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MUSEUM CULTURE
London
Daniel J.
Sherman
and
Irit
Rogoff
editors
H i s t o r i e s
D i s c o u r s e s
S p e c t a c l e s

Copyright 1994 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Chapter 9, “‘Degenerate Art’ and Documenta I: Modernism Ostracized and Disarmed,”
originallyappearedinDieunbewältigteModerne:KunstundÖffentlichkeitbyWalter
Grasskamp, copyright C.H.Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Oscar Beck), Munich,
1989; reprinted with permission of Verlag C.H.Beck. Chapter 12, “A New Center:
The National Museum of Women in the Arts,” originally appeared in ArtinAmerica;
reprinted with permission of the author. Chapter 13, “Selling Nations: International
Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy,” originally appeared in ArtinAmerica (September
1991); reprinted with permission of ArtinAmerica.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455–3092
Simultaneously published in the United Kingdom
byRoutledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-16819-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26336-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-09273-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-09274-4 (pbk)

v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis
Daniel J.Sherman and Irit Rogoff ix
PartI
Histories
1. The German Art Museum and the History of the Nation
DetlefHoffmann 3
2. The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics
of Seeing
SethKoven 22
3. “An Elite Experience for Everyone”: Art Museums,
the Public, and Cultural Literacy
VeraL.Zolberg 49
4. Identity as Self-Discovery: The Ecomuseum in France
DominiquePoulot 66
5. With Open Doors: Museums and Historical Narratives
in Israel’s Public Space
AriellaAzoulay 85
PartII
Discourses
6. The Museum as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France
ChantalGeorgel 113
7. Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura,
and Commodity Fetishism
DanielJ.Sherman 123

vi CONTENTS
8. The Struggle against the Museum; or, The Display of Art
in Totalitarian Space
BorisGroys 144
9. “Degenerate Art” and Documenta I: Modernism Ostracized
and Disarmed
WalterGrasskamp 163
PartIII
Spectacles
10. The Times and Spaces of History: Representation, Assyria,
and the British Museum
FrederickN.Bohrer 197
11. From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Fascism
in German-History Museums
IritRogoff 223
12. A New Center: The National Museum of Women in the Arts
AnneHigonnet 250
13. Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural
Diplomacy
BrianWallis 265
Contributors 283
Index 287

vii
Acknowledgments
This book grew out of a conference, “The Institutions of Culture: The Museum,”
held at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in March 1988. We
are grateful for the encouragement and assistance of the center’s chairman,
Stanley Hoffmann, its assistant director, Abby Collins, and its staff members,
especiallyCeallaighReddy,JoAnBeaton,JacquelineBrown,AnaPopiel,andJohn
Andrus. We would like to thank the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Samuel
H.Kress Foundation for supporting the conference and for allowing us to use
surplus funds for translations and other expenses connected with bringing the
volume to press. Our thanks also to the chairs and discussants at the conference,
Carol Duncan, Peter Paret, Danielle Rice, Alan Shestack, and Paul Hayes Tucker;
to its keynote speaker, Hans Haacke; and to Edward Kaufman and Patricia
Mainardi, whose contributions could not be included in this volume. The heated
debates generated by the conference spurred us on in our belief that this was a
field that we were compelled to explore further.
Five years in preparation, this book differs considerably from the conference
program. While our work on the project has been a rich and wide-ranging
exploration, the result is intended only as a mapping out of a field still in
formation, rather than as the summary of a concluded investigation. We would
like to thank all of our collaborators on this volume, as well as the students in our
seminars, for expanding our perception of this field of inquiry and for sustaining
our sense of its energy and contemporaneity.
We very much appreciate the willingness of the original conference
participants to rework their papers for publication; special thanks to Chantal
GeorgelandDominiquePoulot,who,inadditiontotheeditors,wroteentirelynew
essays for the volume. Our gratitude also goes to Ariella Azoulay, Walter
Grasskamp, and Boris Groys, who, joining theproject after the conference, kindly

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
agreed to contribute their insights to the book; to our translators, Elliott
A.Green, Marc Roudebush, Thomas Seifrid, and Michael Shae; and to
Janet Wolff, for her helpful suggestions. The support and assistance of
Lisa Freeman, Janaki Bakhle, and Robert Mosimann of the University of
Minnesota Press was invaluable. Daniel Sherman would like to thank
Allene Biehle, for her efficient management of the publication fund at
Rice, and Edward Douglas, for his support of many kinds. Our final
thanks must go to each other, for putting up with each other’s habits,

ix
quirks, and temperaments; both our friendship and, we hope, this book
are richer for our peculiar but fruitful collaboration.
Introduction: Frameworks for Critical
Analysis
DanielJ.ShermanandIritRogoff
The past generation has seen both an unparalleled increase in the number of
museums throughout the world and an unprecedented expansion and
diversification of their activities. As a natural consequence, museums have
become the object of considerable, and constantly increasing, attention both in
the mass media and in scholarly and critical writing. But most of these
considerations have remained within the boundaries of particular disciplinary
concerns: they have looked at museums as sites, whether of architecture, of
exhibitions, of national or cultural narratives, or of political and pedagogical
projects aimed at different constituencies.1
This collection of essays, in contrast,
focuses on museums as the intricate amalgam of historical structures and
narratives, practices and strategies of display, and the concerns and imperatives of
various governing ideologies. We seek to formulate terms and questions that can
beappliedbothtoexhibitedculture,whatmuseumsandothersputondisplay,and
to exhibition culture, the ideas, values, and symbols that pervade and shape the
practice of exhibiting. In asking how museums accord objects particular
significances, in examining the politics of museum exhibitions and display
strategies, and in comparing policies and attitudes toward museum publics over
time, we are attempting an inquiry into modes of cultural construction from an
innovative and increasingly important vantage point.
Clearly, the interrogation of museum practice cannot be separated from the
larger terrains of cultural history, theory, and criticism. But the essays in this
volume cohere around the reformulation of these discourses in terms specific to
museums. We do not, of course, claim credit for this reformulation, which is the
product of a critical intervention as old as the developments that prompted it.

x INTRODUCTION
Over the past twenty years a broad range of critical analyses have
converged on the museum, unmasking thestructures, rituals, and
procedures by which the relations between objects, bodies of
knowledge, and processes of ideological persuasion are enacted. This
process of unmasking, which continues to evolve and unfold around us,
provides the basis for our inquiry.
For what characterizes the present moment is not only the unparalleled
expansion of museum activity but also the growing awareness of the persistent
critical discourse that has accompanied it since the time of the French
Revolution. This discourse has itself taken part in, and been informed by, the
elaboration of other critical discourses of cultural value, epistemic structures,
and modes of representation. This book, then, joins the recently initiated
charting of both a historical and a contemporary “museum discourse” in terms
of its connections to other significant cultural discourses. By focusing on a
number of institutional cases and a series of important texts, we seek both to
interrogate concrete histories through concepts of knowledge, representation,
fiction, consciousness, and desire and to reinscribe such histories in those
concepts.
Museums’ multiple histories lie in the evolving interplay between the basic
notions of collecting, classifying, displaying, and, on the part of the public,
receiving that underlie their institutional practices. All of the essays in the book
share the conviction not only that museums have a history, but also that their
enterprise entails an attempt to conceal it, “to transform,” in Daniel Buren’s terms,
“History into Nature.”2
Recovering the history of the museum, which is not the
same as the histories of individual institutions but can be regarded as their
ultimateobjective,onesharedbyourcontributors,consequentlyinvolvesacertain
amount of deconstruction. This book accordingly offers not simply a collection
of narrative accounts but also a collective critique of the materials and strategies
museums employ to naturalize the concreteness of the social and historical
processes in which they participate. In this light, the concept of the museum
emerges as a field of interplay between the social histories of collecting,
classifying, displaying, entertaining, and legitimating.
Museums embody a number of fundamental notions or concepts, which
together constitute the basis of an institutional practice or politics. Although it is
possible to theorize these notions in a variety of ways, recent critical and
historical work on the museum has delineated four broad groups that arguably

INTRODUCTION xi
encompass museums’ most important relationships. First, museums
invariably base their enterprise on a certain notion of objects and on a
system for classifying them. Classification functions through the
imposition of order and meaning on objects and through the positing of
objects as triggers of ideas. Although museums seek to characterize
their classification as somehow inherent in the objects they present, it
always takes place, at least in the first instance, within some externally
constructed discursive field, such as the “nation,” the local
“community,” “culture” as opposed to some aspect of the “natural
world,” a historical “epoch” or “period,” or the categories of “artistic
school” or “style.” This is the second set of concepts that museums
institutionalize: the context, usually constructed as some kind of
community (of people or of values), that objects are held to signify. The
museum, by representing it, of course participates in the construction
of this notion, and in the historical shifts it undergoes. It does so in the
name of a third concept, that of the public or audience it claims to
serve, and in terms of whom it defines the public sphere in which it
operates. The way in which the audience or public receives the
displays and meanings that are offered in turn constitutes a fourth pole
of museums’ discourse and practice.
The functions of categorization and classification, as Ludmilla Jordanova has
argued, are indelibly interconnected. Classification functions at various levels:
first, the entire institution may be placed in a category such as natural history, fine
arts, design, or historical re-creation (theme parks). Within, the museum may be
organized around internal groupings such as periods, schools, styles, or national
cultures. Finally, at the level of individual objects, labels, catalogs, and other
ancillary materials offer a “context” in which an object can be read, thus investing
itwithauthenticity,authorship,antiquity,andvalue.3
Themuseum,inotherwords,
while seemingly representing objectively and empirically located contexts for the
objects it displays, actually participates in the construction of these categories and
in the numerous internal shifts and differentiations they are held to contain.
Equally, museums contribute to and perpetuate the dividing practices of historical
periodization, providing centennial categories with the cultural cohesion of
dominantstyles.
This critical analysis owes much to the early work of Michel Foucault, who
used a linguistic model to thematize the relations between epistemic structures,
disciplinary boundaries, the construction of internally coherent discourses, and

xii INTRODUCTION
the play of power relations.4
This model illuminates the ways museums
both sustain and construct cultural master narratives that achieve an
internal unity by imposing one cultural tendency as the most prominent
manifestation of any historical period. Thus the classification of an object
involves the choice of a particular kind of presentation, which then
establishes a museological context that provides the object with meaning.
At the same time, the context works to determine the selection of
viewing public and the cultural capital that this public gleans from the
museum.
The museological context, in other words, exists within a larger signifying
process that invokes notions of community. This may be a transhistorical
community of art lovers, a local community that has formed the collection, a
national community that the objects represent, a politically aspirant community
that seeks alternative forms of representation and alternative identities, or some
combination of all four. But by presenting objects as signifiers within an artificially
created institutional frame, museums underline their irretrievable otherness, their
separation from the world of lived experience. In so doing, museums
simultaneously construct a self, the viewer, or in collective terms a public. The
processes of reception of the display strategies that museums present also
participate in the constitution of a museum culture.
All of the museum’s strategies of display involve assumptions, often
unacknowledged, about the community the museum is addressing, which is not
necessarily (and indeed not usually) coterminous with the community it is
representing. The former is conventionally labeled a “public,” in Thomas Crow’s
sense of a “representation of the significant totality” of a potential audience that
“appears via the claims made to represent it.”5
But the very notion of a public, the
subject of several essays in this volume, itself often conceals important
contradictions. As Vera Zolberg’s essay in this volume makes clear, museums have
typicallyrepresentedthepublicasaconstituencytowhomtheyprovidesomekind
of education. Yet the historical dichotomy between art, which is associated with
pleasure, and artifact, connoting instruction, has made it difficult for museums to
sustain this definition, which also constitutes one of their fundamental self-
justifications.
The structuring components of museums and the museum discourse have
until this point involved supposedly objective and verifiable elements. With the
public, however, questions of subjectivity, and notably of the ways in which
audiences’ varying receptions of museum displays gratify particular subjective

