Felicity Bodenstein

Date / lieu : 20 et 21 octobre 2017 / Paris, INHA Le développement de l’archéologie fondée sur l’étude du site a permis de mobiliser un imaginaire porté sur un passé matériel d’une grande diversité. La possibilité de retrouver le passé dans toute sa matérialité et un nouveau goût pour le spectacle public président à l’idée d’évoquer les découvertes archéologiques loin des sites mêmes, ex situ donc, pour le plus grand plaisir des curieux cosmopolites. Télécharger le programme du colloque. → S..

Le Cabinet des médailles et antiques de la Bibliothèque nationale conserve les « bijoux savants » aux origines du collectionnisme occidental avec son médaillier universel, des pierres gravées et des collections d’antiques d’une diversité étonnante. Si celles-ci proviennent pour les parties les plus anciennes, des collections de la maison royale et de trésors ecclésiastiques, cette thèse ne remonte pas aux origines du département mais s’occupe de son destin à l’âge des musées, entre la Restauration, avec l’arrivée au département en 1819 de Désiré Raoul-Rochette (1789-1854) et la période qui suit la première guerre mondiale jusqu’à la mort d’Ernest Babelon (1854-1924). Elle cherche à comprendre, comment ce « parangon des cabinets d’amateurs de jadis » s’est développé, pris comme il l’était entre une tradition antiquaire aristocratique et les exigences de la modernité, républicaine et spécialiste. Elle aborde les différents aspects de la vie du département à l’intérieur du quadrilatère...

Le Cabinet des medailles et antiques de la Bibliotheque nationale conserve les « bijoux savants » aux origines du collectionnisme occidental avec son medaillier universel, des pierres gravees et des collections d’antiques d’une diversite etonnante. Si celles-ci proviennent pour les parties les plus anciennes, des collections de la maison royale et de tresors ecclesiastiques, cette these ne remonte pas aux origines du departement mais s’occupe de son destin a l’âge des musees, entre la Restauration, avec l’arrivee au departement en 1819 de Desire Raoul-Rochette (1789-1854) et la periode qui suit la premiere guerre mondiale jusqu’a la mort d’Ernest Babelon (1854-1924). Elle cherche a comprendre, comment ce « parangon des cabinets d’amateurs de jadis » s’est developpe, pris comme il l’etait entre une tradition antiquaire aristocratique et les exigences de la modernite, republicaine et specialiste. Elle aborde les differents aspects de la vie du departement a l’interieur du quadrilatere...

Based on the papers presented at the international conference "National museums and the negotiation of difficult pasts"; this report examines how museums attempt to represent the most contested and in some cases "unspeakable" elements of the past. National museums are increasingly called upon to provide forums for dealing with highly sensitive issues of traumatic past events – particularly those related to situations of political violence. The first section of the report deals with cases related to conflicting representations of "natural" and ethnic communities. With a focus on the Mediterranean; the papers examine museum policies in dealing with conflicts of displaced communities in the border lands between Italy and the ex-Yugoslavia or in the contested religious heritage of Greek Cypriots. The second section focuses on the role national museums play in handling historical issues that are socially and politically sensitive. The Soviet rule in Estonia ...

Des objets exemplaires de la relation art/histoire En 2014, un groupe d’activistes berlinois, « No Humboldt 21 », publiait une série d’affiches pour dénoncer ou souligner certains aspects de l’histoire conflictuelle des collections destinées à prendre place dans le Humboldt Forum sur l’île aux Musées. Une tête en laiton de la reine mère Idia provenant de Benin City figurait sur l’une de ces affiches avec le slogan suivant : « Schon Beutekunst betrachtet ? » [ « Avez-vous déjà contemplé de l’a..

Les objets du royaume du Benin en ivoire, corail, laiton, bois et autres materiaux, presents dans des musees partout dans le monde, ont ete pour la plupart pilles par les forces navales britanniques en 1897 lors d’une expedition dite punitive contre le souverain du Benin, l’Oba Ovonramwen (1857-1914). Toutefois les circonstances et les mecanismes exacts de ce pillage restent encore a etablir. Cet article propose une typologie des pratiques de collecte afin de mieux comprendre quelles valeurs et quelles significations leur attribuent alors les membres de l’expedition. Elle permet aussi de mieux comprendre l’etat lacunaire de nos connaissances sur la vie sociale de ces objets pilles et deplaces en Europe et ailleurs.

Pendant longtemps une rumeur a circulé: la momie de Cléopâtre serait enterrée dans le jardin Vivienne de la Bibliothèque nationale. L'histoire des momies à la Bibliothèque nationale et en particulier au Cabinet des médailles et antiques permet de mieux comprendre une légende urbaine qui renvoie à la réalité des conditions de conservation très difficile de ces artefacts/corps particulièrement complexes.

