Museum history, international exchanges, cultural identity, art history, museology, transnational influences, national museums, museum architecture
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Abstract
This collective work redefines the history of museums by highlighting international and intercultural exchanges that shaped them between 1750 and 1940.
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[...] The various essays analyze the formation of several museums and collections around the world, highlighting the multiple international influences at work in these processes, while also showing that this also contributes to the construction of high places of national identity. The book thus offers a panorama of all the forms that transnational influences can take in the construction of the museum during this period. It is organized into five chapters that constitute a form of typology of international influences and relations at the heart of the emergence of museums. [...]
[...] The fifth chapter invites us to consider the interactions between national and transnational forces that are constitutive of the museum as an institution. In her analysis of the birth of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Portugal, Emília Ferreira emphasizes the links between the organization of an exhibition of Iberian decorative arts at the South Kensington Museum in London in 1881, and the birth of Portugal's first national museum. A Portuguese commission had indeed been commissioned to collect works throughout Portugal for the exhibition, which formed the basis for the constitution of the first Portuguese national collection. [...]
[...] Koksal's article on the creation of the first Turkish national museums shows how these museums were created with the aim of modernization, which at the time meant Westernization: we find a neoclassical architecture, and a collection fed by Greek and Roman objects. The first museum directors were European scholars (an English museologist and then a German archaeologist). The criticism that can be made of this work is the contrast between its initial ambition and the nature of the proposed analyses, which only give us a very synthetic overview of the dynamics at work. In addition, most of the articles focus on European museums, and especially British ones. [...]
[...] Towards a Transnational History of Museums, 1750-1940 was directed by Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy. It brings together a series of publications written on the occasion of a conference at the Technische Universität de Berlin in 2012, dedicated to questioning the traditional historiographical approach to the museum. Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy are both affiliated with the Technische Universität de Berlin. Bénédicte Savoy is a professor of art history and holder of the chair "Art History as Cultural History" at the Technische Universität de Berlin, in addition to being a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and exhibition commissioner. [...]
[...] The first chapter focuses on the circulation of objects that make up museum collections. Charlotte Schreiter's analysis of plaster casts of sculptures shows how collections have been enriched through the circulation of objects between nations. During the second half of the 19th century, casts represented a significant proportion of collections accessible to the public, with the aim of presenting a set of national references displayed in a chronological order. But to construct this national history, museums had to cooperate with plaster cast producers across Europe, with the largest workshops being located in Paris and Berlin. [...]
