Museum of Modern Art

“ In this there is the same difficulty that we find in making the selection of modern paintings. What are we going to consider good and what are we going to consider poor fifty years from now? Very often the museum director will find that it will be possible for him to arrange for transient exhibitions of minor arts in the same way that he arranges for transient exhibitions of paintings, and where it is possible, it obviates the difficulty which arises from buying modern art objects. ”

“ As specimens of sculpture they serve as excellent studies to young artists, whose taste is formed and chastened by the simplicity and truth of the models presented to them. The advantage of studying the ancients in this department of art rests pretty nearly on the same grounds as those which may be given for our study of their written models. Modern times produce excellence in every department of human industry, and our knowledge of nature, the result of continued accumulations, needs not now the limited experience of former ages. ”

“ He devoted the last four years of his life in classifying and arranging his Museum, which is distributed in twenty-four rooms, and consists of architectural models of ancient and modern edifices; a large collection of architectural drawings, designs, plans, and measurements, by many great architects; a library of the best works on art, particularly on Architecture; antique fragments of buildings, as columns, capitals, ornaments, and friezes in marble ”

“ He must therefore quit his home and seek for the models of ancient and modern art. In the British Museum, in the Louvre, in the Vatican, and in the repositories of art in Berlin, Munich, and other European cities, he must spend months and years in the study of his profession. He must copy, day after day, those master triumphs of [Pg 184] genius which the taste of ages has consecrated, and gather from their study the true principles of his art. ”

“ In the eleven months during which they have operated they have been visited by over 110,000 people. In this time it has been demonstrated conclusively that a sales place may partake of the excellence of standard, the beauty of installation, the atmosphere, the character, and the dignity of a modern museum and yet impart quite another form of message. ”

“ The first is that an art museum is of the greatest value to a community when its collections embrace both the major and minor arts of all countries and all times. The second is that the standard must be high. It would be idle to pretend that every object in our collection is a masterpiece of the highest order, but it is better to have an ideal, which may not be wholly realized, than to have none. ”

“ The public galleries of a museum, whether of natural history, antiquities or art, should not contain the bulk of the collection, but only special things, carefully selected, and equally carefully placed in case or on wall, with artistic judgment as to space-bordering and colour of background, and with scientific perfection of illumination, so as to produce the "just" impression on the leisurely visitor. ”

“ Can we induce the multitude to seek in art, not edification, but exaltation? Can we make them unashamed of the emotion they feel for the fine lines of a warehouse or a railway bridge? If we can do this we shall have freed works of art from the museum atmosphere; and this is just what we have got to do. We must make people understand that forms can be significant without resembling Gothic cathedrals or Greek temples, and that art is the creation, not the imitation, of form. Then, but not till then, can they go with impunity to seek aesthetic emotion in museums and galleries. ”

“ In planning, therefore, the division of space in a museum, the committee should always arrange for exhibits of interest to the local industries. In addition there must, of course, be a collection for cultural purposes, which should mean material covering the history of art in all periods and all countries. A collection of reproductions is of inestimable value in the teaching of the history of art. Few museums can hope to possess fine examples of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance sculpture. ”

“ The second great need is for a museum equipped with well-chosen specimens of the world's art. Our government and citizens are establishing schools of industrial and fine art, yet when we would point our pupils to examples of pure art, lo! ”

“ Once upon a time a famous art museum searched the world over for the best paintings it could find. After a long search, the museum found a beautiful Old Master painting depicting youths and maidens frolicking in a wood. The directors were only too glad to pay millions for this painting because they were captivated by its beauty and elegance. How delightfully the maidens' hair and mouths were drawn, how perfectly the hands and arms of the youths, how life-like the bare feet on the forest floor. ”

“ In the National Gallery one finds a throng of nursery-maids, and men just come from their work; true, they make a great deal of noise thronging to and fro on the uncarpeted floors in their thick boots, and noise from which, when penetrated by the atmosphere of Art, men in the thickest boots would know how to refrain; still I felt that the sight of such objects must be gradually doing them a great deal of good. The British Museum would, in itself, be an education for a man who should go there once a week, and think and read at his leisure moments about what he saw. ”

“ Without, however, presuming to be an art critic, and without being so enthusiastic as some in favour of ancient art, we cannot pass through the courts of the British Museum without being struck with the massive grandeur and classic beauty of some of the ideal creations of those men who have left us such a comprehensive syllabus, as it were, of primeval civilization. ”

“ If the history of this museum of civilization would record strange instances of popular neglect for great works of art, it must at the same time show that works of genius, in whatever perishable material embodied, have a strange vitality. ”

“ How charming it would be if municipalities would have in every museum a section of "modern craft work," independent of the collections of antiquities we store up. For we also have beautiful things being created amongst us, no less beautiful because they result from the demands of modern needs and usages. ”

