MGHG Study Day: Sources and Approaches in Museum History

Kajal Meghani, MGHG Postgraduate Officer writes:

It was a sunny but chilly day as attendees of the PGR/ECR MGHG Study Day gathered at the Jodrell Research Laboratory at Kew Gardens. It was the first in-person event that the MGHG had organised following the pandemic to share research and challenges. Keynotes and work-in-progress papers ranged in material, geography and method; from Korean ceramics to Indian coin collections, from Cumbria to Columbia, from creating databases to speculative histories. Here are some of the key themes and points that stood out for me:

The potential and challenges of quantitative data

During many of the presentations, I was often awestruck by the incredible findings and sleek visualisations that doctoral and early career researchers had produced using data mostly taken from collection databases. Visualisations included line graphs, heat maps and networks to mention but a few ways that researchers had approached their datasets. Isobel MacDonald’s keynote contextualised the collection of Han Sloane (1660 – 1753), whose bequest led to the foundation of the British Museum in 1753, with the rest of the museum’s collection. Through her visualisations, Isobel demonstrated that despite the continued focus on Sloane’s collection, it only amounts to 0.3% of the museum’s registered collection today. To get to this figure however, involved a painstaking process of extracting data from the museum’s collection database and ‘cleaning’ or processing the data to create visualisations. Isobel explained that while this figure was expected given that Sloane’s collection is now dispersed to other collections such as that of the Natural History Museum and the British Library, it challenges widely held narratives about the British Museum’s collection. While Sloane’s collection was important for the foundation of the museum, the continued focus on this aspect of the museum’s history can detract from other histories that have yet to be explored.

Figure 1: Entrance to the Jodrell Laboratory, Kew Gardens

Figure 2:  Isobel Macdonald presenting her findings on the British Museum's collection

Lauren Barnes, whose work-in-progress paper gave an overview of her research on Korean collections across the UK, made an interest observation about data ‘cleaning’. Lauren suggested that instead of ‘cleaning’, as researchers we are adding or embellishing the data with our own knowledge to make it workable for our own research. Dawn Kantar has taken this a step further with her research on British portrait-sittings from 1900 to 1960 now in the National Portrait Gallery. Dawn saw the potential of utilising this data to develop a database populated with extracted information from textual accounts of sittings, which is often used instead to provide anecdotal information for exhibition or gallery labels.  These presentations showed the potential and limitations of ‘big data’ and the analysis that could be conducted with such a dataset. While visualisations generated from data could act as a springboard for further research, granular research was still required to answer the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions behind certain trends.

The importance of highlighting systematic silences

While it is frustrating, it is not unusual to find objects with unknown provenances when working with museum collections. Often these gaps come from information being disassociated with objects as they are transferred from private to public spaces, or even across departments within museums and galleries. However, as shown by Emma Martin’s keynote, and Sean Cham and Niti Acharya work-in-progress papers, these gaps can be intentional and produced by systems that specialised in erasure. Emma’s keynote focused on the lack of provenance for Tibetan objects in museum collections as a result of the deliberate removal of this information by the colonial government in India. She explained how the British colonial government divested political and diplomatic gifts of their provenance by depositing them in the British Toshakhana (treasure house) before they were sold to recoup the cost of any diplomatic gifts that had been presented by the colonial government to South Asian rulers or dignitaries.

Figure 3: Emma Martin presenting her research on Tibetan objects and the British Toshakhana

Sean’s research examined the lack of depictions of the British empire in the subject matter of paintings at the National Gallery, which obscured the institution’s link with British imperial history. Sean argued that this was despite many of the Gallery's Trustees deriving wealth from empire, which was used to purchase objects that were later donated to other public institutions such as the British Museum. Niti’s research focusing on women collectors and their contributions to the British Museum’s South Asian collection focused on Marion Rivett-Carnac (1843-1935). Carnac, despite being a wealthy woman who amassed a large collection of Indian jewellery that was displayed at six international exhibitions and subsequently donated to various European museums, is silent within various institutional archives. Niti explained that this was partly a result of her identity being obscured by conventions of the time that prioritised her husband’s name when donations were recorded in museum registers, which eclipsed Marion’s identity as the collector. These presentations demonstrated that while it is difficult (and in some cases near impossible) to regain some provenances, it is important to be aware of and acknowledge the systems that produce these silences that continue to impact research into institutions and collections.

Transforming silences and absences into sources

Several of the day’s presentations focused on methods to approach silences and absences present in institutional archives, which as demonstrated above, lead to partial and biased histories when left unaddressed. Presentations by Brad Scott, Shreya Gupta, Catalina Delgado Rojas and Megan Mills-Amissah showcased some of the ways in which they were tackling or working with these silences.  Brad’s presentation focused on the ways in which he was identifying the indigenous peoples that had largely been overlooked in the studies of the networks involved in the collation of Hans Sloane’s Herbarium by re-examining primary sources and mapping absences.

Figure 4: Brad Scott presenting his research on Sloane's Herbarium

Similarly, Shreya mapped the many individuals of Indian heritage such as coin dealer Chanda Mall (active 1872-1901) who sold coins to British numismatist Richard Bertram Whitehead (1879-1967) to help develop his collection. Using a visualisation programme called Onodo, Shreya’s research aimed to decentre Whitehead as a collector and contextualise his collecting in relation to the many Indian individuals that aided his collecting practices.  Catalina too used the relational approach to unpack symbolic reparations and highlight overlooked parties involved in the development of the Museum of Memory of Colombia. Megan showed how gaps in the archive could be bridged in her research on the representations of Ananse, a prominent figure in Ashanti folklore, within museum collections through contemporary visual culture. This Afro/African-futurist lens provide an ‘against-the-grain’ reading of the colonial archive that currently dominates the way in which Ananse is understood within the museum context. These presentations offered alternative and creative ways to think through silences and absences that can often be encountered during research.

Working with institutional memory

Researchers use a variety of sources, tangible to intangible, to piece together histories of institutions. However, presentations given by Mark Liebenrood and Jenny Durrant reminded me that institutions are made up of individuals, which seems like an obvious statement to make but sometimes working with archives can distance you from the very individuals that are a part of this history. Mark’s paper focused on developing an institutional history of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria, which was established by Li Yuan-chia (1929 - 1994), a Chinese artist, poet and curator in 1972. Using the LYC’s exhibition catalogues, all of which are unique in terms of the design and information they include within the pages, Mark posed the question if and how an institutional history could be composed using the catalogues as a source. For me, this presentation demonstrated that exhibition catalogues, uniform in style or not, can embody the knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the individuals involved in their creation. While Mark was working with a tangible archive, Jenny’s paper focused on her use of oral history in recording curatorial memory. Jenny, who had worked as a curator at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, reflected on her ‘insider’ status and the impact that has on creating an institutional history. Jenny’s thoughtful questioning on the ethics of using information gained through her insider status and trust from former colleagues is an issue that many researchers grapple with as they undertake collaborative research projects where the staff at institutions that we are studying are also colleagues and confidants.

Tracing histories through objects

Objects can be tangible reminders of overlooked, unknown and unusual connections between people, institutions and places in the world, which was exemplified in the research being conducted by Viveca Mellegård and Tobias Gardner. Tobias Gardner work-in-progress paper traced the links between Sheffield and Atlantic slavery through plantation hoes and Bowie knives manufactured in Sheffield. Tobias explained Sheffield’s production of plantation hoes, which were used by enslaved peoples on plantations in the Americas, and Bowie knives engraved with pro-slavery inscriptions, complicate narratives that focus on Sheffield’s antislavery activism. Through his presentation, Tobias raised questions as to how this history can be made accessible to a wider public and reflected on the exhibition of plantation hoes and Bowie knives within museums spaces.  At Kew's Economic Botany Collection, we were shown samples of Indigo and related material by Viveca, who is researching Kew’s collections of Indigofera tinctoria from India and its links with contemporary indigo production and dyeing in West Bengal. Viveca described the many sources from which indigo samples ended up in the Economic Botany Collection, and I was particularly surprised to find out that Coleman's (of Coleman's Mustard fame) produced indigo too! We only had time to see a small portion of the collection but what Viveca was able to show and explain to us in that time made us all want to come back to visit the Economic Botany Collection again.