levy rates for metropolitan purposes. The battle involved a positively Dickensian cast of characters—“mass civil disobedience, powerful corporate adversaries, hostile metropolitan and parliamentary opinion, and sceptical judges” (89). Should the city be divided into two sanitary districts, north and south of the river? The poverty of the southern districts precluded this: financial input from the much wealthier north would be needed to resolve the sanitary ills of the south bank. Despite the opposition, theMetropolitan Board ofWorks won a signal victory, achieving a “total revolution in metropolitan taxation” (91). Much of Hanley’s text is given to discussion of the detail of legal cases and strategies, yet his text is never dry. Lucidly written and beautifully organized, this is a major work of scholarship. The thoughtful reading of existing literature and scrupulous labor among previously unexplored legal documents is clear on every page, and even more so in the scholarly apparatus, which covers nearly as many pages as the main text of the book. Hanley’s control over his material is masterly, and thoughtful signposting means that the reader never loses the path of the story. His emphasis on the external boundaries to private property in the first four chapters, does, however, sit a little oddly with the shift to domesticity in the final chapter. Here, Hanley focuses on municipal intervention in internal house features—on the provision of drainage for water closets and the abolition of privies, and on the struggle to regulate and control moral and physical conditions in houses let in lodgings. Regulation here, he notes, “was crucially informed” by “heteronormative middle-class domesticity,” although this ideology did not succeed in determining the scope of the legislation. While this transition to the regulation of internal boundary space is perhaps an inevitable and logical progression, and though it forms a critical part of Hanley’s argument for the creation of local communities of health, it does feel more like the beginning of a different book, one devoted to the legal undermining of the concept—at least in poor class housing—of the idea that the Englishman’s home was his castle.

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth century archaeological artifacts were contemplated as the pieces of a puzzle that, it was hoped, would someday be completed to form an integral reconstruction of past worlds. As the background for their display, museum murals completed the visitor's experience by creating a complete visual environment. Over the course of the century, neo-classical murals on mythological themes were supplanted by schemes of decoration that featured specific references to the objects on display. An increased valorization of the fragment accompanied the important transformation in museums that saw white walls replace earlier decors during the first half of the twentieth century in accordance with modernist aesthetics. We will consider this evolution by examining the murals conceived for the display of Greco-Roman and Oriental objects in the Louvre from the Musée Charles X (1827) to the decoration (1887) and subsequent stripping (1934) of the Daru staircase that frames the Victory of Samothrace.

Building National Museums in Europe 1750–2010. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna 28-30 April 2011. EuNaMus Report No. 1. Peter Aronsson & Gabriella ...

CONCLUSION: NATIONAL MUSEUMS, HISTORY AND A SOCIALLY COHESIVE EUROPE 63 National museums need to be autonomous creative institutions 64 National museums need to understand and be open about their performances 64 National museums need to overcome national constraints 64 National museums need to develop and share tools for establishing bridge-building narratives 64 National museums need to review their impact on perceptions of citizenship 64 National museums need to reach new audiences 65 ...

Since the opening of the Museum du Louvre in 1793, France has developed an important network of state funded national museums, the majority of which are dedicated to art historical displays. This is especially the case for the majority of museums run by the Reunion des musees nationaux, a network that manages the largest group of national museums in France. It is striking that, at any given time throughout the country’s history, some of the most important creations of national museums came about as a direct result of the personal initiative and implication of the country’s leaders, whether they were kings, emperors or presidents. This proves the extent to which the museum was, and is, in France, an explicitly national enterprise of great political prestige and symbolic value. National museums have, since the Revolution, been a strong factor in the French nation building process and a clear definition of their administration, in terms of central state ownership, provides the best fra...

Portugal began to develop a group of national museums in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its first collections were formed by the monarchy, and very much conditioned by the often difficult and complex relationship between the state and the Catholic Church. The first public museum in Portuguese territory was founded in Porto in 1833 to house artworks from monasteries, shut down as a result of the liberal’s victory in the civil war (1828-1834). Its creation was strongly related to the separation of Church and State with the suppression of the ecclesiastical orders in 1834 in a process that was completed in 1910 with the declaration of a secular republic. An extensive series of museums owe their existence to this transfer of church property to the state. The evolution of Portuguese museums was heavily marked by the Military dictatorship (19261933) and by the Estado Novo (1933-1974) under the rule of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (19331968). Though museums were managed by a cou...

The problematic and laboriously constructed nature of the Belgian nation is, to a large extent, reflected in the structure and distribution of Belgium’s federal/national museums. The complexity and contradictory nature of the administrative organisation of the Belgian state led one of its leading contemporary artists to comment that ‘maybe the country itself is a work of art’ (Fabre, 1998: 403). Its national museums those which receive direct federal funding are the result of a series of projects that founded the large cultural institutions of Brussels in the nineteenth century, decreed by the Belgian monarchy that was itself only founded in 1830. Brussels, the largely French speaking capital of the nation situated geographically in the centre of a Flemish speaking region, is since 1830 the seat of a constitutional monarchy and democratically elected parliament that governs over the two very distinct linguistic and cultural areas: the northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern Fr...

The paper will successively establish why national museums in the past generally constructed the image of Napoleon as a “Grand homme”, a heroic leader and patron of the arts, providing a more unified, consensual vision and tendentiously hagiographic presentation of Napoleon than the more divided domain of general written historiography. It will also show how permanent presentations and temporary exhibits in the last two decades have attempted to revise different aspects of the museum’s master narratives of Napoleon by desacralizing the representation of his physical body, underlining his role in one of Europe’s most horrific wars and examining from a political point of view the artistic productions of his time and thus moving towards a more dualistic narrative. These recent museographical reinterpretations of Napoleon’s role in exhibitions held across Europe seem to have allowed him to incarnate many ambiguous aspects of the European idea and the sometimes-contradictory nature of it...

In 1913, English travel writer Georges Renwick, described Luxembourg as “a curious experiment in nation-making”, (quoted by Pit, 2010: 1). Indeed, politically and geographically it is an exceptional nation-state: the only remaining sovereign Grand Duchy in Europe, it is also one of its smallest members, with a population of half a million inhabitants making the country, as a whole, less populous than most European capital cities. This small country is host to three languages, French, German and Luxembourgish (officially recognized as a distinct language, not just a German dialect, from 1919 onwards), making it an area of great linguistic cultural diversity. In terms of nation-building it has been influenced both by the French and by the German nationbuilding process and nationalist thinking. The comparably small size of Luxembourg allows for a relatively easy and precise study of the processes that established this ‘imagined community’, to employ the famous term used by Benedict And...

