Museums, Modernity and Conflict

Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century

Kate Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000260397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts.

Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden.

Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

Part I

Collecting and conflict

1Salvage and speculation

Collecting on the London art market after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)

Tom Stammers

Introduction

According to Guido Guerzoni in his celebrated overview of the British art market: ‘War was the true mother of the market, with its thefts, robberies, abuses of power and confiscations.’ In a provocative analysis, Guerzoni described how the nineteenth-century artistic economy thrived on the ‘decomposition’ of the social structures in neighbouring states. ‘From time immemorial, traumatic political turmoil (risings, rebellions, coups etc) were accompanied by the arrival of exiles and fugitives in London, a city which welcomed them with the sale of their treasures.’¹ This observation was true for the entire age of revolutions, as British collectors had been quick to profit from the periodic crises engulfing the French monarchy, and their acquisitions fed into museum and gallery development. The abolition of corporate institutions and the attack on the nobility and clergy after 1789 threw a huge quantity of artworks onto the open market, with British aristocrats in the vanguard of buying up Boulle cabinets, Sèvres porcelain and rare books (a cross-Channel trade that flourished with the connivance of French dealers and despite the imposition of a wartime blockade).² Thanks in part to the influx of émigré collections, London emerged from the French Revolution as the undisputed hegemon of the European art market. London's commanding share of art arose from its commercial dynamism, in marked contrast to coercive methods employed by Napoleonic armies who plundered continental collections for the profit of the Louvre.³

Subsequent revolutions in July 1830 (with the overthrow of the Bourbons) and February 1848 (the fall of the Orléans dynasty) drove the toppled dynasties into exile. For pretenders of all stripes, London became a site of political manoeuvring and financial restructuring. The recently elected Prince-President of the Second Republic, Louis-Napoléon, arranged a sale at Christie's in 1849 to free up capital for his imperial ambitions; in May 1853 Christie's witnessed the dispersal of the paintings of Louis-Philippe, including many Spanish masters, three years after the king's death at Claremont, Surrey.⁴ The crisis of 1870–1871 was particularly acute, since it witnessed not only the collapse of the monarchical system – embodied in the Second Empire of Napoleon III – but also military defeat at the hands of Prussia, a painful occupation and siege of the capital, and finally a metropolitan insurgency against the National Government in Versailles. With the data taken from customs receipts and the volume of imports, Guerzoni argued that in 1870–1871 the number of auctions in Paris fell from 383 in 1869 to 268 in 1870 and 80 in 1871, as the political and military crisis brought business to a standstill, whereas in London over these same years the number of sales increased from 196 to 205, and from 223 to 231 by 1872. This can be backed up by considering London's market share of European sales, which rose from 25% in 1869 to 32% in 1870, 41% in 1871 – the zenith of the crisis – and remained a healthy 31% in 1872.⁵

Guerzoni's econometric approach has underlined the central dynamic by which different poles of the art market were periodically paralysed or replenished by the effects of war. Such indirect consequences of conflict on collecting have received far less attention that more overtly coercive processes of transferring and sometimes deliberately destroying works of art, some of which were also visible in 1870–1871. Prussian scholars in 1870 undertook a full inquiry into works of art which had been looted from German galleries by the Napoleonic armies seven decades before, although the reclamation of lost art was not written into the final peace treaty.⁶ The French press were horrified by the destruction of historic buildings caused by Prussian shelling – such as the burning of the palace of Saint-Cloud, and the loss of the library at Strasbourg – finding in this type of cultural atrocities a barbaric assault on French civilisation.⁷ Meanwhile within Paris the revolutionary government of the Commune instigated a policy of iconoclasm against the despised symbols of the monarchical past, whether the memorial to Louis XVI, the Chapelle Expiatoire (which was not demolished due to lack of time) or the Vendôme Column topped by a statue of Napoleon I (which was). The enduring intolerance to political signs in France has been recently diagnosed by Emmanuel Fureix via the metaphor of the ‘injured eye’ (l'oeil brisé).⁸ Confiscation, looting, expropriation, iconoclasm, vandalism: such phenomena have been generated a significant literature, whereas the less volitional and more dispersive aspects of cultural politics, as expressed through the market, demand fuller investigation. Yet it was out of the market that major private and public collections were formed across the century, as individuals and institutions speculated on the opportunities afforded by war to buy and sell, vying to possess (and protect) artworks displaced or imperilled by violence. In this perspective, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune represent a fascinating chapter in how art collections became enmeshed in the political crisis, a chapter with lasting consequences for the fate of museums across Europe.

