Jesper Grube Overgaard, trans. Otto: Reol. København: Borgen 2001, 102–108.
I.
In Bruce Chatwin’s little book of the same title, Kaspar Utz, the erotomaniac, the swindler and collector of Meissen porcelain, in an article entitled ‘The Private Collector’, is recounted to have written:“An object in a museum exhibition case […] must live as unnatural an existence as an animal in the zoo. The object dies in the museum – from suffocation and the glare of the public – while the private possession gives the owner the desire and need to touch. Like the little child who reaches out after the thing it names, the ardent collector returns to the object, in a harmonic interaction between hand and eye, the life giving touch of its creator. The enemy of the collector is the museum keeper. The ideal thing would be for museums to be looted every fifteen years and for their collections to be thrown out onto the market again…”
My task here will be an attempt to evaluate this dialectic of clearly violent character we see Chatwin stretch between private collector and museum keeper, along with what lies behind this conflict, in relation to the accumulation of useless objects, which one must recognise makes up a collection and the ideologies that connect to it.
It’s well known that the museums of our time are built upon a gradual subsumption of the medieval ‘public’ collections -usually churches, abandoned monasteries and the like. Awareness of these ‘public’ collections only surfaced at the end of the eighteenth century, and it was only during the nineteenth century that the museum, as we now know it, could be said to have taken shape. The medieval collection comprised of, for example, relics, paintings and other objects of curiosity that were collected in monasteries and churches within a more or less specifically spiritually edifying purpose and thus not to establish any ‘collection’, in a more simple understanding.
On the contrary, one could say that before the fifteenth century one didn’t find any discourse concerning ‘the private’, as we would understand it today. The private collection (and maybe along with this the private, as such) developed parallel to and as a result of the banking system and the economic growth in renaissance Florence and Venice, and it was also here in these regions that the first private collections have their home. The first two private collectors we know about appeared in Venice at the end of the fourteenth century. In the beginning of the fifteenth century there were at least six Venetian collectors, two of which lived on Crete. At that time, this number was only exceeded in Europe by Florence where we now know that eleven collectors had resided. There was then a sharp rise in the number of private collectors in Italy and the rest of Europe, and the aristocratic, the ecclesiastical as well as the bourgeois world in Europe came to be speckled with these ‘curiosos’, ‘antiquarios’ or ‘connaisseurs’, as the collections were called during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century.
The private collections were first called scrittorio, studiolo or studio, and in tact with their diffusion during the seventeenth century, these ‘studies’, located in or close to the private apartments, were reserved for masterpieces, and the ‘gallery’ (galleria) became the room, which would house the basic collection or substantiating material. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Venetian republic realised that the paintings in their possession, which were spread primarily between religious institutions, had through the centuries been subject to dust, smoke from candles, through time, even damp, and were always hung in spaces with dramatic temperature changes and were often subject to attempts at restoration, which in the best cases were clumsy, but were more often than not directly damaging.
Paintings were quite often replaced by others that were more in harmony with the tastes of the time. They also ran the risk of being stolen, only to end up being sold abroad. In the beginning this was not only considered an inescapable fact but completely normal. It was only after a decree on the 3rd September 1778 that paintings became a concern of the state (and one can with some justification argue that this date has far more importance than the actual development of the various museums that came into being, which first and foremost were converted from ‘private’ to ‘public’). Thus, conservation, restoration and the displaying of paintings for guests began to become a matter for the state. One can also observe a similar tendency emerging at this point in collections of natural specimens. Within the first half of the seventeenth century, nobody would have anticipated that the state would become the owner of any natural history collection, even though this type of collection had existed since the sixteenth century. In the same way, nobody before the middle of the eighteenth century would have demanded that the state take responsibility for the preservation of paintings and sculpture, or, for that matter, the founding of a public gallery.
The most well known was of course the royal (and the aristocratic) collections, as they usually had far greater means at their disposal; but, because these collections were organised under the same principles as those in private collections, they were essentially seen as private collections, a condition that held, on the whole, up until the practice and ideology of the French Revolution, when the status of the Louvre radically altered from being a monarch’s private gallery to the public gallery of the Republic (the Louvre was opened in 1793), which, being totally incorporated within the thinking of Enlightenment, thereby became a beacon to all other nations of that time, whether republican or not. Because of political and economic differences, the Anglo-Saxon model developed in a rather different manner (e.g. the British Museum was founded already in 1753 on a collection belonging to the property of Sir Hans Sloane, which was bought for £20,000, after governmental intervention) but ideologically it largely mirrors the same thoughts regarding the general public and free communication (as an extension of the of the formation of the Royal Society some centuries earlier in 1662, as a reaction to the ‘hermetic’ i.e. the self-enclosed sciences).
