursuit of the only Jacques Callot print missing from his set, and continuing with Flaubert's tale of Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), in which two men embark on the futile task of cataloging the junk of modern Paris.⁶ On the other hand, we recognize that patterns of collecting and display vary from one culture and historical moment to another and within a given moment will be heavily conditioned by the matrix of factors—class, ethnicity, gender, and so on—that determine social status and identity. Who collects what and when, and how what is collected is organized and presented to the world, are thus matters of deep cultural and historic interest. In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, classification is “truly the mirror of our thoughts, its changes through time the best guide to the history of human perceptions.”⁷ What can be said for collecting on the individual level is equally true for societies at large: our public museums may be viewed as expressions of collective values and aspirations.

If the architecture of museums signals their civic and symbolic value in the world, what may be called the semiotics of the museum interior are no less important, for through the museum's internal codes and conventions, its modes of classification and display, hierarchies are affirmed and systems of thought and interpretation articulated. As James Clifford put it, the “taxonomic, aesthetic structure” of a collection constitutes the vital matrix within which individual objects are apprehended and given meaning.⁸

The value of order in museums is registered up front through the floor plan (fig. 65), available at the entrance to every museum. On a practical level the plan offers a means of orientation through space, but it also functions symbolically to signify a totality that is greater than the sum of its parts. By means of the plan one experiences the museum abstractly as a network of ordered spaces governed by categories of classification (American furniture, European paintings, etc.). The plan proposes a circuit through a rational and often symmetrical sequence of spaces that suggests a complete overview of the field in question, whether art, natural history, or Native American culture. Every object on display exists in its own rich particularity while also contributing to larger units that add up to a whole; a painting by Poussin, for example, represents the artist but also the seventeenth-century French school, one chapter in the narrative of European painting, which itself is a subsection of the history of art, whose parameters are signaled on the plan.

65. Plan of the National Gallery of Art, West Building, 2006. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives.

When a work of art is acquired for a museum, it must satisfy two criteria: first, it must be considered a good object of its kind (“good” entails judgments of quality, authenticity, and condition made by curators and conservators); and, second, it should strengthen the museum by filling a gap in its collection (following a preconceived notion of what constitutes an ideal collection). In the case of Poussin, museums that already own a good example of his work might rather pursue a previously unrepresented artist. What is a good fit for one museum may be superfluous for another. Where a less than stellar or perhaps heavily restored Poussin might nevertheless enrich a small museum collection lacking in his work, it would hold little appeal to the curators of a collection already strong in his art, like the National Gallery in London or the Louvre. Those museums, great as they are, have gaps of their own to fill, though the gift of an important Poussin would probably not be rejected. Poussin would be altogether irrelevant to museums focusing on the decorative arts or Asian art, but those museums proceed in the same way toward their respective collecting ideals. The point is that no collection is ever complete. Museum directors and curators are always looking to improve their collections, and their fantasies revolve around how best that might be done. Witness a recent article in the Wall Street Journal: in the manner of an after-dinner game, six leading museum directors were asked to choose one work of art they coveted for their own collections. The choices—all paintings—reflected the directors' fields of interest and expertise, yet in each case quality, condition, and the needs of their museums were a top priority (authenticity was taken for granted, as was the primacy of painting). John Walsh, then director of the Getty Collection, a relatively new museum with plenty of gaps to fill, chose Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece from the Metropolitan Museum, which he described as “perhaps the greatest early Netherlandish painting in America.” The article continued, “While ‘The Merode’ is not for sale, Mr. Walsh says he'd love to have it. Experts say the Getty could use a blue-chip painting like this, to keep up with other museums its size.”⁹ In 2004 the Metropolitan filled a gap of its own through the purchase—for close to $50 million—of the last remaining painting by Duccio in private hands. The acquisition of the finely preserved Madonna and Child from circa 1300 filled “a gap in the [Met's] Renaissance holdings that the museum assumed it could not close,” said Director Philippe de Montebello, and “will enable visitors to follow the entire trajectory of European painting from its beginnings to the present.…The first slide in an art history 101 course is a Duccio. He was one of the founders of Western art.”¹⁰ Many gaps can be filled with $50 million, but some gaps are more important than others. What Montebello tells us is that illustrating art history 101—in other words European art from the Renaissance—is the first goal of any major art museum.

To make these points more concrete, let us turn briefly to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and consider what visitors learn between the lines of their visit, so to speak. The building's title defines its contents as the nation's art, while the architecture, location, and tax-supported free admission underline the importance of its mission to the American way of life. Orientation within its magnificent interior is provided by a floor plan, which directs the visitor upstairs to the suite of light-filled picture galleries. Like many traditional museums, the National Gallery locates the primary spectacle on the upper floor—the piano nobile, or “noble floor,” recalling European aristocratic palaces and requiring that we ascend to encounter the highest of artistic achievements. Sculpture, the decorative arts, prints, and drawings, as lesser art forms, occupy the lower level. The principal galleries are numbered sequentially and trace a chronological path that begins with the Italian Renaissance (and another rare work by Duccio) and culminates at the dawn of modern art in the late nineteenth century. The narrative will be familiar to students of Art History 101. Western art began in Renaissance Italy, spreading north to Venice from Tuscany and Umbria; Italian art remained strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influencing developments in Spain, before expiring with Tiepolo and Goya, respectively. The northern European schools of painting ran a parallel course, beginning with the Flemish and German masters (van der Weyden, Durer, etc.) and reaching maturity in seventeenth-century Belgium and Holland with Rubens and Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Vermeer. French and British art vied for attention in the eighteenth century before France prevailed in the nineteenth with Courbet, Manet, and the impressionists. The rise of America and modern art, charted at the end of the main building's circuit, culminates with post-World War II developments in I.M. Pei's East Wing of the gallery (1978).¹¹ Along the way, each school is represented by its great masters; luxurious wall treatments and the generous spacing of individual paintings suggest that everything on display is worthy of consideration. Truly outstanding works are singled out through isolated display and/or architectural framing (fig. 66). Labeling is discreet, and information is kept to a minimum; one is there to look, not read. Contemplation is the order of the day, and all activities incompatible with it, running, talking, eating, and so on, are forbidden. Though visitors may wander freely (and the freedom to go where we please and stay as long as we like is a main attraction of museums), the existence of a prescribed route and code of conduct lends the visit a ritual quality, as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach have argued.¹²

The air of permanence and universality that hovers over the National Gallery and like museums disguises the degree to which what one encounters in the way of art and installation is the product of human judgment and susceptible to revision. A post-Foucauldian consciousness leads us to ask questions scarcely thinkable a generation ago: Why is the definition of art limited to a selective European heritage? Within that tradition, why do we find, say, no Belgian art of the eighteenth century or Spanish impressionism? Are we to suppose that Flemish painters after Rubens or Spanish artists after Goya were so intimidated by their predecessors' achievements that they abandoned painting for other careers? Why no Native American or folk art in the American galleries? Who decides that Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci deserves to be displayed by itself on a velvet-covered wall in the middle of the room? The collection, in both its strengths and its weaknesses, reflects the governing tastes of the cultural elite who founded the gallery before and after World War II, men and (a few) women—Samuel Kress, Chester Dale, Joseph Widener, Paul and Ailsa Mellon, among others—whose names are sprinkled liberally across walls and labels. Only in the last twenty or thirty years have revisionist art history and multiculturalism drawn attention to the absence from the nation's pantheon of minority and women artists and traditions beyond Europe and the United States (eighteenth-century Belgian art still awaits its champion). Though the National Gallery limits itself to a narrow segment of Euro-American painting and sculpture and has changed little since its inception in 1941, Washington's Mall has been greatly diversified in recent years to include new museums of Asian, African, Native American, and African American art and culture (a museum of Latin American art will surely soon follow).

66. Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Early Modern Paradigms

Washington's National Gallery may be taken as the epitome of modern museology with respect to the classification and display of canonical European and North American art. Viewed historically, however, the modern philosophy of display was not generated ex nihilo but evolved over time from earlier modes of presentation that today seem as alien as Foucault's Chinese encyclopedia. To a modern eye, accustomed to modern methods of organization and sparse museum displays, the Kunst und Wunderkammer (literally “art and wonder room”) of early modern Europe seems little more than a disorganized heap of objects, an “aimless collection of curiosities and bric-a-brac, brought together without method or system,” as one museum man put it in 1930.¹³ Knowledge of these “curiosity cabinets,” none of which survive intact, comes primarily through printed catalogs and their engraved frontispieces (fig. 67). Though recent research has shown that they functioned as sites of learning and possessed an underlying order, the dizzying spectacle of crowded walls and ceilings gives an initial impression of playful disorder at odds with serious study.¹⁴ At the same time, a consistent emphasis on decorative, symmetrical presentation suggests that a desire to impress visiting gentlemen rivaled scholarly endeavor as a motivating principle. Collections were useful, but they also had to be pleasing to the eye.