Artworks were portable, and their trajectories followed the flood of refugees produced by war. As the Second Empire unravelled at astonishing speed in early September 1870, the desperate former Surintendant des Beaux-Arts, the comte de Nieuwerkerke, fled to London to dispose of his collections. Here he found a buyer for his Renaissance objets d'art and superb arms and armour in the shape of Richard Wallace.⁹ A great philanthropist to the besieged French capital (as commemorated in the city's drinking fountains), Wallace nonetheless doubted whether Paris could ever be a safe place to house the objects he had inherited from the Hertford estate. In 1872 Wallace displayed his new purchases before a mass public at Bethnal Green and three decades later, his widow would bequeathed the exceptional collection of fine and decorative art built up by succeeding generations of the Hertford family to London.¹⁰ In this way, the decisions made by collectors in the heat of the conflict profoundly shaped the contents and creation of a major British museum, one which introduced a thoroughly French collection of art, assembled in Paris, to a new audience. Elsewhere, the events of 1870–1871 pushed collectors in different directions: an ardent Bonapartist, Louis Carrand, could not reconcile himself to the new French Republic and bequeathed his own medieval and Renaissance artefacts to the Barghello in Florence.¹¹ Having narrowly escaped being shot by Communards, the violence in Paris prompted Théodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi to journey to Japan in 1871, a visit which profoundly shaped the development of Asian collections at the Musée Cernuschi, now owned by the City of Paris.¹²

Conflict and revolution were catalysts for the consolidation, the relocation and the dispersal of collections, although these processes have often been difficult to acknowledge within conventional institutional histories. Nonetheless, period observers could be disarmingly candid about the prospects for buying art in wartime. The paintings acquired by William Tilden Blodgett, and which represent the founding collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, were sourced in Belgium and France in 1871. ‘At any other time their purchase would not have been possible’ according to The New York World.¹³ This chapter explores the traffic of art out of France during or immediately after the political crisis. The aim is to consider the impact of the war on different kinds of artworks – especially Old Master paintings and the decorative arts – which left French shores and appeared in London auctions. It goes further in insisting that the dislocation and circulation of artworks was not just a side-product of the conflict, but a crucial means through which curious Londoners could experience the drama at one remove. In the spring of 1871, they could already relive the siege of Paris thanks to a special exhibition held on Argyll street in a building branded ‘The Palais-Royal,’ and where they could see maps, models, ‘living photographs' of captured French and German ‘officers' and even a mitrailleuse or volley gun used in the battles (see Figure 1.1).¹⁴ In a less-sensational vein, the London salerooms were another venue in which the British public could directly encounter the fallout from the conflict, its victims, its ideas and its ruins, just as they had encountered the remnants of earlier French Revolutions.

Figure 1.1Exhibition relating to the Siege of Paris, Palais Royal, Argyll Street, 1871 [@ Victoria & Albert Museum, London]

Cross-Channel commerce

On 8 September 1870, Paul Durand-Ruel left his family and travelled to London with 35 crates of paintings where he set up business in the unfortunately named ‘German Gallery’ on New Bond Street. In January 1871, Durand-Ruel's life was changed when he was introduced to the young draft dodger, Claude Monet. As the compelling exhibition at the Tate in 2017 demonstrated, the future Impressionists were among the least commercially successful of the colony of refugee artists in London, since they were rejected from exhibiting at the Royal Academy (unlike Salon favourite Jean-Louis Gérôme), failed to find patrons (unlike the Communard sculptor, Jules Dalou) and failed to attract much attention at the Kensington international exhibition in spring 1871 (unlike Meissonnier). In Camille Pissarro's gloomy analysis: ‘Here there is no art, it is all a matter of business.’¹⁵ Their marginal position in the market is radically different from an artist like Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor who organised successful sales of his terracotta through Christie's in November 1871.¹⁶ The focus on a handful of avant-garde painters has prevented reflection for how the so-called année terrible played out on other sections of the art market.

One valuable window on this process comes from the stock books of Agnews, a firm originally from Liverpool but with premises on Bond Street and which emerged as leading dealers of reproductive prints, Old Masters and contemporary painting. Intriguingly, Charles Morland Agnew was fascinated by events in Paris and his diary records a trip he and his father William made to the French capital in mid-September 1871, mirroring the delight many British tourists took in the sublimity of the ruins. On this occasion he visited many of the sites reduced to rubble either by Prussian shelling or the terrible fires of la semaine sanglante, the week of street battles fought between the Communards and the Versaillais troops determined to recapture the city. The scars of battle were apparent everywhere (‘marks of firing on several houses'); the Tuileries and the Hôtel-de-Ville lay in ashes, shot marks were visible on Notre-Dame, the outlying palace of Saint-Cloud was a ‘mass of burnt things' and he inspected ‘the stump of the Vendôme column, which the communists pulled down.’ Agnew also found time to visit studios of artists like William Wyld, see the galleries of the Louvre which were still accessible (‘some of it is burned down’) and examined ‘a very pretty picture in Mr. Petit's rooms, which W. wanted to buy.’¹⁷

The ledgers in London confirm the importance of Agnew's contacts with European dealers. On 6 August 1872 Paul Durand-Ruel bought from Agnew's Paul Delaroche's Christ in the Garden and on 30 June 1873 he sold them a genre scene by Antony Serres, The Widow. Such academic and Romantic canvases were more regular staples of Durand-Ruel's dealing than the works of Manet or Monet, which were a minor concern at this juncture. He even took a gamble on the English school: on 12 June 1871 he sold to Thomas Agnew a work by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, namely The Bridesmaid, which now hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum.¹⁸ Durand-Ruel was only one of several French dealers in modern painting who were active in London during these busy years. Agnew's conducted with Georges Petit and Alexandre Bernheim, both of whom would in future play a major role in marketing Impressionism....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: museums and war
• PART I Collecting and conflict
• PART II Keeping going?
• PART III Propaganda, morale and resistance
• PART IV Museums of war and conflict
• Index