Museums and Their Enemies

Author(s): Francis Haskell

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue: Art Museums and
Education (Summer, 1985), pp. 13-22
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3332461
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Museums and Their Enemies

FRANCIS HASKELL

The case against public art museums was made with very great force
after they first became important establishments in the second half
eighteenth century and particularly in the wake of the French Revo
and the Napoleonic conquests. It was argued that museums destroy
very purpose of the art which they had been called upon to house
preserve. It was not just that a painting designed to move the devo
prayers might hang next to one designed to move the dissolute to lu
was rather that each lost its true function once it had been moved from

bedroom or chapel to the bare walls of a building which was necessarily

devoid of any of the associations of bedroom or chapel.
Such protests ignored the obvious fact that the process had already
been in operation for more than two hundred years before the inaugura-
tion of public museums. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century picture col-
lectors showed no hesitation in acquiring for their galleries both religious
and secular pictures, and although it could sometimes be claimed that as
these had been commissioned by the owner, they were fulfilling a genuine
need (and thus a valid function), this was by no means always the case,
and with the passing of time it became less and less frequent. We today
may not be sure who is respresented in Leonardo's Mona Lisa, but it is
not at all evident that its first owner, King Franqois Ier of France, was
better informed than we are; and in any case the one thing that does seem
probable is that the lady was not known to the king personally. In other
words, pictures both old and modern, utterly devoid of personal associa-
tions, were admired, acquired, and exhibited as beautiful objects, as "works
of art," well before the institution of museums.

Francis Haskell is The Professor of History of Art at Oxford University. He is the

author of Patrons and Painters, Rediscoveries in Art, L'arte e il linguaggio della
politica, Taste and the Antique (with Nicholas Penny), and numerous journal articles.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 1985

01985 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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14 Francis Haskell

And yet it was the institution of museums that gave rise to the ob
tions-and hence also to the high-sounding claims which it will be the
of this essay to explore. The reason is probably that the associat
power of works of art only makes itself powerfully felt when such p
is itself under threat. Throughout the eighteenth century pictures, s
times important ones, had been wrenched from their original location
rich Englishmen and Russians and Germans, who had hitherto been on
fringes of the artistic civilization of the Renaissance, visited France
especially Italy, to take back to their palaces and country houses the m
terpieces that they found there; and there are signs that this aroused res
ment: not just that a Raphael or a Correggio or a Guido Reni might
sent into exile, but that such pictures were leaving the particular dest
tions for which they had been created.
It was, however, the French Revolution that really brought home
people the significance of those paintings and sculptures whose pote
we today have neutered by placing them in museums designed to re
everything about them except what had once been their function. H
many people, one wonders, had, before 1789, paid any attention to t
fleur-de-lys round the borders of some tapestry figuring an adventur
Don Quixote; or to the coat of arms embossed on a tomb in a provin
church; or even to the portrait of some royal mistress hanging in the c
dors of a distant castle? Then, suddenly, all such objects, and many m
became crucially important symbols of feudalism or superstition, re
ders of cruel oppression to be destroyed without remorse. But a
people did feel remorse: the carving of the arms might be of except
quality, the royal mistress painted by a great artist. And so many w
were rescued from the furnaces and publicly exhibited because they w
of "historical interest" only.
It was this that in turn distressed many art lovers, even if they so
times acknowledged that the only alternative was destruction. And,
today, we who live in a world of museums-museums which embrace
just paintings and sculptures, but also prehistoric animals and old m
cars, instruments of torture and relics of the concentration camps-
sometimes share that distress. Few of us would feel wholly at our ease
we to visit a museum tastefully filled with war memorials removed f
the village greens and town squares on which they had been erected
1918-and this unease would surely persist even if it were explained t
that heavy frosts or torrential rains were damaging the memorials in
original locations. Or again, there was a rumor last year that Piero d
Francesca's fresco of the Madonna del Parto was to be detached from the
comparatively remote cemetery chapel at Monterchi where it is to be
found, sent to the United States for treatment, and temporarily exhibited
in the Metropolitan Museum. Even among those who would have been able

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 Museums and Their Enemies 15

to see the fresco incomparably better in New York than at Monterchi (

indeed might only have been able to see it in New York) there was notabl
if irrational relief when this rumor turned out to be false-or at any ra
when the plan came to nothing.
Such a reaction is now atavistic, but it gives us some indication of th
hostility that was once aroused by the whole concept of museums and th
is still occasionally expressed.
Against that hostility we have had to build our defenses-for no one
seriously thinks of disbanding the public museum today. And the princip
defense has been made in the name of education: for no one can object
education-neither white nor black; neither communist nor capitalist, n
Third World; neither Catholic nor Protestant; neither Jew nor Muslim. Bu
education for what?

