Engines of Culture

Philanthropy and Art Museums

Daniel M. Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138509603
• eBook ISBN: 9781351294027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book shows why American social policy was incomplete with respect to the arts and argues that art museums are an instructive example of the accommodation of public and private interests. It is useful for political scientists, policymakers, scholars of philanthropy, artists, and historians.

1
Museums for the Public

The development of art museums in America since the 1870’s has been a function of their involvement in the philanthropic process and, to a lesser extent, of their need to justify additional support from government funds. The earliest American art galleries, in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, were, for the most part, either business enterprises or the static property of learned societies; after the Civil War, changing sources and patterns of financial support modified museum goals and policies. The public museums established in the past ninety years had their origin in creative philanthropy—benevolent action by groups of private individuals who had a complex vision of the potentialities of the institutions they supported. As the American museums matured, the actions and ideas of these individuals were colored by the public character of the institutions they founded and supported.

The influence of philanthropy and public support on museum development is evident in several areas. Donors and administrators carefully articulated moral and social justifications for benefactions and for the institutions’ existence and expansion. One result of this social concern on the part of philanthropists was that American art galleries, dependent on philanthropic and municipal support, combined the functions of acquisition, exhibition and exposition at an earlier date than most museums in Europe, which were conceived mainly as national or local treasure houses. Moreover, the combination of public and private funds, which created and sustained most American museums, made them extremely sensitive to public opinion and to national and local crises in politics, economics and social thought. Despite the egotism and short-sightedness of some leading benefactors, art museums have moved with a changing America from 1870 to the present day to become the largest and perhaps the most significant voluntarily supported cultural institutions in modern history.

In 1845, William Dunlap, historian of art and design in America, saw no indication of any effort to create public art galleries.¹ A quarter-century later, public museums were being founded across the nation, although the Middle-Atlantic and North-Central states contained about seventy-five percent of museum property until the third decade of the twentieth century.

The public museums founded in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries differed from earlier American galleries in having specific programs for public service, enunciated and administered by independent corporations. These institutions were inspired by and borrowed their techniques for exhibition from European museums. But motives and methods developed in Europe were modified by American patterns of philanthropy, education, and government.

European museums were the product of eighteenth and nineteenth century educational theory, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In some cases, France particularly, they were made possible by violent social revolutions. These galleries were repositories of national and international treasures, symbols of national prestige, even emblems of the middle class’ victory over the aristocracy in struggles for power. Their educational function was conceived in limited terms; the past teaching by example. They were often forbidding, dark, disorganized and cluttered. Few efforts were made to publicize the collections or to develop coherent educational programs until the twentieth century. European museums were always maintained by the public treasury; private philanthropy aided, but neither created nor sustained the Louvre or the National Gallery of London.²

American public museums contrast sharply with this description. In the nineteenth century, American philanthropists did not believe the country had a national art treasure worthy of museum exhibition; our national prestige could not be measured in terms of a lengthy past which yielded glorious examples of a high level of civilization.* Our private art collections had been made in one generation; there were no aristocratic family collections to compare with those in Europe and to inspire similar envy and hatred among the newly-powerful middle class. Founders of American public museums were concerned about the quality of culture in America and the role of taste in civilized life. The institutions they created were conceived as instruments of direct and indirect education, and American museums benefitted from the fact that their founding coincided with a revolution in educational thought.

The most important difference between Europe and America was the role of private citizens in creating and sustaining the institutions. Museum growth in America had a double dynamic: on one hand, the direct and subtle influence of the need for approval, concessions, funds, and services from municipal and state governments; on the other, the changing goals and methods of private philanthropists. Private collectors and self-appointed guardians of culture were transformed into public benefactors by the interaction of their own concern for public welfare with the need to co-operate with the elected and appointed representatives of the people. Nineteenth-century philanthropists, usually able to forge their own policies, condescended to representatives of local government only if they desired. But in the twentieth century, changes in American society and politics combined with changes in the means and ends of philanthropy to make prospective benefactors more sensitive to the needs and desires of the public, less willing and able to convert the living into the dead hand.