Figure 5: Viveca Mellegård showing us the indigo samples in Kew's Economic Botany Collection

Conclusion

All in all, I found the keynotes and work-in-progress presentations to be incredibly stimulating and inspiring. I very much enjoyed meeting other postgraduate and early career researchers investigating institutional histories and learning more about their experience of conducting this research. It was encouraging to hear that many of us (often working in isolation on our respective research projects) were grappling with some of the same issues and questions, and exchanging ideas over biscuits, tea and sandwiches is always a plus in my book.

Displaying museum history

The Museums and Galleries History Group are pleased to host the third and final blog post by the one of the runners up of our recent competition, Dr Anna Tulliach, Research Fellow at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

I have always been fascinated by history and how this has shaped the society we live in. My work as a museum researcher reflects this interest: I can define myself as a museum historian, for having always focused my attention on the history of museums (more precisely, on their history during wartime periods). When I visit a museum, I am fascinated in understanding its history by capturing the information that curators, in one way or another, have decided to provide visitors on this matter. This blog post arises from my considerations on the modalities how museums today are exhibiting their history, gathered during my visits at museums and exhibitions.

Ever more frequently, over the past decade museums have reflected on their own history and on the modalities of representing it within museum spaces, with the purpose of making museum history more accessible to a wider public. It is possible to recognise several approaches to the displaying of museum history: the organisation of entire sections dedicated to the history of the museum; a frequent reference to the collections’ history throughout the museum itinerary; the use of original display cases ‘modernised’; a faithful reconstruction of former exhibition displays; and the organisation of temporary exhibitions.

Outstanding examples of museums that have successfully addressed museum history within their exhibition spaces are the Archaeological Museum of Bologna and the Egyptian Museum in Turin (Italy). These museums have a similar history, but their ways of exhibiting it differ. Both museums were born in the second half of the 19th century, conceived as ‘modern’ museums open not only to researchers but to the public. Moreover, their collections originated from the ensemble of private collections and findings from archaeological digs. Nevertheless, museum curators adopted two different approaches to the representation of their respective museums’ histories.

The Archaeological Museum of Bologna

At the Archaeological Museum of Bologna, curators both maintained original 19th-century displays (such as in the so-called Foundry of San Francesco, fig. 1) and employed old showcases modernised according to contemporary museographic standards (as for the Greek collection, fig. 2). Furthermore, visitors can appreciate the Archaeological Museum’s history because the museum itself is still located in its original building, where the old exhibition rooms’ architecture and past design choices are still in place (e.g., the pictorial cycle of the 19th century, reproducing Etruscan and Egyptian paintings, fig. 3). Consequently, visitors experience a constant dialogue between ancient and modern museographic practices.

Fig. 1. Room Xb of the Archaeological Museum of Bologna, housing the Foundry of San Francesco (Ripostiglio di San Francesco). The room display reproduces the one adopted in the 19th century, representing an historical visual documentation of the museographic practices of that period (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna).

Fig. 2. A section of the room VI of the Archaeological Museum of Bologna, housing a portion of the Greek collection. There, museum curators have decided to use old display cases modernised according to contemporary museographic standards (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna).

Fig. 3. Overview of the Archaeological Museum’s room X, displaying the Etruscan collection. The picture shows part of the pictorial cycle of the 19th century, reproducing Etruscan funerary paintings, made by Luigi Busi with an educational purpose (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna).

In addition to this, in 2018 museum history was chosen as the topic of a temporary exhibition (Ritratti di Famiglia. Personaggi, Oggetti, Storie del Museo Civico fra Bologna, l’Italia e l’Europa, 10 March – 19 August 2018). It was centred around the history of the Archaeological Museum’s collections and the men who, during the centuries, developed the museum to the point where it became one of the most important archaeological museums in Italy.

As suggested by the title of the exhibition (Ritratti di Famiglia/Family Portraits), the history of the Archaeological Museum’s collections was narrated through the personalities of collectors, archaeologists and museum directors who are considered the ‘fathers’ of the museum (fig. 4). Objects and archival documents told the story of a particular period in the history of the museum, intertwined with the history of museums and archaeology in general. With this exhibition, curators successfully explained the complex nature of the Archaeological Museum’s collections and the processes that contributed to the museum’s foundation. There, visitors had the opportunity to get to know the Archaeological Museum’s collections more intimately, to investigate the historical evolution of the ways of looking at antiquities and of preserving them, and, above all, to expand on the subject of the birth of modern museums.

Fig. 4. Exhibition ‘Ritratti di Famiglia/Family Portraits’ (Archaeological Museum of Bologna), section dedicated to Pericle Ducati, museum director between 1921 and 1944. During his direction, the museum notably incremented its collections and established relationships with other Italian and European museums thanks to loans and donations (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna).

The Egyptian Museum of Turin

In 2015, the Egyptian Museum of Turin opened again after a major reorganisation project. Curators decided to arrange the first museum section as an introduction for the visitors to the history of the museum itself and of its collections. The history of the museum was narrated through objects, archival documents, photographs, the use of old display cases, and by the collectors and Egyptologists who assembled its prestigious collection throughout the centuries (e.g., Bernardino Drovetti, Jean François Champollion, and Ernesto Schiaparelli). The section was conceived as an introduction to the museum collections displayed in the subsequent exhibition rooms.

Moreover, throughout the whole museum itinerary there is a constant reference to the history of the museum collections, with the recurrent use of photographs and documents related to the discovery of the archaeological objects exhibited and of the excavations conducted (fig. 5). Therefore, besides representing the history of the museum itself, this approach provides a comprehensive view of the history of archaeology and of museum history in general.

Fig. 5. A portion of a display case in the room 6 of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, showing the information provided by museum curators on the history of the archaeological digs at Deir El-Medina, where the museum objects displayed in the room were discovered (Museo Egizio, Torino).

The first section dedicated to museum history was reorganised in 2019. The new arrangement sees five exhibition rooms entirely dedicated to the history of the museum, again recounted through the main personalities who founded the museum collections. Video installations support the exhibition which is composed mainly of objects, archival documents, and historic photographs. This time, great emphasis is on the faithful reconstruction of an 18th-century museum room, made of original display cases, where the objects are exhibited following 18th-century museographic practices (e.g., without the use of labels) – an immersive experience for museum visitors.

As we have seen, in recent years, museums have often been investigating their histories through the organisation of exhibitions and the rearrangement of museum rooms, in order to expand the knowledge on these topics by museum visitors. The examples proposed here suggest that in displaying museum history there is not an approach that prevails over the others, but every practice is effective in its own way. Museums today should reflect on their history and address a critical dialogue about the past as way to enhance the understanding of their collections, aiming to guarantee their safeguarding and valorisation for future generations.

Further reading

Giovetti, Paola et al. (2018) Ritratti di Famiglia. Personaggi, Oggetti, Storie del Museo Civico fra Bologna, l’Italia e l’Europa. Bologna: Comune di Bologna

Hill, Kate (2012) ‘Introduction: Museums and Biographies – Telling Stories about People, Things and Relationships’, in Kate Hill (ed.) Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer

Moiso, Beppe (2016) La Storia del Museo Egizio. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini Editore. An updated edition of the book has been published in 2022

Morigi Govi, Cristiana and Sassatelli, Giuseppe (1984) Dalla Stanza delle Antichità al Museo Civico. Storia della Formazione del Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna. Bologna: Grafis Edizioni

Tulliach, Anna (2018) ‘Ritratti di famiglia, the Archaeological Museum, Bologna’. Reviewed in: Museum Worlds 6 (1), 151-154

For an overview on the museum history section of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, see: Museo Egizio (2019) La Storia del Museo Egizio: Nuove Sale al Museo Egizio. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF91kYKEiVE

Deliberate Disconnections: Narratives and Display in the Palestine Archaeological Museum in the 1920s

The Museums and Galleries History Group are delighted to host the following blog post by the one of the runners up of our recent competition, Chloe Emmott.