This issue of JAMS considers the exponential growth of an export market for cultural objects from the African continent since the middle of the nineteenth century, from the first episodes of commercial and military colonialism (Cormack) through to the dramatic rise from the 1890s onwards (Hüsgen, Tsogang Fossi). It then considers the shift away from the categorization of African cultural objects as ethnographic to the flourishing of a “primitive art” (also often termed as “art nègre”)1 trade in Paris (Saint-Raymond, Vaudry) and finally moves through the issue of post-colonial trade (Girard-Muscagorry); closing with an article on the question of illicit trafficking that has marked the currently termed “tribal art” market for African objects. The director of Abidjan Musée des civilisations, Silvie Memel Kassi also considers how the current situation of African museums is changing and how these institutions are preparing in order to offer a suitable environment for returning objects. The central question is the role of commercial transactions in the establishment of systematic collecting practices of cultural material from sub-Saharan Africa, transactions driven by the growing presence of European powers on the continent and motivated by the corollary establishment of specialized ethnographic collections in Europe.

Editorial
Susanne Meyer-Abich

Africa: Trade, Traffic, Collections
Felicity Bodenstein

Violence, Globalization and the Trade in "ethnographic" Artefacts in nineteenth-century Sudan
Zoe Cormack

Colonial Expeditions and Collecting – The Context of the "Togo-Hinterland" Expedition of 1894/1895
Jan Hüsgen

Itinerary of a Cameroon Cross River Collection in Art Market Networks. An Analysis of Transaction Correspondence between Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig
Richard Tsogang Fossi

The vanishing paths of African artefacts: Mapping the Parisian auction market for "primitive" objects in the interwar period
Léa Saint-Raymond, Elodie Vaudry

Zing–Foumban–Paris: Tracing a Mumuye mask from Nigeria to France

The Illicit Circulation of Ivorian Collections: Challenges and Prospects
Silvie Memel-Kassi

Book Review: Yaëlle Biro, Fabriquer le regard: Marchands, réseaux, et objets africains à l'aube du XXe siècle
Felicity Bodenstein

Book Review: Zachary Kingdon, Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa. A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows
Julien Bondaz

Interview with Jean Roudillon

Les  objets  du  royaume  du  Benin  en  ivoire,  corail,  laiton,  bois  et  autres  matériaux,  présents  dans  des  musées  partout  dans  le  monde,  ont  été  pour  la  plupart  pillés  par  les  forces  navales  britanniques  en  1897  lors  d’une  expédition  dite  punitive  contre  le  souverain  du  Bénin,  l’Oba  Ovonramwen  (1857-1914).  Toutefois  les  circonstances  et  les  méca-nismes exacts de ce pillage restent encore à établir. Cet  article  propose  une  typologie  des  pratiques  de  collecte afin de mieux comprendre quelles valeurs et quelles significations leur attribuent alors les membres  de  l’expédition.  Elle  permet  aussi  de  mieux  comprendre  l’état  lacunaire  de  nos  connais-sances  sur  la  vie  sociale  de  ces  objets  pillés  et  déplacés en Europe et ailleurs.

Les cinq masques en ivoire de la reine-mère Idia (16e siècle) qui sont aujourd’hui à Londres, New York, Seattle, Stuttgart et dans une collection privée anglaise sont sans doute les objets les plus iconiques de l’art du continent africain tel qu’il peut être illustré dans les ouvrages de référence. Or, leurs péripéties d’objets pillés au royaume de Bénin puis vendus par les forces navales britanniques en 1897 permettent d’observer deux mouvements en quelque sortes contraires dans la gestion de ce multiple : d’une part celui de la dispersion globale à travers le marché d’un groupe fait au départ pour agir ensemble localement. Et d’autre part, la redécouverte de leur statut d’ensemble ou de multiple, et de ce qu’Alfred Gell a appelé l’objet personne disséminé à travers leur (re)identification avec Iyoba Idia à partir des années 1950. Nous verrons qu’à partir de ce moment-là, ces deux mouvements s’entremêlent et entrent de façon croissante en tension.

As the issue of the place of the so-called « Benin Bronzes » in German collections reaches a saturation point in terms of media coverage , this article considers this proliferation of interest in relation to the comparative silence that surrounds other important cases of military activities that lead to acquisitions of important holdings in extra-European collections.  By considering the trajectories of Benin bronzes alongside those of objects looted in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth century we intend to discuss the imbalance between contemporary representations of these histories and the archival reality of understanding the singular destinies of objects (pieces of art, craftsmanship, objects of worship and ancestral heirlooms) set into motion by the « small wars » of the colonial era.

Pendant longtemps une rumeur a circulé: la momie de Cléopâtre serait enterrée dans le jardin Vivienne de la Bibliothèque nationale. L'histoire des momies à la Bibliothèque nationale et en particulier au Cabinet des médailles et antiques permet de mieux comprendre une légende urbaine qui renvoie à la réalité des conditions de conservation très difficile de ces artefacts/corps particulièrement complexes.

