Page 49 - Studio International - May June 1975

Art Museums

The concept and the phenomenon

Michael Compton

This article is an attempt to discuss some of the problems which
arise out of the relationship between the concept of a public gallery,
and the physical means by which it can be embodied. On the whole not
much attention has been paid to these problems and, moreover, there
has been no great shift of attention from the aims to the uptake of the
service offered by public galleries, comparable to that which has
occurred in other fields of public service. The kind of gallery or art
museum which I want to talk about is the gallery which, whatever else
it may do, is basically a collection of works of art, purchased by or
given to the state, local authority or private trust, so that the public
may have access to them. This concept is a powerful and an old one,
prevalent to a fairly equal degree in the 'developed' countries of both
East and West today.
In principle a gallery may simply preserve what by consensus are considered `The essential element is the material document,
good works of art, allowing the public freely to find any that please, interest or and I mean this in the physical sense of the
affect them. In addition it may seek to inform or to seduce the visitor so that he actual object, not pictorial reproductions of it,
may make more of the experience or be led to repeat and vary it so as to become still less artistic or literary illustration. The
one of the regular art public. These possibilities are not logically contradictory photographs, lantern slides, film strips,
but practically they may be so. For a collection compendious enough to offer microfilms, cinematograph films, dioramas and
variety to suit all needs or expectations and well enough selected to offer an diagrams which are so largely used in what is
education in art is a large and extremely expensive affair. The sheer quantity may called "visual instruction" are books adapted for
confuse the viewer and dull his appetite. However, most of the richer states community reading. . . . I can imagine an
possess one or more very large collections of this type. Unless they are merely extremely useful institution containing nothing
nationalized princely collections these will often aim to be encyclopaedic while but this apparatus of visual instruction but I
favouring the national school. There will also be a number of smaller public would not call it a museum.'
collections which cannot aim to be equally inclusive but which may offer the Sir John Fosdyke, Director of the British
public an 'art experience' comprising perhaps a very few masterpieces together Museum in Royal Society of Arts, Museums
with a number of secondary old masters and a stronger representation of local in Modern Life, 1949.
and modern national schools. The pattern varies to some extent with the
national structure : England's museums are strongly centralized, Germany's,
Italy's or the United States's much less so. However not only is the pattern
quite general but the way in which one of the major galleries of the world is laid
out is on the whole very much like another. The principal elements of this
consensus are clear enough but have not often been spelled out.
There is a tendency to have a loosely chronological sequence. Except where a
museum, like the Wallace Collection or the Barnes Foundation, is fundamentally
a private collection, this rule is not often ignored altogether. On the other hand
I know of no art museum whose arrangement is rigorously chronological.
There is a tendency to group works according to schools. Among the earlier
artists these will be national or local schools (as at the National Gallery);
occasionally in the case of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century paintings, but
frequently in the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-, these may be 'isms' which
themselves usually have a national factor. Looser groupings based on common
aims, techniques or styles are also fairly common. The works of a single artist
may be hung together. If he has had a long and multifarious career like
Michelangelo or Picasso this will pose a problem to the curator because it
will cut across other considerations.
There is a tendency for curators to consider the physical characteristics of the
work like the size, the direction of a composition, overall colour, the frame type
or shape. One can go into many museums and see walls hung like this :

Large pictures are put in large rooms and small in small, but there is also a
tendency to match the position of a painting or sculpture to the specific
architectural character of a room — to place an altarpiece in a room with an
axial, chapel-like plan, to put a four-star 'treasure' in the centre of a wall,
opposite the entry or even on an easel. Each of these tendencies has its validity
and is hard to ignore.* Taking the same three : National Gallery 1975 room VI
Art has been and is a living tradition; each individual work is created in the
knowledge of what went before and is positively and negatively dependent
on it. Chronology is therefore relevant.
Art is in part a group activity, an artist responds to what his fellow artists
and other people around him do and how they live. The hanging together of
related works may therefore enhance their power.
A painting or sculpture is an object with a specific character which often
demands from the viewer an awareness of spatial relationships and of the
*They are also very old. The chronological hang goes back at least to 1815 when the
Academia in Florence was rearranged and the others were inherited from the private
collections.

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