I have been researching the Palestine Archaeological Museum as part of my PhD thesis on British archaeology in Palestine. I am interested in how we interact with the past via its material remains and how these interactions are shaped by the wider socio-political context of the times, and this is what has sparked my interest in museums.

The Palestine Archaeological Museum is an example of how colonial museums were used a vehicle for state-building, and as venues in which colonial territories were explained in the voice of the imperial power.  It stands alongside others such as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo which Christina Riggs describes as a ‘stage on which to act out Europe’s command over the antiquities of Egypt’, and the Iraq Museum, opened in 1923, under the direction of British archaeologist Gertrude Bell. (Iraq also being a British Mandate in previously Ottoman territory).

The museum opened in 1921, with an opening ceremony attended by the High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel. The museum formed a key part of a post-war propaganda strategy which saw the British emphasise how they were rescuing the antiquities from years of supposed Ottoman corruption and neglect. Museum keeper, W.J. Phythian Adams, suggested that antiquities were ‘ransacked, neglected, and forgotten’ under the Ottomans and had now ‘been rescued from oblivion’. However, the bulk of the museum collection was inherited from the Ottoman Imperial Museum of Jerusalem, founded in 1901, and despite the concerns of Phythian Adams, were in good condition when inherited by the British, with no reports of damage.

The museum used the display of its collections to promote a linear historical narrative which emphasised the role of Palestine as part of the cultural heritage of the British Empire, whilst disconnecting it from contemporary Palestine, the Palestinians, and the Arab world. The Mandate demonstrated attempts to create an equal society, such as the policy of three official languages - English, Arabic and Hebrew, which can be seen here in the Museum’s signage (figures 2 & 3). The Mandate was, however, embedded in a system of racial hierarchy which saw Palestinian Arabs, who were predominantly Muslim, at the bottom and white, Christian Europeans at the top. This was reflected in the museum’s staff, who at the top levels were all white and British. The few Palestinians who did rise through the ranks, tended to be middle-class, Christian and educated in British-run schools. Albert Glock’s research suggests that in March 1947 only four Palestinians out of the seventy-three employed by the Department of Antiquities held higher positions – namely three junior inspectors and one librarian, and there is little reason to believe that the statistics for the early mandate period were different. The vast majority of Palestinians employed held lower status roles, such as guards like the unnamed figure in figure 2.

Most excavations in Palestine were undertaken by teams from Europe and the US who were interested almost exclusively in Biblical archaeology, which led to a bias in the museum’s collections - they do not cover anything much earlier than the Early Bronze Age or any later than the Roman or Byzantine era, meaning there is an almost complete absence of any Islamic and Ottoman era material. The collections were organised chronologically and cover the Biblical and Classical eras, with other periods represented by only a few token artefacts. This created a conceptual divide, disconnecting contemporary Palestinians from their heritage by claiming Palestine as part of the British Empire’s cultural heritage. The Museum, through its focus on Biblical and Classical remains - such as the stunning sarcophagi from Ashkelon and Tell Barak (figure 3) - presented a history which connected the British to Palestine via a narrative of ‘western civilisation’. The Illustrated London News of August 16, 1924, praised them as ‘Gems of Classical Art’, emphasising their Europeanness and the coup of the British discovery.

In A Century of Excavation in Palestine, R.A.S. Macalister, an Irish archaeologist who worked in Palestine from the 1890s until the 1920s, describes the faces on one of the sarcophagi (seen in figure 3) as having ‘a strangely Oriental cast of countenance that could be matched by faces to be met with in a walk-through Jerusalem of to-day.’ This suggests the sarcophagus has both a connection to the peoples of Palestine, and that Macalister recognises this, but also that a Classical piece is somehow ‘strange’ for having faces with non-European features. Yet Palestine was part of the Greek world, as was much of Asia Minor and North Africa. This is an example of the whitewashing of the Classical world and the creation of a Eurocentric narrative of history.

This separation, which draws a clear barrier between the Biblical and Classical past and the present, Islamic- and Ottoman-influenced Middle East, is one which we can still see in many western museum collections today. Many Ancient Near Eastern collections (the use of the outdated term ‘Near East’ creating further distance with the modern Middle East) are displayed in a manner which disconnects them from the contemporary Middle East. In contrast many Classical collections are seen as more connected to modern Europe, particularly when you consider the Neo-Classical architecture of many museums, which was intended to visually connect these new museums to the grandeur of the classical past. Indeed, many ancient ‘Near Eastern’ collections are displayed to emphasise the role of Mesopotamia as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, in relation to its perceived role as the ancestor of ‘western civilisation’. And it is exactly this emphasis, which highlights the connection between Palestine as the Holy Land and as part of the Classical world, as being part of the cultural heritage of the British Empire which we see in the Museum.

Whilst the British kept most artefacts in Palestine, they still created a narrative which connected themselves to Palestine and disconnected the Palestinians. This disconnection is echoed today, as the museum’s current incarnation – the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum, lies in occupied East Jerusalem, inaccessible to the vast majority of Palestinians.

Images

Figure 1. Exterior view of the museum. ‘The former Palestine Archaeological Museum & objects in the museum’ (LC-DIG-matpc-09880), Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress  https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2019701345/

Figure 2. The museum guard at the entrance. ‘The former Palestine Archaeological Museum & objects in the museum’ (LC-DIG-matpc-09881), Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2019701346/

Figure 3. A sarcophagus from Tell Barak on display in the museum. ‘The former Palestine Archaeological Museum & objects in the museum’ (LC-DIG-matpc-09882) Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2019701347/

Sources and further reading

Gitler, Inbal Ben-Asher and Bar Leshem, ‘Creating Museum Culture in Mandate Palestine’, Israel Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 138–57, https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.26.3.09

Glock, Albert ‘Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past’, Journal of Palestine Studies 23, no. 3 (1994): 70-84 , https://doi.org/10.2307/2537961

Irving, Sarah ‘Palestinian Christians in the Mandate Department of Antiquities: History and Archaeology in a Colonial Space’, in European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948 (Springer, 2020): 161–85, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55540-5_9

Macalister, Robert Alexander Stewart A Century of Excavation in Palestine (Religious Tract Society, 1925).

Riggs, Christina. "Colonial visions: Egyptian antiquities and contested histories in the Cairo Museum." Museum Worlds 1, no. 1 (2013): 65-84.

St Laurent, Beatrice and Himmet Taşkömür, “The Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, 1890-1930: An Alternative Narrative,” Jerusalem Quarterly (2013): 6-45, http://vc.bridgew.edu/art_fac/7   

Phythian-Adams, W. J ‘The Future of Excavation in the Holy Land’, Asiatic Review XVII (April 1921): 333–38.

How long do museums last?

The Museums and Galleries History Group are delighted to host the following blog post by the winner of our recent competition, Mark Liebenrood.

The ICOM definition of a museum was recently rewritten, and in its new form still defines museums as ‘permanent institutions’. But while some museums have indeed been open for centuries, others have lasted only months before closing. All closures in the UK since 1960 have been recorded by the Mapping Museums project, and as the project’s database includes the opening and closing dates for most of these museums, it’s possible to get an insight into how long museums typically last before they shut. What can examining the lifespans of those closures tell us about the nature of the UK’s museum sector?

There are 866 closures listed in the database to date, but only 566 museums have exact opening and closing dates – just under two-thirds of the closures. Nonetheless, that smaller set of museums can still offer a fairly accurate picture of museum lifespans.

The distribution of those durations is shown in the chart below. The median average duration of a museum in the sample is 23 years, shown by the dashed line. That duration may seem surprisingly brief, but the distribution is strongly weighted towards shorter lifespans. Half of these museums lasted between 13 and 40 years. Far fewer of the closed museums in the database have longer lifespans, and the chart shows a long tail of those small numbers that reaches to almost 200 years.