INTRODUCTION xiii
desires, enter into the discussion. As several of the essays in this volume
argue, museums can serve as a site for the construction of fictitious
histories that respond to unconscious desires. Simultaneously, as
Theodor Adorno realized in using the term “museal” to describe objects
to which the viewer no longer has a vital relationship and that
consequently are dying, strategies of display can make museums the
funerary site for uncomfortable or inconvenient historical narratives,
what Denis Adams refers to as “the architecture of amnesia.”6
In
Germany, as the essays by Detlef Hoffmann, Walter Grasskamp, and Irit
Rogoff suggest, these desires have taken a number of forms. Hoffmann
describes the pursuit of an elusive collective and national identity,
Grasskamp a longing for membership in a broader, largely depoliticized
culture classified under the rubric of modernism, Rogoff the need to
transcend or bypass inconvenient histories.
The signifying processes through which museums endow objects with
meaning also act, through such basic forms of social organization as gender,
race, and class, to privilege and exclude certain kinds of viewing and thus to
construct their audiences in historically specific ways as interpretative
communities. It is important, for example, to distinguish between the display of
other people’s cultures and the consequent construction of their identities
within a Western cultural discourse and the problematics of displaying cultural
appropriation, such as “primitivism,” within dominant cultural practices. For in
such distinctions the contemporary political significance of the interplay
between such categories as objects, contexts, and publics or interpretative
communities can be discerned.
In addition, however, another level of interplay takes place within our
conceptualization of this collection and its structure. For the book exists at the
intersection between the aforementioned categories of analysis and the
enveloping groupings of histories, discourses, and spectacles that contain them.
We have refrained from constituting categories that in any way confine, define,
or interpet the essays, precisely in order to point to the plurality of national
cultural, individual, and group subject positions assembled here. The very
organization of the volume thus serves to acknowledge that the questions
raised—their historical formation, political urgency, and the fields of inquiry
they form—differ in each case, and that this difference is of primary
importance. Clearly, we who work within the critical analysis of culture have
shared a certain intellectual formation. Many of us have benefited from the

xiv INTRODUCTION
readings of several generations of Marxist and materialist analyses, from
the application of linguistic models to the understanding of cultural and
epistemic structures, and from the perception of difference and
subjectivity offered by critical studies of gender and of colonialism. But
these have been simply our building blocks, our points of entry into the
discussion of displayed culture. Rather than confining or enclosing our
discussions, the full range of our categories of analysis operates within
and across a plurality of histories, theories, and discourses.
The four structuring concepts of object, context, public, and reception
occupy a central place in much of the critical analytical apparatus that all
the essays activate. Their centrality in turn makes these terms the
inescapable basis for a book conceived as an interrogation of museums’
histories and practices. While focusing on one or another of these
themes, all the essays in this book share a consciousness of their
interrelatedness. They are, however, broad and general categories, and
we need to examine the actual practices that inform their internal
functioning and the critical theories that have worked to make them apparent.
In addition to theories of classification inspired by Foucault, several other
kinds of theoretical work have played an important part in the conceptualization
of museums. Writers of the Frankfurt school used both Marxist and Hegelian
thought to articulate a critique of museums as institutions and to theorize
collecting as a cultural practice of broad significance. The early critical analysis of
collecting, that of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, conceives of “collecting” as an
activity that defies capital’s insistence that the object be possessed by the collector,
and that it serve some useful purpose. In a series of essays from the 1920s and
1930s, both argue for a certain “uselessness” of collected objects, which enables
the countertype collector to unravel the secret historical meanings of the things
accumulated.InthePassagenwerk,FileH,Benjaminwrites:
In the act of collecting it is decisive that the object be dissociated from all of its
original functions in order to enter into the closest possible relationship with its
equivalents. This is the diametrical opposite of use, and stands under the curious
category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grandiose attempt
to transcend the totally irrational quality of a mere being-there through integration
into a new, specifically created historical system—the collection. And for the true
collector every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all
knowledge of the age, of the landscape, the industry, the owner from which it
derives…. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, now

INTRODUCTION xv
becomes the socle, the frame, the pedestal and the seal of his
ownership…. Collecting is a form of practical memory and among the
profane manifestations of “proximity” the most convincing one.
Therefore, even the minutest act of political commemoration in the
commerce in antiques becomes in a sense epochal. We are here
reconstructing an alarm clock that awakens the kitsch of the past century
into “re-collection.”7
So the museum treats its objects independently of the material conditions of its
own epoch, in what Adorno called “a culturally conservative practice that lacks a
critique of political economy even though it speaks of the accumulation of
excessive and therefore unusable capital.”8
In Benjamin’s collection,
objects are “given their due,” re-collected in accordance with the political
perception of the moment. The difference is that, for Benjamin,
“historicism presents an eternal image of the past, historical materialism a
unique engagement with it…. The task of historical materialism is to set
to work an engagement with history original to every new present. It has
recourse to consciousness of the present that shatters the continuum of
history.”9
Another body of work has the distinction of joining artistic practice and
theoretical critique. The interventions of artists such as Daniel Buren, Marcel
Broodthaers,andHansHaackehave,inDouglasCrimp’swords,“workedtoreveal
the social and material conditions of art’s production and reception—those
conditionsthatithasbeenthemuseum’sfunctiontodissemble.”10
Haacke’snotion
of museums as “managers of consciousness” derives from Hans Magnus
Enzensberger’s 1960s concept of the “consciousness industry.” This project has
had two main tenets: first, to alert the viewing public to the ever-increasing
complexity of the relations between corporate sponsorship, museums, and the
national/ international political and economic policies that serve to frame them.
Second, Haacke in particular has worked in great detail to expose the forms of
museum exhibition and installations, from banners to frames, from labels and
layouts to display cases and invitation cards, as active agents of ideological
persuasion.11
Over the past decade, artists and critics concerned with exhibition culture have
further refined this perspective through models of gender-specific analysis. The
New York branch of the Guerrilla Girls, for example, has documented the
continuing absence of women artists from both permanent collections and
temporary exhibitions within mainstream American museum culture. The

xvi INTRODUCTION
Canadian artist Vera Frenkel offers another example in her documentary
project, accompanied by videos and performance activity, entitled “The
Cornelia Lumsden Archive.” Frenkel traces, through her veritable
absence, the shadowy presence of a fictive twentieth-century woman
writer; she does this by scrupulously emulating the archival modes that
would have preserved her had she existed.12
At the same time, feminist
theory has begun to move beyond the issue of the absence of women
from canonical displays of cultural production to inquire into the
gendered nature of the very categories of periodization, style, and the
authoritative status of the artifact that museums establish. Pursuing this
line of investigation, Anne Higonnet’s essay in this volume examines the
gendering of display and marketing practices by museums in the names
of particular recuperative projects, while Irit Rogoff probes the hidden
potential of reading the presentation of historical narratives in gendered
modes of display.
All this work on museums makes clear that, just as certain core concepts lie at the
heart of the museum’s ideology, certain activities play a central role in giving that
ideology shape. Daniel Buren has described these activities as collecting,
preservation, and the provision of a refuge that is also a frame. Carol Duncan and
Alan Wallach, in their ground-breaking work of the late 1970s, added to the notion
of refuge that of ceremonial space, which invites, indeed impels, visitors to
experience the visit as a ritual.13
These activities remain fundamental to museums
because they derive from the concatenation of political, social, and economic
forces that have produced museums as public institutions since the eighteenth
century.
The dynamics of these processes have emerged with theoretical clarity and
historical precision in the new history of museums that followed on and paralleled
Duncan and Wallach’s analyses. Initially, much of this work, such as that of
Édouard Pommier on France and Françoise ForsterHahn on Germany, was
concerned with elucidating the political stakes of the major national institutions,
so carefully occluded by the triumphalist history produced around them.14
In the
United States, sociologists like Paul DiMaggio and Vera Zolberg, clearly
influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, played a key role in developing a
critical history of museums.15
Thus issues of aspiration to status and social
mobility tended to dominate the pioneering scholarly studies of American
museums, which, with the exception of Neil Harris’s suggestive essays, were less

INTRODUCTION xvii
concerned with the politics of display.16
Recently, historians such as
Annie Coombes, working on museums in Britain, and two of the
contributors to this volume, Dominique Poulot and Daniel Sherman,
working on France, have sought to merge these two levels of analysis so
as to reconfigure the history of museums in terms of a broad
understanding of cultural politics. Both in America and in Europe, they
have argued, nationstates, emergent bourgeois elites, and wealthy
individuals have used museums to legitimate their hegemony with the
aura of culture. In the process these groups have endowed museums
with considerable authority to define and to represent the cultural
sphere.17
The new history of museums, which focuses largely, if not exclusively, on art
museums, has been informed by a host of historical studies and critical
interventions concerning a wide variety of institutions, including historical
museums,ethnographicalandanthropologicalmuseums,andmuseumsofnatural
history. Douglas Crimp, James Clifford, Hal Foster, Donna Haraway, Walter
Grasskamp, and many others have dealt at length with the ideological
underpinnings of collecting and display refracted through models of class, sexual,
and cultural difference. Clifford, Foster, and Haraway have examined in particular
the fate of “other” artifacts, notably tribal cultural artifacts.18
Imported through
the political economies of colonialism, constructed through pseudoscientific
discourses as the irrational opposites of the post-Enlightenment legacy of
Western humanism and its claim to “progress,” such artifacts at present serve to
legitimate modernist claims to have glimpsed the dark heart of a “primal urge” to
create and express its own condition.
Beyond the residue of their historical investments, the strategies museums
deploy have been, and remain, contingent and variable. The developing field of
cultural studies, for example, has made it increasingly clear that culture operates
through spectacle and through the ceaseless reproduction of mass-media
practices. Blockbuster exhibitions and stylish and atmospheric depictions of the
cultures of peoples such as the ancient Egyptian, the African, and the Native
American function in tandem with consumer advertising to produce culture as
spectacle so that spectacle can be marketed as a form of cultural legitimacy. The
modern museum occupies a unique place within this process: it is the home and
defining source of the phenomenon of the original while simultaneously
generating its circulation in reproduced form as a part of commodity culture.
Thus the museum functions as a central power in what Jean Baudrillard has