It is also clear that despite standard references to the Wunderkammer as a microcosm of the world, early modern collections in fact “excluded 99.9 percent of the known universe” and concentrated instead on that which was most rare and wondrous.¹⁵ The inscription above the door to Pierre Borel's seventeenth-century cabinet qualified universality precisely this way: “a microcosm or compendium of all rare strange things.”¹⁶ Though curiosity could lead to knowledge, a surfeit of wonder, according to Descartes, “can never be otherwise than bad [because it] prevents our perceiving more of the object than the first face which is presented, or consequently of acquiring a more particular knowledge of it.”¹⁷ Early curiosity cabinets appear guilty of profuse wonder, and travel journals indeed reveal that such collections quickly became destinations for the superficial wonder-seekers Descartes dismissed. Furthermore, as the rise of modern science stripped previously prized curiosities (bezoar stones, unicorn horns, two-headed calves, and so on) of their scientific value, the Wunderkammer survived mainly as a source of public entertainment.

67. The Wunderkammer of Ferdinando Cospi. Etching from Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano (Bologna, 1677). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The collection of Marchese Cospi in Bologna is a good example of these tensions and trends. Formed by an aristocrat “as a noble pastime,” the Cospi collection was nevertheless cataloged by a learned doctor, Lorenzo Legati, and eventually bequeathed to the city of Bologna in 1657 to join the famous natural history collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi at the Palazzo Publico. But a closer look at the collection and catalog has led modern scholars to conclude that “the fundamental aim of Cospi's museum was to provoke astonishment and wonder rather than analytically reconstruct the whole natural world.”¹⁸ Of Legati's catalog, Paula Findlen has observed that it “demonstrated over and over again [that] the objects worthy of possession served to delight an audience that perceived curiosity as an end in itself.”¹⁹ Though scholarly in format, the catalog made much of Cospi's courtly connections and upbringing, emblematized in the frontispiece bearing his coat of arms complete with Medici crest. Privileging curiosity and status above science, Cospi employed a dwarf—a curiosity in his own right, of course—to show the collection and sent complimentary copies of the catalog to “many Princes of Italy, Cardinals, and Knights of Merit.”²⁰

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, aristocrats like Marchese Cospi had largely turned their collecting energies and bid for social distinction toward art. Discredited by modern science, curiosity went underground, surviving in the “low” cultural orbit of freak shows and circuses until a recent revival of interest channeled through the high art of Diane Arbus, Damien Hirst, and others returned it to avant-garde respectability.²¹

Perhaps not surprisingly, in early art collections paintings were displayed much as natural curiosities had been, that is to say in densely packed, symmetrical arrangements that privileged decorative effect over taxonomic order or comfortable viewing. Once again, we know of these early art collections mainly through printed catalogs and accompanying engravings. A splendid volume of etchings by Frans van Stampart and Anton Joseph von Prenner records the sumptuous installation of the imperial collection in Vienna, completed in 1728 (fig. 68).²² An elaborate scheme of gilt frames and rococo plasterwork locks the paintings in place like pieces of an elegant jigsaw puzzle. Some attempt has been made to pair subjects (portraits, genre pictures) across a central vertical axis, but order as we know it today was absent, and scrutinizing individual pictures would have been difficult. Furthermore, the tight symmetry we see required that some paintings be cut down or enlarged to fit into their appointed position on the wall.

In some cases, however, early modern arrangements were less arbitrary than they seem, or at least they could be made to serve a purposeful mode of viewing endorsed by art critics and theorists. Seemingly random or eclectic arrangements encouraged a kind of comparative viewing that revealed the distinctive qualities of the great masters.²³ According to early modern art theory, painting was divided into constituent parts—drawing, color, composition, and expression—and through the ages artists and schools tended to excel in one branch or another; the Venetians were held to be excellent colorists but deficient in drawing, for example, while the Florentines were the reverse. An arrangement that juxtaposed, say, Titian and Michelangelo would give connoisseurs and students a good understanding of their respective strengths and weaknesses (color vs. drawing). Texts by early art theorists, notably Roger de Piles and André Félibien, modeled comparative criticism though fictional dialogue among art lovers. In his famous Entretiens (Conversations), first published in 1666, Félibien took his readers on a tour of the French royal collection, then displayed in the Tuilleries Palace, through the eyes of an experienced art lover and his disciple. “Enter the gallery,” said the expert, “and you will see excellent works by the great masters. It is there that each of them displays his strengths, and taken together their works form a marvelous concert. Their different beauties manifest the grandeur of painting. That which is peculiar to one, and which is not to be found in others, testifies to the vast extent of this art, which no one man can master in all its parts.”²⁴ Surviving descriptions of the first public art gallery in France, opened in Paris at the Luxembourg Palace in 1750 with one hundred paintings from the royal collection, show the comparative method in action. In one account, taking the form of a letter from a gentleman in Paris to a marquise in the provinces, the author entered the first room and relayed his delight in finding “thirteen paintings…whose variety offers the curious a sampling of the five different schools. The ingenious and agreeable contrasts!” Moving on to next gallery, he remarked, “The variety in this room was no less striking.…[T]he different schools demonstrate their respective strengths,” and so forth.²⁵ The ultimate goal of a comparative hang was a better understanding of painting as an art form; early modern art lovers enjoyed the challenge of identifying and articulating what we would now call the stylistic traits of different artists.

68. Installation view of the Imperial Gallery, Vienna. Etching from Frans van Stampart and Anton Joseph von Prenner, Prodomus Theatrum artis pictoriae (Vienna, ca. 1735).

Modern Methods

When the Louvre opened in 1793 the paintings were arranged much as they had been at the Luxembourg, but by this time a comparative arrangement had come to seem oldfashioned, out of step with developments in the art world. That the eclectic system had been favored by aristocratic art lovers did not help. Within months the initial comparative hang at the Louvre was replaced by a new system of national school and chronology, a system that privileged knowledge of art history over art and judgments of authenticity and attribution (i.e., connoisseurship) over style. Those values had long been important desiderata for critics and collectors. In the 1620s a treatise by Giulio Mancini defined connoisseurship as the ability to recognize a painting's medium, age, authorship, originality, and excellence.²⁶ A century later a general survey of European collecting by the German Caspar Neickel offered would-be art collectors the following guidelines: (1) collect only original works, no copies; and (2) give preference to “costly paintings by the best masters, such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Durer, etc.”²⁷ Beyond the market forces that drove up interest in the Old Masters and questions of attribution and authenticity, a new approach to the display of art received further impetus from Enlightenment historicism and emerging modes of classification in the parallel realm of natural history. New taxonomies pioneered by Buffon and Linnaeus ordered plants and animals into genus and species, a system that corresponded closely enough to the art world designations of school and artist. Historicism then arranged artists within each school in chronological order. By the mid-eighteenth century the early modern Wunderkammer had given way to collections of natural history governed by “a methodical order that distributed its objects by class, genus, and species,” according to one of Buffon's disciples.²⁸ Art collections followed suit. In the 1790s the dealer, connoisseur, and art historian Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun declared that a picture collection not arranged by school and artist was “as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class, or family.”²⁹

69. The Rubens Room, Electoral Gallery, Düsseldorf. Engraving from Nicolas de Pigage, Galerie Electorale de Dusseldorf (Basel, ca. 1778).

An arrangement by artist and chronology first appeared in late-sixteenth-century collections of prints and drawings bound together in book form so as to be “read” as an unfolding linear narrative within each school.³⁰ Relatively inexpensive, plentiful, and small in scale, works on paper lent themselves to connoisseurial manipulation. It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that a classification by school and history worked its way into the three-dimensional domain of the princely art gallery. At the Electoral Gallery in Düsseldorf the artist, dealer, and connoisseur Lambert Krahe (who owned a print collection arranged along art historical lines) rearranged the collection in 1756 by school and artist, recorded in a magnificent catalog complete with installation views published some years later (fig. 69).³¹ In the Flemish section, Krahe went one step further and created a gallery devoted to the work of a single artist—Rubens. Though the paintings conform to a harmonious symmetrical arrangement befitting a princely gallery, they are now comfortably spaced and easily legible to afford the beholder an overview of the great master's career and achievement. Similar efforts were under way at Dresden and at the Uffizi in Florence at much the same time, but the most thorough and remarkable reorganization took place at Vienna, where in the 1770s the sumptuous Baroque display at Vienna's Imperial Gallery, discussed above (fig. 68), was dismantled and the collection rehoused in a new modern-looking museum in the Belvedere Palace (fig. 70; note the similarity in plan to Washington's National Gallery). Under the supervision of the art expert and engraver Christian Mechel, paintings were returned to their original shapes and given simple neoclassical frames; they were reorganized in schools and displayed chronologically with works by the same artist grouped together. Mechel explained the dramatic overhaul of the imperial collection in the introduction to his catalog: “The purpose of all our endeavors was to use the numerous separate spaces of this beautiful building so that the whole arrangement as well as the individual pieces would be…a visible history of art.”³²

70. Plan of the Imperial Gallery, Vienna. Engraving from Chrétien de Mechel, Galerie des tableaux de la Galerie Impériale et Royale de Vienne (Basel, ca. 1784).

71. Maria Cosway, View of Raphael's Transfiguration at the Louvre Museum, ca. 1803. Etching from Julius Griffiths, Galerie du Louvre (Paris, 1806). Photo: American Philosophical Society.