“ If they are tolerably old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the lustreless gem of the museum—these things have a mild historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate something. ”

“ The first function of a Museum— (for a little while I shall speak of Art and Natural History as alike cared for in an ideal one) —is to give example of perfect order and perfect elegance, in the true sense of that test word, to the disorderly and rude populace. Everything in its own place, everything looking its best because it is there, nothing crowded, nothing unnecessary, nothing puzzling. ”

“ Around this street great numbers of celebrated buildings are erected, from the close of the seventeenth century up to the present, including the School of Arts and Sciences, royal stables, universities and palaces of Kaiser Wilhelm I; the old Museum, a beautiful building in Greek style, all abounding in collections of choice antiques, art, in the way of frescos, bronzes, gems, vases, pictures, stationery, and everything on earth to delight the eye of the connoisseur as well as to tire it; so that royalty and its environs lose half their interest when forced to gorge oneself day in and day out. ”

“ Through the exertions of Sir Charles Newton, to whom every student of classic art should be grateful, some of the wonderful treasures so long immured in the grimy vaults of the British Museum have at last been brought to light, and the new Sculpture Room now opened to the public will amply repay the trouble of a visit, even from those to whom art is a stumbling-block and a rock of offence. ”

“ For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is formed in which a whole nation is interested; formed on a scale which permits the exhibition of monuments of art in unbroken symmetry, and of the productions of nature in unthwarted growth,—formed under the auspices of science which can hardly err, and of wealth [Pg 246] which can hardly be exhausted; and placed in the close neighborhood of a metropolis overflowing with a population weary of labor, yet thirsting for knowledge, where contemplation may be consistent with rest, and instruction with enjoyment. ”

“ By-and-by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation. ”

“ It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. ”

“ We must not be content to contemplate merely; we must create; we must be active in our dealings with art.
It is here that I shall fall foul of certain excellent men and women who are attempting to "bring art into the lives of the people" by dragging parties of school children and factory girls through the National Gallery and the British Museum. Who is not familiar with those little flocks of victims clattering and shuffling through the galleries, inspissating the gloom of the museum atmosphere? ”

“ It is true, however, that people need some preliminary instruction before they can get all the good possible to be got from the prodigious treasures of art possessed by the country in that form: there also one sees things in a piecemeal way: nor can I deny that there is something melancholy about a museum, such a tale of violence, destruction, and carelessness, as its treasured scraps tell us.
But moreover you may sometimes have an opportunity of studying ancient art in a narrower but a more intimate, a more kindly form, the monuments of our own land. ”

“ In this house, designed as a gift primarily to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final rites. ”

“ A collection of reproductions in plaster to supplement original material is desirable. To simply store such a collection as is done in many European museums is a waste of material. Among the visitors to our museums, there are very few who are studying the history of sculpture so profoundly that a crowded or careless arrangement which would be intelligible to a specialist is of any interest. On the contrary, the purpose of a cast collection is to stimulate enthusiasm in the study of art among all visitors. ”

“ The habit of visiting an art museum in the evening has not been formed, and the moving picture show, where a man can sit at ease in his arm-chair and be amused, is much more attractive than the art museum. ”

“ Not that dramatic, still less didactic, intention should disqualify a work of art for museum purposes. But—broadly—dramatic and didactic art should be universally national, the luster of our streets, the treasure of our palaces, the pleasure of our homes. Much art that is weak, transitory, and rude may thus become helpful to us. But the museum is only for what is eternally right, and well done, according to divine law and human skill. The least things are to be there—and the greatest—but all good with the goodness that makes a child cheerful and an old man calm ”

“ The annual picture expositions in the Champs Elysées are always crowded to suffocation, especially on free days, showing that the common people are not wholly indifferent to art, but for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained, the celebrated museum, the one-time residence of the Kings of France, with all its historic memories, its priceless pictures and endless rooms filled with sculptures and antiquities is treated with indifference and neglect. ”

“ To prevent the monotony that attaches to a mere museum arrangement, in which glass cases are ordinarily the most prominent features, the whole of the collected objects, whether of science, art, or nature, were to be arranged in picturesque groupings, and harmony was to reign throughout. ”

“ A present of copies of the British Museum casts, along with the fund of the Ancient Art Society, would originate a Cast Gallery, and a few good pictures could be bought as a commencement of a National Gallery of Painting, leaving the economy of the managers and the liberality of the public gradually to fill up. ”

“ Into the museum come the disjecta membra of other lands, other cultures, other civilizations. All that had once been a living faith and practice is here reduced to a separate specimen, pattern, or form. For the museum, the world of art has already been created: the future is restricted to a duplication of the perfected past. This animus is identic with that which made the Romans so skillful in copying Greek statues and so dull in carving their own ”