xviii INTRODUCTION
termed “the transition from use value to a philosophy of wish fulfillment”
through advertising practices.19
The sections into which we have divided the book are of course artificial; not
only the central themes outlined here but also a number of common insights
related to them link together the essays both within and across the three parts. Part
I seeks to confront the multiplicity of the histories in which museums have
participated. Detlef Hoffmann considers the relationship between the emergent
and developing institution of the art museum and the problematic construction
of German national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays
by Seth Koven, Vera Zolberg, and Dominique Poulot consider three very different
attempts—in Victorian Britain, the United States since the nineteenth century, and
contemporary France—to bridge the gap between the museum and its public. In
all cases attempts at museological innovation have to deal with the inertia of
museums’ prior institutional investments, whether in class-bound notions of
cultural and political authority or in conservative constructions of cultural
patrimony. Ariella Azoulay’s examination of Israeli historical museums provides a
fitting coda to this exploration by conjoining the problematics of the public,
museologicalinnovation,andnationalidentity.
The essays in Part II all have to do in some way with the claims museums
make about their enterprise, with the discursive and other strategies they employ
in the process, or with the continuities and inflections of the museum discourse
and its critiques. As Chantal Georgel argues in her essay, museums appropriate
from other sites and activities such as exhibitions, department stores, and
libraries habits of looking that also constitute power relationships. Georgel
illuminates this phenomenon from the reverse angle of the discursive
reappropriation of the museum by cognate institutions. Daniel Sherman’s essay
examines what might be called, following Benjamin, the prehistory of the
critical discourse of museums, drawing parallels between the work of one of the
earliest critics of museums, the French art theorist Quatremère de Quincy, and
the later insights of Marx and Benjamin. The two remaining essays in Part II
both examine the relations between museums and certain discourses that have
used them for purposes of legitimation within particular national communities.
Boris Groys considers the ways in which the museum displays of the Soviet
Union reformulated modes of perception and classification in the service of
Stalinist ideology. Walter Grasskamp’s essay on Documenta examines the
politics of the museological embrace of modernism in the Federal Republic of
Germany.

INTRODUCTION xix
Part III offers a number of instances in which strategies of cultural
display embrace the technologies of spectacle, as Guy Debord has
given us to understand the term. Frederick Bohrer’s essay again
represents a kind of prehistory of museum display as spectacle,
examining one of its most prevalent forms, exoticism, at the moment
of its transformation by the emergent popular press. The essays by Irit
Rogoff and Anne Higonnet explore the ways in which categories of
gender, themselves refracted through the practices of spectacle, take
part in the construction of museum audiences through the
manipulation of the desires and subjectivities of the varying groups
that constitute their publics. Finally, Brian Wallis shows how, in the
recent era of mass communication and global polarization, the act of
exhibiting serves to legitimate particular constructions of national
identity within the international arena.
This book does not simply mark the coming of age of museum studies as a
discipline in its own right; that is, indeed, only another example of the rapidly
expanding influence of the institution. Nor does it simply fill an important need
for cultural historians, art historians, and critics. We had, in conceiving our project,
hoped for more than that, hoped that these essays would call attention to the
museum’s presence and power in the broadest conceivable configuration of
contemporary culture. Given our perception of the centrality of the institution,
thequestionsweraise,theproblemsweconsider,andthestrategies,evententative
ones, we propose have a significance, and an urgency, that go far beyond the
museum; they are, we believe, essential to an understanding of our culture that is
itself a prerequisite to changing it.
Notes
1. This is notably true of several recent anthologies concerning museums: Robert Lumley, ed.,
TheMuseumTime-Machine(LondonandNewYork,1988);PeterVergo,ed.,TheNewMuseology(London,
1989);WarrenLeonandRoyRosenzweig,eds.,HistoryMuseumsintheUnitedStates:ACriticalAssessment
(Urbana and Chicago, 1989); Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., ExhibitingCultures:ThePoeticsand
PoliticsofDisplay(Washington,D.C.,1991).
2. Buren, “Function of the Museum,” Artforum 12, no. 1 (September 1973): p. 62.
3. Ludmilla Jordanova, “Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums,” in Vergo,
ed.,TheNewMuseology.
4. See especially Foucault, TheArchaeologyofKnowledgeandtheDiscourseonLanguage, trans.
A.M.Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972).
5. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.,
1985), p. 5.

xx INTRODUCTION
6. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in his Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 175; Denis Adams: The Architecture of Amnesia is the title of a
collection of Adams’s projects up to the late 1980s (New York, 1990).
7. Translation from Douglas Crimp, “This Is Not a Museum of Art,” in Marge Goldwater et al.,
MarcelBroodthaers(MinneapolisandNewYork,1989),pp.71–72.
8. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” p. 176.
9. Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in his One-WayStreetandOtherWritings,
trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1979), p. 352.
10. “The Postmodern Museum,” Parachute, no. 46 (March-May 1987): p. 62.
11.HansHaacke,UnfinishedBusiness (Cambridge,Mass.,andNewYork,1987).
12. Vera Frenkel, “The Cornelia Lumsden Archive,” in MuseumsbyArtists (Montreal, 1984).
13. “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist
Perspectives 1, no. 4 (Winter 1978): pp. 28–51; and “The Universal Survey Museum,” ArtHistory3,no.4
(December 1980): pp. 448–69.
14.See,forexample,Pommier,“Naissancedesmuséesdeprovince,”inLeslieuxdemémoire,vol.2:
Lanation (3 books), ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1986), book 2, pp. 451–95.
15. DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an
Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): pp. 33–50;
Zolberg, “Tensions of Mission in American Art Museums,” in NonprofitEnterpriseintheArts:Studiesin
Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul J.DiMaggio (New York, 1986), pp. 184–98. It is worth noting that
Bourdieu published, with Alain Darbel, an important work on museum publics well before his more
theoreticalwritingondistinctionandculturalcapital:L’Amourdel’art:Lesmuséesd’arteuropéensetleur
public(Paris,1966).
16. See, for example, Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,”
AmericanQuarterly 14 (1962): pp. 545–64; Harris, “Museums, Merchandising and Popular Taste,” in
MaterialCultureandtheStudyofAmericanLife,ed.lanM.G.Quimby(NewYork,1978),pp.140–73.
17. See, for example, Coombes, “Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities,”
OxfordArtJournal 11 (1988): pp. 57–68; Poulot, “L’invention de la bonne volonté’ culturelle: L’image
dumuséeauXIXesiècle,”Lemouvementsocial, no.131(April-June1985):pp.35–64;Poulot,“Muséeet
sociétédansl’Europemoderne,”Mélangesdel’ÉcolefrançaisedeRome-Moyenage/Tempsmodernes98(1987):
pp.991–1096;Sherman,WorthyMonuments:ArtMuseumsandthePoliticsofCultureinNineteenth-Century
France(Cambridge,Mass.,1989).
18. Among the most important recent contributions in this field are Clifford, ThePredicamentof
Culture:Twentieth-CenturyEthnography,Literature,andArt(Cambridge,Mass.,1988);Foster,“WhiteSkins,
BlackMasks,”inRecodings:Art,Spectacle,CulturalPolitics(Seattle,1985);Haraway,PrimateVisions:Gender,
Race,andNatureintheWorldofModernScience(NewYork,1989);SusanHitler,ed.,TheMythofPrimitivism
(NewYork,1991);SallyPrice,PrimitiveArtinCivilizedPlaces(Chicago,1989);andMariannaTorgovnick,
GonePrimitive:SavageIntellects,ModernLives(Chicago,1990).
19.“TheSystemofObjects,”inJeanBaudrillard:SelectedWritings,ed.MarkPoster(Stanford,Calif.,
1988), pp. 10–28.

3
1
The German Art Museum and the History
of the Nation
Detlef Hoffmann
Art museums developed, alongside other museums in the modern sense,1
out of the chambers of art and curiosities collected during the late Middle
Ages and the early modern period. The increasing specialization—as the
basis of autonomy2
—of all domains in the eighteenth century not only
led to a separation of science from art and of both from practical life; it
also subdivided science and art into sciences and arts. Thus, by the end
of the nineteenth century we may still encounter art museums, but we
find that the subdivision into painting galleries, collections of sculpture,
and museums of applied art has become the rule.
It is no coincidence that we associate the emergence of the art museum
with the French Revolution. Even though the yearning for a German
nation-state is older, it has only been a manifestly political demand since
the early nineteenth century. Historical reflection on the German nation
had already begun in the eighteenth century, and indeed had occurred
sporadically since the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was not until
after the French Revolution and the Wars of Liberation, however, that we
witness a serious contemplation of national history.3
In 1859, Julius Grosse described the situation as follows:
When the Holy Roman Empire finally disintegrated, everything that
was once great and powerful, laudable and genuine, gained new
value in the imagination of the impoverished heirs. The empire had
become childish in its extreme old age, but it had secretly buried and
hidden its indestructible treasures. The old man had been ridiculed
and derided, but when he was dead, the memory awakened of the
simplicity and strength of his days of youth, of his heroic deeds,
buildings and imperial victories; as they carried his corpse to the gates
of the cemetery, the modern heirs began to sing the first songs of
reverence, to raise voices of praise and glory.4

4 DETLEF HOFFMANN
This text, dating from the time following the suppressed revolution of
1848–49, which was as much a movement for national unity as for
revolutionary reform, compares the end of the empire in 1806 to a funeral
procession. As in all obituaries, the deceased was shown a degree of
respect that he never received while he was alive. And if that was not
enough to resurrect him, there was at least an attempt to conserve what
he had left behind. It is no coincidence that Grosse speaks of bequeathed
“treasures.” He goes on to equate material remains—“buildings”—with
records of events—“heroic deeds,” “imperial victories.” This conservation
of the remnants of national—especially medieval—history contrasts sharply
with developments in France, where iconoclasm and the destruction of
medieval sculptures and buildings were important elements in the
emergence of the nation.
As early as the seventeenth century, the German yearning to create a
single nation out of the innumerable principalities, both large and small,
that occupied German territory at that time manifested itself in the form
of efforts to cultivate a common language and a common literature. In
the reception of Tacitus and in the imaginative interpretation of
archaeological finds, the Germanic tribes became ancestors. Throughout
this period, France was looked upon with envious yearning as the
exemplary enemy. Just as Arminius stood in opposition to the Romans,
yet thereby occupied a place within the context of the classical world, so
the notion developed of a German cultural nation engaged in struggle
against the despised French language—which was rejected as a fashionable
affectation—yet modeled to a certain extent on the French cultural nation.
The situation in the enlightened eighteenth century was similarly complex.
The idea of a global humanity also reinforced the love of differentiation.
Every form of otherness was celebrated as yet another facet in the overall
picture of the human species. World citizenship and national pride were
not necessarily mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they were contingent
on one another. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
the effect of the revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic Wars, and in this
connection the anti-French Wars of Liberation—although these were fueled
by revolutionary ideas—was to bring forth the demand not merely for
cultural or military unity but also for a politically unified nation, a demand
that always implied struggle against the particularistic potentates, the
princes. In the course of secularization, which included the dissolution of
monasteries, medieval works of art were also detached from their original
context. There were few people alive at that time who appreciated the
aesthetic quality of Stephan Lochner or Albrecht Dürer. The Boisserée

