Private Collecting, Exhibition and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club, by Stacey J. Pierson

Stacey Pierson’s book has many implications for art market studies, archival research, and the study of the social nature of art world activities – collecting, exhibiting, and the development, indeed even the creation or invention, of public taste. Focusing on the history of the Burlington Fine Arts Club (BFAC), founded in 1866 as a gentleman’s club to exhibit its members’ art collections, the history of this club, kept in a rich archive, provides a magnified examination of an organization devoted to intense collecting, exhibiting, dealing and dissemination by catalogs of a collective field of knowledge. Unique among such clubs were its regular and special biannual exhibitions, the latter with catalogs and open by invitation to the public. Its members were collectors, curators, politicians, from across social categories (e.g. MPs, aristocrats, bankers, artists, diplomats, museum professionals) who organized these events that were both private and public. Some members and contributors were women. Their catalogs and exhibitions expressed not only their tastes but also their “associated specialists’ view of connoisseurship, art history and thematic display” (x), a profound nexus of knowledge and expertise by specialists and collectors who organized and thematized their collections as repositories of knowledge and also expressive of a discourse on art across a wide and often innovative variety of collected objects. Pierson hit the jackpot with a rich archive of the club’s meeting minutes, activities, and catalogs. She rightly sees these activities as formative of both professional curating and scholarship and of public taste and knowledge of art and objets d’art. Her argument for the importance of the club includes her claim that the club’s activities demonstrated “that the so-called ‘global turn’ in art history began to take place well before the midtwentieth century” (xi). Of course, the global turn began much sooner, with private collections by civil servants of the East India Company and eighteenth-century Chinoiserie, and became a public topic through the 1851 Great Exhibition with the then-stunning revelation that Middle Eastern and Indian art objects, and to a lesser extent Continental objects, bested British manufactured goods, sparking the collecting of non-European objects by the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A).