Is the average lifespan the same for all types of museums? Because the Mapping Museums data also records a museum’s governance and size, it is possible to determine whether there are variations in lifespan between different types of museum.

Governance

The chart above shows durations by the type of governance. At the top are local authority museums, and there are 151 closures of these recorded in the dataset. Local authority museums have a median average duration of 39 years, the longest of the four groups shown here. There are very few closures of national museums, and these are mostly branches rather than standalone museums. These have lasted for an average of 33 years. Independent museums have even shorter average durations. Not for profit independents have an average lifespan of 22 years, while those run privately have a shorter average lifespan of 17 years. Private museums are also the largest group in this data, with 187 recorded as closed. Based on these figures, private museums are far more likely to have shorter lives than other types.

Size

Considering the lifespans of museums by their size gives a different picture. A museum’s size in this data is determined by the number of visitors. Small museums received up to ten thousand visitors a year, medium museums up to 50,000, and large museums up to 1 million. Relatively few large museums have closed, and those that did had an average lifespan of 26 years. About three times as many medium museums closed, and these had a longer average lifespan of 36 years. Lastly, three times as many small museums closed as did those of medium size. Not only do small museums seem the most likely to close, but they have the shortest average lifespan of all three groups, at just 21 years.

Behind these statistics are the stories of hundreds of closures, most of which have yet to be told. Three museums lasted less than a year. The Museum of British Beer - The World of Brewing, which was near London’s Tower Bridge, opened in 1980 and closed months later for reasons that are as yet unrecorded. In 2014, the Prefab Museum in South London was open for just six months before being destroyed by a fire, and is now an online resource. And York saw the short-lived opening of the UK’s only Fish and Chip museum, which featured a coal-powered fish fryer. It closed just a few months after it opened in 2019.

What kinds of museums last an average length of time? As the sector is so diverse it is hard to generalise, but a small sample of the museums that lasted 23 years gives an indication of the variety: the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives (1963–86), which was the first film museum in Britain, Colchester’s Social History Museum (1974–1997), and the Prison Service Museum in Rugby (1982–2005).

Some museums stand out for their long lifespans. The local authority museum that was open longest was the Falconer Museum in Forres, Scotland, open for 149 years until it closed in 2020. The Geological Museum in London is the longest-lived national museum to feature in these statistics and was open for 151 years (its building and collections now form part of the Natural History Museum). The closed museum that lasted longest was the museum of the Royal Artillery in Woolwich, South London. This began life in 1820 at the Rotunda, a circular tent-like building designed by John Nash that had been moved to Woolwich Common from its original site at Carlton House. In 2001 the museum was moved to the nearby Royal Arsenal and renamed as Firepower. The museum lasted until 2016 – a grand total of 196 years – and is now in storage in Wiltshire.

The Rotunda, Woolwich. Photo: by Kleon3, CC BY-SA 4.0

As the data shows, most closed museums have had much shorter lives than the Royal Artillery Museum. On average, they have been open for little more than a tenth of that time. That statistic raises a question that I touched on at the start. How should we think about the supposed permanence of museums when so many were not permanent but temporary, and often short-lived?

Mark Liebenrood was research assistant on the Mapping Museums project from 2017 to 2021 and completed his PhD on museum closure in 2022. He is researcher on the project ‘Museums in the Pandemic: risk, closure, and resilience’, and a visiting early career fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, 2022–3.

PGR & ECR Study Day: Call for Participants

Museum History Research: Sources, Methods, Approaches

Jodrell Lecture Theatre, Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

19 January 2023, 10am—4.30pm

MGHG are pleased to announce a PGR/ECR study day to explore methodological approaches to researching museum history. The day is aimed at those working with museum archive material and/or museum objects as part of historical research projects. With keynote contributions from Dr Emma Martin (University of Manchester) and Dr Isobel MacDonald (British Museum), the event will explore different approaches to the range of museum sources, from the data-driven to the object-focused. In a programme incorporating keynote papers, work-in-progress papers, engagement with material from Kew’s museum and archive collections and discussion sessions, it will challenge participants to think about what sorts of history are produced by different sources and analytical approaches, and how we can develop museum history methodologies to explore new aspects of museum history.

Key questions for the day include:

• What are the structures and silences of museum collections and archives?

• How should different sources be approached and understood?

• What kinds of approach, from data crunching to history of emotions to material analysis, can help us understand museums and their collections?

Call for participants:

To take part in the study day, please send in, along with name and contact details:

• A short description of your research including sources and methodologies used (max 100 words); and optionally—

• A short proposal for a work-in-progress paper (10 mins) including title and max 100 word description. Please highlight methodological issues and questions arising in your work.

There will be approx. 16 slots for work-in-progress papers but up to 25 slots for the study day as a whole. Send to contact@mghg.info by 1 December 2022.

Attendance will be free for accepted participants, and those without institutional support for travel costs may be eligible for a small bursary—please let us know when you apply.

MGHG Blog Post Prize

Do you have a story, an idea or some research to share about museum and gallery histories? If so, we want to hear it!

The Museums and Galleries History Group are offering prizes for the best blog posts written by MGHG members for the MGHG blog. Posts should be original work which addresses museums or galleries from a historical and/or theoretical perspective, and will be assessed by a panel of MGHG Board members. There are three prizes on offer: £50 for the best post, and £25 for two runners-up. The deadline is 1 October 2022, and winning posts will be featured here on the MGHG blog. We look forward to hearing from you!

The rules:

• Entries must be received by 1 October 2022.

• Posts should be original work of between 500 – 1000 words, accompanied by up to 5 images

• Posts should be in .pdf or Word format, with images as high resolution .jpegs or .tiffs (300dpi or above). It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that all appropriate permissions for image reproduction are secured.

• Please send entries to contact@mghg.info accompanied by a separate document giving your name, contact email address, and organisational affiliation if appropriate.

• Posts will be judged anonymously, on the criteria of their potential interest to MGHG members and their fit with the themes of the blog.

• Winners will be notified in due course and their post will appear on the MGHG blog.

Physical to Digital: Conferencing in the Age of Covid

Conference beginnings

Meeting in our supervisor’s office in Brighton in October 2020 to discuss a conference idea on museum exhibition design, we did not realise that our initial visions of a physical conference would remain just that - a vision. Booking rooms for keynote speakers, meeting and greeting participants, chairing discussions and museological debates and post-conference meet-ups - none of these would materialise in the ways we were imagining. From this initial scoping-out meeting we agreed to continue our discussion via email. For the small project team, consisting of Dr Claire Wintle, Hajra Williams and Kate Guy, all from University of Brighton this would be the first and only physical meeting for the entire planning stage and duration of the conference.

Covid and digital conferencing 

By February 2020 we had confirmed our keynote speakers and conference dates and from 27 February we publicised the call out for papers through our networks. And then Covid…we have by now heard those three words resonate in conversations around the world as people reflect on their lives during the past year from the first lockdown in March 2020. However, our supervisor and co-organiser, Dr Claire Wintle was not deterred by a global pandemic - she simply suggested moving the conference online. Coincidentally, Dr Tim Satterthwaite of University of Brighton was convening a digital conference, Future States: Modernity and national identity in popular magazines, 1890-1945, from 23 March to 5 April, 2020, at a time when our own discussions were taking shape. We decided to use the Future States conference format as a starting point. A little funding was set aside to buy in the expertise of Tim to guide us through the initial stages of website development. As the vehicle for the conference, it was crucial to get this right. Tim’s initial advice and input was invaluable - having said that it was a steep learning curve to navigate technical aspects of website development. Admittedly we were using a template (Wordpress), but this still required technical knowledge in terms of inputting text, images, links to resources and videos of speakers.

Planning

We had not anticipated such an incredible response to our call for papers. Abstracts from scholars and practitioners came in from around the world. We narrowed these down to fifty-eight speakers, a stark increase on the ten we had initially planned for our physical event. We decided on an asynchronous format, asking participants to prerecord their presentations. We supplied them with a recording guide, which offered two options, a simple recording approach on PowerPoint or a more advanced method using video editing software. Presentations would be released in batches and would remain on the website for a two-week period for attendees to watch at their convenience. The conference would conclude with a live plenary. Image copyright issues meant some papers had to be withdrawn after this period but many of the papers including the plenary discussion are still on the website. 

