# The Museum (Jackson)/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV The Formation of Collections
ACCORDING to the American system, a museum is an outgrowth of the educational need of the community and does not come into existence necessarily because of an already formed collection waiting to be housed. This condition renders a museum director's problem much more difficult than that faced by his European confrère who, almost invariably, finds himself in charge of an already formed collection. The American museum director must first of all make a careful plan by which he will be guided in the future for the scope and the direction of the activity of his museum. Where the people of a city need art, they often do not know what kind of art is going to be best for them, and the museum director must help them to choose wisely. The first necessity, therefore, that confronts the committee and director in planning a new museum is to study the needs of the city in which the museum is to be placed. If, for instance, there is already in existence in the city ​some collection which with proper tact may eventually come to the museum, it is the duty of the committee to plan the collection which they are to buy in such a way that it will not cover the same field. But the existence of private or other collections is not the only thing to be considered. There are two ends in view in adding the museum to the educational equipment of a city. One is the development of a high class of artisans producing a more artistic grade of manufactures. The second is the general cultural development of the community. In order to do their duty by the first of these classes, the committee and the director must study the manufactures of the city. They should make a survey of the kind of artistic products which are being turned out and then see how the museum could be made of interest and value to the workers in these different manufactories. For instance, in a city where a large amount of glass is produced there should be in the museum a representative collection of glass of all periods and countries. Very often, collections are made by wise manufacturers for the use of the workmen. One of the most interesting of these collections is in Dresden, where Herr Kuhnscherf, a prominent iron manufacturer, has a collection of early German hand-wrought iron locks, keys, knockers, gates, ​window bars, etc. This is open to the workers, and the men are supposed to spend, a certain amount of time in studying it, the idea being that they will have a greater respect for hand work and inspiration to better execution by this means. The same thing is, of course, true to an even greater extent in Lyons, France, where the city government maintains a large museum devoted entirely to the textile art of all nations and of all periods in order that the workmen in the silk factories may understand fully the development of the art to which they are devoting themselves.
In planning, therefore, the division of space in a museum, the committee should always arrange for exhibits of interest to the local industries. In addition there must, of course, be a collection for cultural purposes, which should mean material covering the history of art in all periods and all countries. A collection of reproductions is of inestimable value in the teaching of the history of art. Few museums can hope to possess fine examples of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance sculpture. At present the supply of originals is limited not only by the small number which are being found, but also by the laws forbidding the exportation of works of art. Casts must be shown by themselves and plainly marked "plaster cast from the original in . . ." ​Reproductions shown with the originals are always confusing, and clarity must be maintained in a museum. It is unfortunate that it is not possible to obtain equally successful reproductions of paintings. A collection of photographs is of inestimable value to the director and staff in a museum, but gives so little idea to the ordinary layman that the exhibition of photographs is a questionable means of education. Their use in lectures is, of course, an entirely different matter. Excellent reproductions of gold and silver finds have been made by the electrolytic method in a number of museums and by several well-known firms in Germany and elsewhere. One of the most complete installations for the reproduction of these objects may be found at the museum of St. Germain near Paris. This museum is especially rich in prehistoric and archæological material and has produced some very remarkable replicas of bronze and silver and gold objects in its collection.
Most people in thinking of an art museum have in mind a picture gallery, and the museum director who only collects minor arts or sculpture would be very unpopular; on the other hand, it is not well for the public to forget that all art is not painting and good collections of the other classes of material are essential.
The difficulty of selecting from a mass of ​modern paintings the ones which will be considered worthy of a place in a museum fifty years hence is extreme. It is unfortunate that we are biased in our views by temperament and by fashion. It is impossible to say in what fashion consists, and why we idolize an artist to-day whom we shall have forgotten after a generation. At the time that Whistler's portrait of his mother was exhibited in Paris, the picture received little commendation, and now the picture which won first prize in the Salon that year is considered a worthless daub in comparison. When we look back over the pictures that have made a great success and have been much talked about during the last twenty-five years, we are amazed to find how few of them we to-day consider worthy of a place in a museum. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. The most popular picture at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, "Breaking Home Ties," hardly won a glance at the San Francisco exhibition in 191 5. Some one has well said that the buying of modern pictures for exhibition in a museum is gambling with public funds. It is a hazard which the museum director need not take, as a collection of paintings can be rapidly built up by gift and bequest, and the wise director will therefore spend his available funds on old and well-tried masters. But if the ​museum director is going to collect modern pictures, why should he not with equal right collect modern furniture of artistic design or modern glass or modern porcelain or any other thing of modern manufacture which has artistic merit? In speaking of the collections which should be made for the use of the artisan, we must not forget that his inspiration will come not only from the work that has been done in the past but equally from the best work that is being done at present. Just as it is necessary for the painter to keep up with the times by going to the annual exhibitions of the Academy of Design, or the Academy of Fine Arts, or by seeing a selection of the pictures shown, so the artisan should keep abreast of the work done not only in this country but abroad in the same field as his own. In this there is the same difficulty that we find in making the selection of modern paintings. What are we going to consider good and what are we going to consider poor fifty years from now? Very often the museum director will find that it will be possible for him to arrange for transient exhibitions of minor arts in the same way that he arranges for transient exhibitions of paintings, and where it is possible, it obviates the difficulty which arises from buying modern art objects.
A Successful "Period" Room in America. Colonial Kitchen, Oakland Public Museum, Oakland, California
​days before the building of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, when Renaissance art was represented in Berlin by a room in the Altes Museum, is one which may well be copied in the present time. In that room were arranged paintings, sculpture, furniture, rugs, tapestries, and works of minor art; the one point in common being the period in which the objects were produced. The effect of this room was charming and may well be imitated. It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. For instance, in a well-known European museum where a wooden figure was put for artistic effect into a corner in which it did not fit and cut to fit that place, the museum authorities were, to put it strongly, criminally culpable.
A collection, therefore, for cultural purposes should contain, as we have said above, casts of the finest sculpture of the different periods not shown in rooms where there are originals, and ​period rooms or rooms in which the different arts produced are shown in their relation to one another, and picture galleries containing such pictures as will not fit in with the arrangement of the rooms by period. There should be, in addition, study series and ample quarters for special collections like prints and textiles which will not be exhibited continuously.
See "Die Museen als Volksbildungsstätten"; the report of the Mannheim Conference of Museum Directors, Berlin, Carl Heymanns Verlag, 1904; K. Koetschau, Museumswesen und Kunstförderung, Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 1903, p. 93.