Cathedrals of Urban Modernity

Creation of the First Museums of Contemporary Art

J. Pedro Lorente

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429839832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

First published in 1998, this volume explores the expanding wave of a new kind of museums of contemporary art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lorente examines their 'coming of age' and the weight of their museological legacy, arguing that the establishment of great national museums of art at London and Paris radiated out, carrying their influence with it. This book emerged as part of a series on towns and cities and has a focus on London and Paris as centres of artistic innovation.

Chapter One
New kinds of museums in the nineteenth century: the 'cathedrals of urban modernity'

Metaphors are glittering attention-catchers, most useful for text headings and openings, when it is essential to capture the imagination of readers. One of the most successful examples of this Homeric trick is the famous line, now quoted in many handbooks of art history, by which towards 1040 a writer called Radulfo Gláber described the development of medieval cathedrals as a new cloak, clothing in white new stones the old fabric of European cities. If he had come back to life any time between the French Revolution and World War I, he might have rhapsodised in similar terms over the garlands of iron and marble blooming then in most cities of the Western world. Libraries, museums, city halls, parliaments, academies, palaces of justice, opera houses, leisure attractions like the Eiffel tower, were the new temples watching over the growth of modern cities around them, as church towers and the domes of cathedrals had dominated the skyline of every town or court hitherto.

These new civic temples were typical developments of the nineteenth century (Pevsner, 1976), but perhaps none of them deserves more rightfully the title of 'cathedrals of urban modernity' than those specially consecrated to contemporary art, because they were a brand new invention of the nineteenth-century metropolis. Other innovations of the period, as regards the boom in art palaces, were the halls for temporary art exhibitions (Kunsthalle, world fair pavilions), the museums specialising in arts and crafts (museums of industrial design, galleries of decorative arts, museums for the productions of regional popular traditions) or those conceived to pay homage to a country's heroes and culture (national portrait galleries, halls of fame). However, it could be argued, agreeing with what Francis Haskell has enthusiastically said, that 'the most important new development of the nineteenth century [regarding art galleries] was the creation of museums designed to hold contemporary art' (Haskell, 1981: 7). The first of them, created in Paris, was officially called Musée des Artistes Vivants - Museum of Living Artists - and a range of names was used for its equivalents elsewhere, although the denomination which finally prevailed was 'museum of contemporary art' or else 'museum of modern art' (a significant distinction between these two names only appeared in the twentieth century)·

Cities as spearheads of innovative public support of art

The birth of a new type of museum specialising in recent art has to be considered within its historical context: the emergence of a modern art world, which occurred simultaneously with the development of modern urban culture. As Donald J. Olsen has persuasively argued, it is inconceivable to attempt writing a history of universities, academies, museums, artists' studios, concert halls, or any other cultural institution without paying homage to the role played in their development by urban growth; and vice-versa, it is equally impossible to disentangle the history of great cities from the span of their cultural institutions: 'culture as we know it would find it hard to exist without cities' (Olsen, 1993: 172). Following the industrial revolution and massive migrations from the countryside fostered by the development of transport in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a rapidly growing share of the population in Western Europe became urban inhabitants. It was in such an urban context and particularly in capital cities that the first public museums and great galleries were born, mainly in the largest metropolises of London, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam, but also in new royal capitals hoping to attract population, such as Dresden and St Petersburg - where the erection of the Zwinger complex and the Hermitage, out of low lying marshland, followed their promotion as new capitals of the Saxon-Polish kingdom and the Russian Empire.

The parallel growth of modern urban life and public museums has often been associated with the social emergence of the bourgeoisie and the start of a new age of leisure and tourism (Horne, 1984). If cities and towns of medieval and early-modern Europe had competed to possess important relics and great churches, which had inspired large pilgrimages and increased their population and prosperity, now they would compete in acquiring major art works for their galleries¹ and in trumpeting their cultural venues. Museums and urban monuments were also becoming people-attractors and great contributors to a city's fame and reputation. There is no doubt that a high profile in the arts can raise the historic reputation of a city. The Athens of Pericles or the Florence of Lorenzo il Magnifico have always enjoyed a 'Golden Age' image thanks to their fame as 'art capitals', notwithstanding the pains of historians who have repeatedly proved how far they were from being prosperous cities or political paradises. Aware of the potential for eternal glamour, every modern metropolis would also seek to establish a reputation as an art emporium, inviting comparisons with the most renowned art capitals of Antiquity. Thus nineteenth-century Paris and London, whose churches and civic monuments could not compete as tourist attractions to those visited by the cultural pilgrims of the 'Grand Tour', became rivals in the hunt for treasure to stock their collections and museums, formulating a myth of themselves as, respectively, the new Rome and the new Athens.