THE GERMAN ART MUSEUM AND THE HISTORY OF THE NATION 5
brothers5
were among those few, and it was their collection that provided
the nucleus for the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Another prominent figure
whose love of the German nation manifested itself in the form of an art
collection was Baron von Stein, the Prussian reformer and, for a short
time, minister. The paintings he assembled at his castle in Cappenberg
near Dortmund expressed the continuity of nationhood by depicting events
from German imperial history. Even if the following anecdote is not true,
it is symptomatic of the different ways of dealing with these material
records. In the summer of 1814, Stein traveled down the Rhine in the
company of Goethe, by then an old man. The two of them met Ernst
Moritz Arndt in Cologne, who reports:
There next to him [Stein] stood the greatest German of the 19th century,
Wolfgang Goethe, viewing the cathedral. And Stein [said] to us: Quiet,
dear children, quiet! Please don’t mention anything political. He doesn’t
like that sort of thing. I admit it is not something we can praise him for,
but he really is too great.6
This highlights a fundamental problem. Many of those who saved
endangered artworks, who committed themselves to housing artworks in
public collections, divorced national past from national future, which
could only come about as the result of political actions—or political
restraint, for in the domain of politics, failure to make decisions can have
consequences just as far-reaching as decisions actually made. Applied to
our example, this means that those who collected art as an alternative to
fighting for German unity in the political arena were in fact, despite
intentions to the contrary, helping to seal the victory of the old feudal
powers.
The word most frequently used to denote medieval artworks was
Altertümer, “antiquities,” and less often Antiquitäten, “antiques.” This
word Altertümer meant more than simply artworks, as is apparent from
the memorandum drawn up by the Hessian landscape painter Georg
Wilhelm Issel in 1817. It was entitled “On German People’s Museums
[Über deutsche Volksmuseen]: A Few Pious Words on Museums of German
Antiquities and Art” and in it he demanded
the clearest compilation of all that is able to characterize and to make
available to the senses:
a) the history of the nobility and the people;
b) the men who have most served in the fame and development of the
land;

6 DETLEF HOFFMANN
c) the state of art and literature;
d) the most important inventions and discoveries;
e) the customs and traditions of the fatherland from the most ancient up
to more recent times.7
Goethe, however, in his essay titled “On Art and Antiquity in the Rhine
and Main Areas,” written in 1816, describes the Boisserée collection as a
piece of art history. He completely ignores any connection to the history
of the nation.8
Thus we are already able to identify a very clear distinction being
made between “art” on the one hand and “history of the nation” on the
other. Increasingly, “antiquities” were understood as artifacts, as
illustrations or sources of reference that could be used to confirm
knowledge gained independently of these national remnants, mostly
through the study of texts. The purpose of these objects in Issel’s
program, it will be remembered, was to “make historical facts available to
the senses.” “Art” was increasingly regarded as a separate quality of
being, accessible only through contemplation, not through an inquisitive
curiosity. For instance, in his Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden
Klosterbruders (Out-pourings from the heart of an art-loving Friar),
written in 1797, Wackenroder likens the gallery to a “fair.” He demands,
however, that galleries become “temples” where, in silent humility and in
heart-raising seclusion, one could take pleasure in marveling at the
greatest artists as the highest of earthly beings.9
This position, vehemently
supported by the German romanticists, marked the parting of the ways
between the artifacts of historical research on the one hand and art on
the other. The consequence of this separation was not only that the
artwork was no longer consulted as a historical source, but also that the
aesthetic quality, that the form, was no longer a source of historical
insight. “Art” took on the status of something standing apart from history
(as something trans-historical, existing on a metahistorical level).
Consequently, from the viewpoint of the collectors, the museum
devoted to the past of the nation, the Germanic National Museum
(Germanisches Nationalmuseum) in Nuremberg, was primarily a
collection of historical objects.10
Its founder, Baron Hans von Aufsess,
had to propagate the idea of a national museum for decades before it
was finally realized in 1852. It is no coincidence that the first outwardly
visible step in this direction was the appearance, in 1832, of a
periodical entitled Gazette for the Study of the Middle Ages
(Anzeiger für die Kunde des Mittelalters). Progress toward the

foundation of this museum with national focus was actually achieved
by the citizens (Bürger), who were often members of historical
societies. In addition to the first difficulty of gaining acceptance for the
idea of a national institution (as opposed to a regional one), another
major obstacle had to be overcome. In this land of many divided states,
there was no single capital city in which the museum could have been
established. There was no common state; even ideas of who should
and would want to belong to this state diverged greatly. Therefore, the
baron chose a city in his native Franconia: Nuremberg, which he called
“the most German of all cities.” Although art played a major role in this
decision (one need only think of Albrecht Dürer and the Dürer cult in
the nineteenth century),11
von Aufsess never spoke of an art museum.
At one stage he referred to his venture by the picturesque name of
Conservatory for Antiquities, hoping thus to attain the unity of German
citizens. In a circular, dated 1846, to the General Assembly of German
Legal Scholars, Historical and Linguistic Researchers in Frankfurt, he
demanded “the establishment of a great historical and antiquarian
national museum.” Following its foundation in 1852, the decision was
taken on April 20, 1857, to house the museum in the Carthusian
monastery, where it is still located to this day.12
Let us contrast the Germanic National Museum with the “historical
museum in Versailles,” where art was also used as a vehicle for imparting
history. Louis Philippe established this “museum for the history of
France” (“à toutes les gloires de la France”) between 1833 and 1837.13
Here, in the former palace of the French kings, which was an exhibition
piece in itself, huge paintings illustrated events taken from French
history—from Clodwig to the Crusades and from Joan of Arc to the
revolution. But the museum did not limit itself to the past; the respective
present was also depicted up until the time of Napoleon III, which
explains why the series of pictures ends with the Battle of Solferino 1859.
The paintings were augmented by originals and plaster casts of statues
and busts. Thus, whereas Goethe hated the very mention of politics, the
Versailles collection set out to combine history with the politics of the
day. Franz Kugler, who describes this museum in a lecture held in 1846,
emphasizes its primarily artistic character.14
He feels overwhelmed by its
richness and says: “It drives us to search for a thread that could guide us
through this labyrinth of art, a certain, intellectually stimulating
conclusion to bring home with us from the observation of this world of
art, which is combined with so much intellectual aspiration and
intention.” Kugler analyzes the paintings as works of art, examining them

8 DETLEF HOFFMANN
for their content of truth. He then applies these concepts to Germany,
again under the aspect of art criticism:
A German historical museum would have to be founded from the start
on essentially different principles. Here, in accordance with the German
national character, we would have to take as our base the ennobling
meaning of history, portrayals that hold the inner core of historical life,
that bring the poetic element of popular life to awareness…. Other
principles could be applied artistically as well in approaching the
treatment of the individual in German art…the style of grandeur, the
direction of universal validity predominates. Most of the historical
questions which appear in Germany have been handled by our painters
in such a manner.
This severely abbreviated text is the only conception known to me of a
potential unity of national art and national history. Clear differences between
Germany and other nations are to be observed in terms not only of
contents but also of form. Two years before the Revolution of 1848–49,
Kugler15
formulated his vision of a congruence of German history and
art—housed in a national museum. What was supplied by Wilhelminian
pomp after 1870–71 is not to be confused with Kugler’s ideas.
Kugler became a professor at the Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1835
and in 1843 took charge of the art department in the Prussian Ministry of
Cultural Affairs. There could be no more telling documentation of his
combined interest in both theory and political practice than these two
professional positions. His Manual of Art History, published in 1841–42,
was not only significant for being the first systematic history of art; his
view of the development of art reveals a philosophical conception in
which we find unmistakable parallels with Hegel. His politics also reflected
a belief that nothing could stand in the way of the continued development
of bourgeois democratic power. This political conception is embedded in
the idea of a national museum.
The Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg remained the only
museum to have the past of the entire land as its subject until after the
Second World War. In the German Democratic Republic, in East Berlin,
the Museum of German History was founded in what had originally been
an arsenal (Zeughaus) on which restoration work was completed in 1967.
From 1876 to 1880, this building had been converted into an arms museum
attached to a “hall of fame” that, following the example of Versailles,
celebrated great Prusso-German feats. It was only logical and fitting that
this should become the place where the East German regime wielded its

interpretational power in documenting German history. This museum
was, to a much higher degree than the one in Nuremberg, a collection of
historical objects and relics. No conscious attempt was made to incorporate
a specifically artistic dimension.16
In the year of German (re) unification, the discussion surrounding the
German Historical Museum, which the West German chancellor, Helmut
Kohl, had presented to the city of West Berlin in 1986, was placed in a
completely new context.17
When a majority of East Germany’s first
democratically elected parliament voted for union with the west, the
power to define German history, as portrayed in the German Historical
Museum, was also surrendered to the west. What was planned in 1986 as
an antithesis, as a competitive instrument of the west against the east,
came to an end with the victory of the west. At times it seemed ominously
likely that the board of directors would be dominated by historians, that
is, by people whose academic training was text-based, and there remains
a very real danger of objects being displayed in order to illustrate
preconceived ideas of history. Now that the liberal museum has moved
into the building on Unter den Linden formerly occupied by the communist
museum, however, works of art can expect to receive a more discerning
reception than could have been hoped for only a short time ago. It
remains to be seen whether the collection is capable of encouraging the
citizens of western and eastern Germany to “identify” with the enlarged
Federal Republic, or indeed with German history.
Both the West German and the East German foundations were intended
as purely historical museums, not as museums for the “antiquity and art of
the Fatherland.” As early as 1919, in Art Museums and the German People,
an anthology that is very important for the questions we are discussing
here, Otto Lauffer drew a distinction between two types of historical museum.
The first he called “museums following the Nuremberg model”:
They contain simultaneously art collections, sections for crafts and finally
groups of archaeological and regional historical memorials. The common
thread that binds these different sections together is the native origin.
They make use in part of the happy position in which they see
themselves to be as a result of the variety of their possessions.18
Thus, “artistic value and historical learning become linked.” A distinction
is made, therefore, between “value” and “learning,” which can be seen as
a parallel to the division between form and content. Here art is assigned
to the realms of form and value, while history denotes content and learning.
The fact that even as perceptive a museologist as Otto Lauffer makes this