II.
“The enemy of the collector is the museum keeper”By no means do private collectors disappear from the scene after the establishment of national museums but now he exists in parallel and, following our suppositions, in opposition to this powerful institution. Let us therefore take a closer look at how this postulated opposition could be thought to express itself, and what, in such a sketch of the conflict, can be said about the status of the modern art museum.
As for genre, the earlier private collections were quite often arranged in a peculiar manner by our standards, so that it proved often difficult to separate a collection of natural specimens from the collector in question’s book, antique and exotica collection, or even the furniture included in the collection. For the private collector, a collection of furniture and exotica adorned with beautiful images makes up an inseparable whole. This state of affairs is presumably dictated by the fact that the collector resides and works within his collection.
Even though most private collectors are more or less specialised within a single or a couple of closely areas, the private collector in principle is always open to unrelated additions from whatsoever direction, all depending on the collector’s interests and taste -that is to say in accordance with the taxonomic principles of the collector. As the public authorities came to increasingly incorporate private collections into state museums (via donations, purchase or expropriation), the private collections became divided into different types of collection (some toward natural history, others toward art history and a third group toward the history of engineering or medical science etc, while a final group were dismissed as being without merit) and sections of earlier private collections were added to sections of other collections so as to establish the beginnings of the new public collections, based on the foundation established under the far-reaching revolution within discourse during the second half of the eighteenth century (in other words, the development of the fine arts, aesthetics, critique and art history, scientific paradigms and thereby modern scientific disciplines etc.)
The art museum had a special status right from the start, in as much as art, which at that time would be to say the fine arts from the early renaissance and after, gave expression to the highest degree of refinement within culture, to which a selection of antique sculpture were included (preferably from the Athens of Perikles and also Roman busts), and now and again, albeit with some doubt, Egyptian sculpture, but later styles, e.g. rococo, also had trouble raising themselves into this company.
Crudely put, this is the classical art museum, and throughout history this has shown itself to be able to do nothing whatsoever other than affirm it’s own history - maybe because no Louis Seize furniture, shells or elaborately decorated Towers of Babel in ivory now had the possibility to affect the selected paintings and sculpture (as they were just as permanently situated elsewhere) - presumably because this history has shown itself to be the most adept at survival.
A conflict arose under modernism between ‘classical’ and ‘new’ art, a conflict most radically articulated in the Futurist’s desire to destroy everything the museum stood for. From these encounters with the avant-garde, museums took a rather different shape under high modernism. But when the building of museums begun in earnest after the Second World War, when modernism had long since triumphed in this dispute, the modern art museum was still essentially built upon the same premise as that of the classical museum, but simply under an altered image. The museum was still the ideological tool through which one could extend the cultural attitude of the state or the public, a sensus communis as far as good taste was concerned. It is nevertheless sometimes striking how little ‘communis’ there is in ‘sensus’; if you consider, for example, the fact that the Museum of Modern Art was more or less personally founded by the American art dealer Alfred Barr, who in the 1930’s established a veritable crusade for the dissemination of modern art, and used the Museum of Modern Art as headquarters for his ideological campaign. One didn’t, therefore, concentrate on the individual artist – which signified the patron – nor did one pay attention to the ideological and idiotic disputes between various groupings. The criterion for Barr’s and the Museum of Modern Art’s interest lay solely within the adjective ‘modern’. This strategy for the radicalisation of the early (French) modernism thus came to also establish the ground for America’s future dominance and takeover of the modern art scene. In the Museum of Modern Art, one simply made sure to get one’s hands on the best (or most modern) work from every camp or from every artist, to place them side by side within the avant-garde architecture. This ‘one of each’ strategy has affected art museums the world over and has became even clearer after the establishment of the Marshall plan in the former West Germany, where one museum after another of this type was founded as a link in the elaboration of a specifically western ideology, where liberty of choice and diversity (one of each), modernity and the sovereignty of the individual and the right to ‘occupy space’ runs like a common thread throughout subsequent museums.
