Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2018.1427344
Jens Sejrup
ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of a Japanese-funded annex to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam over the past twenty-five years. The analysis focuses on three key years in the building’s history: 1991, 1999, and 2015. Critically examining public debate and media coverage of the building in contemporary Dutch- and Japanese-language sources, I argue that changing claims and public perceptions of Japan reflected the country’s shifting economic fortunes and international position during the period. The sources consistently framed the Japanese-designed building within a language of dreams. However, the dreams gradually transformed from desires and nostalgic projections to sleepiness and inactivity. Japan, and the annex as its symbolic embodiment, remained a ‘place of dreams’, but the nature of those ‘dreams’ changed dramatically over the period studied.
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Pub Date : 2018-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2018.1429369
A. Clark
ABSTRACT Published in 1895, Léonce Bénédite’s Le Musée du Luxembourg interceded in debates around Caillebotte Bequest, by elevating Impressionism as a style critical to the French state’s official history of nineteenth-century art. As the first fully illustrated catalogue dedicated to this institution, Le Musée du Luxembourg not only described the museum’s extant collection but, in effect, prescribed a future history of art to be narrated on its walls. Yet, the Caillebotte Bequest and its Impressionist paintings and works on paper were only installed at the museum in 1897. This article interrogates how Le Musée du Luxembourg preemptively ushered Impressionism into official art history, studying the intersections between Bénédite’s enthusiasm for this art and the French state’s calls for fine-arts policies predicated on such republican principles as impartiality and eclecticism.
摘要Léonce Bénédite于1895年出版的《卢森堡博物馆》（Le Musée du Luxembourg，实际上，它规定了一个未来的艺术史，将在墙上讲述。然而，Caillebotte Bequest及其印象派绘画和纸上作品直到1897年才在博物馆展出。这篇文章质疑了卢森堡博物馆是如何先发制人地将印象派引入官方艺术史的，研究了贝内特对这门艺术的热情与法国政府呼吁以公正和折衷主义等共和原则为基础的美术政策之间的交叉点。
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Pub Date : 2017-11-09DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2018.1389450
R. Delson
ABSTRACT A pioneering food conservation exhibition (1917–1918) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was the result of collaboration between the Museum's Departments of Anthropology and Public Health. The AMNH was the only major natural history museum in the United States to mount an installation featuring guidelines for wartime food conservation. Its innovative displays included models demonstrating 100 calorie portions and nutritional values of commonly eaten foods, as well as examples of unutilised and underutilised food sources such as seaweed and seafood, and unfamiliar native food crops (e.g. maize). This exhibition foreshadowed modern day concerns with food sustainability and proved to be an important example of how a scientific museum could contribute to the war effort. It was also a significant departure from old-fashioned natural history displays and contemporary dioramas, as well as an experimental foray for the Museum into public policy issues of the day.
{"title":"‘The bullet and the crust’: A World War I exhibition on nutrition and food conservation at the American Museum of Natural History","authors":"R. Delson","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2018.1389450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2018.1389450","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A pioneering food conservation exhibition (1917–1918) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) was the result of collaboration between the Museum's Departments of Anthropology and Public Health. The AMNH was the only major natural history museum in the United States to mount an installation featuring guidelines for wartime food conservation. Its innovative displays included models demonstrating 100 calorie portions and nutritional values of commonly eaten foods, as well as examples of unutilised and underutilised food sources such as seaweed and seafood, and unfamiliar native food crops (e.g. maize). This exhibition foreshadowed modern day concerns with food sustainability and proved to be an important example of how a scientific museum could contribute to the war effort. It was also a significant departure from old-fashioned natural history displays and contemporary dioramas, as well as an experimental foray for the Museum into public policy issues of the day.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2018.1389450","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46394654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-06-15DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328818
C. Riggs
ABSTRACT From the late nineteenth century, photography was inseparable from archaeological fieldwork, and object photography in particular was crucial to the creation and circulation of the archaeological artefact. Which objects were selected for photography, how they were photographed, and what then happened to both object and photograph: these interrelated aspects of ‘the object habit’ require further interrogation in order to situate the historical acts of knowledge production through which archaeologists, museum curators, and a wider public have apprehended the material remains of the ancient past. In this paper, I draw on examples of object photography in Egyptian archaeology from the 1850s onwards, and in particular, the archive formed during the 1920s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Like the objects themselves, photographs were destined to circulate between field and museum, and the photographic requirements of these complementary spaces arguably influenced both the ‘look’ of object photographs and the way the photographs were themselves used and catalogued, not only at the time of a given excavation, but subsequently. As this paper argues, colonial-era formations of knowledge about the object endure in the archive, obscuring the social and material practices through which photography operated.