10 DETLEF HOFFMANN
distinction without question shows how deeply Kugler’s ideas were
concealed in the past. But later in the text, Lauffer widens and sharpens
the division still further by imputing a specific order to each of his three
groups of objects. He writes:
When they [the museums] exhibit the objects of the different sections in
separate groups, the order of each section will come entirely of itself: the
art historical order of the painting galleries, the historico-stylistic and
technological order of the crafts museums for the crafts sections and
finally the historico-cultural order of archaeological museums for the
regional historical and archaeological sections.
Besides these “museums of the Nuremberg type,” there are the “collections
consisting purely of antiquities.” Of these, Lauffer says that they invite
“their visitors not to artistic enjoyment but to rational learning.” Art is
therefore assigned to pleasure, to emotion, to value, to form; history to
reason, to contents, to learning. The historical objects, says Lauffer in the
subsequent passage, are primarily defined by a form appropriate to their
purpose. And it is this dualism of “enjoyment” versus “learning,”
corresponding to emotion versus reason, and finally to art versus academic
knowledge, especially history, that determines the discussion even today.
In this division—and how could it be otherwise?—the history of the art
museum mirrors the developments I have outlined thus far.19
In the nineteenth century, historical objects and artworks, which had
still been treated equally in the “collection of national antiquities,” became
increasingly separated. The endearing chaos that once characterized the
collection of antiquities, and that was still predominant in romanticism,
now gave way to an academically ordered system. This endearing chaos
allowed the collections to reflect the many-faceted richness of the human
species (Gattung Mensch), as Georg Forster put it. Romantic collectors
became more strongly and selectively interested in the history of the
nation and especially in the Middle Ages, but this too could be interpreted
in terms of a desire to develop a more precise definition of the concept of
the human species. With each new object, the idea of humankind naturally
became richer and more varied, and therefore also truer.20
Although
romanticism narrowed the scope down to the nation, the element of
curiosity and the pleasure derived from collecting remained the same.
The relationship to the objects collected was not selective but integral.
The nineteenth-century segmentation of science and art, to which I
briefly referred at the beginning of this essay, was not only a question of
drawing a distinction between nature and culture. Just as, for example,

zoology was separated from botany, so art was separated from history.
Lauffer’s classification of historical objects according to their function led
to collections of arms in one room, while the next might contain everything
pertaining to guilds, to be followed by an exhibition of tools, which
might be further subdivided according to the various trades.
Thus, what we find is an object-oriented positivism that not only left
unanswered the question of how the various groups of objects were
interconnected, but also declined even to attempt to paint—and reproduce
in the museum—a scientific picture of history founded on material evidence
and thus also on works of art. The emphasis on amassing parts necessarily
precluded a coherent picture, or indeed any pictures at all, of the whole.
Under these circumstances, the museums—even the art museums—were
places of learning not only for the academic few, but also for a bourgeois
public who were able to incorporate the objects they found there into
their view of a liberal society and thus extrapolate this view into the past.
At the same time, however, this meant that the museum neither drew
attention to gaps in the bourgeois male’s view of the world nor relativized
this view. If social groups or cultural forms were absent, this absence was
not made manifest. It was not until after 1968—if I may briefly be allowed
to leap forward in time in my brief sketch of the history of German
museums—that attention was first drawn to gaps in the contents of the
collections, that omissions became a topic of interest. The first discovery
of the late-1960s reform movements was the absence of the working
class from the arena of representation, an absence of a social group that
from the point of view of the late-1960s neo-Marxist critiques was largely
synonymous with politically organized men. In the struggle by various
student reform movements against the establishment, which they came to
equate with “fascism,” national socialism was reduced to nothing more
than a variation on the normal mode of capitalist rule, a local variant of a
larger economic and political paradigm. In viewing fascism as a primarily
economic and political construct and in not paying sufficient attention to
the virulant racism that played an equally important part in its ideology,
the student movement ran the extreme danger of somehow reproducing
the antiSemitism of their parents. Thus, for example, their support of the
Palestinian cause and its linked and vehement anti-Israeli politics, in the
name of an antifascist and anticapitalist struggle ignored the anti-Semitic
past of the very fascism they were trying to protest and came close to
reproducing its racial prejudices. My purpose in describing this in such
detail is to bring out the fact that when people talked of a “critical coming
to terms with the past”—“kritische Aufarbeitung” was the contemporary

12 DETLEF HOFFMANN
catchphrase—there could be two (or more) sides to these efforts. For
example, it was not until the late 1970s that museums first took up the
subject of nineteenth-century bourgeois society’s denial of civil rights to
women, a theme that began to be reflected in exhibition and collection
concepts.21
Suffice it to note here that the ostensibly neutral positivism of
the museum prior to the turn of the last century transpires in practice to
be an uninterrupted series of omissions.
Around 1900, reformers of the art museum (on which I shall now
concentrate) reacted to the status quo by trying to make it possible again
for people to visit museums without any prior knowledge. Alfred Lichtwark,
for example, declared knowledge of the history of art to be unessential,
indeed even harmful,22
as did his contemporary Heinrich Wölfflin. Art
history was said to be the exclusive preserve of the academic. Nonetheless,
cultivated—that is, trained—eyes made it possible for people to develop
a cultivated taste and thus derive enjoyment from art. Cultivation of artistic
taste meant, on the one hand, the possibility of overcoming the separation
of time between past works and present observers, and, on the other, of
reuniting art with life. “Life” in this conception—as exemplified by
Lichtwark—referred exclusively to the present. The nation played an
important role in this. Its capacities were to be optimized in competition
for world markets. The national past had no place in this idea of the art
museum; it was a topic best left to the museum in Nuremberg, to the Hall
of Fame in the Zeughaus, and to painters of historical scenes.
After the Second World War, historical museums were staffed mainly
by art historians. The historical objects drifted into the storeroom. The
main focus was on local or regional art history. The Germanic National
Museum was also a good example of this; from 1933 to 1945—although
the seeds were probably sown before 1933—the name was associated
with such nasty concepts that many were glad to flee to the ivory tower
of analysis of artistic form.
Finally, not only the museum but also art itself changed during the last
hundred years, and this change deserves a brief description. Art had long
ago become independent not only of the wholeness of life, but also of
history. The assumption that art is autonomous is in itself a significant
historical phenomenon, evident since the end of the eighteenth century
and rooted in the Renaissance. Since the second half of the nineteenth
century at the latest, more and more artists in Western society have insisted
on the autonomy of art. They describe it as a way of being independent
of nature and history. (This undialectic argument will have to suffice in
the interests of brevity.) They think of the fine arts as a “universal language”

that is capable of overcoming social, cultural, and temporal boundaries.
This explains why concrete objects in a specific manifestation have been
accorded less significance, as they always signal a particular place in
time, in a society and a culture. The universal has consisted increasingly
of the language of art itself, the style, the manner. Interest was lost in
what was depicted; what mattered was how it was depicted. But, while
they hoped to gain universality through autonomy, artists lost the wider
audience that, through the mediation of the object, they had still been
able to reach in the nineteenth century.23
Whether we welcome it or not, this development cannot be undone.
Anyone who wishes to understand art and its languages must—paradoxical
though it might have sounded to Lichtwark’s ears—acquire a knowledge
of its histories. He or she must be or must become a specialist in art.
Again and again artists have tried to break out of this bind, to make an
unmediated intervention in life, to become understandable to, to be
received by and accepted in everyday culture. They have often found,
however, that the field was already occupied. As art became autonomous
and free from function and idealization, the terrain it had vacated had
been developed not only by applied art but also by modern
representational pictorial media—ranging from photography to film and
including everything we have come to call “mass media” and “the popular
arts” (which undoubtedly culminate in the object-addicted
gesamtkunstwerk known as Disney World). It need hardly be emphasized
that the nature of the relationship between autonomous art and functional
art or, at least, representational art, is not static but dialectic.
Before I formulate my question, I must first describe an attempt, earlier
this century, to reverse this development using not only the state’s total
monopoly of power, but also the instruments of terror. I am referring, of
course, to the National Socialist policy toward art. The impatience of the
“petty bourgeois” with the efforts required for comprehension of modernist
art, together with the radical assertion of racist politics, led to a fusion of
the art museum with the national past. By purging German art museums
of “degenerate art”—“entartete Kunst”—and by staging the Great German
Art Exhibition to promote paintings and sculptures that were loyal to the
party line, the Nazis hoped to make it possible for visitors to the art
museum to feel in harmony with their purified history. The price to be
paid for this was the denial of the complexity not only of art but also of
history. Appearance was sold as reality—and thereafter became reality,
with the brutal consequence that reality was transformed by political
terror (“blood and iron”) into appearance.

14 DETLEF HOFFMANN
If one takes note of this historical inventory, then the question of the
relationship between the German art museum and the national past
seems absurd. On entering the new building of the Art Collections of
North Rhine Westphalia in Düsseldorf, the Alte or Neue Pinakothek in
Munich, or the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, only an expert will be able to
discern the structures of collection histories that these three museums
have in common, and that separate them from the Art Gallery in
Manchester, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, or Walker’s Art
Gallery in Liverpool. Naturally, the respective local traditions are in
evidence, but this illustrates the differences between the cities and not
between the countries. The art historian knows why St. Peter’s Altar by
Konrad Witz is in Geneva, why the Portinari Altar by Hugo van der
Goes is in Florence, and why Dürer’s panels of the Apostles are in
Munich rather than Nuremberg. To know the answers to these
questions, like knowing why Dürer’s stag-beetles can be seen in
Malibu, of all places, is to have precise knowledge of the national past.
That which was acquired and collected at a certain period of history
provides an accurate documentation of the cultural mentality of that
time. For the initiate, though hardly for the educated visitor, the
structure of the collection of an art museum is an essential part of a
regional or national past.
Moreover, there was and is no national art museum in Germany to
compare with those in Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam—a
situation Germany shares with Italy. If there is a national signature of
German art museums at all, then it is international variety combined with
local history.
If one actually wanted to make the national past into a topic for a
German art museum (in the form of either a rotating or a permanent
exhibition, a desire that would seem unnecessarily excessive to me), one
would have to include exhibits showing how the structure of the collections
developed over the course of history—not exactly the kind of spectacular
subject that would inspire the general public.
Just how difficult it is to exhibit a historical “art-political” topic in an art
museum is shown by the various attempts during 1988 to put together an
exhibition commemorating the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate art.”
The exhibitions followed one of three basic models: (1) only the pictures
condemned by the Nazis were exhibited, as happened in Düsseldorf, so
that the visitor could have been forgiven for thinking he or she was
wandering through an exhibition entitled Art of the Weimar Republic; (2)
Nazi art à la Ziegler was juxtaposed to Dix and Kirchner, thus avoiding,

through a kind of exhibition guidance strategy, any danger that, after
comparing the two sides, the observer might uphold the Nazis’ verdict by
handing the laurels to Ziegler; or the original Entartete Kunst exhibition
of fifty years earlier was reconstructed and called a historical—as opposed
to an art—exhibition.24
The most recent, and undoubtedly the most thoroughgoing, attempt to
deal with this subject was on show to the public during the spring of
1992 at the Altes Museum in Berlin.25
Like the democracy that was instated
in 1945, this attempt to subject Nazi policy on art to a visual form of
critical appraisal came from the United States. On this occasion the effort
at a cultural revision was encountered from within a recently reunited
Germany, in itself a state of historical revision. Judging by my own
observations of the public at the exhibition, which were confirmed by
the organizers, the first part of the exhibition, the documentary section,
aroused intense interest among visitors. Younger people in particular
were prepared to spend considerable time reading the newspaper articles
and broadsheets and studying the posters and photographs. The second
section, showing the incriminated art of 1938, did not seem to hold the
visitors’ attention to the same degree. Yet the strict dividing line that was
drawn in this exhibition between political information and artistic
presentation brought to light a further problem. As we entered the second
section, we found ourselves in an exhibition of 1920s art that mirrored—
albeit with positive rather than negative overtones—the selection made
in 1938 by the National Socialist judges of artistic merit. What was
condemned at the time as bad art must now be made to appear
unconditionally good in the eyes of the German public—especially in
the eyes of the older, guilt-ridden generation of Germans. The Nazis’
black-and-white oversimplification thus served as a model for the exhibition
of 1992 (I refer throughout to the second part of the reconstructed
exhibition). The problem of expressionism and its relationship to currents
of Nazi Weltanschauung was dealt with on a textual level in the first
section, but not on a visual level in the second. The fact that many Nazi
painters (Ziegler and Peiner, to name but two) were actually much closer
to Neue Sachlichkeit than the post-1945 legends would have us believe
was a lesson that apparently could not be conveyed in visual terms. Yet
at least the younger members of the public have a right to a differentiated
portrayal; otherwise it would look as though the “degenerate art” of 1938
represented all that was good in Germany, whereas the organizers of that
time felt it represented all that was evil. Let it be noted that one means of
ascertaining the health of the German nation is to use its reaction to