II bis
“The ideal thing would be for museums to be looted every fifteen years and for their collections to be thrown out onto the market again…”The desired accessibility or universalisation one wishes from public museums is achieved by fixing the object in its space, removing it from its obscure circulation. The circulation of items in the private, i.e. obscure, market prevents a familiarisation with the artwork, which will never be reached by a public.
This extract gets its character in the museum’s ‘permanent collection’. But a ‘permanent collection’ is at the same time a permanent history: thus the classical museum will always recount the history of Winckelmann or that of Alfred Barr’s modern museum or that of the Marshall plan. Actually, the same Winckelmann of whom our Chatwin exclaimed (p16): “As a nineteen year old [Kaspar Utz] had published an impassioned defence of the rococo style in the journal Nunc – an art of playful curves from an era where women were idolised- against the contemptible remarks of the pederast Winckelmann: ‘Porcelain is almost always used for idiotic dolls.’” The museum attempts, and has repeatedly attempted, to detach itself from these historic developments with well-known consequences.
This is connected to the fact that the number of museum directors and other accountable people within a permanent museum will gradually increase and that the private element ultimately appears not too dissimilar from the artist Jan Skovgård’s vision of the same museum, but wholly in harmony with the idea of the museum as such. From this, private collectors have concluded that only the private collection or a recirculation of the now fossilised museum collections would be able to tell a new story. Even though the private collector ‘murders’ the objects in the obscurity of his home, they are resurrected in a new form when they circulate into new collections and contexts.
III.
“Locked behind the glass, they seem to beguile him into their secret Lilliputian world – and also to shout of freedom” (p16)At the same time as the modern post-war museum on a certain level breaks from the classical, it has nonetheless turned out to be easily adopted under the same taxonomic principle, in as much as they both narrate the same story (why one is always tempted into drawing heavily upon a tradition from, for example, Giotto to Yves Klein, but never from Giotto to Funkis furniture – and why on earth one would want to do such a thing at all, I remain unable to answer.) But the question that ought to be asked in this context is as follows: should Giotto, via a suitably bizarre and impertinent rich individual, be installed in a home filled with Funkis furniture, simply because this hypothetical individual happens to be of the opinion that a finer cocktail couldn’t be found and was therefore prepared to spend the necessary money to live, perhaps even to sleep, work and eat in this environment; should this collection on the strength of the private investment and the idiosyncratic insistence it mirrors have any effect on history and its objects than a supposedly inventive museum keeper with the same taste for Giotto and Funkis?
One can therefore take this question to its logical conclusion: is it possible that a Jasper Johns, for example, or a Titian are completely different objects in museums than when in a private collection? Or further, is it possible that modernist art can’t be considered outside of an ultimate public manifestation in the form of the museum? Besides, this is what our Kaspar Utz claimed: “… in a harmonic interaction between hand and eye, the ardent collector returns to the object the life-giving touch of its creator.”
But this “life-giving touch” also implies that the collection isn’t open to the public: indeed, it is unthinkable that Mr Utz’s collection of Meissen porcelain would be open to the public’s fumbling …, and just as it is not available to the public neither is it open to any public inspection, therefore the private collection has no opening hours.
A museum usually turns on its lights and opens to the public from Tuesday to Sunday between ten and six. For those who work, there are in addition late opening hours, usually on Thursdays until eight o’clock.
As if the private collector avoided the light and opening hours, he is often also a reclusive person who, even if rich, which often is the case with collectors of art, print, rare books and incunabula, nonetheless wears a long dark coat or cape, or worn clothes, as if he was a tramp.
Art and book dealers are well aware of this; they have often seen a mysterious person nervously look around in their shop or exhibition space, as if it was a shady room of immoral distractions and their experiences reveal that it is in no way unlikely that these persons have got pockets or a plastic bag full of bank notes. In the same way, they’ve learnt that when a seemingly intelligent person with a look of the connoisseur about him studies pictures and turns the pages of a book for too long, then he’ll only rarely ever buy anything.
The fact that collectors show up badly equipped at book and art dealers has presumably got to do with the fact that they buy because they have to (i.e. because of an inner necessity), while museums purchase because they have to do so within a defined sum of money, with which they have been entrusted by the public authorities, the funding board or committee (i.e. because of external necessities).