Technical issues

It was a steep learning curve to deliver an online event of this scale, and we did not foresee the range and scale of the technical issues we would face. Access to equipment, software, and technical skills varied amongst our participants, and many required additional support. We responded by setting time aside to provide this support despite the fact that participants were in various time zones in different parts of the world. For some, a few emails back and forth sufficed, but others required short demonstrations via video. Unexpectedly, in providing such support, we developed a rapport with our participants, fostering great relationships and camaraderie despite the physical distance of an online event.

Large video files were downloaded and stored on an external hard drive, then uploaded to SharePoint, a secure web-based collaborative platform used by University of Brighton. Uploading the videos to SharePoint was a lengthy process as the platform would frequently crash due to the large multimedia files. Minor technical problems continued during the conference, the most critical issue was the sound dropping out or distorting during some videos. It is worth noting that distortion was caused by people splicing their videos before sending in. In some cases, this problem was remedied by reuploading the video to the site. For other videos we required the invaluable support and expertise of the university's IT support team.

Outcome and impact

Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures conference took place between September 1-11, 2020. Over 500 attendees and 58 presenters/speakers participated. Key themes that emerged from the conference papers included collaborative, multi-authored exhibitions, often from a decolonial and postcolonial perspective; the materiality of exhibition design that goes ‘beyond text’, focusing on labour and production processes; and methodological approaches to studying museum exhibition history. The aim is to develop these themes further in an edited volume. 

The advantages of an online conference are many- it is low cost, carbon neutral, more accessible and inclusive. Inclusivity is worth a mentioning in more detail, we lost count of the number of times people thanked us for the opportunity to watch the presentations in their own time and at their own pace. Subtitles were provided through YouTube and text transcripts were available for those who requested. The conference provided other lessons too – above all, for presenters and organisers, the importance of learning digital skills and adapting to an online format. The website enabled us to include everything in one place, abstracts, participant information, reading lists, details of global research centres and archives. The disadvantages of online events can lead to a feeling of distance and isolation and in order to offset these factors, we developed opportunities for panellists and audience participants to come together as much as possible. We did this through a noticeboard and chat room functionality on the website, a finale of a live plenary discussion and encouraged engagement through social media. In post-conference evaluation below, attendees highlighted their experiences and offered suggestions for improvements:

“Fantastic speakers, an accessible delivery model, a highly-engaged level of debate and, overall, an extremely well-organised event. It really set the bar for how online conferences can work. I will also really appreciate being able to draw on legacy resource in my teaching and practice in the future.”

“I liked the more leisurely and on your own time way of viewing the presentations but missed the rigor of in-person and the chance to socialise and share in person…. Finding a way to have more synchronous attendee interaction would be good. However, I really like the virtual format because you could go back and re-watch presentations, and of course it cut out the sometimes challenging cost and time of travel.”

“I really appreciated the moments when the conference was hyper local (based on speaker’s expertise, no matter what geographical region or museum type); when content supported or current moment’s politics of anti-racism and decolonization; when speakers and content moved beyond standard euro-U.S. stories.”

“Watercooler/coffee bar moments and the ability to connect with speakers soon after their presentations were absent here. How might they be restored?”

“Overall I thought this was a great conference that ran very smoothly and a helpful resource for ongoing research.”

The conference highlighted the importance of investing in technology and software and ensuring continuous training in IT for those wishing to engage in educational and public-facing events. With the help of our participants, we created an international research community for the duration of the conference and a much needed, useful, accessible and permanent resource on museum exhibition design histories.


Hajra Williams and Kate Guy

University of Brighton

To visit the conference website: 

https://musex-design.org

Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/cdh/index.aspx

Digitising ‘an ideal gallery on paper’: Sir George Scharf’s Manchester Art Treasures sketchbooks

Sir George Scharf (1820-1895) looms large in the history of the National Portrait Gallery. Appointed Secretary 1857 and then created Director in 1882, he was instrumental in the Gallery’s early development. Indeed, Trustees deemed him a model of ‘unflagging zeal and industry’. He was a trained artist, an enthusiastic antiquarian, and a meticulous record creator. The Gallery’s Archive holds a substantial collection of his papers and at their core are over two hundred volumes of pocket sketchbooks, densely populated with drawings, notes and references. A new digital resource draws on a discreet set of sketchbooks documenting Scharf’s work for the 1857 Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition, prior to joining the Gallery. If your research intersects with old master artworks, private art collections, public exhibitions or social history of this era, please explore the digital offer at https://www.npg.org.uk/research/scharf-sketchbooks/

Scharf and the Art Treasures exhibition


MGHG members are doubtless familiar with the famous Art Treasures exhibition. Staged in Manchester May-October 1857, it was a landmark in scale and approach to public art appreciation, using classification and chronological arrangement to promote understanding of successive periods and schools of art. Over 16,000 exhibits in diverse media drew more than 1.3 visitors to the specially constructed Art Treasures Pavillion at Old Trafford (fig. 1).

Scharf was Art Secretary to the exhibition. He also curated its Ancient Masters section, for which he sourced 1,200 loaned works. He secured these loans with characteristic diligence, visiting more than one hundred collections, and recorded his efforts in sketchbooks (fig. 2). In Scharf’s own words, he documented ‘an ideal gallery on paper, taking the choicest specimens of every master in the history of art, as far as I remembered their existence in this country.’ The data Scharf recorded for old master artworks in British private collections drew Dr Philip Cottrell of the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin, who recognized the sketchbooks’ immense research potential. Volumes analysed by the recent project are full of notes and images. Scharf recorded artworks and their environs during his rail-enabled travels to locations in England, Scotland and Wales. He also documented his visits to the finished exhibition, making studies of works on display and a number of ‘wall maps’ recording sections of the chronological hang (fig. 3). 



A new digital resource


Dr Cottrell led The George Scharf Manchester Art Treasures Sketchbooks project, funded by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust. Dr Cottrell and the National Portrait Gallery collaborated to deliver the recently launched online resource, and it is one Scharf would have found invaluable. He peppered his physical records with handwritten cross-references, attempting to achieve on paper something much more feasible in the digital age. Thanks to the project, digital images of sketchbook pages are available online alongside detailed database entries created by Dr Cottrell. Users can search by keyword or Art Treasures catalogue number. Entries draw together valuable information on provenance, the contents of Victorian private collections (many subsequently disbursed), and the present day location of artworks, where known.

Scharf and his papers at the National Portrait Gallery


For those curious about Scharf and his legacy, the digital resource also includes an introductory guide to his papers at the National Portrait Gallery Archive.

Any who venture further will find his Art Treasures sketchbooks one thread of a far richer seam. Scharf’s artistic skill renders his sketchbooks particularly appealing. One discreet sequence contain sketches of his travels to sites in Asia Minor with the 1839-1844 archaeological expeditions of Sir Charles Fellows. The wider run of his personal sketchbooks initially reflect the development of his draughtsmanship, then navigate his time as a lecturer, researcher and teacher of art, and following his appointment at the National Portrait Gallery contents increasingly reflect his portrait research and surveys of art collections public and private. A separate sequence of Trustees’ sketchbooks document portraits offered to the Gallery for acquisition and collections Scharf surveyed in an official capacity. Contents throughout reflect Scharf’s lived experience. His renderings of artworks are interspersed with sketches of everyday scenes, architecture, and even dogs in fancy dress(!)