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Pub Date : 2017-06-05DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328872
Marco Tamborini, Mareike Vennen
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes one of the biggest paleontological expeditions at the turn of the twentieth century. The Tendaguru expedition in the South of German East Africa, today’s Tanzania, took place from 1909 to 1913. Organised by Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde, the expedition took advantage of the German colonial enterprise, unearthing and transporting over 225 tons of fossils to Berlin. Among them were the bones of what eventually became the biggest mounted dinosaur in the world: Brachiosaurus brancai. This paper focuses on the issues that interrupted or delayed the visible outcome of the Tendaguru expedition and thus complicated, delayed, or interrupted a supposedly very unproblematic enterprise. By focusing on these complications, this paper aims to give new insights into the history of the Tendaguru expedition and its aftermath. At the same time, this episode in the history of transforming natural objects into objects of natural history serves to show the ways in which disruptions shaped and transformed both paleontological fieldwork and practical work at the museum. Thereby, the paper ultimately calls attention to the complex interactions between disruptions, narratives, and object habits. It further illustrates how museum objects were shaped by misfortunes and adversity, as well as broader institutional, political, and scientific narrations in colonial and post-colonial Germany, thus continuing to reshape the object habits of Brachiosaurus brancai.
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Pub Date : 2017-06-05DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328780
Alice Stevenson, E. Libonati, John D. Baines
ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of ‘object habits’ for diversifying the scope of museum histories. The term is shorthand referring to an area’s customs relating to objects, taking into account factors that influence the types of things chosen, motivations for collecting, modes of acquisition, temporal variations in procurement, styles of engagements with artefacts or specimens, their treatment, documentation and representation, as well as attitudes to their presentation and reception. These customs emerge not only within the museum or out in the field, but significantly between the two, within the full agency of the world. The articles in this special issue explore the potential of ‘object habits’ in relation to the history of museums and collections across a selection of disciplines and a range of object types, including ancient artefacts, natural history specimens, archival documents, and photographic evidence.
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Pub Date : 2017-05-30DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328858
C. Manias
ABSTRACT This article examines the images sketched by the palaeontologist Robert Broom (based in South Africa) in his correspondence to the scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the early-twentieth century. The drawings in Broom’s correspondence demonstrate a number of features around ‘the object habit,’ most notably how the construction and exchange of images were crucial aspects of studying, defining and understanding scientific objects, and built networks and relationships between scientists. The article examines how claims to truth and authority in early-twentieth century scientific discourse could operate around objects, and how private correspondence could simultaneously serve as an avenue to present apparently ‘objective’ data, emphasise key features of analysis, or engage in more speculative theorising.