European visitors have described the uniqueness of American art museums. They have emphasized the central importance of private benefactors, the excellence and size of museum buildings, the attractiveness of exhibits, the resourcefulness of museum directors who must serve philanthropists and communities as well as art, the scope and variety of museum educational programs, and the desire of almost every public museum to possess a collection from all parts of the world and all periods of history. These points were made in detail by the French art historian, Rene Brimo, whose study of the history of taste and art institutions in America appeared in 1938. Brimo explained that American public galleries were created to serve both a social and intellectual elite and the general public, and that reliance on private philanthropy made American museums more subject to changes in public taste than those in Europe.³

Brimo also described some indirect results of dependence on private funds. Perhaps the most important result, from his point of view, was the close collaboration between museums and private collectors who were, of course, potential donors of funds and objects. Significant also were the activities outside the visual arts undertaken by American museums, particularly concert programs and lecture courses in music, literature, drama, and history. European museums, Brimo asserted, favored the elite while those in America encouraged “social concern as philanthropy for social profit, as patronage to instruct...not only an elite but the great public toward an ideal of perfection.” In the course of their development, he concluded, American museums became “the center and the personification of the intellectual life of the United States.”⁴

The public museums described by Brimo and other Europeans were founded in most major American cities between 1870 and 1920 and have several common characteristics: dependence for support on gifts and bequests and, in most cases, on municipal tax funds; a name which reflects collective rather than individual action, though a donor’s name may be used for a wing or a special room; and a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees which formulates policy and is responsible for selecting professional administrators. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago are the leading examples of this form of museum organization. These museums view themselves as requesting support by and as serving the broadest possible public.

This dominant type of museum has had a pervasive influence. Many galleries created from the collections of single individuals or historical societies have been transformed into public museums.⁵ Others, founded to promote particular points of view, particularly the modern art movement, have obtained tax exemption by claiming that special pleading for modern art is an educational activity.

There are at least eight other types of art museums in America, founded by philanthropists or public institutions, but differing from the public museums in origin or goals.⁶ The simplest ones are the private galleries left to the public as monuments to their donors. Static in character, they rely on only one philanthropic act; the Gardner Museum in Boston and the Barnes collection in Philadelphia are examples, A similar type are the museums bearing the name of a single donor, but with capacity and funds for growth; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums in New York, for instance. A third type initiated by a single philanthropist is closely related to the public museums: in Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, one man, industrialist Stephen Salisbury, provided the initial funds for a museum in the hope that the community would take responsibility for the institution’s growth. A fourth variety is the university museum founded by a single benefactor, with the university taking responsibility for maintenance and growth; the museum at Stanford and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard are illustrations.

Most American museums, however, like the public galleries, were founded and are sustained by collective action. Some were organized as community activities by academies or historical societies; a few of these, such as the galleries in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Portland, Oregon, became public museums; others, like the museums of the New York and Wisconsin Historical Societies remained limited in size and aspiration. A number of museums were founded by direct government action; the New York State Museum and the St. Louis City Museum come to mind. A seventh type are those founded by private philanthropy which have become government agencies, examples of which are the National Gallery, endowed by Andrew Mellon, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, originally organized by private citizens. Finally, there are several museums, like those in Newark and Jamestown, which were initially administered by public libraries.

Although museum philanthropy is in some ways a new departure, intimately related to changing patterns of both art patronage and education, it has several characteristics in common with other kinds of benefactions. Like gifts to social welfare agencies and higher education in the past century, museum philanthropy was grounded in an urge to instruct and uplift the American people. It shares with religious charity a desire to promote and disseminate knowledge of certain eternal verities; in fact, museums were often viewed as surrogate churches.⁷ Museums, like other objects of voluntary benevolent action in America, reflected philanthropists’ belief that there are unique values in nongovernmental operations. Moreover, museum philanthropy shares with every other modern American charitable cause the conviction that growth and progress are necessary in society and in charitable institutions; few public museums have been considered complete. In addition, although museum philanthropy, more than most other causes, engaged a donor’s personality, museums were affected by the twentieth-century shift in emphasis from individual small gifts to organized, large-scale benefactions.⁸

By the end of the nineteenth century, most museum philanthropists and administrators had developed a mythology about their role which has persisted to the present day. They viewed themselves as consecrated enthusiasts bringing taste and truth to the vulgar. This was a convenient justification for ignoring the facts about municipal appropriations and the unvarnished egotism of many gifts and bequests. Their self-satisfaction was reinforced in the twentieth century by the international reputation acquired by American public museums.