Though not the first to employ the new taxonomy of school and history, the Louvre of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era (1793–1815) became the most famous and influential example because of its size, quality, and fame. As definitively organized, the Louvre divided its paintings into the three main schools, the Italian, Northern, and French, and ordered each chronologically (the Italian and Northern schools were further subdivided into Florentine, Venetian, and Bolognese, and Dutch, Flemish, and German, respectively). The need to maintain decorative symmetry forced compromises in the arrangement, but to a remarkable and unprecedented degree the Louvre achieved its stated goal of displaying a “continuous and uninterrupted sequence revealing the progress of the arts and the degrees of perfection attained by various nations that have cultivated them.”³³ A particularly celebrated section of the Grand Gallery dedicated to Raphael exemplified Enlightenment ideals of taxonomy and arrangement (fig. 71). The set of eight paintings at once conformed to expectations of symmetry and visual order (down to the complementary compositions and matching canvas shapes on either side of a central axis) and illustrated a crucial chapter in the history of art using masterpieces of the highest rank. Following Vasari, Raphael's final great work The Transfiguration was surrounded by exemplary paintings by Raphael's teacher, Perugino (top register, left and right), and formative works from his own career, amounting to a condensed visual explication of his stylistic development from apprenticeship (middle register, left) through the influence of Leonardo (portrait of Castiglione and La Belle Jardinière, bottom and middle right) to final independence and genius represented in the central piece.

While the subtleties of this arrangement may have been lost on the masses, its lessons were fully absorbed by important museum men of the nineteenth century who visited the Louvre at its height. Georg von Dillis, future director of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, spoke for many when he wrote from Paris: “One must admire everything here: the order, the systematic disposition of each branch of art, the free access…. It should become the model for all institutions.”³⁴ Memory of the Louvre was still fresh in the mind of Gustav Waagen when he joined with Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Carl-Friedrich von Rumohr, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to plan the Altes Museum in Berlin in the 1820s. There the implicit tension between quality and history, neatly resolved in the Transfiguration bay at the Louvre thanks to a wealth of looted art, came to the surface when the four men argued with, and eventually prevailed over, the art historian Alois Hirt, who had earlier proposed a comprehensive scholarly program for the Berlin museum. Privileging the perceived needs of the general public over the narrower interests of artists and connoisseurs, Waagen and his colleagues left aside paintings valued primarily for their historical interest and focused instead on a smaller number of highquality paintings laid out simply by school and chronology. On the ground floor below the paintings galleries, the collection of ancient sculpture was arranged thematically, with the most highly prized marbles housed under Schinkel's magnificent rotunda. The central display of timeless works in “a beautiful and sublime space,” wrote Schinkel, “makes [the visitor] receptive and creates a mood of enjoyment and understanding for what the building contains.”³⁵ “First delight, then instruct” was the guiding principle at the Altes Museum in the face of an expanding bourgeois public more interested in masterpieces and inspiration than in lessons in the history of art.³⁶ Balancing the needs of well-informed visitors against those of the lay public remains a significant challenge for the modern art museum.

Masterpieces

When Gustav Waagen traveled from Berlin to London to advise the British on their new National Gallery in 1853, he duly recommended highlighting the collection's better works by displaying them with room to breathe: “Each painting becomes in this manner isolated and its effect heightened.”³⁷ Though Waagen's views on display were widely shared, the growth of museum collections during the latter half of the nineteenth century left most galleries looking as cluttered as curiosity cabinets of the ancien régime. An overabundance of objects obscured the virtues of classification and pleasures of easy viewing. The ill effects of overcrowding were noted on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1913 survey of German museums noted: “Restlessly [the visitor's] eye races from one object to another in the crowded spaces, often captured by superficial things and overlooking what is significant, until he is finally totally exhausted.”³⁸ “The larger museums and exhibitions became,” wrote Friedrich Naumann, “the more oppressive was the burden of art history for the individual visitor.”³⁹ An anonymous letter to the Atlantic Monthly in 1929 complained about the “horrors of museum trotting” at the Metropolitan Museum with too much to take in and precious little guidance; the letter concluded that the only solution was to create smaller museums with less to look at.⁴⁰

The inevitability of growth led early-twentieth-century architects to plan new museums (e.g., in the United States, in Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and Toledo) with room for future expansion. The solution for existing public art museums was better collection management, meaning the gradual thinning of displays and the creation of study rooms and reserve collections for scholars. Rethinking standing collections also led to the development of new techniques to highlight selected works.

Collectors and early museums had always found ways of promoting their masterpieces (at the Uffizi as early as the sixteenth century the best of the Medici collection was gathered in the Tribuna, for example), but with the spread of museums and the rise of modern museology in the late nineteenth century, efforts to refine display conditions and concentrate the beholder's attention became a matter of systematic study.⁴¹ The problem of clutter had become a widespread concern toward the end of the nineteenth century. In London the Natural History Museum set an important precedent when in the early 1880s it reorganized its massive collection into galleries of primary objects for the general public and secondary, or reserve, collections for scholars.⁴² In that decade German directors and curators endorsed the same principle in the course of a comprehensive review of the museum system initiated by Kaiser Friedrich III.⁴³ Led by Wilhelm von Bode and Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin, German museums implemented various reforms around 1900, including the simplification of museum design and collection installation. Apparently influenced by innovations in commercial galleries and exhibitions of modern art, art museums throughout Germany removed damask wall coverings and unnecessary furniture and reduced the number of paintings on display. New attitudes toward display filtered across the Atlantic in time to influence the formation of Boston's new Museum of Fine Arts, which was rebuilt in the first decade of the twentieth century (figs. 33–34). Representatives from Boston visited over a hundred European museums, interviewed leading art historians and curators, and thoroughly reviewed the literature, preparing the way for what the critic Frank Jewett Mather, writing in the Nation, called a “new and revolutionary program.”⁴⁴ The program was in fact much indebted to German museology, but the opportunity to realize the latest thinking with respect to contents, organization, and public relations in a new, purpose-built institution was new and worthy of note. Instead of a large, unified collection, which, according to Mather, “baffled” and “oppressed” the general public and satisfied only the “occasional savant or the loafer escaping the rigors of winter,” the new MFA would be divided into the principal display galleries on the main (upper) floor, where, for the benefit of the general public, only the best original works of art were exhibited under optimal conditions of light and space, and the reserve collection on the ground floor, where objects of lesser aesthetic worth but historical value were housed in strict order for scholars and connoisseurs. Furthermore, as mentioned in chapter 2, the internal architecture was geared to public appreciation. The main galleries were “absolutely without architectural adornment” so that “nothing may attract the eye of the visitor from the objects therein displayed…. In a word, installation has been carefully studied to help the visitor to see and enjoy each object for its own full value.”⁴⁵ (The exception was the contextual display of the Japanese collection, to which I will return.) The MFA's spokesman and theorist Benjamin Gilman was among the first to document the “museum fatigue” induced by old-fashioned display techniques and recommended various practical remedies, including, in addition to streamlined exhibitions, new display cases and gallery seating. He even designed a portable “skiascope” (fig. 36) to enhance visibility of “skied” pictures hung high on walls in galleries that still clung to old-fashioned display principles.

More than once in the first years of the twentieth century, Europe's leading art journal, the Burlington Magazine, applauded Boston's “aesthetic” approach and emphasis on “the power of full abstraction from surroundings and concentration upon one object at a time.”⁴⁶ Reports issuing from international meetings and installation photographs in museum publications revealed the rise of a new orthodoxy. Before-and-after shots of a gallery at the Louvre (fig. 72) show a subtle but significant turn to lighter walls, a reduction in the number of pictures, and more intimate viewing with the removal of guard rails. Fewer objects more widely spaced relieved the monotony of paintings joined as one across the length of the gallery. Charles Loring summarized recent developments in 1927: “The trend is to concentrate on a few superior objects…[and] a greater use of small rooms where attention may be focused on two or three masterpieces, well lighted and set at the level of the eye against subdued backgrounds, rather than of long, wide galleries with skylights where the walls are crowded with a bewildering display.”⁴⁷ At the Madrid museum conference sponsored by the League of Nations in 1934, Eric Maclagen from London's Victoria and Albert Museum specifically commended the so-called Boston system as the model to be followed, but by that date museums everywhere were already following it. Reporting from their respective institutions at the same conference, the directors of the Louvre, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, London's National Gallery, Vienna's Kunsthistoriches Museum, and Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts described recent rearrangements of their collections undertaken to accentuate their “aesthetic value.”⁴⁸ At each of those museums, the art was still displayed chronologically and by school, but the emphasis had turned decisively to the visual apprehension and appreciation of masterpieces. The director of the Budapest museum went so far to say that it would be a sacrilege to diminish the “artistic effect” of a work of art for the sake of historical explication. Maclagen and Alfred Stix from Vienna both warned against an overly art historical arrangement, which might please fellow curators but would mean nothing to the public, who, after all, “did not ask for systematic organization or the display of complete series” but came instead for “inspiration and pleasure.”

The new approach to display found its way to the Toledo Museum deep in the North American heartland, where in the 1930s a remodeled interior housed selected works hung widely spaced in a single row at eye level (fig. 73). According to the director, the space around a work of art enhanced viewer appreciation, like “the silence that follows the execution of a piece of music.”⁴⁹ School and chronology had been followed but not scrupulously, for, he maintained, visitors seek “the pleasures of contemplation more than those of a lecture.”

72. Before and after reorganization of the Louvre in the early 1930s. From Office International des Musées, Muséographie: Architecture et aménagement des musées d'art (Paris: Société des Nations, 1935).