The private collection is therefore in its structure and functioning undemocratic and weighs up badly to our idea of how we otherwise might imagine a modern society ought to be organised. But the private collector is also undemocratic in another more serious sense, in that he stands up for war, robbery and revolution, simply because such social unrest functions in a positive manner on the circulation of items: “The ideal thing would be for museums to be looted every fifteen years and for their collections to be thrown out onto the market again…” The private collector exploits such periods and thrives on the misery of others. The good fortune of being born into such an epoch, and to be suitably immorally predisposed, is described by Ejnar Munksgaard, in the foreword to Charles Nodier’s Den Boggale (“The Bookworm”) (Copenhagen, Carit Andersen, 1946, p. VI-VIII): “Throughout his youth, Charles Nodier had plenty of opportunity to make acquaintance with the world’s most exceptional book collectors. The successive revolutions were responsible for an incredible number of rare books finding their way onto the market, which had previously been hidden in the libraries of the aristocracy. A lot has been said about how the banks of the Seine and the shops of antiquarians were filled with literary rarities that ordinary book keepers never had dreamt would become available again. In large numbers, books from emigrants were seized and confiscated and after 1792 one sees these libraries being sold together with paintings, furniture and art objects of different kind. Because of the hard times, there weren’t many buyers. All attempts to hold the most valuable books at a reasonable price failed. Original manuscripts, rare volumes could be found on the banks of the Seine like debris strewn upon a beach after the shipwreck of the monarchy. Here one could buy incunabula for 2-3 Francs and rare books aux armes de France, bound by France’s most famous bookbinders, being sold for next to nothing. It was simply not possible to sell the colossal number of books […] Paintings by Watteau cost 5 to 6 Francs and Greuze was valued at 15 Francs.” In less turbulent times the private collector exploits the social calamities they can unearth, mostly forced sales, people who are economically hard up and the like, where items can generally be got hold of at discount prices. In actual fact, the private collecting of culturally significant articles remains reserved for the wealthy; it is therefore essential for the private collector that national just as well as global class distinctions are maintained as much as possible. The private collector frowns upon his culture’s renunciation of its imperialistic exoticism in relation to the procurement of items from rare, unusual and exotic locations.
It has therefore been claimed with some justification that the private collector should rather be compared to the swindler or thief, or even a thief who only wants things for himself or for a narrow circle of acquaintances, and who unwillingly shares his plenitude of eroto-aesthetic treats and cultural capital with others. For the same reason, the private collector buys (or alternatively steals) only in accordance with his own taste, paying no attention to how much relevance this might have for the public at large.
“… private ownership gives the owner the right and need to touch. Like the little child who reaches out after the thing it names […], in a harmonic interaction between hand and eye…” The private collector buys, or acquires by other means, that which he desires, often as a form of self-affirmation. This act of self-affirmation, yes, this perversion which, since Freud, has been able to describe via sexual pathological terminology such as narcissism, anal regression, fetishism an the like, seems to alter the context of the object from a public concern to a private masturbatory surplus between subject and the beloved object, as if items in a collection within a private residence were liberated from their art context. And further, it is as if this very private element in this type of association, this affected ‘touching’ as we observe in Kaspar Utz, goes against context and even deafens the strong art context.
“… must live as unnatural an existence as an animal in the zoo. The object dies in the museum –from suffocation and the glare of the public.” The private collector would probably argue that the reason the object of the public museum was specifically installed on a neutral (white) wall and in a neutral (well lit) space, was to avoid an all too intimate communion with the object, that is to say a kind of aseptic protection, which prevents art lovers happening to defile public objects with their private passions, their ‘life-giving touch’.
The private collector is not concerned about any pedagogic mission. Private collections are in fact often so badly documented that we still know very little about what these historically famed collections actually consist of, and just as little, if not less, about the nature of what sort of private collection prevails in our time. This is due to the fact that the private collector usually acquires items that he imagines could be integrated within his home.
The private collector gladly hunts after new items. To better his chances of a successful hunt, the private collector never applies for public funds (grants, subsidies and so forth), presumably because this could potentially open the way for public scrutiny. On the contrary, private collectors with lack of means and low moral status – which isn’t as rare as one might imagine – would rather steal from the poor or cheat the taxman.