16 DETLEF HOFFMANN
modern art as a clinical barometer. A slightly raised temperature is
apparently normal, but from time to time the chart shows a steeply rising
curve, and it is then that vigilance is called for. It is not the evaluation of
artworks that is decisive here; of vital importance is the actual political
and cultural use that is made of them. Paradoxical though it may sound,
on the question of “degenerate art” the German art museum is congruent
with the history of the nation.
There are other ways for the art museum to deal effectively with the
national past. Allow me to begin with a personal example. At the hearings
organized by West Berlin’s senator for cultural affairs on January 13, 1984,
to discuss the German historical museum project, I proposed that
contemporary artists be commissioned to record events from German
history in a fashion similar to what was done in Versailles 150 years ago.26
The reaction of historian Hagen Schulze was interesting. He described
such pictures as a “collection of sources for present reflections on history,”
a definition with which I would concur. The pictures in Versailles, he
continued, were a “collection for the depiction of historical myths” that
served to legitimate present ideologies. Here too I would concur. However,
I would take issue with the assumption that while artists create myths,
scholars and scholarship do not. The supposedly “authentic” past received
through scholarship is just as much a myth as the present one. Titian’s
portrait of Charles V (1532–33) is no less a subject for criticism than
Alfred Rethel’s 1840 painting in the emperor’s hall in Frankfurt; David’s
Marat or Napoleon is as much a constitution of myths as the Wallenstein
biography by Golo Mann or the book on Bismarck by Lothar Gall. Truth
always becomes evident if myths are subjected to critical comparison.
The art museum can make such comparison possible, but the visitors
themselves must engage in the work of comparing.
If we do not want to deny the development toward autonomous art—
and this development also shapes the visitor’s habits of perception—then
such a comparison can only be carried out intelligently if we understand
aesthetic categories as historical categories, that is, if we understand the
formal structure of an artwork, a picture, as a statement about its place in
society and the time in which it was created. Those who know the difficulty
art historical literature has in treating aesthetic categories as historical
ones will appreciate how much work has to be done to make this a
didactic concept for the museum.
This final section deals with what I call an aesthetic biography. No extensive
or thorough art historical research has yet been conducted on this topic.

Each biography consists of pictures, images that may be banal or
demanding, famous or unknown. Not all of these pictures necessarily
belong solely to an individual. Indeed, it is quite possible for certain
pictures to belong to a whole generation (at least from a particular region
or nation). If these personal pictures could be integrated into exhibitions
of officially sanctioned pictures, they would add a historical dimension to
aesthetic dimensions. These personal pictures are sometimes connected
with the national past, but mostly the officially constituted national aspect
of the past is weaker in people’s imaginations than the local or social
aspect. Nevertheless, the qualities of both would be the value of this
aesthetic biography. The fund of personal pictures could, for example,
be investigated for late nineteenth century Germany in terms of the number
of reproductions of Böcklin or Thoma printed. In the postwar period, my
generation—I was born in 1940—attached great value to Franz Marc’s
(representational and yet simultaneously modern) pictures, but what do
they actually portray for my generation? In what sense do I—together
with many western Germans of my age—see Franz Marc’s pictures
differently than the French, Italians, or Swedes would see them?
For many people who were young during the Weimar Republic, youth
was identified with particular forms, with modern buildings (flat roofs)
and modern art, which meant both expressionism and the new
functionalism (Neue Sachlichkeit). When the Nazis condemned these
pictures, many felt (as I know from members of the banned young workers’
movement of the period) that a piece of their own history was being
destroyed. Artworks were, in this case, actually something like coded
memories of one’s life history.
But besides these, very different memories of pictures exist—paintings
like the ones that hung in school or in church, that one always looked at,
often because boredom made it impossible to do otherwise. It could be
the unfinished painting of George Washington in an American schoolroom
or of the Virgin Mary of Lourdes in a Catholic church. It might be the
belling stag hanging in the traditional German living room or the Dance
of the Elves in the parents’ bedroom; perhaps the soft beard and mother-
of-pearl eyes of Karl Marx, or Che Guevara staring down from an offset
poster; or it could be Marilyn Monroe as a pinup, or an Andy Warhol
painting. Or a combination of all of these. In the subjective emotional
store of treasures, these pictures can stand on an equal footing alongside
more famous, publicly respected ones. Here, local painters or schools of
painting—hardly known beyond the region—gain meaning in the lives
of many people, although their influence when measured internationally

18 DETLEF HOFFMANN
is as yet marginal. Here again, the style of such pictures matches—with a
time lag—those that are more well known. The question of how, or
indeed whether, a more precise knowledge of these phenomena could
in fact promote the treatment of national history in the art museum
remains.27
Art plays a fairly marginal role in most people’s lives. Like monuments28
and buildings, like landscapes and roads, artworks are not consciously
looked at; they are simply there. On only two occasions do they arouse
greater interest: when they appear in the limelight of public attention,
and when they disappear. When the Lenbachhaus in Munich purchased
Joseph Beuys’s Zeige Deine Wunde29
the acquisition was met with a wave
of public indignation (in which arguments were often brought forward
echoing those once leveled against “degenerate art”). Yet the museum’s
directors stuck to their guns, and now, years later, the work stands quietly
in its room, seldom receiving close attention. Only if it were to be removed
again—perhaps at the hands of an overly zealous cleaner—would the
debate that would allow us to count the people to whom this work
means something reemerge. It is only when dormant objects are activated
that their significance—and that includes their historical significance—
becomes apparent. As long as latencies do not become manifest, art will
remain in a realm of its own, far removed from history. This is a description
that holds good, if not among museums cognoscenti, at any rate among
the vast majority of people.
If, however, we broaden the concept of art, as I have tried to do here,
to allow images from the private sphere, from advertising and film to
dwell under the same roof, then the eminent significance of these “pictorial
treasures” is beyond question. Yet can they be collected in an art museum?
And if so, would they then have something to do with the history of the
nation? Is the nation not a fiction that falls apart at the very moment we
attempt to link it to experience, to visual experiences? Or is it that fictions,
precisely because they are unreal, have a particular suggestive force, like
a drug that is mistaken for food? The events that took place in the Soviet
Union after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his reform program and the
consequences they have had for Eastern Europe have left us—not only,
but also, in Germany—with more questions and fewer answers.
Notes
1. See Volker Plagemann, Das deutsche Kunstmuseum (Munich, 1967), especially pp. 11–
22; the recognized authority is still Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern
der Spätrenaissance: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens (Leipzig, 1908).

2. Michael Müller, ed., Autonomie der Kunst: Zur Genese und Kritik einer bürgerlichen
Kategorie (Frankfurt, 1972).
3. For more detail, see Detlef Hoffmann, “Germania: Die vieldeutige Personifikation
einer deutschen Nation,” in the exhibition catalog Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit: 200
Jahre Französische Revolution in Deutschland (Nuremberg, 1989), pp. 137–55.
4. Julius Grosse: Die deutsche allgemeine und historische Kunstausstellung zu München
im Jahre 1858, Studien zur Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1959), p. 39.
5. Gudrun Calov, ed., Museen und Sammler des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin,
1969) (=Museumskunde 1–3, 1969), especially pp. 74–92.
6. Quoted in Peter Bloch, “Über die Kunstbestrebungen und die Sammeltätigkeit des
Reichsfreiherrn vom Stein,” in the exhibition catalogue Meisterwerke mittelalterlicher
Glasmalerei aus der Sammlung des Reichsfreiherm van Stein (Hamburg, 1966), pp. 9–13,
especially p. 10.
7. Georg Wilhelm Issel, Über deutsche Volksmuseen 1817. Einige fromme Worte über
Museen deutscher Altertümer und Kunst. Quoted in Plagemann, Das deutsche
Kunstmuseum, pp. 28f.
8. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Über Kunst und Altertum in den Rhein-und Maingegenden,”
first published in Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, March 9–12, 1916, reprinted in dtv
Gesamtausgabe of the complete works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, vols. 33 and 34: Schriften
zur Kunst, part 2 (Munich, 1962), pp. 18–27.
9. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Berlin, 1797; Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 71f.
10. The history of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has often been recorded. August
Essenwein’s introduction to the first volume of the Anzeiger des Germanischen
Nationalmuseums (vol. 1, nos. 1 and 2, January and February 1884, pp. 1–9) describes the
change of the concept of collecting between him and von Aufsess.
11. Under the aegis of Dürer’s name, art-concentered and nationalist values of the
nineteenth century unite. See Dürers Gloria, exhibition catalog (Berlin [West], 1971);
Nürnberger Dürerfeiern 1828–1928, exhibition catalog (Nuremberg, 1971); Matthias
Mende and Inge Hebecker, eds., Das Dürer-Stammbuch von 1828 (Nuremberg, 1973). Even
Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt-mysticism was adapted by him to Dürer; see Julius Langbehn
and Momme Nissen, Dürer als Führer: Vom Rembrandtdeutschen und seinem Gehilfen
(Munich, 1923).
12. See the introduction by Gerhard Bott in Schatzkammer der Deutschen, aus den
Sammlungen des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (Nuremberg, 1982). The choice of this
title (Treasury of the Germans) in the ninth decade of the twentieth century is rather naive,
but the book was sponsored by a large mail order firm.
13. Th. Gaethgens, Versailles als Nationaldenkmal: Die Galerie des Batailles im Musée
Historique von Louis-Philippe (Antwerp, 1984).
14. Franz Kugler, Kleine Schriften und Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, part 3 (Stuttgart,
1854), pp. 476–87; before the German Revolution of 1848 the relation between a national
subject and a national style was intensively discussed; see Detlef Hoffmann, “Germania
zwischen Kaisersaal und Paulskirche: Der Kampf um Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1830–
1848)”, in the exhibition catalog Trophäe oder Leichenstein? Kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte des
Geschichtsbewußtseins in Frankfurt im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1978), pp. 83–133,
especially pp. 99–106.
15. Franz Kugler (1808–58) was an art historian. In 1833 he became professor of art
history at the academy and at the University in Berlin; in 1842 he was appointed a member
of the Senate of the Academy. In the following years he became the person responsible for
cultural affairs and for art projects in the Prussian Ministry. His Handbuch der Geschichte der
Malerei, von Konstantin d. Gr. bis auf die neuere Zeit (Berlin, 1837) made him one of the
founders of art history as a scientific discipline. The second edition (1847) was revised by
Jacob Burckhardt, who on Kugler’s side took part in the discussion about the way historical