In keeping with the drift toward quality over quantity, museums made a further effort to emphasize recognized masterpieces. At the Rijksmuseum, for example, within the chronological sequence of rooms, each wall “made evident some principal work” through its arrangement, and Rembrandt's Nightwatch got a room of its own. Similar arrangements were made at the Prado for Velázquez's Las Meninas, in Parma for Correggio's St. Jerome, at the Brera in Milan for Raphael's Spozalizio, and at the Louvre for the Mona Lisa. Today, as every visitor to Paris knows, the latter commands a generous wall in the center of a room to accommodate the crowds who come daily to pay homage.

73. American Gallery, Toledo Museum of Art, 1930s. Photo courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art Archives.

These new trends in museum display received empirical backing from a study published in 1935 by Yale psychologist Arthur Melton. Experimenting with installations of varying density at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (fig. 74), Melton confirmed what many already knew, that the average visitor unschooled in art history had a limited attention span, suffered easily from museum fatigue, paid little attention to underlying systems of classification, and responded better to a limited offering of art that really mattered. Selectivity and presentation were of the greatest importance, Melton found, because most visitors were easily seduced by display conventions and would ignore a masterpiece poorly hung in favor of a poor painting prominently displayed.⁵⁰

An exhibition at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris assembled by a star-studded cast of French intellectuals and museum men identified the privileging of masterpieces in plain rooms as the key element of modernist museum aesthetics. The text accompanying the show described the tendency toward viewing art in autonomous and purely formal terms: “The modern sensibility, no longer seeking in a work of art an historical witness but an individual aesthetic phenomenon, has led museums to efface themselves behind the masterpieces they display. Walls stripped of decor are nothing more than an abstract background against which objects may be seen; those objects are well spaced so that the visitor may examine each one without distraction, all in keeping with the demands of the modern aesthetic.”⁵¹

What this text alludes to, in effect, is the emergence of the “white cube,” the essential building block of the modern museum. Itself an expression of the modern aesthetic, the white cube—characterized by unadorned and windowless white walls, polished wooden floors, and artificial ceiling light—may be viewed historically as crucial to the genesis of twentieth-century art (fig. 75). Designed to block out the external world and concentrate the beholder's gaze, the white cube encouraged the drive toward self-sufficiency, flatness, and purity that we now associate with high modernist painting (abstract expressionism, color field, etc.). So vital is the environment to the art, according to Brian O'Doherty, that we can't think of one apart from the other: “The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space; or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth-century art.”⁵² And so vital was the white cube to modernism that postmodern art from the 1960s took on as one of its defining features a principled rejection of that space in the form of site-specific work, “happenings,” and conceptual and performance art, which was either located far from the customary circuits of the art world or not easily bought and sold and hung on gallery walls.

74. Experimental installations. From Arthur Melton, Problems of Installation in Museums of Art (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1935).

In the 1920s and 1930s progressive architects turned their attention to the challenges of refined display, visitor fatigue, and public access. Conceptual designs by Clarence Stein and Lee Simonson imagined skyscraper museums in which elevators whisked visitors to compact exhibitions on different floors.⁵³ Luc Benoist and Charles Friésé went one step further in their fanciful design for an “automatic museum,” consisting of a Ferris wheel-like mechanism that revolved seated visitors past small displays of objects on different levels. At each stop the cabin doors opened onto small rooms of paintings or art objects that in turn rotated every thirty seconds to reveal new things. “In this way, in an hour and a half, a thousand visitors could view a thousand paintings without ever leaving their seats.”⁵⁴ Numerous actual museums built between the wars give the impression of being planned from the inside out around a core of immaculately crafted display spaces. At the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam (fig. 38) or the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, for example, the quality of interior light and space and concern for internal circulation create a serene atmosphere for aesthetic contemplation. The same can be said for Goodwin & Stone's Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened in 1939. The MoMA that Alfred Barr built struck a balance between history and quality by illustrating the development of modern art through masterpieces comfortably exhibited in a sequence of discrete rooms with low ceilings, controlled lighting, and neutral walls (fig. 41). Barr relied on a clean, standardized mode of display to persuade a skeptical American public that the works of Picasso and the European avant-garde were masterpieces worthy of comparison to Rembrandt and Leonardo. Though in obvious respects the antithesis of MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington dates from the same period and is equally characterized by a highly selective collection that promotes individual works within a chronological framework. Behind the conservative facade and imposing communal spaces lie dignified, well-lit picture galleries that afford their contents room to breathe (fig. 66). Over thirty years after its completion, it was still considered a building that could “confirm as a masterpiece anything shown in its elegant spaces,” in the words of the art historian Joshua Taylor.⁵⁵

75. “The White Cube” (Ellsworth Kelly at the Museum of Modern Art, 1990s).

76. Installation view of the Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich, 1937. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York.

As a counterpoint to mainstream museums on either side of the Atlantic, the notorious Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 (fig. 76) inverted the established conventions of display precisely to undermine the credibility of modern art. By means of a crowded, asymmetrical, out-of-kilter arrangement, disparaging wall graffiti (“Madness becomes method,” “Crazy at any price,” “Nature as seen by sick minds,” etc.), and poor light, the organizers aimed to create an off-putting environment in which the artworks shown seemed anything but masterpieces. A contemporary witness later recalled: “All the pictures selected…were huddled together in these long, narrow galleries with the worst possible lighting…The pictures were hung as though by idiots or children just as they came, as close together as possible, obstructed by pieces of sculpture on stands or on the ground, and provided with provocative descriptions and obscene gibes.”⁵⁶

Communist museology provided another important counterexample for museums in Europe and the United States in the 1930s. At the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, for example, instead of stressing art's autonomy, the installation placed works of art in the larger movement of history and class struggle with the aid of maps, charts, statistics, excerpts from literature, and didactic wall labels. In an article describing the Soviet museum system to the rest of the world, Theodore Schmit, professor at Leningrad, issued a well-informed rebuttal of Western priorities when he wrote: “The concept of art for art's sake, of art created by the isolated genius, of art possessing its own absolute value—this concept is incompatible with Marxist doctrine…. Art is but a manifestation of society, art is always propaganda for an entire ensemble of ideas and sentiments, for a manner of seeing and conceiving the world.”⁵⁷

By the 1930s museums had largely settled earlier problems of overcrowding through a more single-minded pursuit of quality. Increased focus on modes of display entailed higher standards in the permanent collection. Everything acquired had to be a masterpiece whose inclusion in the galleries could be justified primarily on grounds of quality. “Quality” and “rarity” were the chief criteria in acquiring new works, wrote the director of the Boston MFA in 1946, and surely no director or curator since would beg to differ.⁵⁸ As collections have grown, so has the pressure to add—and subtract—selectively following those criteria and the canon that governs the field in question. Defending a recent decision to sell (deaccession) an impressive landscape by Henri-Edmond Cross, a second-tier postimpressionist colleague of Seurat and Signac, MoMA's director remarked: “Cross just is not an artist the museum will collect in any kind of systematic way. We'd never show this picture.”⁵⁹ Though the painting was perhaps Cross's finest work, Cross was no Seurat; he does not merit a place in art history 101. MoMA is gambling that what is considered the “best” of late-nineteenth-century French art won't one day shift to include Cross; in the meantime the proceeds from the sale of the Cross presumably went to buy a work judged worthy of the museum's exalted collection.

Lighting

The neutral walls and generous spacing of works of art have remained standard features of the modern museum. Owing to advances in technology and evolving standards of conservation, the most challenging and variable aspect of gallery design from the early twentieth century has been lighting. Perhaps because means and methods of lighting vary and evolve, it is a constant source of interest to directors and curators. Since its adoption at the Louvre in the late eighteenth century, top lighting has remained the system of choice in public art museums. Side lighting through conventional windows was used in the nineteenth century (for example, at the Rijksmuseum), and it was often recommended for the display of sculpture, but its obvious disadvantages in picture galleries (reduced wall space, shifting pockets of light and shadow) discouraged its broad adoption. The Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin (1904) featured both, with side lighting in use for three-dimensional objects in the perimeter rooms and top lighting in the central picture galleries. Controlling top light to temper glare and the damaging effect of direct sunlight has proved a constant challenge, however. Skylights, lanterns, and clerestory windows were all used at different times with varying degrees of success, and no one system became dominant. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Seager system, which deflected natural light from above onto sidewalls and left the viewer's space below in even shadow, enjoyed a limited vogue, though not everyone liked it.⁶⁰ Since then various related systems of filters, baffles, and louvers have been used to achieve a similar result.