On the 23rd October 1836, one could read in Gazette des Tribunaux about a Spanish priest, Vincente, who had opened a small but well stocked antiquarian bookshop in Barcelona, after his monastery, which had been full of rare books, went up in smoke. Even though Vincente didn’t willingly part with his beloved rarities, he made so many good deals that his competitors conspired against him, making it almost impossible for him to obtain any new books. There came a day when one of Lambert Palmart’s Spanish incunabula (1482), referred to as a unique specimen in the auction catalogue, went under the hammer. Vincente, as usual, was outbid, even though he followed the bidding up to a fantastic sum. One night, shortly after the auction, the happy owner of this rare book died when his house burnt down. During the following weeks, Barcelona was victim to a veritable wave of terror: on a daily basis, murder victims were found in neighbourhood passages, on streets and in the river; neither money nor jewellery had been touched while the police remained helpless. The victims were of all ages and had lived irreproachable lives. There was only one thing – one could conclude - that they had in common: they were all book collectors. During the following investigations the unique specimen, which should have gone up in smoke, was found in Don Vincente’s shop. The mystery of the many murdered bibliophiles was then simultaneously solved: they were all collectors who had purchased books that he couldn’t bare to part with and after the purchase he had then stabbed them. This unedifying story constituted Gustave Flaubert’s point of departure for his tale Bibliomanie from 1836.
I myself met an Austrian bibliophile last summer, who described the rarity of the first edition of Josephin Mutzenbacher oder Jugendgeschichte einer wienerischen Dame, von ihr selbst geschrieben (private print, Vienna, Fritz Freund, 1906), vol.8, [II] 382 pages (‘332’ is a printing error), simply by stating that you ‘could be murdered because of it’.
A public museum could never dream of thieving, not even cheating the taxman. On the contrary, the museum enjoys living up to its commitments: it pays the highest market price, perhaps even excessive prices, for the works it chooses to buy. Presumably, this is connected to the fact that the art museum doesn’t pay with its own, i.e. private, money, but uses money from society, for the benefit of society, in as much as society also wishes to be enlightened.
This has meant that ‘market price’ has become a purely imagined measure within the world of museums. This has been to the detriment of private collectors of art (unlike libraries, which rarely purchase older printed matter) who have seen the prices of their items multiply and many have given up in favour of antiques, which few museums have an interest in, as is also the case for medieval items from the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
While museums took shape, two schools of antiquarianism existed side by side; one spoke in favour of the antique from a more pronounced ethical and aesthetic perspective, which not only gave the antique artefacts (including inscriptions and coinage) a value derived from a historically documented perspective, but also an artistic and moral value independent of its historic erudition. The other school viewed the Middle Ages from a more distinctly historic perspective, which, at that time, meant that it, as the first, didn’t condemn the Middle Ages as barbaric, as it nevertheless harboured an historic interest. Advocates of the first school of thought would therefore place items, if these items weren’t relics from the land’s glorious past, at the level of Chinese and other exotic objects and simply as entertainment. Even though advocates of the other tendency interested themselves in the Middle Ages from a historic perspective, they still considered the antique to be far superior as far as aesthetic and ethical qualities were concerned. Both these tendencies resulted in state academies and museums skipping over the Middle Ages and handing this period over to the private collectors.
IV.
A private collection has only its owner and maybe his or her closest circle of friends to take pleasure in it. The museum, on the other hand, is a site from which we all can enjoy and benefit.Note.
The first section builds upon various sources, an ultra-short summary (and thereby grossly simplified) of quite basic facts, which one would find in any book with the words ‘museum’ or ‘collection’ in the title. In this context, I have primarily made use of Kryzysztof Pomian’s excellent and very thorough Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), with other studies in mind such as Joan Evans’ A history of the Society of Antiquaries (Oxford 1956), R.J.W. Evans’ Rudolf II and his Time (Oxford 1973) and Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst‑ und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Leipzig 1908). It should be stressed that this transition from private to public collections of natural specimens, artefacts, curiosities and antiques is a very complicated and intricate movement, dependent on a multitude of unstable historic parameters, e.g. the historic shift that arose between ‘private’ and ‘public’ after the Middle Ages (cf. e.g. Phillipe Arie’s studies within the history of death and the family); and terms such as ‘museum’, ‘study’, ‘gallery’ and ‘library’ could often signify an enfolded (e.g. a book) and an unfolded space, or somewhere in-between (e.g. a cupboard), and we can discern a fluid border between actors such as ‘philosopher’, ‘scholar’, ‘antiquarian’, ‘curioso’, ‘collector’, ‘amateur’, ‘connoisseur’ and ‘dilettante’, and, to push this even further, the objects of a collection are never absolute, but commute, internally as well as externally, between private and public in relation to various parameters of interest and taste.The rest of this text is of course loose speculation, but as far as modern modalities for private collectors are concerned, one can consult, for instance, the anthology The Cultures of Collecting (London, 1994, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal).
Jan Bäcklund