...in Bénédicte Savoy and Christina Kott (eds.), Mars & Museum. Europäische Museen im Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin : Böhlau, 2016 (forthcoming)

Ernest Babelon directed the Cabinet des médailles et antiques of the National Library in Paris for over 30 years. In the only text that he ever wrote in the first person, he tells of how the museum got through those difficult years of the First World War, during which the department lost two of its employees and his own son, Jean, was a prisoner in Germany. During this time, whilst the collections were sent for the most part to Toulouse, he prepared the reinstallation of the entire museum in the new wing of the National Library, recently completed. He tells this story as his own war effort, but it was not his only one, as he also became very much involved in the production of historical propaganda related to the question of the left bank of the Rhine river. In this presentation we will try to analyse what relationship there was between his work as curator and his conception of history, between France’s antiquarian tradition and the promotion of France’s territorial legitimacy.

in Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (eds.), Historisierung. Begriff - Methode - Praxis, Stuttgart/Weimar : J.B. Metzler, forthcoming May 2016.
This essay examines an important transformation in public history in relation to two institutions, the British Museum in London and the Neue Museum in Berlin and their identity as collections and monuments in their own right . In an analysis of the crisis of the commemorative monument in contemporary Germany James E. Young recognizes the continued desire for a form of monumentality, observing a general move from the heroic to the ironic as “the need for a unified vision of the past, as found in the traditional monument, necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing.”  To what extent can a similar shift be observed as these museums construct institutional memory and how does this contribute to “institutional survival” , to renewing their mandate to preserve and to be themselves preserved and transmitted for the benefit of future generations?
When we consider the British Museum and the Neue Museum as representative models of the ‘universal museums’ of the first museum age , it follows that it is significant to see how, in today’s ‘second museum age’, both of these museums have incorporated specific representations of their institutional past into the partial or full renovation of their houses . The Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum  reveals how artefacts relating to a former ‘order of things’ have been used to produce an overarching vision of the museum’s initial encyclopaedic project. The case of the Neue Museum, whose newly renovated building can be seen as an exhibit in itself , is considered from the point of view of the remains of the historicist murals created in the 1850s and 1860s and the meaning of their role in a ‘new’ (2009) museum narrative.

Throughout the nineteenth century archaeological artefacts were contemplated as the pieces of a puzzle that, it was hoped, would someday be completed to form an integral reconstruction of past worlds. As the background for their display, museum murals completed the visitor’s experience by creating a complete visual environment. Over the course of the century, neo-classical murals on mythological themes were supplanted by schemes of decoration that featured specific references to the objects on display. An increased valorisation of the fragment accompanied the important transformation in museums that saw white walls replace earlier decors during the first half of the twentieth century in accordance with modernist aesthetics. We will consider this evolution by examining the murals conceived for the display of Greco-Roman and Oriental objects in the Louvre from the Musée Charles X (1827) to the decoration (1887) and subsequent stripping (1934) of the Daru staircase that frames the Victory of Samothrace.

Le musée conçu par l'architecte Jean-Louis Pascal présente l'intérêt d'être un programme complet et constitue un bel exemple de l'esthétique éclectique et historiciste des années 1900. Le Cabinet des médailles, transféré de Versailles à la rue de Richelieu en 1741, fait date dans ...

Workshop

Organized by the Max-Planck-Research Group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The cross-cultural Lives of Things"

 

"The museum is the colossal mirror in which man, finally contemplating himself in all forms, and finding himself literally an object of wonder, abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in art magazines." Whilst for Georges Bataille (Documents, 1929) the mirror was a metaphor of the museum as a whole, the museum selfie can be understood as a symbol of the visitors' desire to document their own individual and embodied experience of an exhibit. Yet this experience—although seemingly unique and personal—is mediated by the conceptual frames the museum itself embodies, which include: aesthetic delectation, academic inquiry and identity formation. In fact, the museum functions at a critical juncture in the mutually constitutive relationship between the visitor's body, the material space of physical objects (displays, architecture) and the construction of social and cultural concepts (such as national identity, race, and gender).

A long intellectual tradition has maintained a subject/object divide in Western thinking, which has meant that this juncture remains something of a blind spot. More recently, a turn towards material studies has attempted to blur the conceptual boundaries between people and objects through new perspectives on the social lives of things, thing theory, and affect theory. However, this so-called post-humanist trend tends to focus on the object more so than on its effect on the subject. Just as art historians study the origins and history of objects before they enter the museum, so too must we take seriously the specificity of visitors to museums and their histories and experiences of race, sex, gender, culture, religion, class, queer, trans and other identities. This workshop aims to put these many modalities of analysis of the subject/object relationship into a more balanced dialogue with a rigorous focus on the intersectional experience of bodies (people and objects) across multiple vectors of identity. We seek to analyze how material, cultural, social and political construction functions on both sides of this subject/object relationship as both come inscribed with histories and identities and can also change or mutually reinforce one another within the space of the museum.

Encounters between humans and objects in museums are mediated and animated by a number of different factors, which may be culturally shared and transmitted but at the same time are not stable, fixed, or automatic. These factors include: time, space and culture. The temporality of the encounter may be inflected by the time difference between the origin of the object and the person, time-period, or how time is constructed—for both people and objects—according to paradigms like modernism, classicism or primitivism. The space of the encounter includes the museum's location, architecture, mode of display, or purpose (for example, nation building, identity formation, memorial, aesthetic or religious experience). Finally, we are interested in how the histories, belief systems and cultural codes that are manifested by both people and objects inscribe, or in some cases forbid, their encounter.