Once upon a time the answer to that was comparatively simple. The
education of artists in their own profession could be carried out to a sig-
nificant extent in the museums. Whereas previously it had been difficult
(though almost never wholly impossible) to study the composition and
technique of some masterpiece by Raphael in a royal palace or ill-lit
church, soon an increasing number of his greatest paintings and then the
totality of them became freely available to any art student and not just to
the well-introduced and well-established master. Indeed, so important was
such training considered to be that the first proposals for the establish-
ment of public museums, which were made in England and France in the
middle of the eighteenth century, stressed that their purpose would be to
train new artists: any benefit or pleasure which might accrue to the public
in general was entirely secondary. And when, partly as a result of such
pressures, museums did come into being, they were often opened only to
students, who were given opportunities to visit them which were unavail-
able to the ordinary amateur. It was largely in the interests of art students
that half the countries of Western Europe were looted in order to bring
masterpieces to the Musee Napoleon in the first years of the nineteenth
century. And the policy was surely successful. From Gericault onwards,
the great French masters of the nineteenth century copied in the Louvre.
Painters who bitterly resented the instructions of pedantic teachers rightly
felt no inhibitions about submitting their original talents to the austere dis-
cipline imposed by a Raphael, a Titian, or a Rubens. "Romantics" and
"Classicists" and "Realists" might choose different masters, but they went
to the museums to study them. And even young art students who talked
brashly about the iniquity of museums and the need to destroy them
because it was only by looking at nature with fresh, uncontaminated eyes
that true masterpieces could be created, nonetheless took advantage of the
museums.

Many still do, no doubt. And yet no one will seriousl

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16 Francis Haskell

education, in the sense in which that term was once understood, now take
place in our public museums. Artists of all ages visit the Uffizi and the
Louvre, the Prado and the National Gallery and learn from them; but w
would be surprised to find them working at their easels in front of a Titia
or a Rembrandt-even if such behavior was remotely possible in today's
crowded galleries: those crowds to whom we will soon have to turn.
One aspect of the public museum, however, remains even more impor-
tant for the artist and his education today than it has ever been in the pas
Cezanne is supposed to have said that it was his aim to make of Impres-
sionism something durable, something for the museum. That shrewd obse
vation not only acknowledges the awe-inspiring role that museums had
assumed in European and American civilization by the end of the nine-
teenth century-a role analogous to that of the ancient temple, in the arch
tectural style of which so many were built-but also points to the fact th
the museum had by now become the destination of much contemporary
art as well as of the masterpieces of the past. Perhaps Gericault's Raft o
the Medusa of 1819 was the first picture whose only home could be
public museum-a museum, moreover, which had been inaugurated barel
a year or so earlier: the enormous size, the painful subject, the political
implications-all these made even a royal palace unthinkable. And so ther
grew up the museums of contemporary art alongside those devoted to th
art of earlier periods (but often in the same building). Their impact can
hardly be exaggerated; but a full consideration of it falls outside the scop
of this essay, and here we need only point out that museums of moder
art have, for better or for worse, fulfilled the most agonized predictions
those theorists who in the late eighteenth century fought against the esta
lishment of any kind of public art gallery. Few observers today would
deny that the many painters and sculptors who design work with the
museum in mind are freed from the constraints which controlled (and
stimulated) the creative ambitions of earlier artists, who were often to
the subject, the size, and the number of figures, sometimes even the styl
of their proposed product-for which they might indeed well have been
paid in advance. But this has not stilled doubts as to whether other, les
visible constraints may not have proved even more frustrating; and fear
that artists may have become alienated from society, unsure of the val
of their own work, just because many museums of modern art have de
clared it to be their policy (and a perfectly legitimate one) to have repre
sented in their galleries every type of current production, are familiar t
anyone who follows discussions on the theme.
This was not always so. At the beginning of the nineteenth century
more reasonable anxiety was that expressed by John Constable to th
effect that museums of old masters would result in the creation of so ex-
clusive a taste that all modern art would be judged by it-and held to have

