The Magic of Museums and the Eloquence of Artifacts

Sometimes, in sleepy Midwestern towns and Eastern European capitals, we may have the good fortune to wander into some melancholy collection of dusty artifacts or fossils and find ourselves transported back to the museums of our childhood: those stodgy, no-nonsense, deeply romantic institutions that have mostly vanished and reemerged, unrecognizably Disneyfied, interactive, child-centered and user-friendly. A dinosaur skeleton, a pottery shard lettered with spidery catalog numbers, an embarrassingly racist diorama of indigenous people at work or play--all evoke the atmosphere of those mysterious Victorian temples to knowledge, consecrated to the notion of human educability.

Four recent books invite us to consider the questions of what museums are and should be, of how and why they originated and of what they have become. These matters are addressed most directly in Steven Conn’s study of--and lament for--the optimistic, democratic 19th century faith in an “object-based-epistemology,” a belief “that the world could be understood through the collection, observation, classification and display of objects; and a certainty that this work served the higher purpose of illuminating God’s plan for the world and humans’ place in it.”

Museums, argues Conn, were originally conceived not only as educational but also as research institutions charged with the dual task of producing new knowledge and communicating that knowledge to the masses. For most of this period, museums were laboratories for the study of the natural and social sciences, history and economics. By the early part of this century, this function was largely assumed by the universities, leaving museums to redefine their purpose. In support of his theory, Conn focuses on the evolution of some very different institutions: the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum, the now-defunct Philadelphia Commercial Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He considers the ongoing debate about the manner in which objects are grouped (culturally or chronologically, for example), their skewed or accurate representations of history, and how museums have ceded their place on the cutting edge of knowledge, mostly to universities. There’s something elegiac about this “narrative of failed hopes and reduced expectations” in this “rise and fall story” that, after we have read it, may partly explain the sadness of those deserted, out-of-the-way, provincial museums.

History’s role in shaping the museum is documented rather more dramatically in Geraldine Norman’s “The Hermitage.” This study of St. Petersburg’s magnificent collection provides an occasion for detailing the glorious excesses of the Russian monarchy, most notably Catherine the Great, who jump-started the museum with her “gluttonous”--to use Catherine’s own word--acquisition of 4,000 Old Master paintings; her initial purchase in 1764 was a consignment of 225 master works originally intended for Frederick the Great of Prussia. In the late 19th century, the museum stagnated under the Romanovs and was used as a hospital during World War I.

Happily, the Bolshevik Revolution overlooked the museum’s aristocratic origins, regarding it as “a precious repository of national culture which should be preserved for the enjoyment of the proletariat.” But during the Stalinist era, “more than 50 curators were arrested and sentenced to internal exile, prison, labor camp, or execution”--all of them on trumped-up charges--and Communist Party leaders held a predictably dim view of any modern art that strayed from the dictates of Socialist Realism. Struck by 32 shells and two bombs during the Siege of Leningrad, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, the museum dispersed its holdings and offered sustenance to workers who staved off starvation by eating “the furniture glue which the Hermitage staff had learned to serve up as jelly--the large stock of glue laid in by the restorers just before the war was one of the principal reasons why any of the Hermitage staff survived. The restorers’ drying oil was also used for frying appetizing morsels like potato peelings.” After the war, the museum’s exhibition space was increased to make room for the holdings, which were reassembled from their wartime shelters. In the last decade, we learn, the Hermitage’s problems have become more like a severe version of the worries confronting the world’s other major museums--funding, preservation, expansion.

As one might gather from its resolutely forward-looking title, Victoria Newhouse’s “Towards a New Museum” is less concerned with the cultural or historical education museum-going can provide than with aesthetic experience. Museum architecture, in Newhouse’s view, contributes to and even determines this experience (certainly this could be said about the thrillingly ornate--but poorly lit--salons of the Hermitage), and this lavishly illustrated volume of thoughtful criticism examines what’s best and worst about the ways in which new museums are being designed and older ones renovated. To this end, Newhouse considers the “surprise and delight” provided by museums, including Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz, designed by Peter Zumthor, a “ghostly box of a building” that harmonizes beautifully with its surroundings; and the well-thought-out and intelligent “silent and serene” Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki: “From the moment one enters the museum’s white concrete-walled reception atrium, the mystery of its receding curve and diffused skylight arouses a sense of excitement and anticipation.”

Such pleasant emotions are, according to Newhouse, much harder to locate in Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where “the very light that defines and animates the architecture so successfully poses a problem for viewing the museum’s contents. The brise-soleils do not effectively control the bright southern sun that pours through the facade. . . . The high levels of sun also make air conditioning prohibitively expensive.” She is highly critical of the new Getty Museum in Brentwood, “an ultra-conservative statement at home with its well-manicured suburban neighbors,” a “bizarre mixture of possibilities” that “continues the regional tradition of entertainment fantasy pioneered by the Hollywood film industry.” But Newhouse saves her harshest opprobrium for the renovations of established museums--the “Wings That Don’t Fly”--reconfigurations and additions that “cannibalize” existing structures and obscure their original inspiration. These defacements include the addition made to the Guggenheim Museum (“The Guggenheim is a building that should never have been altered”) and the I.M. Pei pyramid added to the Louvre. Newhouse takes us through the Metropolitan’s newer rooms, including the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing--a “confusing jumble of undistinguished spaces”--which “got the architecture it deserved.”

Even those of us who pine for the Victorian museums, with their creepy evocations of 19th century science, may find ourselves agreeing with many of Newhouse’s assessments and hoping that those who design new museums will heed her accolades and caveats. Fortunately, however, the disturbing additions to the Metropolitan go unnoticed by the artists whom New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman takes on brief trips in order to gather the comments he records in the entertaining and enlightening “Portraits.” Of the four books, only Kimmelman’s attempts to capture the experience of going to a museum--or at least of going with one’s most interesting and charming friends.

In these “opinionated guides,” artists (from Kiki Smith to Leon Golub, from Brice Marden to Jacob Lawrence) lead Kimmelman through the collections of certain museums (including the Louvre, London’s National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum) and to particular works that resonate for them. Few of their choices or their responses are predictable. Elizabeth Murray, known for her bright, exuberant canvases, is drawn to the delicacy of Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Jug”: “Vermeer is making an unremarkable moment when nothing much is happening gain a kind of mystical gravity. Partly it comes from the way he absents himself through the lack of visible brush strokes, so that we seem to be looking straight through a window across time.” For Chuck Close, the celebrated painter of giant portraits, a power figure from the Congo sparks a meditation on the transcendent nature of art: “People always wonder how paintings get made. How do they magically transcend their physicality? How do you take a stick with hairs on it, rub it in colored dirt, wipe it on a piece of cloth wrapped around some wood and make space where it doesn’t exist? I am no closer to understanding it today than when I began.” Cindy Sherman--the least voluble of Kimmelman’s guests and also the least familiar with the Metropolitan’s holdings--is moved by Courbet’s nudes to reaffirm the value of museums: “The nice thing about seeing paintings in the museum is looking at them up close. . . . You know, it’s a totally different experience from seeing them in catalogs.”

This recognition of the magic that comes from being in the presence of an authentic object brings us full circle to Conn’s notions about the eloquence of artifacts. Curators may have tempered their ambitions for improving our souls, but the contents of their museums continue to speak to us, across time. The artists in Kimmelman’s book remind us that despite how museums have changed, they are still places of pleasure and education for those with the desire--or perhaps the peculiar compulsion--to learn what they have to teach us.