The Museum as Mirror - Reflections on Encounters between People and Objects

Workshop to be held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (23-24 November 2017)

15. Juli 2017
Call for Papers

The use of selfie sticks in museums and recent museum policies excluding or indeed encouraging the practice have triggered two kinds of concern. On the one hand, the presence of the selfie stick is considered to be a dangerous material extension of the visitor’s body and a potential source of damage and disturbance. On the other hand, its popularity begs the question:  how do visitors bond with objects in museums and what are they identifying with in this seemingly narcissistic engagement with objects, artworks and monuments as they stagger back and forth in order to find the best shot? The museum selfie can be understood as a contemporary metaphor for the visitors' desire to document their own individual and embodied experience of an exhibit. Yet this experience—although seemingly unique and personal—is mediated by the conceptual frames the museum itself embodies, which include: aesthetic delectation, academic inquiry and identity formation. In fact, the museum functions at a critical juncture in the mutually constitutive relationship between the visitor’s body, the material space of physical objects (displays, architecture) and the construction of social and cultural concepts (such as national identity, race, and gender).

A long intellectual tradition has maintained a subject/object divide in Western thinking, which has meant that this juncture remains something of a blind spot. More recently, a turn towards material studies has attempted to blur the conceptual boundaries between people and objects through new perspectives on the social lives of things, thing theory, and affect theory. However, this so-called post-humanist trend tends to focus on the object more so than on its effect on the subject. Just as art historians study the origins and history of objects before they enter the museum, so too must we take seriously the specificity of visitors to museums and their histories and experiences of race, sex, gender, culture, religion, class, queer, trans and other identities. This workshop will aim to put these many modalities of analysis of the subject/object relationship into a more balanced dialogue with a rigorous focus on the intersectional experience of bodies (people and objects) across multiple vectors of identity.  We seek to analyze how material, cultural, social and political construction functions on both sides of this subject/object relationship as both come inscribed with histories and identities and can also change or mutually reinforce one another within the space of the museum.

Encounters between humans and objects in museums are mediated and animated by a number of different factors, which may be culturally shared and transmitted but at the same time are not stable, fixed, or automatic.  These factors include: time, space and culture. The temporality of the encounter may be inflected by the time difference between the origin of the object and the person, time-period, or how time is constructed—for both people and objects—according to paradigms like modernism, classicism or primitivism.  The space of the encounter includes the museum’s location, architecture, mode of display, or purpose (for example, nation building, identity formation, memorial, aesthetic or religious experience).  Finally, we are interested in how the histories, belief systems and cultural codes that are manifested by both people and objects inscribe, or in some cases forbid, their encounter.

We encourage papers that analyze these encounters in museums as portrayed by artists through visual practices such as painting, print, sculpture, film, photography, and performative practices; linguistically in literary accounts; or aurally in music, audio or other formats. We are also interested in more collective attempts to analyze these encounters such as sociological studies or accounts in journals or other media.

 

Applications in English consisting of an abstract of 400 words and a short C.V. in a single PDF should be submitted by July 15, 2017 to alison.boyd@khi.fi.it. Contributions for travel expenses will be available.

 

The workshop is part of the activities taking place within the framework of the Max Planck Research Group Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things.

 
Convenors:

Alison Boyd, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut, Postdoctoral Fellow
Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut, director of the Max Planck research group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things"
Felicity Bodenstein, musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Postdoctoral Fellow

The problematic and laboriously constructed nature of the Belgian nation is, to a large extent, reflected in the structure and distribution of Belgium’s federal/national museums. The complexity and contradictory nature of the administrative organisation of the Belgian state led one of its leading contemporary artists to comment that ’maybe the country itself is a work of art’ (Fabre, 1998: 403). Its national museums - those which receive direct federal funding - are the result of a series of projects that founded the large cultural institutions of Brussels in the nineteenth century, decreed by the Belgian monarchy that was itself only founded in 1830. Brussels, the largely French speaking capital of the nation situated geographically in the centre of a Flemish speaking region, is since 1830 the seat of a constitutional monarchy and democratically elected parliament that governs over the two very distinct linguistic and cultural areas: the northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern French-speaking Wallonia. In his article on ’What, if Anything, Is a Belgian?’, Van der Craen writes : ’Belgium has been at the centre of a heated debate since its creation. The relatively young country has had little time to develop any nationalistic feelings in comparison to, for instance, the Netherlands or France’ (2002 : 32). In constructing a nationalist discourse through the creation of national institutions such as museums, the Belgian monarchy looked very much to the French model for inspiration, and the strong influence of France, both politically and culturally, can be clearly retraced in the history the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. In the parliamentary debates concerning the organization and support of the arts, France appears as the preponderant model (Montens, 2001: 14).

Today, the relative inertia of Belgium’s federal institutions is indicative of the problems that the Belgian federal state has been experiencing in the face of rising regionalism and the transfer of the management of cultural affaires to the communities. As has been pointed out by numerous critics, its national museums, the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale and the Musée royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire militaire especially, can be characterized by the ’dusty’ character of their museography. Of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (1910) an American scholar wrote: ’The fundamental message remains the same: when going through the revolving doors of the museum’s main entrance, one has the feeling of entering into a liminal space, frozen in time’ (Muteba, J., 2003: 61).

Three periods are of capital importance to understand the evolution of Belgium’s national museums: the French occupation at the end of the eighteenth century (1793-1815) – although no museums were really established this was a crucial period for the crystallisation of a public consciousness of artistic heritage; the years following Belgian independence in 1830 with the decision of the city of Brussels to sell its collections to the state (1843) and finally the period of the jubilees and the great national, universal and colonial exhibitions (1880-1930). Recent decades have, in stark contrast to what can be observed in other countries (for example Luxembourg), seen no major projects initiated by Belgium’s federal cultural authorities, and this despite the fact the museum as an institution is of growing popular appeal. One may however mention the creation in 2005 of the BELvue Museum that tells the history of Belgium as structured by the reigns of its successive monarchs.