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 Museums and Their Enemies 17

failed. Constable may have been partly right. Despite the diversity of thei
contents, it is by no means impossible that the great national galleries o
England, France, and other European countries played their part in foster
ing that distrust of the apparently new, the modern, the unconvention
which, for the very first time in history, became such a feature of West
European attitudes to contemporary art in general. Serried ranks o
Raphaels and Rubenses, accessible to a wide public which (for reason
which will shortly be examined) was strongly encouraged to visit them fo
spiritual nourishment, may have acted like guards or policemen blockin
the road of younger artists. And this in turn encouraged those responsibl
for museums of modern art to become extremely cautious as to what the
were prepared to admit-until the very end of the nineteenth century. It
not often realized that before the invention of cheap and adequate phot
graphic reproductions and the habit of travelling exhibitions, new develo
ments in the arts may well have been harder to follow for the well-dis-
posed amateur than they had been in the eighteenth century. Annual ex
hibitions were short-lived, and viewing conditions at them were almost in
tolerable; only a few of the better artists any longer painted altarpieces o
murals in churches; and middle-class houses were far more tightly close
than had been the palaces of the aristocracy. Modern museums thus had
an important role to play, but young artists wishing to learn from the
what new art of interest was being created would have had a frustratin
and disappointing job, until institutions all over the world began to take
lead from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and to foster the new

in virtue of its novelty. And it has already been suggested that the conse-
quences of such policies also had their drawbacks.
However, the notion that the educational benefits supposedly derived
from museums were to be confined to artists themselves had of course
been abandoned long before then. Art, it was recognized, could also serve
the historian. Art history itself does indeed date largely from the age of
museums. It was only possible for Winckelmann to set it on its course (by
insisting on the need for stylistic analysis through the careful observation
of original sculptures rather than for biographical compilations based on
second-hand literary references) because so many of the "private collec-
tions" of eighteenth-century Rome were in fact open to scholars. The
aggrandisement of the Louvre at the expense of princely collections else-
where in Europe led to important publications of all kinds, including the
first serious attempts to reproduce the complete works of some of the
greatest masters of the past-Raphael, Poussin, and many more. And this
pattern continued when the contents of the Louvre were dispersed after
the Battle of Waterloo; for the public museums which had been created
throughout French-dominated Europe as monasteries and other religious
foundations had been secularized were not dismantled but, on the con-

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18 Francis Haskell

trary, were increased in scope and size. Cheap catalogues, as well a

nificently illustrated folios, were published in large numbers, and
came easier for connoisseurs to dispose of grotesquely overopt
attributions when a work of art was in the public domain than wh
still belonged to a private collector who might well render access di
or take other reprisals. It is surely significant that adequate museum
logues are still today very rare in those parts of the world wh
privileges or other special concessions give the private owner sign
control over what finds its way into public galleries-and hence over
its attribution should be.

But it was arrangement far more than catalogues (which were only
rarely of much significance before the second half of the nineteenth century)
which really proved influential in spreading an understanding of the his-
tory of art. A rational reorganization of semipublic galleries had accom-
panied the thinking of the Enlightenment-in Italy, above all, where
extremely cultivated, well-informed, and intelligent men were in charge
of the Uffizi in Florence in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
But thereafter it was Germany which gave the lead. The gallery in Berlin
became especially famous both for its pioneering acquisition of early
Italian and Flemish art and for the coherent way this was displayed and
labelled. And the director of the Berlin Museum, who was also one of
the very first university professors of art history, Gustav Waagen, was a
tireless traveller throughout Europe and a tireless advocate of the prin-
ciples which he had put into effect in Berlin. His advice was constantly
sought-and constantly given. Art history became a German speciality.
Karl Friedrich von Rumohr explored Italian painting with a seriousness
which had hitherto been reserved for antiquity; Johann David Passavant
wrote the first monograph on an artist (Raphael, of course) which still
commands respect. Both men were closely associated with public muse-
ums, and the quality of their work stands in sharp constrast to the some-
times brilliant, sometimes casual, erratic, and corrupt connoisseurship and
criticism to be found elsewhere in Europe. It is significant that the first
and, in the nineteenth century, one of the only, Englishmen whose con-
tribution to art history can be even remotely compared with his great
German predecessors, contemporaries, and successors was Charles Eastlake,
who was also intimately involved with a public museum-the National
Gallery in London.
But the fostering of art history remained in most people's eyes almost
incidental to the main function of the art museum, which was what can
for the moment be loosely described as the improvement of public taste,
though-as we will soon see-such a term is not really adequate for de-
scribing the high hopes which were invested in it. For taste, as it was
thought of during much of the nineteenth century, had a distinctly utili-

