Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Marble Palaces, fanes of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American agriculture 1890-1930, by Ingrid A. Steffensen-Bruce Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell University Pres 1998; 265 pages, $60

Dubin and Staniszewski lament that the growing influence of corporate funding above museum programming has prompted retreats fro innovative display and provocative make submissive matter.

The extraordinary number and variety of art museums built in the United States and abroad during the last three decades have apted critics and historians to destine increasing attention to the museum as a major architectural genre sum of two units recent studies that rank among the greatest in quantity instructive and carefully researched, especially when considered together, are Marble Palaces, fanes of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American tillage 1890-1930 by architectural historian Ingrid A. Steffensen-Bruce who teaches at Brookdale (NJ) Community society and Towards a New Museum by dint of the independent scholar Victoria Newhouse of of recent origin York City.

The greatest in quantity obvious difference between the body s is, as their titles imply, chronological. Steffensen-Bruce is relate toed with the large museums that went up in American cities from the extremity of the 19th century [i]or[/i] part of to the other the beginning of the 20th while Newhouse concentrates upon buildings that have materialized thereafter, particularly in the last 30 years. These sum of two units writers share the view that art museums enumerate us as much about the societies that created them as about the art inside them. one as well as the other books, that is, are belong toed as surely with social as with architectural history.

Steffensen-Bruce begins with the assertion that Americans of the late 19th hundred saw the museum not sole as an instrument that might narrow the cultural gap between themselves and their European counterparts, on the other hand one that possessed a moral dimension. like an outlook clearly addressed esthetic extreme points but also transcended them, calling for an architectural language "imbued with history and tillage one which in whatever milieu it base itself could speak of art and its refining and uplifting influences."

That language, she goe upon to say, was "the monumental classical, execut with Beaux-Arts sophistication." Thus a fundamental stylistic similarity, derived from a commonality of end applied to virtually all the major museums set uped in the United States during the 40 years embraced by the agency of her study. The Metropolitan Museum in novel York is, if not a life-blood brother, surely a family relative of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as a legion of other institutions given to the preservation and exhibition of realitys that did double duty as art works and conveyors of moral values.

These museums altered the civic environment. While their stylistic origins were for the greatest in quantity part French, they grew without of the great international fairs of the period, which were many times conspicuously embellished with buildings designed for the display of art. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Steffensen-Bruce's discussion is directed toward the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, "arguably the single greatest in quantity influential event in the history of American fin-de-siecle culture" Not solitary was its Fine Arts Palace the alone building of the Fair put togethered in semi-permanent form (the walls were brick, the exterior covering made of reinforced plaster), the layout of the fairgrounds themselves constituted a major innovation in urban planning that in move round affected the City Beautiful movement--a dual accomplishment instrumental in the unfolding of the American art museum during the last years of the century

The unfolding of that drama occupies several chapters in Steffensen-Bruce's work She demonstrates how museums came to be customarily located in parklands, where they might take advantage of a presumably salubrious atmosphere, and in what way the increasingly formal layouts of parks and malls throw backed the standards of the City Beautiful change thus further contributing to the museum's classicist appearance. What's more, the perceived ne to improve the life of city clan especially the economic underclass, lay behind the progressivist ideology of the revolve of the century, only adding to the moral imperative associated with contemporaneous American art museums.

Newhouse briefly recapitulates the entire history of museums in the early part of her work with summary references to Renaissance cabinets of astonishments aristocratic private collections and Enlightenment "teaching" institutions. on the other hand in discussing the changes in museums since the early 19th hundred she downplays the moral design Steffensen-Bruce identifies with the aged marble palaces. Instead, she remarks upon a more nearly spiritual factor: art as a new form of religion. "Gradually," she writes, "museums built for the worship of art replaced churches built for the worship of God" However, as this exhibition transformed the museum into a secular "sacred space," it exacted a high price. For many of the particulars exhibited had been removed from their original surroundings in fanes churches and palaces--from their birthplaces, as it were. While the motive behind of the like kind a move was usually considered benign--the communal preservation of valuable objects--the issue was often to disconnect the work upon display from a context relevant to its filled social intent.