Beyond his sketchbooks, Scharf’s meticulous approach to research, note taking and diary keeping offer much to historians of his era. His papers are a splendid resource for scholars of museum history, offering considerable insight into the early development of the National Portrait Gallery in particular. Known as ‘The Father of the Gallery’, Scharf oversaw diverse areas of activity as the institution grew, including visitor access and the development of research resources. He influenced the formation of the portrait Collection and established an institutional acquisition methodology rooted in portrait research, aspects of which still inform current practice. His contribution to the curatorial field has been the subject of recent study: Elizabeth Heath examined the advancement of his professional approach in her 2018 doctoral thesis ‘Sir George Scharf and the early National Portrait Gallery: reconstructing an intellectual and professional artistic world, 1857–1895’. This interrogated Scharf’s personal and professional networks, emphasizing his place in an emerging professionalization within the field, an approach combining rigorous, academic research with public service impulse. His institutional impact is evident in National Portrait Gallery’s Archive & Library. Scharf began all of the collections that specialist staff across curatorial, library and archive spheres maintain today. He laid the foundations of the institutional archive and established sequences of reference images, built up a working Library, and accumulated primary sources. These resources assisted him in his wide-ranging role and created an invaluable legacy for future staff and visitors to the Archive & Library. Descriptions of Scharf’s papers, and thousands of other records in the Gallery’s archives, are available via the online Archive Catalogue: http://archivecatalogue.npg.org.uk/CalmView/ 



Bryony Millan, Senior Archive & Library Manager at the National Portrait Gallery and MGHG Treasurer.

Further reading

Cottrell, Philip, ‘Art Treasures of the United Kingdom and the United States: The George Scharf Papers’, The Art Bulletin Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 2012) https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188780?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents [accessed 12 December 2019]

Heath, Elizabeth, (2018) Sir George Scharf and the early National Portrait Gallery: reconstructing an intellectual and professional artistic world, 1857–1895. Doctoral thesis (PhD), University of Sussex/National Portrait Gallery http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/73230/ [accessed 12 December 2019]

Heath, Elizabeth, ‘A man of ‘unflagging zeal and industry’: Sir George Scharf as an emerging professional within the nineteenth-century museum world’, Journal of Art Historiography 18 (June 2018) https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/18-jun-18/ [accessed 12 December 2019]

National Portrait Gallery, ‘Sir George Scharf 1820-1895: Director, Researcher, Victorian Socialite’ https://www.npg.org.uk/research/archive/archive-journeys/sir-george-scharf/ [accessed 12 December 2019]

Image captions

fig. 1. NPG7/3/4/2/54/38, view of the Art Treasures Palace from the window of Scharf’s Old Trafford lodgings, Jul 1857. Scharf sketchbook 46 (National Portrait Gallery, London).

fig. 2. NPG7/3/4/2/53/60, notes and sketches on works of art in the collections of William Walter Legge, 5th Earl Dartmouth of Grosvenor Square and Lord Ward's Gallery, Piccadilly, London, Feb 1857. Scharf sketchbook 45 (National Portrait Gallery, London). 

fig. 3: NPG7/3/4/2/59/26, sketch of part of the Art Treasures hang (British Portrait Gallery, back of Saloon D), made in situ at the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, October 1857. Scharf sketchbook 49 (National Portrait Gallery, London).

Peter Masefield and the National Air Museum by Peter Elliott

The United Kingdom has Government-funded museums of science and industry, seafaring, media, and railways. Yet, there is no National Aviation (or Aerospace) Museum, despite several attempts to create one and Britain’s impressive record of aeronautical achievement. Sir Peter Masefield campaigned for such a museum in the 1950s. This blog post explores the background to this proposal and the reasons for its failure. These include an assumption that there was little demand for such a museum and the belief that the provision in two existing museums was adequate. A particularly important factor was government departments’ reluctance to fund a new museum.

For the first half of the 20th century, the Science Museum had collected aircraft and associated material as an emerging technology, whilst the Imperial War Museum regarded aircraft as a weapon. Individuals such as Richard Nash and Richard Shuttleworth had assembled their own collections of aircraft from the early days of British aviation. The Royal Air Force felt in the 1930s that the IWM’s remit – the First World War – was limiting its exposure to the public and tried, via the Air Ministry, to set up an Air Services museum, but first the Depression and then Britain’s rearmament programme meant that no funds were available.

The early 1950s brought concerns that elements of Britain’s aeronautical heritage might be lost, and that existing displays were inadequate. In 1953 an editorial in The Aeroplane called for improvements in the Science Museum’s aeronautics display. A further impetus came in January 1954, when the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) announced that it had purchased the Nash Collection. Fears had been expressed that the collection might vanish overseas: in November 1953 Nash had received an offer ‘from America’. Nash had presumably approached the Shuttleworth Trust, since Air Commodore Allen Wheeler (a trustee) had written an article discussing the need for a national museum. This article brought a response from Nash, who explained that in addition to the 14 aircraft in his collection, built between 1908 and 1920, he might have been able to add another 16, had the necessary finance and storage space been available, but the 16 had been destroyed during the war. 

The RAeS called a meeting in October 1954 to consider the creation of a National Aeronautical Collection of historical aircraft. Seventeen organisations attended included government departments, national museums, and various aviation groups. The meeting was chaired by Peter Masefield, whose long aviation career included acting as an adviser to the government on civil air transport, and board appointments at Bristol Aircraft and British European Airways. He was President of the RAeS from 1959-60. Masefield had already written to senior RAF officers, seeking their support for ‘the foundation of a National Aeronautical Collection on similar lines to the National Maritime Museum and Trust.’ The meeting agreed that some form of National Collection was desirable, and Masefield suggested that it could be located at Croydon airport or RAF Hendon. A working party was formed to carry the project forward.

A report in November 1955 that an American museum was seeking to acquire British, German and French aircraft of the First World War brought a further call for a national aviation museum. It seems likely that the collector James H ‘Cole’ Palen was involved; it may have been Palen who tried to purchase the Nash Collection in 1953. 

There was, however, little enthusiasm in the Ministry of Works for another museum. Officials were sceptical about the appeal of an aviation museum, since aviation had a relatively brief history. They were also concerned that the creation of ‘an air museum’ would encourage the Army to demand similar treatment, and feared that their funding would suffer. It was acknowledged, however, that Britain was ‘playing a leading part in aeronautics and it may be that eventually there ought to be some sort of museum of this kind.’ The Treasury was similarly unimpressed: one official wrote that the museum was unlikely to receive gifts ‘unless one regards as benefaction gifts by aeroplane manufacturers of old aeroplanes which they have been rather too shamefaced to scrap hitherto.’ He concluded ‘this project should be played long and killed – with kindness if possible.’ The National Air Museum project was eventually shelved when the Financial Secretary to the Treasury made it clear that the necessary financial backing would not be forthcoming, citing ‘pressure to spend considerably more on existing national institutions’ and that aviation was already represented in the IWM and Science Museum’s collections. The Air Ministry was content for the RAeS to draft lists of aircraft and engines that could form the national collection. The aircraft lists were eventually published in 1959; plaques would be presented to the owners of aircraft ‘considered to be of historic importance.’ During 1959 the Science Museum began planning its new aeronautical gallery; perhaps the seed planted by Masefield’s lobbying had taken root.

The RAeS list identified 185 specific aircraft – both British and foreign - worthy of preservation. Some were already in museums, but most were not. Nearly all of them have survived; a few were later sold overseas and others were scrapped, but some are still flying. The British Aviation Preservation Council (now Aviation Heritage UK), a group formed in 1967 to represent, coordinate and assist aviation museums, compiled its own register in the 1980s. It currently stands at over 2000 aircraft in the many museums that have sprung up since Masefield’s time. However, Masefield’s pioneering listing exercise, and his attempts to set up a national air museum have largely been forgotten.

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Sketch of the plaque that would be presented to the owners of listed aircraft (Royal Aeronautical Society)

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Amy Johnson’s de Havilland Moth Jason hangs in the Science Museum in London (Peter Elliott)

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Peter Masefield, President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 1959-1960 (Royal Aeronautical Society)

Further reading

Files in the National Archives

AIR 2/14352 Historic aircraft collection: minutes of meeting

TNA AIR 20/11199 Proposed national aeronautical museum

AIR 20/12053 Proposals for National Aeronautical Museum 

T 218/57 National Aeronautical Museum

WORK 17/336 Proposed aeronautical museum

Articles

Allen H Wheeler, ‘A national museum of aircraft?’, Flight, 6 November 1953, p.625

Thurstan James, ‘Wanted – a new home’, The Aeroplane, Volume LXXXV (11 December 1953) p. 779.