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 Museums and Their Enemies 19

tarian side to it, being closely related to industrial design, to exports, t

money. There was a painful (and justified) feeling-in England especially-
that design in the nineteenth century was inferior to what it had been
earlier and inferior to that of England's competitors in international mar
kets. Many reasons have been given for this decline (and some of them
were advanced at the time) which was often attributed to the patronage o
an ill-educated urban middle class as opposed to that of a cultivated
landed aristocracy or to the replacement of hand-made objects by th
machine. Neither can be considered very satisfactory as an explanation,
and France, which was so often held up as an example of a better situation
had been very much more ruthless in dealing with aristocratic patronag
than had England. Nonetheless, it was noted that French public expendi
ture on the arts in general was-as it always had been-incomparably greate
than English, and the case for the establishment and the improvement of
a National Gallery in London was often made on these grounds. It is im-
portant to stress that in these early decades of the nineteenth century it
was not the creation of a museum of handicrafts which was called for-and

in this England was to lead the world-but the refinement of taste that, so
it was believed, would be the inevitable consequence of contemplating
man's highest achievements in the visual arts.
There is something mystical in the approach, and this needs to be
emphasized, for the main educative function of the museum always has
rested and always must rest on the mystical and the not strictly definable.
Those theorists of the Italian Renaissance and seventeenth century who
wrote about great painting were fond of claiming without any awareness
of incongruity that, like music and the pursuit of literature, it softened
manners and brought about a general improvement in morals. Much later,
in the nineteenth century, there were to be many writers who enjoyed
arguing exactly the contrary and who were fascinated by the paradox
of great aesthetes who were also great villains; but their views made little
impact on those concerned with the place of museums in society. Art, it
was usually agreed, was morally improving, and it was to be approached
with reverence. In the art gallery at Dresden, Goethe had behaved as if he
were in church, and his views, and those of many other German writers to
the same effect, spread throughout Europe.
It can hardly be overemphasized that for such writers and their dis-
ciples it was great art itself that was purifying, just by virtue of its being
great art, quite irrespective of what had been its original purpose: thus in
the Dresden picture gallery, which so moved Goethe, there hung both
Raphael's Sistine Madonna, a great altarpiece which had been acquired
from the church in Italy for which it had been painted, and also Giorgione's
Sleeping Venus, one of the earliest pagan, erotic masterpieces of the Vene-
tian Renaissance. No distinction was made between the degrees of moral

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20 Francis Haskell

elevation which were to be expected from contemplating either o

pictures, just as few people, if anyone, now make a distinction-on
of subject matter-between the paintings they go to admire in the
national collections today. Thus Goethe's attitude marks the apoth
"museum mentality," even before museums had begun to occupy a
nent place in world culture. The implications of such an attitude bo
artists and for general taste were perhaps being defiantly shown
Manet in the 1860s when his De'jeuner sur l'Herbe caused such an
It is at least possible that this picture was intended to be in part
proach to the high-minded somnolence induced by museum reveren
Concert Champptre by Giorgione (or Titian) had long been publicl
hibited and admired without any qualms. By modernizing one
principal features of that masterpiece of the Venetian Renaissanc
combination of clothed men and nude women-and setting his scene
world of his own time, as (presumably) he imagined that Giorgio
done in his painting, Manet appears to be suggesting that once a p
has been accepted by a great museum it has (like an Englishman a
by a good club) succeeded in shedding any of the possibly scandalou
ciations which had once clustered around it. To that extent the educational

function of a museum directly conflicts with the true function of the

works which hang in it. This is a variant of the arguments already referred
to at the beginning of this article, and it has had an ironical sequel. For
now Manet's own Dbjeuner sur l'Herbe has been accepted by a great mu-
seum, and it too is greeted with the awestruck reverence reserved for
canonical masterpieces. What was once deemed a weakness in museum cul-
ture thus becomes its greatest strength: the essence of art is in some way
superior to, even detached from, the content of any actual work of art.
Most people recognize this, some occasionally deplore it, but few would
wish to do away with it. But this is not to deny that the moral role assigned
to museums has often led to absurdities-as have also the rare attempts to
deny such a role to it. In the middle of the nineteenth century an English
writer tried in a pamphlet addressed to a member of the House of Lords to
distinguish between the educational and the moral function of the public
museum: "The legitimate influence of art, as a branch of education, is
great and beneficial; but it is not moral, except in a very indirect and
secondary way. The true province of art is, to refine taste and polish
manners. Thus a familiarity with the works of the great masters has a
powerful tendency to effect; and for this much more might have been
done in this country to the advantage of our population. But, to infer that
by refining taste and polishing manners you elevate morals, is what neither
the philosophy of our nature nor the history of cities and nations will
support." Even if one discounted ancient Greece and the Roman Empire,
he continued, there was the indubitable fact that "that modern city which