The difficulty of controlling natural light, which of course fluctuates according to the season, time of day, and weather, together with the desire to make museums more accessible, made artificial light appealing, especially in northern climates, as it became safer and cheaper in the early 1900s. Before electricity became widely available, some museums, beginning with South Kensington in 1857, experimented with gas lighting. Despite the advantages it afforded with respect to access (evening hours helped give South Kensington higher attendance figures than the British Museum and National Gallery combined), the cost and corrosive side effects, not to mention the risk of fire, checked its spread.⁶¹ In 1880 electricity replaced gas at South Kensington and was soon used at other museums, though again the cost and fear of fire (fires in Paris and Vienna were blamed on faulty electrical systems) limited its implementation until the 1920s and 1930s. Although many directors continued to insist that natural light was better for viewing art, the convenience and democratic advantages of electricity could not be denied, and most museums opted for a combination of the two. Frequently, electric lighting was installed above laylights, allowing the two light sources to be adjusted, mixed, and diffused according to need out of sight of the visiting public.⁶² Electric light has held its own, of course, becoming a staple ingredient of white-cube galleries and museums like MoMA; technological innovations have created a spectrum of possibilities (fluorescent, incandescent, tungsten), each with its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of relative warmth and color of light, cost, and potential hazards to art.⁶³ Spot, or “boutique” lighting, pioneered in commercial environments and recommended for museum use by Lee Simonson in the early 1930s, has become a staple of museum display, serving effectively to concentrate the viewer's attention and create an aura around chosen objects. Many curators would still agree with Simonson's remark: “Much of the dealer's hocus-pocus of velvet hangings and dim, religious lighting is ludicrous. But the principle underlying his method is psychologically sound”—and therefore useful in museums.⁶⁴

In the past thirty years or so, natural light has surged back into favor, becoming a virtual fetish of museum architects and directors. Though new museums make heavy use of electric light in the evenings and on overcast days (an exception being Dia: Beacon [fig. 58], which relies solely on daylight and closes early in winter), the successful handling of space and natural light is a defining feature of contemporary museum design. It is certainly what accounts for the cult status of Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano (see chapter 2). In the buildings of Kahn and Piano, but also those of Richard Meier, Tadeo Ando, Rafael Moneo, and others, the treatment of light, subtly different in the hands of each architect, goes beyond illumination to take on a symbolic function, as Meier reveals in his commentary on the High Museum in Atlanta: “Apart from its purely functional role, light in this building is a constant preoccupation, a symbol of the museum's purpose. Light is basic to the architectural conception: the museum is meant to be both physically and metaphysically radiant. The building is intended both to contain and reflect light, and in this way to express the museum's purpose as a place of enlightenment and center of the city's cultural life.”⁶⁵

History versus Masterpieces

The eighteenth-century imperative to order art by school and chronology produced a second museum type that favored history over aesthetics and masterpieces. While the Napoleonic Louvre was setting standards for the public art museum, a second museum in Paris, the Museum of French Monuments (1795–1816; fig. 77), founded by Alexandre Lenoir, pioneered a strict historical classification that proved equally influential in its own way.⁶⁶ The Museum of French Monuments contained sculpture and stained glass from the medieval period to the eighteenth century, most of it salvaged from churches vandalized during the Revolution. Central to the ritual life and fabric of the church over the centuries but of little interest to serious art collectors, monumental tomb sculpture and stained glass, once liberated by the Revolution from their traditional place and function, were valued primarily for their ability to illustrate the development of French history through both the style of the objects and the famous personages they represented. Consequently, the museum's collection was arranged chronologically with rooms devoted to separate centuries, starting from the thirteenth and arranged in sequence around the cloister of an abandoned convent. To further demonstrate historical change, simulated architectural contexts suggestive of the respective centuries accompanied the chosen pieces of sculpture and glass. A tour of the museum offered a walk through history and testified to the evolution of French design, customs, and costume from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the present. The atmospheric effect of these early period rooms, combined with the parade of famous men and women in effigy, proved remarkably popular with the public (though some, especially foreigners, objected to the secularization of sacred objects).

Lenoir's museum helped spark a new appreciation for medieval art and a heightened awareness of national heritage in the form of historical sites and monuments in the first decades of the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ Though his museum was faulted for numerous historical inaccuracies, Lenoir is remembered today for the impetus he gave to the study of French history and the development of history museums combining original objects and period decor. Advances in historical knowledge led to more authentic period displays, beginning with the Musée de Cluny, which opened in Paris in 1844 (fig. 78). In place of simulated interiors stocked with displaced monuments and fragments, Cluny strove for a new level of persuasiveness through a seemingly natural arrangement of genuine artifacts in a real period interior. One visitor described the rooms in the following terms: “Furnishings, hangings, stained glass, armor, utensils and jewelry—all has been miraculously recovered and preserved; you walk in the midst of a vanished civilisation; you are enveloped by the good old chivalric times.”⁶⁸ Whereas Lenoir's museum did nothing to disguise the assembled nature of the collection and the artificiality of the setting, the Musée de Cluny, as Stephen Bann has argued, effaced signs of curatorial intervention and created instead the illusion of a historical moment frozen in time. The “period room” as we know it begins here in the quest for transparency, for full immersion in the past.

77. Thirteenth-Century Room, Museum of French Monuments, ca. 1815. Engraving from Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des monuments français (Paris, 1816).

78. Francis I Room, Musée de Cluny, ca. 1845. Engraving from Alexandre du Sommerard, Les arts au moyen âge (Paris, 1838–46).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in step with the rise of nationalism and the success of ethnic pavilions at world's fairs, permanent history museums featuring authentic period rooms and settings grew in popularity, especially in northern Europe. New museums opened in Hamburg, Munich (Bavarian Museum), Nuremburg (Germanic Museum), Paris (Carnavalet), Arles (Arlaten), Stockholm (Skansen), and Zurich (Swiss National Museum), to name only the most prominent, to promote national and regional identity and preserve indigenous cultures against the homogenizing forces of modernity. Preservation movements turned historical sites into museums, in some cases with living guides simulating contemporary customs, dress, and speech (in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg is the best-known example).

79. Installation view of the Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Sculpture exhibition at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin, after 1904. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York.

The relative merits and demerits of period settings were much discussed in Germany in the late nineteenth century. The influential director Wilhelm von Bode went back and forth on the idea, recognizing on one hand the educational benefits of combining the art forms of a period in the same room, yet regretting on the other the inevitably simulated quality of the ensemble.⁶⁹ In the end at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum he settled for a compromise. While the central picture galleries concentrated exclusively on major paintings, the side galleries (fig. 79) offered a mixture of paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts—displayed not as they might be in a private home but following public museum standards (note the cassone positioned on a low-lying pedestal rather than on the floor). In such rooms diverse art forms created a cumulative image of artistic production during a given period without sacrificing the legibility of individual objects.

Bode's disciple William Valentiner took the idea of integrated period displays to the United States and implemented it first in the European Decorative Arts section of the Metropolitan Museum, after 1906, and later in a more systematic fashion at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he took over as director in 1924.⁷⁰ Working in Detroit with the architect Paul Cret, Valentiner designed a sequence of simulated period environments for European art around a courtyard and filled them with authentic objects. The Dutch room was covered with red Spanish leather, the Italian room with red velvet, and the French, Flemish, and English rooms with original wood paneling, while the architecture and fenestration varied accordingly. The distance from Europe justified the importation and re-creation of entire “period rooms” with architectural ornament and matching furniture, as Fiske Kimball, pioneering director of the Philadelphia Museum, explained in the 1920s:

We have conceived the interior of the Museum, in its principal area, as unrolling in historical order the pageant of the evolution of art, with paintings, sculpture and crafts of each period in association. We, in America, without the surrounding monuments of earlier ages everywhere found in Europe and Asia, have thought it suitable to include also works of architecture in the association. Thus while the majority of movable works are shown in galleries of simple wall surface, there are also many rooms which, beside offering a congenial atmosphere for their contents, are in themselves works of art.⁷¹

During the same period on either side of the Atlantic, so-called personal collection museums, consisting of highly decorated personal spaces and period settings, entered the museum movement. In Detroit, Valentiner hoped to make “[t]he whole museum…more like a private collection in a large private house,”⁷² which, of course, precisely describes the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Wallace Collection in London, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, and many others that opened to the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those personal museums accentuated their difference from public museums in large part through the conspicuous pursuit of idiosyncratic modes of display, including seemingly random juxtapositions, sumptuous interiors, and frequent reminders of the collector's individual taste and will.

Despite, or because of, their popularity with a broad public (a survey conducted by Kimball at Philadelphia in 1929 had demonstrated their popular appeal), period environments fell into curatorial disfavor not long after their introduction.⁷³ With more than a touch of condescension, Europeans felt that period rooms might be appropriate in the United States, a nation of immigrants who “crave reminders of their transatlantic homes,”⁷⁴ but unnecessary in Europe itself. Eventually the artificiality of period ensembles, too often relying on objects cobbled together from different sources, conflicted with standards of authenticity upon which a curator's integrity depended. “There is nothing more damaging to [a curator's] prestige than buying a fake,” wrote Thomas Munro, director of the Cleveland Museum in the 1940s, and almost all period ensembles were palpably fake.⁷⁵ Finally, the busyness of period rooms, with their wall and window treatments, furniture, and decorative arts, stood in the way of direct appreciation of original works of art. The 1935 survey by Arthur Melton, cited above, determined that period settings reduced the visitor's ability to concentrate on individual objects. Melton's experiments with controlled installations led him to conclude: “One cannot mix the fine and decorative arts without sacrificing some of the interest which would be aroused by each class if exhibited in isolation. This may mean that the period room or the compositely installed gallery is no place to exhibit those pieces which the curator wishes to bring to the attention of the greatest number of people.”⁷⁶ From the Victoria and Albert Museum, Eric Maclagen carried out an informal survey of his own and found that, public opinion notwithstanding, European museum professionals disliked period rooms for precisely that reason. Siding with Bode's compromise position, Maclagen believed that the decorative arts benefited from juxtaposition in a period setting but that “it is very seldom that furniture or pictures of first-rate quality are shown to the best advantage in a…paneled room,” and in general period rooms “should not be regarded as an ideal setting for masterpieces.”⁷⁷ Henri Verne, director of French national museums, thought period settings confounded “the natural hierarchy of the arts.”⁷⁸ Kenneth Clark, at London's National Gallery, agreed: “If you put a work of art in a very decorative room and you hang it with objects of decoration, you reduce it to their level. The pictures of the Italian Renaissance, which used to be treated in this way, always gave me the impression that they were not the originals but clever reproductions such as one might find in an upholsterer's shop.”⁷⁹ By the late 1930s the “architectural interior” had become “a thing of the past,” according to Lawrence Coleman, president of the American Association of Museums.⁸⁰ Though many period settings survived, others were dismantled in the middle decades of the century in a drive to rid museums of expressive architecture. An extreme negation of period interiors was achieved in the 1950s in the work of Carlo Scarpa and Franco Albini, whose modernization of the Museo Correr in Venice (1953–61; fig. 80) and the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa (1950–51), respectively, all but erased signs of the original architecture and left art isolated, even frameless, in a setting that untouched would have been more or less historically compatible with it. Of the Palazzo Bianco, it was said: “In the interests of education, the palace concept was abandoned…[together with] all embellishments either in material, form or color—the intention being to provide a tranquil visual background…for the contemplation of a work of representational art.”⁸¹