‘National Aviation Museum’ – an urgent need’, Flight, 25 November 1955, p.801

‘Historical Group’, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 63 (584), August 1959, pp 479-482

The Year of the Dealer – Art Markets and Museums

The relationship between public museums and the art market is something that I’ve been working on a quite a few years now – the recent exhibition ‘SOLD! The Great British Antiques Story’ at The Bowes Museum was a key example of where some of this research is ending up. If you missed SOLD! (it ran from 26 January to 5 May 2019) it had a very particular (and unusual) narrative for a museum exhibition – i.e. it presented the museum objects as specific articulations of the art market – the objects even had prices on them – sacrilege! Anyway, it’s long forgotten now, but I thought the MGHG community might be interested to hear that the ‘project’ continues; 

The latest project is called ‘Year of the Dealer’  and the new project website is being constructed (thanks to Peter Edwards in University of Leeds, Arts, Humanities & Cultures Faculty IT team) – you can see the new website here – Year of the Dealer website 

The ‘Year of the Dealer’ project is a collaboration between the University of Leeds, the University of Southampton, 7 major national and regional museums (The Victoria & Albert Museum, The National Museum, Scotland, The Ashmolean Museum, The Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Bowes Museum, Temple Newsam, Preston Park Museum and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery), together with a regional community theatre (The Witham, Barnard Castle) and one of the UK’s leading antique dealing businesses (H. Blairman & Sons). The project runs from 1 June 2019 until 31 May 2020 and is an ‘Impact and Engagement’ project funded (£100,000) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Over the next 12 months  the Year of the Dealer will be organizing a series of events, activities and museum object trails, using the research arising from the AHRC funded (£231,592) research project ‘Antique Dealers: the British Antique Trade in the 20th century’ AH/K0029371/1 (2013-2016).

Through these events and activities the project aims to draw further attention to the relationships between the art market and public museums and to share expertise, experience and perspectives among stakeholders and to increase public engagement with the significance of the history of the antique trade in British cultural life.

The Year of the Dealer will reveal new and previously marginalised stories of world-renowned and familiar museum objects through the co-production of a series of 7 museum ‘hidden history’ trails; each trail will have a curated selection of up to 20 museum objects foregrounding the history of antique dealers in the biography of the museum object.  So, for example, at The Bowes Museum, we will be drawing renewed attention to some of the museum objects by telling the story about the antique dealers who sold the object to the museum – this rare pair of gilded bronze lamps, made by William Collins in 1823………..

………………..will be reinterpreted through the Year of the Dealer trail in the museum as a pair of lamps sold to the Bowes Museum in 1960 by Stanley J. Pratt, a leading antique dealer then trading in ultra-fashionable Mount Street, London.  How Pratt acquired the lamps and how they ended up at The Bowes Museum will be key elements in the ‘story’ about the objects. Stanley Pratt came from a well-known family of antique dealers dating back into the 19th century; indeed the Pratt family of dealers were established, according to their own publicity, in 1860, and so sold the lamps to The Bowes Museum in their centenary year!

Besides the 7 museum trails, the project will also stage 4 art market themed knowledge exchange workshops and 3 public engagement ‘In Conversation’ events, hosted by the partner museums. The workshops will consider the relationships between the art market and public museums, drawing in historical and contemporary perspectives and will also consider the challenges and future opportunities for the relationships between museums and the art market.  The ‘In Conversation’ events invite key art market professionals, museum professionals, academics and commentators to discuss and debate the subject of the art market and public museums – all the events will be free, thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding.

Other activities as part of the Year of the Dealer project include museum front of house staff and volunteer training workshops at each of the 7 partner museums to ensure that the project research and objectives are disseminated and cascaded to the front-line interface with the public.

We will also be re-staging the play ‘Quinney’s (1914) at the Witham Theatre, Barnard Castle, and are organizing an associated workshop, ‘Dealing with Authenticity’ at The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle.

‘Quinney’s’ is the story of the fictional antique dealer Joseph Quinney. The play and the workshop aim to critically engage the general public with the central role that ‘authenticity’ has played in the art market, and to explore and critique the trope of the antique dealer as a problematic character, often associated with fakes and forgeries and the ‘love of money’. The workshop will be interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on theatre and performance studies and material culture studies as well as the history of antique dealers.

As you can see, there are plans for a very rich series of events, activities and collaborations over the course of the Year of the Dealer project – but we have a great team to help deliver the project – my colleague from University of Southampton, Dr Eleanor Quince, and Vanessa Jones, our project administrator, and my colleagues at the University of Leeds, Professor Jonathan Pitches and Dr George Rodosthenous, and of course all of the curators and staff at the all 10 collaborating partners and a small team of PhD research students to help keep the project on track!……it’s no doubt going to be exhausting, but we hope it will also be a really engaging project…and one that will have real Impact!

We hope to see you at some of the events – we already have some events fixed in the project calendar…so do keep an eye on the project website and the antique dealers research blog.

Dr Mark Westgarth

MGHG Newsletter Editor

(Part of this blog post was posted in the antiquedealersblog)

The Imperial War Museum’s Work to Safeguard Its Collections During the Second World War

By Philip W. Deans

Introduction

Over September-November 2018 I undertook a placement at Imperial War Museums (IWM). This placement was generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership scheme, which has overseen my doctoral studentship. During the placement, I assisted curators to develop an exhibition entitled Art in Exile looking at the IWM during the Second World War: the protection of its collection from aerial attack. This links directly with my own doctoral research on the broader history of the IWM over that period (see Deans 2017) and work for the UK National Committee of the Blue Shield. It also paralleled scholarship presented at the Museums and Galleries History Group’s 2018 summer conference Museums, Collections and Conflict, 1500-2010. 

During this conference, various institutional experiences of war were discussed. These included museum evacuation procedures such as at the Bologna Museum and the Louvre. The evacuations were often effective, or at the very least comprehensive. Over the two days, I was struck by how different the IWM’s evacuation experience was from those presented at the conference. This has motivated me to write about the IWM’s evacuation processes and problems. Decisions made on the spot, plus a conservative mindset on cultural value, caused an ineffective evacuation which had ramifications for the collection.

The Imperial War Museum prepares for war, 1933-1939

As the Second World War loomed, the United Kingdom took extra measures to safeguard its most vulnerable cultural property. The first meeting on the issue took place during 1933, not long after Germany withdrew from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference. The IWM participated from the outset along with other national museums across London. The impetus was the advances in air war during and following the last war. For the first time, the United Kingdom had come under threat by potential enemies operating from mainland Europe. As these threats increased and became clearer with the Spanish Civil War, the dangers posed to the United Kingdom crystallised. There seemed a realistic prospect that the country would suddenly and decisively be knocked out of any conflict with Germany. This fear became reflected in the IWM’s interwar evacuation plans. For example, from 1934, any evacuation was eventually anticipated to be needed with little or no notice, at night, under fire. Consequently, a decision had been taken to arm the museum’s staff with old trench clubs so they could fend off mob attacks on the evacuation lorries. 

Plans for the initial evacuation were driven by practical and ideological considerations. The IWM’s collection included many big, bulky or heavy objects which could not easily be evacuated, e.g. vehicles, aircraft and guns. But it also included more manoeuvrable collections, ranging from smaller objects of materiel, art, photographs, manuscripts, maps and books. The London Fire Brigade reports on aerial bomb damage from the previous war, for example, were unique. Even so, during preparations, there developed a view at the institution that its collection possessed little inherent cultural value compared with those held in the other older national institutions. Alongside more understandable issues concerning size, therefore, this inferiority complex limited the evacuation. Initial removals were thus restricted to oil paintings, watercolours – its modern art at the time comprised the largest and most important in the country – and photographs.