20 DETLEF HOFFMANN
paintings are devoted to the idea of the nation; see Rainer Schoch, “Die belgischen Bilder,”
in Städel-Jahrbuch n.s. 7 (1979): pp. 171–86. Kugler edited the Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte
(Stuttgart, 1841–42), which influenced German art historians up to the First World War; every
educated home had a copy of it. The fifth edition was revised by Wilhelm Lübke, 1871–72.
His Geschichte der Baukunst, vols. 1–3 (Berlin, 1855–60), was completed and revised by
Jacob Burckhardt, Wilhelm Lübke, and Cornelius Gurlitt. Kugler wrote poetry as well as art
history and criticism.
16. The history of the Museum für deutsche Geschichte in East Berlin has not been
written. The artistic interpretation of the Zeughaus from 1876 to 1880 as well as the
interpretation after 1967 has to be reconstructed by means of guidebooks such as, for example,
Das Königliche Zeughaus: Führer durch die Ruhmeshalle und die Sammlungen (Berlin,
1907). Guide-books for the communist museum, including conceptual declarations, are
Kaiserreich Kapitalismus Klassenkampf 1871–1900 (1967); Imperialismus Krieg Revolution
1914–1919 (ca. 1971); 1933–1945 (ca. 1969).
17. The extensive discussions about this museum are documented in Christoph Stölzl,
ed., Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen-Kontroversen-Perspektiven (Frankfurt and
Berlin, 1988).
18. Otto Lauffer, “Historische Museen,” in Die Kunstmuseen und das deutsche Volk, ed.
Deutscher Museumsbund (Berlin, 1919), pp. 169–84.
19. Volkhard Knigge and I argue against this silly opposition; see “Museumspädagogik,”
in Kulturpädagogik und Kulturarbeit: Grundlagen, Praxisfelder, Ausbildung, ed. Sebastian
Müller-Rolli (Weinheim and Munich, 1988), pp. 119–28.
20. This spirit is to be seen in Richard D.Altick, The Shows of London: A Panorama
History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862 (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
21. The Historisches Museum Frankfurt with its director, Dr. Hans Stubenvoll, was the
opinion leader in the discussion about museums of the seventies in West Germany. See
Detlef Hoffmann, Almut Junker, and Peter Schrimbeck, Geschichte als öffentliches
Ärgernis, oder: Ein Museum für die demokratische Gesellschaft (Steinbach, 1974). In
Frauenalltag und Frauenbewegung 1890–1980 (Frankfurt, 1981), the museum revised its
ten-year-old exhibition. The whole development in West Germany is analyzed in Detlef
Hoffmann, “Von der Museumsreform zur Wende,” in Kritische Berichte 18, no. 3 (1990):
pp. 46–52.
22. The opinion of Alfred Lichtwark, the famous director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg,
of the role of the art museum in the context of national economics is described in Irene
Below, “Probleme der ‘Werkbetrachtung’—Lichtwark und die Folgen,” in Kunstwissenschaft
und Kunstvermittlung, ed. Irene Below (Giessen, 1975), pp. 83–136.
23. See Detlef Hoffmann, “Immer ein Stiefkind der großen Kunst. Malerei, Buchillustration
und Kinderbuch im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Detlef Hoffmann and Jens Thiele, Künstler illustrieren
Bilderbücher (Oldenburg, 1986), pp. 17–34. A discussion that deals with this problem on a
large scale is Werner Busch, Die notwendige Arabeske: Wirklichkeitsaneignung und Stilisierung
in der deutschen Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1985).
24. West German books and catalogs dealing with “degenerate art” in the context of
Nazi art politics are f.e. Klaus Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Künste, Kulturverständnis
und Kunstpolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne, 1988); Verfolgt und verführt: Kunst unterm
Hakenkreuz in Hamburg, exhibition catalog (Hamburg, 1983); Peter-Klaus Schuster,
ed., Die “Kunststadt,” München 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst”
(Munich, 1987).
25. Stephanie Barron, ed., Entartete Kunst: Das Schicksal der Avantgarde im Nazi-
Deutschland, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles and Berlin, 1992).
26. Detlef Hoffmann, “Probleme des Aufbaus einer Sammlung zu einem ‘Deutschen
Historischen Museum,’” Discussion in Protokoll der Anhörung zum Forum für Geschichte
und Gegenwart, Tagung im Reichstagsgebäude am 13. Januar 1984 (Berlin, 1984), pp. 26–
34, especially pp. 31 and 32.

27. Sometimes artists have collected objects with this biographic background—for example,
Daniel Spoerri, Le musée sentimental de Cologne (Cologne, 1979). See also Detlef Hoffmann,
“Kulturelle Identifikation,” in Kunst and Alltagskultur, ed. Jutta Held and Norbert Schneider
(Cologne, 1981), pp. 122–31.
28. See “Der Fall der Denkmäler,” Kritische Berichte 3, 1992.
29. Joseph Beuys, Zeige Deine Wunde, vol. 1 photos, vol. 2 reactions (Munich, 1980).

22
2
The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and
the Politics of Seeing
Seth Koven
Oh! East is East, and West is West
as Rudyard Kipling says.
When the poor East enjoys the Art
for which the rich West pays,
See East and West linked in their best!
With the Art-wants of Whitechapel
Good Canon Barnett is just the man
who best knows how to grapple.
So charge this Canon, load to muzzle,
all ye great Jubilee guns.
Pictures as good as sermons? Aye,
much better than some poor ones.
Where Whitechapel’s darkness the weary eyes
of the dreary workers dims,
It may be found that Watts’ pictures
do better than Watts’ hymns.1
In the spring of 1881, the rooms of St. Jude’s parish school, Whitechapel,
in the very heart of “outcast London,” underwent a remarkable
transformation. The usually bare walls were covered with paintings by
the “best” modern British artists and a smattering of old masters. A battalion
of men and women from the fashionable West End of London agreed to
serve as guards in morning, afternoon, and evening shifts. At the public
opening of the picture exhibition, the prominent Liberal politician Lord
Rosebery declared that yet another good thing had befallen the East End
thanks to the vicar of St. Jude’s and his wife, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett.
The Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibition (also called the St. Jude’s
Picture Exhibition) and its successor, the permanent Whitechapel Free
Art Gallery, were explicit attempts to use the display of art objects and
the creation of a working-class art public to promote social reclamation

THE WHITECHAPEL PICTURE EXHIBITIONS 23
and urban renewal. They grew out of the Barnetts’ passionate commitment
to John Ruskin’s theories about the transforming power of art and culture.
Among the most respected social reformers of their generation, the Barnetts
wielded their enormous influence not only through close personal ties
with leading politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who sought out their
views, but also as founders of Toynbee Hall. Toynbee Hall was the first
university settlement, established in 1884 for recent male graduates of
Oxford and Cambridge as a residence hall and center of social welfare
services and investigation in East London.2
The Barnetts promoted the exhibitions, along with university extension
lectures, clubs, debating societies, and classes in arts and crafts, in an
attempt to build a national culture based not on the competing interests
of class, but on consensual citizenship. At a time when the British elite
witnessed violent confrontations between labor and capital, the Barnetts
argued that culture, shared by all but defined according to each person’s
own lights, would help rich and poor to transcend class divisions and
together forge a nation.
Neither the Barnetts nor their followers, however, were so naive as to
believe that pictures alone would solve the problems confronting the
poor of East London. The exhibitions and later the permanent gallery
must be seen as pieces of a much larger project to reshape the interior
and exterior landscapes of the urban poor. The Barnetts were leaders in
the movement to build free libraries, establish urban open spaces, and
design and construct municipally subsidized housing in East London.
Some of their programs required massive state and local government
expenditure. Samuel Barnett was an early and vocal supporter of old-age
pensions and helped develop labor colonies for the unemployed. Library
and museum would replace music hall and pub as the centers of civic life
for the newly enfranchised working-class citizens of the 1880s and 1890s.
The history of the Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and Gallery can be
told in many ways, and from many points of view. The Barnetts tended
to use comedy to describe the exhibitions. In their accounts, which they
spiced with a fair bit of humor and self-mockery, the disorder of the
weeks preceding the exhibitions yielded to the order of the event itself.
The orderliness of the exhibitions reinforced their point that the exhibitions
encouraged the cultural and spiritual elevation of East Enders and, more
generally, the foundation of harmonious social relations between rich
and poor. With some justification, they saw the exhibitions and later the
permanent gallery as triumphs against adverse circumstances. Frances
Borzello, a recent historian of the exhibitions, adopted tragedy as her

24 SETH KOVEN
narrative mode: tidy- but small-minded people and ideas inexorably
produced a messy and unfortunate legacy of popular alienation from art.3
But in many respects, satire seems better suited to an account of the
exhibitions. Satire in part relies on the distance separating what is said—
in this case, the ideological apparatus and rhetoric of the exhibitions—
from what actually is—the ways in which people experienced the
exhibitions. Satire also allows, perhaps even demands, the coexistence of
many and often contradictory meanings and realities. If the organizers
scripted the text of the exhibitions by selecting, exhibiting, and describing
the pictures, the working-class public could and did read against this text
by bringing the realities and presuppositions of their own lives to bear on
what they saw. This essay explores the tensions between the founders’
ideological aspirations and the ways in which different groups of people
experienced and gave meaning to the exhibitions.
It is easy to understand why late-Victorian social reformers turned to
the ostensibly apolitical arena of culture to deflect intensifying class
conflict away from hustings and workplace. But saying this does not
explain why many social reformers were, and perhaps still are, so
committed to the idea that rich and poor literally shared a common
culture and heritage—physically realized in art objects. The exhibitions
were unabashed attempts to apply theories about the political and social
uses of art and its public display to the problems of class relations in late-
Victorian London. The exhibition promoters believed that art objects, if
they were properly displayed and explained to the working-class public,
would serve as the medium through which misunderstanding and hatred
between rich and poor could be translated into mutual appreciation for
the transcendent truths and beauties of art. This shared aesthetic and
moral experience would, they hoped, lead to political, social, and
economic solidarity. Using what fragmentary sources exist about the
ways in which East Londoners interpreted their experiences at the
exhibitions, I attempt to assess the extent to which the promoters’
aspirations were realized.
Many historians have argued cogently that the late-Victorian metropolitan
working class lived a “life apart” from the middle and upper classes.4
Others, G.S.Jones prominent among them, have argued that a kind of
Faustian bargain was implicitly struck between elites and the working
class. The working class accepted the political and economic authority of
elites and, unlike its Continental counterparts, did not support in large
numbers genuinely radical and revolutionary movements. According to
this account, the working class turned inward to construct an insular