Nineteenth-century Paris and London were, above all, rivals in international politics, in the world-wide colonial context, and in the cosmopolitan luxury trades catering for the demands of the wealthy. Both grew enormously; their centres becoming favoured urban stages for bourgeois parading thanks to decisive beautifying programmes which gained momentum as the century advanced. Each city took a pride in developing civic buildings, broadened roads, provided public transport, and popular entertainment as symbols of modernity (Girouard, 1985: 330-333; Hohenberg & Lees, 1985: 290-330; Hall, 1986; Wagenaar, 1993; Dethier & Guiheux, 1994). This began to take shape when the bourgeoisie got an important share of political power, with the July Revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain. At that period Paris had almost 800,000 inhabitants and London more than 1,700,000. Yet the emergence of Paris and London as world metropolises should not only be measured politically or simply in terms of the quantity of population, but also regarding their new influence as 'cultural capitals'. In fact all that came together most naturally. It is no surprise that the switching geographies of art hubs drawn by cultural historians tend to coincide with political, religious or business centres, because cultural prominence has always been very interconnected with military, religious or economic might. Since antiquity art treasures have always been easy looting-prey for the powerful. Art professionals, on the other hand, also tend to migrate to centres of power, or to populous and wealthy cities. Thus in nineteenth-century Europe, London emerged as the modern centre of art dealing and collecting, whilst Paris eventually succeeded in replacing Rome as world art capital and the preferred dwelling place for artists, especially in the last quarter of the century, when art students arrived there in their thousands in pursuit of the celebrated bohemian life. Both cities became also new capitals of 'cultural tourism' and were on the forefront of the growing concern of modern societies over questions of quality of life.

In this context, museums mushroomed as major attractions, becoming in the nineteenth century some of the most popular attractions within the tourist and cultural 'industries', which acquired growing importance to boost cities as lively environments. For any common bourgeois - typical member of the urban middle class - the pursuit of travels, cultural interests and leisure was then commonplace (Meller, 1976; Bailey, 1978; Green, 1990). Therein lies the origin of what Jürgen Habermas has termed the 'bourgeois public sphere' (Habermas, 1989: 27-43): an urban culture of promenades and parks, literary salons, music/theatre venues, coffee houses and recreation clubs, museums, libraries/cabinets de lecture, newspapers and magazines, public exhibitions and fairs, art auctions and print/antique shops, art unions and cultural societies.

The blooming of this new cultural scene affected the way in which contemporary art was produced and consumed. In the palaces of the ancien régime, artists, like other servants, would be given studios and/or lodging on the premises; but in the upper-class urban dwellings of bourgeois society, despite the occasional invitation to the famous ones to attend a dinner party or a salon littéraire, accommodating 'artists-in-residence' became a rarity. Furthermore, the new élites of businesspeople had very little time or inclination to visit artists' studios, many of which were in cheap garrets or in not too respectable city areas. Thus, the old aristocratic ways of exercising patronage, by the commissioning or the purchase of works directly from artists and the close survey of their work, gave way to a bourgeois market economy where art became a commodity shown and sold to its public not directly by the producer, but through the mediation of suppliers. This mediation between artist and society was the business of an array of newly consolidated professions and spaces: the art dealers, the art critics, the press, the engraved reproductions of famous art-works, the popular lotteries of contemporary art works organised by the 'art unions' (also called Kunstvereine, Societés pour l'encouragement des arts, Società promotrici di Belli Arti, etc), the temporary exhibitions, the public museums and galleries.

This phenomenom of art brokerage paved the way 'towards a modern art world' (Allen, 1995), in which London and Paris took the lead. This period was a watershed in the evolution of public support for art production. Art exhibitions were, of course, an old tradition in many historic towns, as adornments to religious or monarchical festivals; but in the period from the French Revolution to World War I they multiplied everywhere, becoming crucial platforms for: a) launching the public success of artists in the early stages of their careers, and b) gathering in a city works brought from far away. After all, the nineteenth century was the great age of exhibitions of all sorts, from the early dioramas or panoramas and rather modest solo exhibitions mounted in studios and barracks by artists or entrepreneurs, to the official exhibitions, annual Salons, Biennali and Universal Expositions, where the prestige of nations was at stake (Holt, 1979, 1981, 1988; Mainardi, 1987, 1993). However, the nineteenth century, or more broadly, the time from the second half of the eighteen century to the First World War was also, as Germain Bazin called it, 'the museum age'.

