Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Fellows und Mitarbeitende des ZI sowie Gastwissenschaftlerinnen und Gastwissenschaftler berichten über laufende Arbeiten. Die offene Form des Workshops ermöglicht eine intensive Diskussion.

Given its continuing relevance, it is rather surprising that the early development of European contemporary art museums is still an underrepresented subject in art-historical scholarship. The proposed research project fills this lacuna. It questions the tension between “national” and “contemporary” and centres on the overlooked evolution of the notion of a modern art within museum space in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so, the project puts forth a novel theoretical perspective on the supposedly familiar story. In particular, it examines when and how the prevailing, academically defined notion of contemporary art museum, — manifested in its hierarchy of genre, collecting, displaying patterns, and self-narration, — shifted in response to the emergence of the dealer-critic system and its modernist aesthetics. The research project takes a case-study approach to realizing the argument and critically compares the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, and the New Pinakothek in Munich and National Gallery in Berlin, the Tate Gallery in London and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. While these museums shared commonalities, they operated within distinct socio-political contexts that inevitably shaped their aesthetic frameworks, institutional evolutions, and curatorial innovations.

[Image Caption: The title page of the inaugural catalogue of the New Pinakothek, Munich. Published in Verzeichniss der Gemälde in der neuen königlichen Pinakothek zu München. (München: J. A. Finsterlin, 1854).]