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 Museums and Their Enemies 21

has been distinguished above all others for the studious cultivation of the
arts-Munich-is also distinguished for this terrible fact-that one out of
every two births is illegitimate ... ."
Despite the naivete of this example one can sympathize with this
author's attempt to unscramble the confusion that had grown up by his
time between manners and morals, and one can perhaps even endorse hi
heartfelt claim that "of the condition of morals in the other great citie
distinguished for the cultivation of the arts in Europe, I need not inform
your Lordship: it is so bad, that he who would call on England to take ex-
ample by those cities would forfeit his claim to be considered an English-
man." The fact remains, however, that with the decline of religious value
everywhere evident, it is the moral function of the art gallery which has
come to the fore, and whatever the rates of illegitimacy may be in New
York or Leningrad, Paris or Munich, the process seems likely to continue.
Art students may well turn to the museums more than they do now fo
education in the strict sense of the word; art historians will certainly d
so-or certainly should do so. But museums are complicated and expensiv
institutions to maintain, and if their future depended only on the presenc
of art students and art historians-or even (dare one say it?) genuine art
lovers-the future would be bleak indeed. Education and pleasure must be
backed up by the notion of moral improvement.
Such moral improvement will have to mean both more and less than
what it has in the past-and it will have little enough to do with the birth
rate. The museum, while recognizing its own illegitimacy (in the sense tha
it consists of works designed for quite different locations), must nonethe
less take advantage of that very fact. Many pictures have now hung for fa
longer in museums than in the churches or the palaces for which they wer
originally designed. Their new associations cluster around them as evoca
tively as their old ones so that the "period rooms," fake chapels, and so
on which are sometimes reconstructed in museums to recall earlier loca-

tions can seem embarrassingly intrusive. Bizarre juxtapositions which

would have astounded earlier patrons and collectors can acquire a new
validity of their own. The "museum without walls"-that jumbled collec-
tion of differing images and styles dating from differing periods and
originating from differing civilizations-which we carry around in our
imaginations thanks to the development of new methods of reproduction
will necessarily become a "museum with walls" and need not suffer too
much in the process; for the tempting theory that art which is too plenti-
ful and too varied in its appeal can touch us only superficially has never
been satisfactorily demonstrated. The emotional force conveyed by the
perception of variety can be just as intense as that which relies for its
effect on concentration. And that emotional force can be profoundly
evocative.

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22 Francis Hask ell

And yet this function of museums is threatened by much in our prese

day civilization; not (yet), paradoxically, by (often understanda
aggrieved sections of society who-it was once feared-would resent th
relics of past civilization under which they (or, rather, their ancestors
lived in a state of stark poverty in horrifying contrast to the luxury w
has always proved necessary for the flourishing of the arts. To those
believe in the great museums of the world there can be nothing but s
faction in the fact that propaganda about the "irrelevance" of an "elit
culture has met with so little success. Indeed, part of the reason for
absence of a "revolt of the masses" against masterpieces produced
and for men and women who despised the masses has obviously been
to the very existence of museums. Twentieth-century revolutions ha
witnessed the deliberate destruction of beautiful churches and beautiful

palaces-but not of museums.

However, this comparative (and perhaps temporary) immunity imposes
obligations which have not always been met. The lazy contempt for the
public shown by all too many European museums (in matters of dis-
play-or lack of it-labelling, information, and so on) can, and should,
arouse anger even in those who need no special inducement to visit
them; it may one day inspire more vengeful feelings in those others who
realize with what arrogance they have been treated. And the link, which
has of course always existed, but which is now vaunted with such obses-
sive insistence, between money and art should surely persuade govern-
ments, museum trustees, and museum directors-in the United States and
in Europe-that they ought to be making every possible effort to dissolve
rather than strengthen (by their collaboration with the market, by impos-
ing entrance charges-whether direct or through moral blackmail-and so
on) an association which degrades their claims to be educational bodies.

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