A museum is, in its simplest definition, a permanent display made public for general education. Thus public accessibility is central to the raison d'être of a museum, which was rather non-existent in the Greek votive repositories or the famous Mouseion of Alexandria, but was already championed in Roman times by Agripa, who had thought of gathering the state's art treasures for public display and even planned a purpose-built palace in the city centre, so that all citizens could enjoy access to them (Fechner, 1993: 15 and 31, footnote 33). In Early Modern Europe the first collections regularly open to visitors - at least the respectable segment of the public - were actually royal, ecclesiastic or university property. The early museums therefore stood, physically and symbolically, by the authorities: as embodiments of a power to 'show and tell' (Bennett, 1995: 87). Only in the eighteenth century did the principle of general accessibility become the rule; this was the beginning of what can be termed, properly speaking, 'public museums', open to all kinds of people. Still, with the exception of the British Museum and, after the French Revolution, the Louvre, they were public displays but not necessarily publicly owned; which is part of the reason why the first museums of antiquities and old masters came to be placed, most naturally, in the heart of the capitals, near the seats of power. In fact, some were dynastic galleries in historic palaces which were now wide open to visitors, such as the Uffizi in Florence, the Capitol Museum in Rome, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Stallhof in Dresden, the Luxembourg and the Louvre in Paris or the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Others were purpose-built museums, also erected near the palaces of power in capital cities, like the Museum Fredericianum at Cassel, Frederick the Great's gallery at Sanssouci, the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican, the Royal Museum of Antiquities in Naples or the Prado in Madrid. (The British Museum of London, the first 'national' museum, belongs to both groups, because it first opened in a ducal palace, Montagu House, but in the nineteenth century a new building was erected for it in a palatial neo-classical style designed by Robert Smirke).

Thus capital cities centralised the national provision of museums, cultural amenities and academies for the training of artists - liberal politics inspired by the French Revolution had abolished the guilds of the ancien régime. The ebullience of the modern metropolis nurtured the development of 'art districts', catalysed by two types of magnet, which would usually attract each other: on the one hand the thriving hubs of artists' studios and art merchants, on the other hand the lavish epicentre of educational facilities. From their garrets on the edge of the historic city centre, artists gazed with trepidation upon urban life: some of the liveliest arts quarters in nineteenth-century Paris wriggled uphill to suburban mounts like La Nouvelle Athènes, Montmartre, Montparnasse. Likewise, in Rome, the national schools/residences built by several governments for their artists and scholars were often located in suburban villas perched on some sort of natural promontory,² thus evoking Mount Akademos, the celebrated hill near Athens were Plato and his disciples used to meet. Nothing extraordinary was, in such a context, the fact that many museum buildings were also planned in forms reminiscent of the classic acropolis: a dramatic skyline of clustered 'museum districts'. The climb to the museum door was usually compared to the ascent to knowledge - a favourite rhetoric figure for Ruskin, who wanted museum visitors to be like devout pilgrims walking a mile or two to climb for access to the precious 'gems found at the top' (Koven, 1994: 26 and 46 footnote 7). Nineteenth-century museums and galleries would mushroom on the top of ranks of impressive stairs or up a steep hill. With their neo-Greek façades and imposing domes, museums came to dominate nineteenth-century cityscapes, largely superseding churches as the focal points of many major street perspectives.

Appropriately, architectural critics like to compare the temple-like museums of the nineteenth century to three historic building-types usually placed in the pinnacle of town-settlements: the Greek and Roman temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of the Middle Ages, or Renaissance and Baroque palaces (Pevsner, 1976, 11-26 and 111-138; Bahns, 1977, 176-192; Miller-Lane, 1979, 101-114; Monnier, 1994, 7-17; Foucart, 1994, 122-135). In addition, museums have often been compared to cemeteries, and in fact some cultural historians are prone to stress that the monumentality of museum buildings derived from ancient funerary pantheons and antique memorials to the famous dead, also found situated towering on a hill or erected at the top of impressive stairs (Traeger, 1981; Davis, 1990: 108).