In the nineteenth century, American philanthropists did not believe our museums could ever rival major European galleries. But great feats of private art collecting, the prelude to almost every large benefaction, continuous European social and political upheavals, and the growing excellence of American art gave them the opportunity to equal European galleries by the third decade of the twentieth century. By that time, however, instead of merely rivaling European treasure-houses most American public museums were moving in two directions; toward acquisition of increasingly valuable collections and toward community service, mainly as educational institutions.

What Russell Lynes describes as the “Art World,” somewhat suspect to many Americans during the nineteenth century, became both respectable and a big business in the same years that public museums were maturing.⁹ These two developments are related: museum growth stimulated the art market, and the opportunity to convert whim into charity provided a moral justification for private collecting on any scale. To put it another way, a desire to consume conspicuously and to shine in the glory reflected from possessed masterpieces was often stimulated and justified by the moral and ethical impulses of American philanthropy over the past three-quarters of a century.

*The terms “philanthropist” and “museum philanthropist” are used in a broad sense throughout this essay; attitudes and values ascribed to them refer to statements and actions by donors of funds and art objects and to opinions expressed at the donors’ request by their spokesmen, professional museum administrators and personal art advisers.

2
Impulse and Justification

Lewis Mumford has argued that public museums are “a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory culture.”¹⁰ But the impulse to create and contribute to art museums was more complex. For better and for worse, museum philanthropists were “curious” in order to moralize, “acquisitive” for the sake of social and educational ideals, and “preyed” on an older culture in order to stimulate a younger one. Their benefactions were encouraged and justified by nineteenth century anxieties about the quality of American life, imported and domestic ideas about progress, improvement and spiritual education, and, perhaps most important, personal altruism and involvement with works of art.

Concern for improvement and uplift involved many philanthropists in a paradoxical justification of their activities: museums were viewed as both utilitarian instruments and antidotes to life in modern America. Similarly, disinterested altruism was often complicated by yearning for social status and prestige and, in the twentieth century, by a desire to control the destiny of surplus funds and estates rather than to allow the government to do so.

Most benefactors were moved by several motives; it is difficult to say which one was the most telling. Art philanthropy, unlike most other kinds of charity, has often represented the extension of an individual’s most satisfying avocation into public service. Perhaps it enabled a man to have his cake and his conscience at the same time, to combine aesthetic delight with good works. The glamour and adventure of art collecting by the merchant princes and princesses of the Gilded Age and after have been recorded elsewhere in considerable detail.¹¹ However, it is necessary to analyze and summarize the anxieties, intellectual and social assumptions, and personal considerations which were reflected in the institutions there men and women founded and sustained.

Although the first genuine public museums were founded in the decades after the Civil War, the mood which led to their creation had its roots in the first half of the century. In the midst of material prosperity and national expansion, many men were concerned about the spiritual side of American life. This concern, reflected in literature and in agitation for religious, social, and educational reform, was also expressed by people interested in art. The founders of the National Institute, the forerunner of the National Gallery of Art, for example, declared in 1840 that “the sons of the intelligent and enlightened and virtuous men who achieved the independence and secured our freedom” were “less intelligent, less enlightened...than their sires.”¹²

The beneficent influence of art on manners and morals was a major theme for many orators and journalists in the decades before the Civil War. To cite a single example which might be duplicated many times, Frederick A. P. Barnard, the well-known educational leader, declared in 1854 that “our territorial expansion and physical power have outstripped the march of our intellectual cultivation and our social refinement.” Art provided a remedy for this deficiency, he continued; it promoted public and private morality. Barnard admonished those whose “tastes have risen above the dead level that characterizes our country” to promote the cause of art.¹³

These anxieties about ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s note
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1. Museums for the Public
• 2. Impulse and Justification
• 3. Sources of Patterns of Museum Philanthropy
• 4. Philanthropy and Museum Policy
• 5. Private Desires and Public Welfare
• Notes
• Index