This is not to imply however that there have not been major developments under the control of the government of the different communities – but simply to underline that the dynamics of museum creation have moved away from the central federal powers.

The identification of Belgium’s most important national/federal museums poses no problem of definition of any kind – though none of them carry the epithet ‘national’ but are denominated as royal. There are exactly five major ‘royal’ museums, all situated in Brussels and all directly funded by the federal government, they form an exemplary group to illustrate the classic national museum typology with a national art museum, an archaeology and history museum, an ethnology/colonial museum, a natural sciences museum and a military museum.

Since the opening of the Muséum du Louvre in 1793, France has developed an important network of state funded national museums, the majority of which are dedicated to art historical displays. This is especially the case for the majority of museums run by the Réunion des musées nationaux, a network that manages the largest group of national museums in France. It is striking that, at any given time throughout the country’s history, some of the most important creations of national museums came about as a direct result of the personal initiative and implication of the country’s leaders, whether they were kings, emperors or presidents. This proves the extent to which the museum was, and is, in France, an explicitly national enterprise of great political prestige and symbolic value. National museums have, since the Revolution, been a strong factor in the French nation building process and a clear definition of their administration, in terms of central state ownership, provides the best frame for their identification.

The Louvre, which obviously stands out as France’s most important national museum, may best be defined as a ’Universal Museum’ and thus as a reflection of the Enlightenment philosophy that greatly influenced the French Revolution, and the political agenda behind the establishment of the museum itself. However the breath of its scope, which has always strived for universality, is also the result of France’s status as a former Empire. Its collections were very much formed and defined during the era of Napoleonic expansion and, although it cannot be considered to be a colonial museum, it has throughout history benefitted from France’s relationships with colonies or areas of great political influence. The museum has contributed to founding France’s identity on values and ideas that places it beyond its national and political borders.

The clearest tendency that may be observed in the evolution of France’s national museums over time is geographic and related to the country’s extremely centralised form of government. This means that the great majority of national museums are indeed concentrated in and around the area of Paris (approx. 70%) with a remarkable number of major institutions situated along the banks of the Seine river: the Louvre, Trocadéro (musée de l’homme), Quai Branly, Orsay etc. They are also, by far and away, the most visited (DEP, 2010: 34).

The second very clear tendency is the definite hegemony of the art museum that has received its own administrative structure with the RMN, a phenomena which should be considered as significant when observed in relation to the, relatively speaking, small contingent of history museums. Scientific, historical and technological museums tend to be directly related to one of the other government ministries and form less well-coordinated networks.

These facts indicate that a choice of France’s five most important national museums (out of the eighty museums given in the annex) may neither be representative from a geographical point of view nor from a disciplinary one. It can only consider those institutions whose prestige has made them France’s most famous ambassadors of culture – both for the French themselves and internationally (France is the country with the greatest number of tourists visiting every year). The central hegemony of the Louvre over the world of French museums has already been stated. In choosing five major national museums, an attempt was made to encompass a variety of disciplines and territories, however categories related to France’s ideology of culture guided the selection that mainly seeks to give an idea of the significance of these institutions in terms of the national paradigm. It tries to illustrate the main ideologies that appear to be at work in the policies and programs responsible for the development of France’s national museums: the promotion of universal values (mainly of art); the illustration of national origins, culture and history and the representation of national grandeur and commemoration. One might add a more contemporary ideological tendency that has been put forward in policies behind the most recent national museum creations: the desire to represent diversity and to establish places of cultural dialogue (Cité de l’immigration, Musée du quai Branly). The following table provides basic information on five of the most well known and visited of France’s national museums. Each museum will be considered as a case study at the end of this report, and taken as the most representative example in a specific genealogy of museums read as the expression of the ideologies outlined above.

In 1913, English travel writer Georges Renwick, described Luxembourg as “a curious experiment in nation-making”, (quoted by Pit, 2010: 1). Indeed, politically and geographically it is an exceptional nation-state: the only remaining sovereign Grand Duchy in Europe, it is also one of its smallest members, with a population of half a million inhabitants making the country, as a whole, less populous than most European capital cities. This small country is host to three languages, French, German and Luxembourgish (officially recognized as a distinct language, not just a German dialect, from 1919 onwards), making it an area of great linguistic cultural diversity. In terms of nation-building it has been influenced both by the French and by the German nationbuilding process and nationalist thinking. The comparably small size of Luxembourg allows for a relatively easy and precise study of the processes that established this ‘imagined community’, to employ the famous term used by Benedict Anderson. Its desire to identify and yet differentiate itself from the larger countries that surround it has lead Luxembourg to develop a strong sense of European identity as a means of establishing itself as an international player and partner; a strategy that can be observed in the creation of some its most recent national museums.

An excellent recent study, entitled Inventing Luxembourg: Representations of the Past, Space and Language from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century , published in 2010 describes and analyses the historical master narrative of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg by looking successively at the discourses relating to its history, territory and language. However, we might add that it pays little attention to projects related to its national museums. It does however, very usefully describe the major traits of national historiography – an analysis that we have relied upon and which has proved extremely fruitful and concordant in our consideration of the country’s museums. The authors state in the introduction that: “this book sets out to examine whether the more recent supranational narrative meshes with the classical national master narrative or whether it represents a paradigm shift. Has an exclusive narrative been replaced by an inclusive one? Has the ethnocentric viewpoint given way to a Eurocentric outlook? What elements of (dis)continuity are there between the traditional and the new strands of the master narratives? Both seem to rely on two concepts: particularism and Mischkultur (mixed culture)” (Pit, 2010: 9). This report will consider to what extent we can ask ourselves these same questions in relation to the development of Luxembourg’s national museums and their narratives.