{"title":"Robert Broom’s prehistoric sketches: conveying objects through illustration in the early-twentieth century","authors":"C. Manias","doi":"10.1080/19369816.2017.1328858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2017.1328858","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the images sketched by the palaeontologist Robert Broom (based in South Africa) in his correspondence to the scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the early-twentieth century. The drawings in Broom’s correspondence demonstrate a number of features around ‘the object habit,’ most notably how the construction and exchange of images were crucial aspects of studying, defining and understanding scientific objects, and built networks and relationships between scientists. The article examines how claims to truth and authority in early-twentieth century scientific discourse could operate around objects, and how private correspondence could simultaneously serve as an avenue to present apparently ‘objective’ data, emphasise key features of analysis, or engage in more speculative theorising.","PeriodicalId":52057,"journal":{"name":"Museum History Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/19369816.2017.1328858","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45169197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-05-29DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328791
E. Libonati
ABSTRACT This paper looks at an aspect of the ‘object habit’ by considering the motivations behind an ancient technical text, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. The text is an ‘encyclopaedia’ of knowledge covering a vast range of subjects and approaches by studying objects including things found in nature and worked by man. For Pliny, these phenomena shared enough to be considered together while presenting an inventory of the resources in the Roman world and thus controlled by the emperor Titus (AD 79–81), to whom the work is addressed. The collection of knowledge for Pliny is a political act. The Natural History’s collapse of distinctions between objects, animate or inanimate, worked by man or in a natural state, as well as its insistence on political motivations for collecting objects and knowledge, serve as starting place for considering the ‘object habit’ and the impact of politics on collecting. Two examples are discussed: a Benin ‘bronze’ at a Cambridge college, and three giraffes gifted to the superpowers of nineteenth-century Europe.
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Pub Date : 2017-05-29DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328874
Hélène Maloigne
ABSTRACT From 1936–39 and 1946–49 Sir Charles Leonard Woolley excavated the site of Tell Atchana/ancient Alalakh in southern Turkey on behalf of the British Museum. The statue of King Idrimi, found in 1939, became one of the British Museum’s many prized objects and is on display to this day. At the close of the excavation season in June 1939 the statue became the subject of a dispute between Woolley and the government of the Hatay State, solved only after the intervention of the British Consul of Aleppo, the British Ambassador at Ankara and the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This paper traces the statue’s journey from its discovery to the British Museum and back to the New Hatay Archaeological Museum in the form of a hologram. Abbreviations: TNA: The National Archives, London; BMCE: British Museum Central Archives
查尔斯·伦纳德·伍利爵士(Sir Charles Leonard Woolley)于1936年至1939年和1946年至1949年代表大英博物馆在土耳其南部发掘了古阿拉akh遗址。伊德里米国王的雕像于1939年被发现，成为大英博物馆众多珍贵藏品之一，至今仍在展出。在1939年6月发掘季节结束时，雕像成为伍利和哈塔伊政府之间争论的焦点，直到阿勒颇的英国领事、英国驻安卡拉大使和土耳其外交部介入后才得以解决。本文以全息图的形式追溯了雕像从被发现到大英博物馆，再回到新哈塔伊考古博物馆的历程。缩写:TNA:伦敦国家档案馆;大英博物馆中央档案馆
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Pub Date : 2017-05-29DOI: 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328913
E. Robson
ABSTRACT The archaeological site of Nimrud in northern Iraq is triply famous in the history of Middle Eastern fieldwork: first as one of the places where young explorer Austen Henry Layard uncovered the physical remains of the Biblical city of ‘Nineveh’ in the 1840s; then as the setting for Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie’s large-scale project to uncover the Assyrian city of Kalhu in the 1940s and 50s; and most recently, as one of the high-profile targets of ISIS’ cultural heritage destruction in the region in early 2015. In 2013–15 I ran an AHRC-funded research project on the history of excavations at Nimrud, the dispersal of finds from the site to museums, and the histories that have been written from that evidence for a website (http://oracc.org/nimrud). One major aim was to provide open-licensed material for re-use by museums holding Nimrud artefacts in their collections, but which do not have specialist curatorial staff to research and explain them. In writing that material it proved surprisingly hard to move away from the well-worn anecdotes of popular narratives that constructed unreliable object habits: heroic Layard’s derring-do in discovering Biblical, imperial monuments; doughty Agatha’s improvised cleaning of the Nimrud ivories with her face-cream; ISIS’s barbaric mission to destroy civilisation. In this paper, I explore the strategies we developed to write a deeper history of the site and its finds, and reflect on our relative successes and failures.
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