Also related to museums is another typical civil-sacred space which appeared in many European capitals in the nineteenth century: the halls of fame and national pantheons, civic temples decorated with busts and sculptures like the Pantheon of Paris or the Walhalla of Regensburg. The similarities of national pantheons and museums in their practices of reinventing the past are obvious (cf. Horne, 1984: 17-20). Some of the most typical museum exhibits were old sepulchres, funerary garments, portraits of celebrities, and narrative paintings of famous historical events (Kahsnitz, 1977). Moreover, museum buildings often had their monumental halls and ornamental facades garnished with portraits and/or names of famous artists (Hetherington, 1978).

Such parallels museum/pantheons seem confirmed by the symbolic fact that some founders of art galleries used them as their mausoleum, an architectural problem successfully solved by John Soane in Dulwich Picture Gallery on the outskirts of London (Waterfield, 1987) and echoed at the University of North Carolina where the Ackland Memorial Art Gallery contains the tomb of Mr Ackland (Burt, 1977: 369). Such taste for museum/mausoleums became especially strong amongst North American donors, albeit more usually placing the tomb of the founder out of the gallery building, in the surrounding grounds, as at the Huntington Gallery in San Marino, California. Some of the most famous examples of this fashion are very recent, like the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, whose founder's grave dominates the site, marked by a granite slab on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, or the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, whose garden also guards the burial place of the collector (Duncan, 1995: 72, 82-89 and 152 footnotes 31-41). In other cases art galleries were used as burial places for artists: visitors to the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen find, together with his art collections and numerous own works, the tomb of the famous sculptor in the patio (Jorgensen, 1984). Similarly, the painter John Trumbull, founder of the art gallery at Yale University, specified that he and his wife be buried under his portrait of George Washington - the museum has always fulfilled his wish in spite of the changes of site: the couple now lie in a cellar directly beneath Washington's portrait (Burt, 1977: 47). However the better known case is perhaps the tomb of Auguste Rodin in front of the entrance of his Museum in Meudon, which attracts numerous tourists in pilgrimage.

Finally, another new type of popular outlet ubiquitous in the urban culture of the nineteenth century was provided by the shopping arcades, department stores, fun fairs and amusement parks, which also relate to museums as they functioned as family attractions displaying all sorts of curiosities, luxuries, wonders and extravagances (Mumford, 1940: 113 and 263; Bennett, 1995: 30 and 74). However, these attractions were seen by museum curators as counter-examples of the way a serious cultural institution should be articulated. The founder of the Australian National Museum of Victoria used to say: 'a private collection can resemble a circus, a museum must not' (Goodman, 1990). It seems that museum professionals worked with this distinctive idea in mind. David Murray, one of the fathers of the historiography of museums, wrote that the modernity of a museum was expressed in its specialisation, and in its careful and accurate classification (Murray, 1904: 231).

In fact, the fear of circuses had already been established in the profession long before. Some precedents for the pursuit of classification and specialisation can be traced back in time as far as, for example, seventeenth century collections, where living creatures were already separated in botanical or zoological gardens while dead specimens were put in the repositories of scientific societies (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992: 140). Other early examples of a remarkable tendency towards classification and specialisation in museums had been set by some eighteenth-century courts. Here carefully classified displays of antiquities - assorted not chronologically, but by typology - were open to the public as specialised museums: the Museo Capitolino, Villa Albani and the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome or the Museo del Palazzo degli Studi in Naples curiously, all of them later lost their 'specialised' character since they were rapidly enlarged and complemented with galleries of paintings (Bazin, 1967: 163-165). In picture galleries a first step towards a classification by schools and chronology was taken by Christian von Mechel in his display of the Dusseldorf Gallery in 1755 and his re-arrangement in 1779 of the imperial collections at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, for which Thomas Dacosta Kauffaman has also found other eighteenth-century precedents in the work of other curators, including Roos in Vienna and Carl Heinrich von Heinecken in Dresden (Pevsner, 1976; Dacosta Kaufmann, 1994).

Despite these examples of earlier specialisation, it is essential to emphasise that, in general, the move towards separating contemporary art from old masterworks in art collections only became a widespread trend during the museum age. In the courts of the ancien régime, every studiolo, galerie, and Kunstkammer would gather a variety of items, re...