Luxembourg, as an independent sovereign state, free of any foreign occupation since 1867, began establishing national collections at a relatively late stage in comparison to other countries. It did however, immediately appear as a priority to the Grand Duchy, with a decree that established the administrative basis for such an institution in 1968 to create the Grand-Ducal Institute. The two main collections of History and Art and of Natural History, though occupying a modest display area in the Athénée from the 1850s onwards, only became independent institutions in the 1920s and opened their doors to the public shortly before the Second World War.

In 1988, the state museums and archives were officially given the title ‘national’, reflecting along with the 1984 Language Law and the construction of the National Monument of Remembrance in 1985, an “upsurge of interest in representations of the past (both memory and history)”, (Pit, 2010: 8). In terms of cultural policy for national museums, a major turning point was Luxembourg’s role as European Capital of Culture in 1995, an event that crystallised national interest and implication in cultural affairs, allowing the state to measure its “tardiness in matters of cultural infrastructure” (Consulate general of Luxembourg in Shanghai, 2011, online). The city has since invested in major cultural projects including a Philharmonic Hall, National Audiovisual Centre, a National Centre for Literature, but also a new home for its already existing national museums, a new municipal museum dedicated to the city’s history and two new national museums: the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the Fortress – all of which we will consider as case studies further on. The last two examples will show how the notions of Particularism and Mischkultur (mixed culture) have found an expression in this new master narrative reflecting an old image of the city symbolized and envisioned as a fortress, “seen as both oppressive and protective” (Pit, 2010: 4). The fortress represents Luxembourg but also the influence of all the foreign powers who ruled the country as successive occupants, from “Vauban to Wenceslas” (Consulate general of Luxembourg in Shanghai, 2011, online). In the last decade, this image of the country has been materialised through the installation of two museums, one resolutely modern and international, the other clearly national and local.

Geographically speaking, national museums in the Netherlands constitute of a group that is, comparative to other countries, more evenly distributed between the country’s major cities than is generally the case - reflecting, to a certain extent, the nation’s origins in a union of individual provinces. Although an important branch of national museums developed in the Hague in the nineteenth century as the direct initiative of the monarchy founded in 1815, this has not been, as in Belgium, the unique driving force of nationally representative museums – and there has been no concentration of national museums in the capital – as Amsterdam was not the main seat of the royal house. So it is that some of the oldest museums, related to the monarchy, are situated in The Hague, but that Amsterdam and Leiden both constitute important centres for national museums. The creation of the museums in each of these cities is related to different forms of initiative and origins. One can, in a sense, historically relate more civic and private initiatives to certain museums in Amsterdam, in the case of The Hague, the most important museums relate directly to the projects of the monarchy and in Leiden, to the development of the University. This is something we will show in our twinned case studies, by considering in parallel the evolution of the national beaux-arts museums in Amsterdam and in The Hague and museums related to ethnography and the colonial enterprise in Amsterdam and in Leiden.

The Dutch central government developed a generous though somewhat uncoordinated system of museum subsidisation in the twentieth century and the network of national museums was very much expanded during this time thanks to the initiative and generosity of private collectors (Rovers, 2009). Indeed, a strong tradition of private patronage has helped the national museums develop since the beginning of the nineteenth century and one might mention Teylers Museum or Tropenmuseum but it is also the case of certain art collections (Krul, 2009).

The number of museums currently under the administration of a central government agency is about 50 in total (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, 2006: 75). Of these, 30 are related to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, 11 to the Ministry of Defence and others, such as the Ministry of Finance, run the Dutch coin museum in Utrecht or the Tax Museum in Rotterdam for example, whilst the Ministry for Foreign Affairs finances the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (cf. Table).

A plan for the modernisation of collection management of Dutch museums called the Deltaplan (1992) has been implemented since 1988 to achieve greater efficiency in terms of museum and collection management, initiating major renovation and inventory schemes. In parallel, a plan was implemented to completely reorganise state museum financing in a way that has led to increasing financial autonomy and also independence of management generally. Since 2005 however, the state has gone back to a more general system of subsidisation that allows for any museum (be they attached to a central government ministry or not) to apply for state funding.

Out of the thirty nationally-owned state museums, our choice of the most important museums in the Netherlands was made to reflect the geographical spread of these institutions and the principal values that they tend to project. Indeed, as shown by our short study of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague (two of the most frequently visited Dutch museums), Dutch national culture seems to be predominantly represented by the paintings of the Golden Age. The rising sense of nationalism related to the First World War is considered with the case of the Open Air Museum of Arnhem, all the more interesting as it has tried to modernise its foundational concept, moving from a nostalgic vision of country life, to a museology that also uses recent developments in habitat as a means to address social and political issues more pertinent and relevant to contemporary Dutch society. Generally speaking, one finds few museums dealing with issues of religious conflicts – although this might be expected given Dutch history. Dutch relations to its very important colonial past, which formed the basis for the country’s wealth and economic growth up until the decolonization that followed the Second World War, will be considered in a parallel study of the two principal ethnology museums in the Netherlands. The most recent creation in terms of national museums, the Zuiderzee Museum deals with more politically neutral but important environmental issues. Not all museums of importance for national identity can be dealt with in the context of this report, such as the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of the most frequented museums in Holland. In the category of small museums, which however do seem to relate to essential aspects of Dutch history, one should mention: Anne Frank House and the Dutch Resistance Museum (see Annex table).