80. Carlo Scarpa, Museo Correr, Venice, late 1950s, gallery interior.

The Art of the Other

At the same time that art museums were debating the merits of contextual display for Western art they were also considering whether and how to assimilate the visual culture of other world traditions. The advent of world's fairs after 1851 and the spread of colonialism gradually widened the Western conception of art to include the applied or industrial arts and the visual traditions of non-European civilizations. Following European territorial ambitions eastward through the Mediterranean, the products of Egypt and Mesopotamia, then India, Japan, and China, were gradually added to the canon. But how to display these newly recognized “arts”? Like medieval objects in the early nineteenth century, non-European objects needed mediation on account of their exoticism and aesthetic variance from the Greco-Roman ideal. Following the lead of Cluny and other regional museums, one obvious form of mediation was an “explanatory” architectural environment. As contextual settings faded out for the display of Western art, they reappeared to aid in the interpretation of non-European cultures. Significantly, at the new Boston MFA after 1909, even as European paintings were reinstalled as masterpieces in clean, modern galleries, highly important objects from Japan went on display in heavily accented rooms around a Japanese garden and pool complete with goldfish, raked sand, and stone lanterns. Rice paper window screens, dim lighting, and replicas of Nara period columns and brackets provided “an appropriate and natural setting” for an exceptional collection of Buddhist sculptures (fig. 81).⁸² The allusion to an original context was in keeping with the pedagogic philosophy of early curators of the Asian collections, Ernest Fenollosa and Ananda Coomaraswamy, who, though fully alive to the aesthetic value of their treasures, felt the need to encourage cultural understanding as well as aesthetic appreciation (the MFA's Japanese collection originally comprised a mass of ethnographic material). In the 1930s, Coomaraswamy swam against the tide of formalist autonomy by advocating an “anthropological approach” to art, hoping through education to help museum-goers see other cultures through something akin to native eyes.⁸³

A remarkable exhibition of Native American art that traveled from San Francisco to MoMA in 1941 gave viewers the best of both worlds through a wide variety of installation strategies, from a white-cube display of Mimbres pottery and a spotlighted gallery for Nahavo textiles to simulated Pueblo dwellings, re-creations of wall pictographs from Utah, and performances of tribal rituals (sand painting and dance). The curators, Frederic Douglas and René d'Harnoncourt, explained: “In theory, it should be possible to arrive at a satisfactory aesthetic evaluation of the art of any group without being much concerned with its cultural background.…Yet we know that increased familiarity with the background of the object not only satisfies intellectual curiosity but actually heightens the appreciation of aesthetic values.”⁸⁴ Alfred Barr later praised the exhibition for avoiding “both the purely aesthetic isolation and the waxworks of the habitat group” and for including the Navaho sand painters “in a Museum gallery but without scenery.”⁸⁵

81. Japanese Temple Room, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1910. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Striking a balance between the aesthetic expectations of Western viewers and the values of other cultures remains a live issue for art museums. In recent decades debate has focused most heavily on the collecting, display, and interpretation of African and indigenous arts of North America and Oceania. While objects from the ancient and “evolved” civilizations of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean were considered “art” and avidly pursued by collectors and art museums from the late nineteenth century, objects from the new and “primitive” worlds of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania were at the same time valued primarily as anthropological documents and destined for natural history or ethnography museums, where they were sorted by tribe and often displayed in dioramas. Though admired by a few avant-garde artists and maverick collectors (e.g., Picasso, Alfred Stieglitz, Roger Fry, and Alfred Barnes), African sculpture migrated to art museums from its customary home in ethnography museums only fitfully through temporary exhibitions (notably MoMA's African Negro Art exhibition in 1935) until the 1960s. The opening of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in 1957 in tandem with the civil rights movement generated the first curatorial positions in African art (often lumped together with Oceanic and Native American). A great many encyclopedic museums and national museum networks have since built permanent collections and new buildings dedicated to those fields (e.g., the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, 2006). The principle of universality to which they adhere has made it straightforward conceptually to add new art forms to the fold, as if they had always been there, but the question of how to represent those visual traditions within the space of the museum has been more problematic.

After decades of exclusion from the privileged circle of art-producing cultures, the first impulse was to highlight the previously overlooked aesthetic power of traditional African objects. If in ethnography museums African artifacts had been valued primarily as specimens of Fang or Yoruba culture and only secondarily (at best) as objects of aesthetic interest, the goal of art museum displays was to reverse those priorities. African “art” should be treated just like Western art. When Susan Vogel installed the Met's first exhibition of African art in 1982 (fig. 82), conformity with the museum's “house style” was a given: “In the context of the Metropolitan, at least at the beginning, it had to be presented as art—pure art, high art, the equal of any in the building. This meant installation techniques used in natural history museums were out. No mannequins, no photomurals, no music.”⁸⁶ Instead of mannequins and music, boutique lighting and a nonhierarchical organization of various types of objects encouraged aesthetic appreciation of each without regard to social function or ethnographic significance. And when Vogel organized the inaugural exhibition of the Center for African Art in New York in 1985, entitled African Masterpieces from the Musée de l'Homme (in Paris), a similar aestheticizing ambition was in evidence. The goal of the exhibition in this new art space was, as the title suggests, to reveal the artistry of objects originally consigned to a museum of ethnography. Things that had been collected and displayed for their anthropological value were now brought to New York and reidentified as masterpieces of African art. In Vogel's words, the exhibition declared: “[T]he sculpture of Africa is real art, as potent and as worthy of respect as the art of any other time or place in history.”⁸⁷ The same motive guided the massive exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent, which opened at London's Royal Academy in 1995 and later traveled to Germany and New York. Spanning sub-Saharan and Islamic North Africa (including Egypt) from prehistoric times to the twentieth century, and employing standard art museum tactics—spotlighted displays in dim rooms, minimal labeling—the exhibition boldly assimilated the African continent, in all its visual and cultural diversity, into the realm of Art. According to the catalog: “The time is at last ripe perhaps for an assertion of Africa's artistic wealth to need no alibi, either political or ethnographic.”⁸⁸

82. Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing, Gallery of African Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

These exhibitions were provocative, however, in the sense that the terms masterpiece, sculpture, and even art used to frame their contents in the familiar Occidental discourse of art do not correspond to the objects' original purpose or their makers' intentions. “Art,” as we understand it in the West, has no exact corollary in traditional African thought or language. The imposition of Western aesthetic conventions on African objects therefore distorts our understanding of those objects and the culturally varied, geographically dispersed societies that produced them. How and why were those objects created and used? Can we properly “respect” another culture without understanding it? Displayed aesthetically, objects “speak to us across time and culture” as “[high] points of human achievement,” as a label in the Vogel's Masterpieces show stated, but they cannot tell us about the time and cultures in which they were made.⁸⁹

The suppression of contextual material in many museum displays prompted the ethnographer James Clifford to remark: “[A]n ignorance of cultural context seems almost a precondition for artistic appreciation.”⁹⁰ Precisely such criticism has prompted a reevaluation of installation techniques in many art museum collections of African and indigenous material. After consciously eschewing the methods of the natural history museum, a modified contextual approach has swept into many African collections (fig. 83) in the form of extensive wall labels and photographs or films documenting the use of like objects in performances and ritual activity. A wall label accompanying a display of African masks at the Brooklyn Museum offers a good example of the dual aesthetic/ anthropological focus that is now commonplace: “While we may appreciate masks as aesthetic objects, when used with music and dance they have the capacity to animate, energize, and enhance funerals, initiation ceremonies, and other special events.”

