Towards a New Museum. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Towards a of recent origin Museum, by Victoria Newhouse, fresh York, Monacelli Press, 1998; 288 pages, $45

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 quicked critics and historians to consecrate 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 community and Towards a New Museum by means of the independent scholar Victoria Newhouse of novel York City.

The greatest in quantity obvious difference between the body s is, as their titles imply, chronological. Steffensen-Bruce is interested with the large museums that went up in American cities from the extremity of the 19th century end 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 number us as much about the societies that created them as about the art inside them. the couple 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 solitary as an instrument that might narrow the cultural gap between themselves and their European counterparts, on the contrary one that possessed a moral dimension. similar 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 ground 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 object applied to virtually all the major museums set uped in the United States during the 40 years embraced by dint 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 frequently conspicuously embellished with buildings designed for the display of art. plenteous 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 alone 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 make go round affected the City Beautiful movement--a dual accomplishment instrumental in the disentanglement of the American art museum during the last years of the century

The unfolding of that drama occupies several chapters in Steffensen-Bruce's volume She demonstrates how museums came to be customarily located in parklands, where they might take advantage of a presumably salubrious atmosphere, and in what manner the increasingly formal layouts of parks and malls mirrored the standards of the City Beautiful motion thus further contributing to the museum's classicist appearance. What's more, the perceived ne to improve the life of city nation 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 volume with summary references to Renaissance cabinets of astonishments aristocratic private collections and Enlightenment "teaching" institutions. on the contrary in discussing the changes in museums since the early 19th hundred she downplays the moral object Steffensen-Bruce identifies with the aged marble palaces. Instead, she remarks upon a more nearly spiritual factor: art as a recent 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 things exhibited had been removed from their original surroundings in fanes churches and palaces--from their birthplaces, as it were. While the motive behind similar a move was usually considered benign--the communal preservation of valuable objects--the result was often to disconnect the work upon display from a context relevant to its replete social intent.