The confederate form of its government and the cantonal structure of the Swiss state largely conditions Switzerland’s museum geography. Cultural affairs are not generally managed by the federal government but are traditionally the jurisdiction of the cantons, and all except a handful of Switzerland’s 949 museums are not national (Federal Department for the Interior, 2005: 3). The birth of Switzerland’s first national museum was long and arduous and great apprehension was repeatedly expressed at the idea of such an institution. For many Swiss, it represented an obvious contradiction to the state’s federal-national principal. In the years between the establishment of the first Helvetic Republic (1798-1803) up until the creation of the Swiss confederate state in 1848 and following, no national museums of any kind were founded. A material reason for this was that the creation of the Federal state was not accompanied by any massive movement of secularization, such as that which had, in France, transferred huge quantities of church possessions and artworks into the hands of the state. In Switzerland, the secularization of ecclesiastical treasures was a gradual process going back to the period of the Reformation and thus predating national concerns. This process had already given rise to many local and regional museum institutions, as a well-developed pre-national principal that boasted fine collections of international stature. Indeed, the project for a national museum presented an obvious difficulty as it implied choosing one place where the country’s national heritage would be presented and represented. However diplomatic difficulties were overturned by the need to stop the sale and export of Swiss antiquities abroad. Yet, since the establishment of the Landesmuseum, in Zurich in 1890, the national museum institution has, though somewhat half heartedly, tried to expand to provide more territorial representativity than the existence of one unique institution established in Zurich can offer. It has only, in the last two decades, come to include the museum of the Château de Prangins in French Switzerland and the Forum Schweizer Geschichte Schwyz, in the German speaking Alpine region (cf. Annex table). The Forum (1995) is, in a sense, the first museum to have been founded to celebrate an idea of the Swiss nation (the Landesmuseum was itself founded to deal with the exodus of Swiss material culture). Its foundation celebrates the 700th anniversary of the Swiss confederation.

In many traditional and high profile fields of collecting, such as the fine arts, especially contemporary art and foreign old masters, ethnography and classical antiquities, Switzerland’s largest and most significant museums are either municipal, cantonal or private institutions. The federal government generally has no or little involvement in the promotion of contemporary artistic expression. In terms of subject matter, Switzerland’s nationally owned museums deal mainly with traditional artistic practices or historical issues of national or local importance. Most authors underline the fact that the Swiss museum landscape is extremely varied and fragmented. The difficulty of obtaining a clear overview and statistical information concerning questions of financing and management of Swiss museums is a problem indicated by various sources (Brülisauer, Schüle, 2004). Yvette Jaggi, president of the Suisse federal cultural foundation, has commented on the absence of public debate concerning a federal cultural policy as a possible consequence of Switzerland’s plurilingual society, which, though source of cultural diversity and richness, also makes communication and exchange more difficult (Pro Helvetia, 2005: 8). The selection of museums chosen in the table below, and in the case studies, shows that Switzerland’s most important ‘national’ museums do not necessarily correspond with Switzerland’s most important museums, according to criteria of visitor numbers or general renown. In terms of art museums for example, and as included in the annex, the collections of Basel, Bern, Geneva or the Kunsthaus of Zurich are more renowned then those of the Landesmuseum. Furthermore, only two of the selected museums are directly run by the Federal state as part of the official network of Federal museums. Indeed, this selection is based on two principals allowing us to go beyond to the very strongly restricted Swiss national museum label (since 2010 it includes only 3 museums). The museums chosen are all mainly financed by the Federal state and their narrative is clearly of ‘national’ scope, in the Swiss context.

Les ouvrages choisis éclairent les modalités de l’essor de l’« histoire de l’art globale » qui interroge non seulement l’état de la discipline aujourd’hui, mais également sa genèse et la manière dont elle conçoit son rôle. Susanne Leeb procède, selon une perspective diachronique, à l’examen de la notion d’« arts du monde » et de la question du canon et des catégories. Parallèlement, avec les travaux de Georges Didi-Huberman et Walter Grasskamp, on s’arrête sur le moment particulier que représente, pour les historiens de l’art, le « musée imaginaire » de Malraux, et sur leur réexamen critique du principe universaliste exemplifié par ses travaux. Les ouvrages de Kavita Singh et de Nicholas Thomas permettent de rattacher ce volet plus conceptuel aux problèmes concrets des conséquences de la collection et de l’interprétation d’objets et d’œuvres dans un monde postcolonial ou postmoderne, essentiellement incompatible avec des concepts totalisants.

An on-going crisis of cultural representation, informed by postcolonial studies and theories of multiculturalism [1], have in the last two decades ushered in major international research projects and large-scale renovation plans in ethnographic museums across Europe. [2] These have transformed the museum landscape at a remarkable pace whilst redefining the terms of collaboration between academics and curators. Michael Kraus opens this collected volume, dealing more specifically with museums in the German-speaking world, by considering a question of vocabulary that illustrates the uneasy relationship between ethnography as an academic discipline and the museum (10-12). Though the term "Völkerkunde" was for a long time interchangeable with ethnography and anthropology, recent usage has tended to retain the first only in relation to work with collections whilst universities have privileged the more easily translatable term of "ethnography". Rather than use this observation to illustrate a lag or out-datedness of the museum, he asks how these spheres of historically related interests came to function out of sync with each other to such an extent that they no longer use the same words to characterize their disciplinary position.