“culture of consolation,” centered in pubs and music halls and impervious
to the cultural imperialism of bourgeois social reformers.5
The prevailing
historiography, therefore, underlines the cultural gulf separating rich and
poor and suggests that forms of cultural behavior and activities were
specific to social classes. Within this framework, the ritual of museum
going, like temperance or attending university extension lectures, is read
as a sign of either bourgeois status or of co-optation by bourgeois cultural
values. In neither case can it be viewed as an expression of working-class
culture or desire.
This study of the Whitechapel Exhibitions builds on but also interrogates
these influential paradigms of class and cultural relations in the metropolis.
It suggests that placing bourgeois and working-class culture in binary
opposition to one another obscures the ongoing and negotiated character
of authority to define the meaning of cultural objects and products. Seen
in this light, even museums, then as now citadels of elite cultural authority
and self-representation, become sites of cross-class exchange as well as
contestation.
John Ruskin and the Poetry and Politics of Sight
The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions represented the Barnetts’ and
Toynbee Hall’s most ambitious and articulate endeavor to apply the
aesthetic theories of the preeminent art critic John Ruskin to slum work.
Ruskin argued in Modern Painters and more fully in Stones of Venice
that the production of art and the ability to understand and see it
reflected the moral values and socioeconomic conditions of the artist
and the artist’s society. Ruskin insisted that ethics, aesthetics, and
godliness were intertwined, so when he declared in Modern Painters
that “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see
something” he meant much more than perceiving a set of visual
sensations. “To see clearly,” he explained, “is poetry, prophecy, and
religion.” For Ruskin, sight engaged the moral and physical capacities of
individuals, who therefore actively experienced and participated in their
own education. The visual sense was paramount to unlocking the
visible and invisible truths of God.
Toynbee residents strove to help the poor of Whitechapel “see” in this
Ruskinian sense of the word. By so doing, they attempted to expand and
redefine the “seeing,” museum-going public to include the working class.
In establishing the picture exhibitions, moreover, the Barnetts looked not
only to Ruskin’s aesthetics, but also to his pronouncements about how a

26 SETH KOVEN
museum or gallery ought to be arranged. Few thinkers in Victorian Britain
had more to say about the social, moral, educational, and aesthetic
functions of museums.
Ruskin financed and opened the museum at Walkley near Sheffield in
1878 to illustrate the laws propounded by his “grammars” for the working
class and to serve as a storehouse of national treasures, a whimsical
antidote to the national debt. Several factors undermined its effectiveness
as an institution for uplifting the working class. Objects appeared to be
organized in a haphazard fashion that made it difficult to construct a
coherent narrative out of the experience.6
Furthermore, Ruskin located
his museum three miles outside of town, and up a steep hill. The ascent
to knowledge, he explained, should always be strenuous.7
It is little
wonder so few Sheffield ironworkers decided to educate themselves at
the museum.
In Deucalion, Ruskin’s geology “grammar” for laboring people, which
he began writing in 1875, he outlined most fully his conception of
museums. “Above all, let all things, for popular use, be beautifully
exhibited,” he insisted. “To teach our people rightly, we must make it a
true joy to them to see the pretty things we have to show: and we must
let them feel that, although, by poverty they may be compelled to the
pain of labour, they need not, by poverty, be debarred from the felicity
and the brightness of rest.”8
Education took precedence over recreation
for Ruskin, though ideally the two were complementary. As he admonished
a correspondent planning an art gallery in Leicester, “You must not make
your Museum a refuge against either rain or ennui, nor let into perfectly
well-furnished, and even, in the true sense, palatial, rooms, the utterly
squalid and ill-bred portion of the people.”9
If the Barnetts found much in Ruskin to inspire them in their daring
scheme, they also recognized his limits as a practical guide. To refuse to
admit the “squalid and ill bred” and to place obstacles in the paths of
those who cared to visit the pictures would obviously have undermined
their whole purpose. While Ruskin spoke of the steep climb to knowledge,
Henrietta Barnett more sensitively observed that working people did not
seek out the “West End Art Treasures” of the British Museum and National
Gallery because of
the expense of transit; the ignorance of ways of getting about; the
shortness of daylight beyond working hours…the impression that the day
when they could go is sure to be the day when the Museum is closed to
the public—all these little discouragements become difficulties,

especially to the large number who have not yet had enough
opportunities of knowing the joy which Art gives.10
The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions celebrated Ruskin’s ideals—but only
after they had been carefully and selectively sifted by the Barnetts.11
“Lessons in Seeing”
The Barnetts believed that great art transcended social divisions and created
a pool of shared emotions, thoughts, and sensations that would tie all
men and women together. Art spoke directly to the instincts and sympathies
of all people in a way that literature and history could not. At times the
Barnetts even romanticized the instinctual abilities of laboring people to
understand the language of art. Free from self-conscious artifice (i.e., the
burden of civilization in a Rousseauian sense), they could go “straight to
the point, and perhaps…reach the artist’s meaning more clearly than
some of those art critics whose vision is obscured by thought of ‘tone,
harmony, and construction.’”12
At a time when anthropology was just emerging as a science and
studies like The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man:
Mental and Social Conditions of Savages (first published in 1870) by the
Barnetts’ friend Sir John Lubbock enjoyed enormous popularity, the
Barnetts endowed the London working class with the virtues and vices of
a primitive people. In a curious reversal of roles, however, it was the
“primitive” East Enders who were invited to view the cultural artifacts of
elite life. The simplicity and honesty of the working class at once served
to rebuke the shams of capitalism and demanded the guidance and cultiva-
tion of those, like the Barnetts, whose family fortunes were made through
manufacture and industry.
The discursive imagining of the working classes as “primitive” and as
the “other” awkwardly affirmed and challenged some key ideological
premises of the exhibitions. The exhibitions aimed to legitimate visibly
the organizers’ claims to be insiders within their adopted communities.
One leader of the settlement movement even described settlers as “the
squires of East London,”13
thereby suggesting that they were the resident
urban gentry of East London. It was normal behavior from midcentury
onward for leaders of the resident urban gentry of provincial towns to
express their civic pride, power, and self-confidence by founding cultural
institutions like museums and libraries.14
But by viewing East Londoners
as primitives, the Whitechapel Exhibitions also unintentionally emphasized

28 SETH KOVEN
the organizers’ status as outsiders, as temporary visitors and as would-be
colonizers of Darkest London. Not surprisingly, the exhibition promoters
sometimes found it rather difficult to negotiate their conflicting claims to
be part of and yet superior to East London.
These contradictions were reproduced by their conflation of “self”
and “other” in describing East Londoners’ relationship to great British
art. Just as settlers claimed to be insiders, so too they insisted that the
paintings on display were part of the cultural inheritance of East
Londoners themselves. In the eyes of Henrietta and Samuel Barnett,
great British art, regardless of its actual legal status, was the property of
the nation as a whole. Their link between the display of British art and
the promotion of national identity and unity reflected wider debates in
the 1880s over competing proposals to establish a new state-owned art
gallery that, unlike the so-called National Gallery, would be “truly
national” in that it would show only great works of British art.15
While
the art establishment struggled to define a canon of exemplary British
art, the Barnetts insisted that the paintings they selected for their loan
exhibitions captured those best qualities of being British that the
“cultured classes” held in common with East Londoners. But it was
difficult to sustain, even in rhetoric, the illusion that the fine art on
display constituted a fragment of East Londoners’ “self.” After all, the
canvases were imported to East London precisely because they were
neither the property nor the products of East Londoners’ lives and
imaginings. The promoters of the exhibitions readily acknowledged
that the paintings materialized values and ideals that they saw as alien
to most East Londoners. The art objects were intended to represent
those ideals that the organizers wished East Londoners would embrace
as their own, not those ideals they believed East Londoners actually
valued.
Thus, despite their admiration for the ability of working people to
understand the essence of art, the Barnetts did not trust to their untutored
instincts alone. They shared with Ruskin a belief in the need to educate
instincts, to provide well-chosen works of art to stimulate an appreciation
for what they believed to be the best. Ruskin interpreted a work of art not
only as the creation of the artist, but also as an object that acted upon the
imagination of the beholder. The Barnetts translated Ruskin’s theoretical
emphasis on the social causes and effects of art into the educational
format of the exhibitions. “‘Lessons given here in seeing’ might have
been put upon the sign board outside our Picture Exhibition,” the Barnetts
wrote in 1889. “Many people would have laughed, thinking it a great

joke that anyone should need to be taught to see.”16
But for Ruskin and
the Barnetts, seeing was no laughing matter.
If art spoke equally to rich and poor, settlers nonetheless believed that
as men of culture, they had special wisdom to offer working people.17
Imbued with a keen sense of their role as bearers of what Matthew
Arnold had called the “best that had been thought and said,” the
exhibitions’ promoters and supporters proposed to illuminate the dark
and unruly corners of London with the light of culture. Toynbee settlers
and associates (male and female) served as both docents and guards.18
The combination of these two roles was particularly apt and paralleled
Arnold’s own conception of the redemptive and disciplinary functions of
culture. Settlers were literally both guardians and interpreters of culture.
In the role of guardians, they protected works of art—as valuable
commodities—from possible appropriation or abuse by working people
and thereby satisfied the requirements of insurance policies. As
interpreters of culture, they were to unlock the spiritual, immaterial
mysteries of art to unknowing eyes.
Some of Toynbee’s helpers chafed at their roles and suspected that
their exalted social status alone did not qualify them to make artistic
pronouncements. “Of course, being a cultured person, I know all about
Art,” recalled one guide in gentle self-mockery. “Someone explained to
me, however, that technical knowledge was not really necessary; general
intelligence and plenty of imagination were the main things.” The un-
lucky docent, with bemused self-awareness of his own cultural
posturing, then recounted the various ways in which the supposedly
ignorant East End schoolchildren exposed his own ignorance of art
during the course of the guided tour.19
The guide’s narrative highlights
the limits of his authority to speak about—and, in a sense to claim
cultural ownership of—the objects displayed. His story challenges the
conflation of class position and cultural authority on which the exhibition
enterprise was based.
Samuel Barnett drew enormous crowds as he led his neighbors through
the exhibition.20
He had rather different reasons for feeling uneasy in his
role. “It is interesting to watch the effect of Art as a teacher,” he mused.
I can’t make up my mind whether it needs the spoken word or not.
Today, people have been so taught to value the surface that unless a
word suggests the underneath, people are likely only to think of sound
and colour. On the other hand a word may mislead and destroy the
silent, far off working of the soul of the painter.21

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