Further refining the new contextualism, Susan Vogel has argued that there are limits to how far museums can go in explaining the original contexts and belief systems of alien cultures, and that since it is our habit in the West to attribute “to the art and artifacts of all times the qualities of our own: that its purpose is to be contemplated, and that its main qualities can be apprehended visually” it would be dishonest and condescending not to treat objects from other cultures in the same way. After all, she notes: “We can be insiders only in our own culture and our own time.”⁹¹ In her landmark 1997 exhibition Baule: African Art/Western Eyes, Vogel attempted to combine approaches by alternating aesthetic and ethnographic modes of display, using spotlighted high-art vitrines in one gallery and dioramas of Baule houses and shrines in another. She summarized her purpose in the accompanying catalog: “This book is inspired by my enjoyment of certain objects of Baule material culture as works of art in a Western sense, but it seeks to explore what ‘artworks’ mean in Baule thinking and in individual Baule lives.”⁹²

83. Installation view of the African Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 2004.

It remains to be asked why an integrated, or balanced, approach to installation, now widespread in installations of African, Asian, and Native American material, is so rarely used for Western art. Why not treat European art as Vogel did Baule culture? The obvious answers—first, Western viewers are unfamiliar with other cultures and, second, the artifacts of those cultures had ritual functions and were not intended for visual scrutiny in a museum—could be said to apply equally to a great many Western objects on view in our art museums. We assume that Western art and its ritual associations are familiar and need no explanation (contextual or textual), but to what extent is the purpose of a Roman sarcophagus or a medieval reliquary understood by museum-goers (anywhere) in the twenty-first-century? Even the cultural context of impressionist painting is but dimly grasped by the legions of its admirers. Why is it that the Boston MFA continues to display its celebrated Japanese Buddhas in a dimly lit templelike setting but would never dream of exhibiting, say, an Italian altarpiece in a mock chapel setting with altar, candles, incense, and music? While such a setting would be considered demeaning to the painting and the religion it represents, the same is not said about the Buddhist sculptures. Not infrequently museums in the United States provide ambient settings for Buddhist objects and “instruction” in profound Buddhist practices, but only a Fred Wilson would dare attempt a parallel approach in the European or North American collections.

84. Installation view of The Birth of Impressionism: From Constable to Monet, Glasgow Museums, 1997. Photo: Glasgow City Council (Museums).

Reflecting on her early days at the Met, Susan Vogel said that she had considered using photomurals and music but changed her mind “because I felt that in the context of the other installations in the building, they would have conditioned perception of the African galleries as an anthropological exhibit. On the other hand, I would have welcomed the addition of music and contextual devices to the galleries of Dutch painting, say, or of arms and armor. I would then have been happy to see the same in the African galleries.”⁹³ Where bold attempts at contextualization have occurred in Western museums they have been met with scorn. As early as 1930 in a scathing attack on period interiors, Frank Jewett Mather asked, Why stop with a few architectural details? “Why not introduce a priest, waxen or in the flesh? Why not hold a mass, oral or phonographic?”⁹⁴ An impressionist exhibition at the Glasgow Museum in 1997 (fig. 84), with Salon-style hanging, costumed mannequins, and a reconstruction of Monet's studio boat, was widely derided in the press.⁹⁵ In France in the early 1980s, following the election of a Socialist government, leftist factions within the political and academic establishments had visions of making the new Musée d'Orsay a dynamic history museum through the addition of audiovisual aids, a nineteenth-century train, and workers' tools and clogs displayed alongside paintings by Millet and van Gogh. The curatorial staff rebelled. “We refused to view the museum as an illustrated history book,” said then chief curator Françoise Cachin.⁹⁶ In the end the two sides settled for a watered-down commitment to including once-popular but now-forgotten “academic” painters together with the once-maligned, now-adulated impressionists. Even then critics felt the interests of “context” had been taken too far. Stephen Greenblatt, for one, argued (seemingly at odds with his own practice of contextual literary analysis) that outstanding works of the French avant-garde had been degraded through what he viewed as a heavy-handed attempt to place them in the cultural milieu of the day. “What has been sacrificed on the altar of cultural resonance,” lamented Greenblatt, “is visual wonder centered on the aesthetic masterpiece.”⁹⁷

Postmodern Conundrums

What bothered Clifford and others about early installations of African and indigenous art was the lack of reflexivity or transparency in the way in which collections were presented. There was no awareness or acknowledgment of the ways in which a museum display intervenes between object and viewer and conditions the viewer's response. In Clifford's field of interest, there was no acknowledgment that Western museum displays represented in effect a continuation and validation of colonial power relations through their imposition of Western norms and disregard for local beliefs and perspectives. He pointed to one especially egregious example, the exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, held at MoMA in 1984–85. In keeping with MoMA's traditional emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of high art, the exhibition examined the influence of certain “primitive” traditions on European modernism beginning with Picasso. “Beneath this generous umbrella,” wrote Clifford, “the tribal” seemed “modern and the modern more richly, more diversely human,” but in the end “the affinities shown at MoMA are all on modernist terms”; genius and innovation were shown to lie with the Western artists who found inspiration in the mute tribal specimens brought to Europe as ethnographic trophies.⁹⁸ Nothing was said about the masks themselves, why they were made, how they arrived in the West, or how contact with the West inspired their makers.⁹⁹ Nor did the exhibition venture into the broader context of Western appreciation of “Negro” culture at the time, with its disturbing currents of racism and sexual exploitation. Following the exhibition, the masks and other objects imported to celebrate a Western achievement returned whence they came. The “Primitivism” show could not have been more poorly timed, as it managed all at once to highlight disparities in the Western museum's representation of the “other,” to suppress larger questions of history and context, and to evade debates about the trajectory of modernism, all of which were being subjected to the critical scrutiny of postmodern theory and revisionist art history.

Yet, as Clifford says, “One of the virtues of an exhibition that blatantly makes a case or tells a story is that it encourages debate and makes possible the suggestion of other stories.”¹⁰⁰ Criticism, in other words, opens the door for change, and change has been manifested in a greater reflexivity and multivalent perspectives found in many exhibitions and museum installations from the late 1980s, including those just listed above. Curators are more conscious of their role in mediating the visitor's experience through the choice, arrangement, and interpretation of exhibits. Some curators now reveal their hand by signing their wall labels; some museums solicit visitors' opinions (and even invite them to write labels),¹⁰¹ and others have broadened the outlook and backgrounds of those they hire as docents. Experimentation is now commonplace in museum practice. Sounding more like a postmodern critic than the director of the British (Ur-)Museum, Neil MacGregor recently stated: “The museum is not a temple of eternal verity; it is at best a workshop for conflicting interpretations, a house of provisional truths.”¹⁰²

Because of proximity to the theorized world of academe and government pressures to increase public access to high culture, art museums in Britain have lately become notable sites of museological innovation. One need look no further than the major “nationals” in London (though regional museums and art centers—in Newcastle, Liverpool, Walsall, and Glasgow, for example—have equally come to life in recent years). The Victoria and Albert Museum has undertaken a bold overhaul of its British, medieval, and Renaissance collections. Taking advantage of deep and eclectic holdings, it has replaced a traditional material-type (painting/sculpture/furniture…) division of its holdings with a sequence of thematic installations that use a remarkable juxtaposition of paintings and photographs, books and miniatures, textiles and prints to offer focused insights into historical phenomena and moments. Traditionalists complain that important works of art have been reduced to material culture and that theme-oriented displays will soon grow tired and need revision, but the changes have energized the museum and proven popular with the general public, school groups, and hard-to-please academics. The cultural range of its collections, meanwhile, has allowed the museum to examine issues of colonialism and cultural hybridity in an unusually candid way. A similar openness to contemporary concerns has led the National Portrait Gallery to go beyond patriotic hagiography and mount engaging thematic exhibitions, such as David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, “Conquering England”: Ireland in Victorian London, and Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700–1850. The National Gallery remains deeply traditional in its installation and contents, but the public interpretation of the collection and occasional programming has been remarkably adventurous at times. For example, in 2004 the gallery acquired Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks with substantial help from public funds. To justify spending twenty million pounds on a single canonical painting, the gallery's education department sought to connect the Raphael and its age-old mother-and-child theme to an unusual constituency—underprivileged teenage mothers. Convening a group workshop around the Raphael, the young women began to “talk about their own situation, and come to terms with what they are doing with their lives.”¹⁰³ In 2006 a gallery was set aside for children's artistic responses to a rather obscure and old-fashioned picture—Mignard's Marquise de Seignelay and Two of Her Sons (1691).

Perhaps the most daring and controversial initiative was the installation of London's two new Tates: Tate Modern and Tate Britain. When the two galleries opened in 2000, both had rejected the standard organization of their collections by schools and chronology—what director Nicholas Serota described as “the conveyor belt of history”—and instead gone with an alternative hang that juxtaposed artists of different periods and (at Tate Modern) nationalities under a set of master themes. At Tate Britain the shakeup produced new rooms entitled “Art and Victorian Society,” “The Cult of Youth,” and “Ways of Seeing Revisited.” At Tate Modern, the section “Landscape/Matter/Environment” paired Claude Monet's painted Water Lilies (after 1916) with Richard Long's earthwork Red Slate Circle (1988). In “Nude/Action/Body,” Matisse, Bacon, and Giacometti went head to head with Bruce Naumann, Tracey Emin, and Gillian Wearing. The idea was to challenge the unquestioned authority of the constructs “history” and “school” and to allow “each of us, curators and visitors alike,” in Serota's words, “to chart our own new path, redrawing the map of modern art, rather than following a simple path laid down by a curator.”¹⁰⁴ The present was put in direct dialogue with the past, artists from one nation with those from another, reflecting the new open-ended worldliness of the contemporary art world. What Serota and his team intended as an antihierarchical, postmodern salvo was attacked by numerous critics as the height of curatorial presumption, however. The Burlington Magazine labeled Tate Modern a “curatorial playground” and mocked the “clever subversions and pick-and-mix variety.”¹⁰⁵ The Monet/Long comparison struck one critic as overly “scripted,”¹⁰⁶ and even the late Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA's chief curator, joined the negative chorus. “When you put a Richard Long next to Monet,” he wrote, “you are forcing viewers to be bound by the curator's vision. I would prefer to have curators try to correspond to some external sense of reality.”¹⁰⁷ By “external sense of reality” Varnedoe meant history and the canon, the constructedness of which the Tate curators hoped to avoid. The influential flowchart of modern art devised by Alfred Barr in the mid-1930s, according to which postimpressionism begets cubism and fauvism, et cetera, on the road to pure abstraction, was precisely the authoritative script the Tate tried to revise in the interests of encouraging new ways of seeing. But for unregenerated modernists chronology could not so easily be dethroned. Siding with Varnedoe, David Sylvester wrote: “It is all very well for curators to want to ignore chronology. But chronology is not a tool of art-historical interpretation which can be used at one moment, discarded at another. It's an objective reality, built into the fabric of the work. And into the artist's awareness.”¹⁰⁸

Critical reaction intensified when what the Burlington called the “epidemic of millennial fever” crossed the Atlantic to New York. The Tate's new hang could be dismissed—and was—as an attempt to disguise gaps in a mediocre collection, but the same could not be said about MoMA. In a review of the multimedia, nonchronological ModernStarts installation in 2000, designed to “provoke new responses and new ideas about modern art,”¹⁰⁹ New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl exclaimed: “Forget chronology. Goodbye to MoMA's old, rigid catechism of modern styles. Hello, postmodernistic mix-and-match…. I've never seen anything so overwrought.” At the root of the problem, he explained, was a loss of faith in the verities that had long sustained our cultural institutions: “MoMA faces a historic crisis. It is a victim of its own success as the world's most authoritative institution of twentieth-century visual culture, at a time when that culture is entering a blind spot of a future-preoccupied present. MoMA was founded to advance ideas of progress that are now dead Trendy museology stands in for fading intellectual pertinence.”¹¹⁰ Jed Perl, writing in the New Republic, came to the same conclusion: the “splice and dice…anti-chronological installations…at MoMA and Tate Modern suggest exactly how badly the foundations of these museums have been shaken.”¹¹¹

Perl needn't have worried so much, however—or perhaps his critique brought the museums to their senses. Within a few years a conventional order was restored to both MoMA and Tate Modern. When MoMA reopened its new midtown complex in 2004 almost nothing of the ModernStarts radicalism remained. Yoshio Taniguchi's simple exterior and white cube interiors connect with the museum's past, and MoMA's parade of masterpieces can again be seen (but for the crowds) in all their glory. Chronology has returned and the decorative arts have been put back in their place. Taniguchi's sensitivity to MoMA's “unique history and context”¹¹² and reaffirmation of tradition, with only a nod to postmodern alternatives, no doubt endeared him to the board. “Visitors may view the collection galleries in chronological sequence by the normal route or may create their own paths,” wrote the architect. “Various opportunities for jumping forward or backward in the chronology through interstitial spaces, variable galleries, and interconnecting stairways are provided.”¹¹³ In other words, it's business as usual, unless you happen to lose your way. To be sure, a few new artists were added to the mix (Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Antonio Tàpies, Howard Hodgkin), and the central atrium has become a place for unexpected juxtapositions, yet the ghosts of MoMA's past, from Alfred Barr to Kirk Varnedoe, would have little reason to complain. The looming crisis of how MoMA would absorb the lessons of postmodernism—including postmodern art, so much of it inimical to a museum environment—has been largely avoided. While insisting that MoMA is not a “museum of modernism in a closed sense,” Kirk Varnedoe's mainstream vision of modern and contemporary art loyal to its roots “primarily in a Western European background” has been realized.¹¹⁴ “We don't collect everything that's made in contemporary art,” he noted. “We collect that part of contemporary art which we think honors the ideals or the ambitions and achievements of the founders of modern art.”¹¹⁵ In 2006 Tate Modern quietly retired its inaugural “mix-and-match” installation in favor of a return to a progression of the familiar “isms” (cubism, surrealism…) of the twentieth century. A large mural adaptation of Barr's famous flowchart of modernism adorns the wall leading to the permanent collection.

If in the end major institutions with canonical collections prove reluctant to change, we are more likely to encounter experiment and change in temporary installations and exhibitions and second-tier museums. Removed from the critical spotlight, many smaller museums have become more adventurous in what they do. If MoMA is bound to a conservative vision of modern art, new spaces like MoMA's branch museum, P.S. 1, the “Temporary Contemporary” in Los Angeles, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in western Massachusetts (fig. 85) have arisen to accommodate virtually anything calling itself art. New museums of contemporary art are comfortable exhibiting contemporary art from beyond the Euro-American orbit in ways mainstream museums are not. Venerable museums in Brooklyn, Newark, and Cincinnati have all lately experimented with thematic and mixed-media installations. In Belgium, the new Memling Museum in Bruges (fig. 86), housed in what was originally a medieval hospital, has (re)installed its masterpiece by Hans Memling in the chapel setting for which it was made, where it begs comparison with Michelangelo's Virgin and Child (fig. 87) in situ across the street in the church of Notre-Dame. In one direction, the new museumchapel has restored some of the Memling's spiritual effect; in another, the visual parallels between the two buildings remind us that the tourist-driven global economy has made museums of many of the world's sacred sites. Where the British Museum feels compelled to display its collection of Benin bronzes as art (see chapter 6) with no mention of their provenance or of Nigerian demands for their repatriation, the Horniman Museum, located in an ethnically diverse area on the other side of London, offers its own Benin plaques as the focal point of a conversation involving different voices, including the views of Africans living in the United Kingdom.¹¹⁶

85. Installation view of Tim Hawkinson's Überorgan (collection of Andrea Nasher) at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000.

Numerous mainstream museums have experimented with change through the short-lived and controlled medium of temporary exhibitions. For example, a broad cross section of institutions has welcomed Fred Wilson's typically irreverent interventions, knowing they will soon disappear. Precisely the same curatorial strategies that provoked such ire in the collections of MoMA and the Tate may be greeted as a welcome breath of fresh air when confined to a brief installation. Witness Holland Cotter's response to an eclectic retrospective of the Whitney Museum's collection in 2006: “The work is mostly arranged by loose theme rather than date, an approach I like. It enlivens objects by setting them in unexpected, often energizing company. And it points up the basic arbitrariness of orthodox art history and critical opinion. An unfamiliar little piece off to the side is revealed to be every bit as interesting as a celebrated big piece in the center of the room.”¹¹⁷

86. Memling's Altarpiece of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, 1474–79, on display at the Memling Museum, Bruges, 2003. Oil on panel, 173.6 × 173.7 cm (central), 176 × 78.9 cm (each wing).

87. Michelangelo's Virgin and Child, 1501–5, at the Church of Notre-Dame, Bruges, 2003. Marble, h. 128 cm.

Among the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the emergence of indigenous museums embracing an alternative point of view. In Australia, as Tony Bennett relates, “a handful of Australian museums…have ceded to Aboriginal peoples the right to refashion the display of Aboriginal materials in order to make their own statements on their own terms.”¹¹⁸ In the Pacific Northwest, James Clifford discovered an oppositional museum practice in four tribal museums that registered “the irruption of history and politics in aesthetic and ethnographic contexts, thus challenging the artculture system still dominant in most major exhibitions of tribal or non-Western work.”¹¹⁹ Each museum offers indigenous perspectives with respect to cultural usage of the work displayed. Equally important, and in contrast to the reluctance of mainstream museums to reflect on the formation of their collections, they record a local view of history that includes the catastrophic intervention of white settlers and subsequent struggles to retain tribal traditions and memory. Similar strategies and a similar purpose inform the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on Washington's Mall. Opened in 2004 and dedicated to “reaffirming traditions and beliefs, encouraging contemporary artistic expression, and empowering the Indian voice,” the NMAI incorporates “Native methodologies for the handling, documentation, care, and presentation of collections” and “actively strives to find new approaches to the study and representation of the history, materials, and cultures of Native peoples.”¹²⁰ At NMAI tribes are responsible for telling their own stories, and the results are unconventional by normative Western standards.¹²¹

The problem with alternative spaces and visions, of course, is that they are no less vulnerable to ideological distortion in their own way. The NMAI, for example, has been criticized for essentializing Indian culture and idealizing history, suppressing unflattering aspects of the Native American record (e.g., intertribal war practices no less brutal than those perpetrated by whites) in pursuit of a celebratory, mythic Indian past. “The result,” said Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, “is homogenized pap in which the collection is used not to reveal the past's complexities, but to serve the present's simplicities.”¹²² That exactly the same criticism was leveled against the National Gallery's Circa 1492 exhibition a decade earlier (see chapter 1)—criticism that helped create the NMAI—reminds us that all museums have a point of view and construct certain narratives at the expense of others. As fields of cultural and historical representation operating in the public sphere, museums will always be contested spaces. The lesson of postmodernism is that there are many stories to tell, many publics to serve, and that only a multiplicity of museums, embracing different voices and aspirations and each evolving over time, can hope to please at least some of the people much of the time.

 

An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels each illustrated by a well-selected specimen. George Brown Goode (1888)

In a museum of fine art, are the labels really more important than the exhibits; or are the exhibits more important than the labels? Benjamin Ives Gilman (1915)