This evaluation sits problematically with the IWM’s foundation and early years. On opening, the institution aimed to sanctify the war dead of the British Empire. Its exhibits were treated as ‘sacred relics’ – objects comprising tangible remains of or links with a saint. Accordingly, the collection was seen as forming tangible connections to the war dead. Yet just nineteen years later, the same collection had begun being treated more like junk. The apparent willingness to jeopardise its collection brings the institution’s commitment towards that message into question. The move also shows the persistence of conventional schemes of value whereby fine art outweighs ephemera and social history material.

The evacuation, August 1939

The initial evacuation of the IWM was far less eventful than had been anticipated. In a pre-emptive move, all the national institutions closed at the Home Secretary’s orders on 23 August 1939. Besides, the knockout blow that had been feared never materialised. When the United Kingdom declared war against Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, no bombs fell immediately. The evacuation took place over 24-25 August 1939. Three lorries provided by the Office of Works were despatched: two on the first day, three on the second. The IWM’s staff sorted the material that had been designated for evacuation in order of priority by three exits. This was planned with meticulous detail, facilitating rapid evacuation while ensuring staff could track where everything went. The lorries they received, however, were far bigger than anticipated. This led to the plans eventually being ignored when it was realised the job could be done faster by just filling each lorry to capacity rather than as per the evacuation schedule.

With loading complete, the lorries proceeded to prearranged refuges. These were three country houses spread out across south east England. 

The refuges

The use of country houses became central to the IWM’s safeguarding plans from 1934. Over the years, various properties were identified. During 1939 these had been confirmed as Colworth House near Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire, owned by Henry Ludwig Mond, 2nd Barron Melchett; Penn House near Amersham in Buckinghamshire, owned by Francis Curzon, 5th Earl Howe; and Ramster Hall near Chiddingfold in Surrey, owned by Florence Priscilla Norman, Lady Norman. Country houses comprised the main refuge for the United Kingdom’s national collections, but were problematic. Although located away from strategic infrastructure, they nevertheless comprised unsafe places to store museum collections. Firstly, they were old. This meant it was difficult to maintain good environmental conditions in them. Their combination of design and materials caused fluctuating relative humidity and temperature, which can be detrimental for museum collections. Secondly, they were often still inhabited or kept in regular use, rendering them a fire risk. That many had been made of flammable material such as wood did not help in this regard. Thirdly, they were often difficult to reach and monitor, being far away from the museums which used them. And fourthly, while landlords willingly looked after so called ‘valuable’ material, the same could not be said for large or less aesthetic material.

The IWM experienced challenges at its refuges. Reflecting on their use after the conflict, the institution’s Director-General, Leslie Ripley Bradley, commented that they had been far from ideal situations. This is most clearly seen with the IWM’s experience at Penn House, near Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire. Penn House was originally owned by the 5th Earl Howe, a Trustee of the IWM since the 1920s. During 1934, the 5th Earl Howe promised Penn House to the museum in an emergency. But circumstances eventually problematised this arrangement. By 1939, responsibility for Penn House transferred over to his son, Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, thus frequently leaving the property unoccupied. Although the 6th Earl Howe honoured his father’s pledge, the environmental conditions at Penn House became unsuitable for the watercolours and drawings that had been deposited there. As a result, these were mostly reclaimed by mid-1940. Yet some fifty oil paintings remained in a separate garage on the estate. These included works by well-known artists, including John Singer Sargent and William Orpen. About ten were described as ‘large’ works, suggesting that Sargent’s famous oil painting, Gassed – ‘the jewel in the IWM’s crown’, one curator told me – may have been among them. But eventually even these needed removing after the 6th Earl Howe decided to lease out the property. The new tenant was a boys’ prep school, which used the garage for vehicles. Over several months, therefore, the oil paintings shared their refuge with working motorcars. The unacceptability of this was quickly realised by staff at the IWM, who arranged for their transferal to Ramster Hall during November 1940.

Implications and further evacuations

Such was the unexpected size of the lorries sent by the Office of Works during the initial evacuation that the IWM’s staff considered extending the evacuation schedule, but decided against it. This would be a decision they may have come to regret. When the Blitz started on 7 September 1940, the IWM found itself at continuous risk. Located in central London near overt targets, the institution was far more vulnerable to air raids than other museums located around the more peaceful South Kensington area. Further evacuations thus became necessary. 

Although fortunately nobody was ever killed at the IWM during the Second World War, some material fell victim to bombing. On 31 January 1941, for example, the IWM’s Naval Gallery received a direct hit. Alongside the destruction of many expensive ship models and other material that had remained there, the museum lost the world’s last Short Seaplane – damaged beyond repair. Flown at the Battle of Jutland during the First World War, this specimen was the first aeroplane ever to participate in a Naval engagement.

With the Blitz underway and its building suffering damage, the IWM’s evacuation policy shifted to a reactive as-and-when-necessary approach. Some items were temporally accepted by other, more safely located institutions into their temporary care. Some were sent on tours around the country. And some were granted refuge in further country houses – this latter method being arranged commercially via the Office of Works. One of the last areas to be evacuated was the IWM’s library. It had long been intended that library material would remain for as long as possible at the institution. This is because the library was thought to be required for consultation by the general public and the state, which indeed became the case. Eventually, however, even this policy became unsustainable. Consequently, during June 1941, the library was evacuated to Barnstaple. With that, virtually everything which could be removed from the IWM’s building, had been removed.

Concluding reflections

The IWM’s struggle with the principles and practices of evacuation during the Second World War sheds light on wider issues around cultural property protection. Its experience was far from universal. A combination of circumstances and conceptions produced an evacuation strategy that became highly conservative and not fit for purpose. In sum, the first problem was that not enough material had been removed from the IWM in the initial evacuation. This came at a cost in air raid damage, and meant the museum eventually necessitated further, more difficult and expensive evacuations once the war started biting. The second problem was the inadequacy of storage locations such as Penn House. Intolerable environmental conditions, brought about by the landlord’s absence, resulted in the refuge being abandoned after just one year. And the third problem was the institution’s hitherto inexplicable inferiority complex, which produced an initial evacuation schedule that conveyed a very specific schema of value. This goes against core museum philosophy today, and the decision making around it would prove costly both in the short and long term. Unfortunately, such schemas of value can still pervade the heritage sector today. This account shows the ramifications conceptions like these potentiate where they are tolerated.

Philip W. Deans is a stage four doctoral research student at Newcastle University. He is Postgraduate Officer for the Museums and Galleries History Group, and Secretariat of the UK National Committee of the Blue Shield.

Note on primary sources

The majority of this blog post has been drawn from archival material in IWM’s own institutional archive and The National Archives. By far the most comprehensive source is the two-part unpublished War History of the Imperial War Museum, 1933-1946 manuscript. This comprises an unpublished account, produced by the Director-General for a proposed volume of the official History of the Second World War civil series about the national museum and galleries, which never came to fruition. This is currently viewable at IWM’s reading room.

Further reading

Deans, Philip W., ‘The Imperial War Museum Originally Opened As a Museum to End All Wars – That Didn’t Last Long’, The Conversation, 7 March 2017 <https://theconversation.com/the-imperial-war-museum-originally-opened-as-a-museum-to-end-all-wars-that-didnt-last-long-72679> [2 January 2019].

Gardiner, Juliet, Wartime: Britain, 1939-1945 (London: Headline Publishing, 2004).

McCamley, N. J., Saving Britain's Art Treasures (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2003).

Pearson, Catherine, Museums in the Second World War: Curators, Culture and Change, ed by Suzanne Keene (Abingdon: Routledge 2017).

Call for Papers: Museological Review Issue 23: (Dis)empowered Museums

Museological Review Issue 23: (Dis)empowered Museums

 Museological Review is an online peer-reviewed journal, published annually by the PhD community of the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. We are now inviting you to submit your research to reflect on our theme.

The theme for Museological Review Issue 23 is ‘(Dis)empowered Museums’. As an active response to the 7th PhD-led conference ‘Museums (em)Power’ (13th – 14th September, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), we invite people to reflect on the power of museums today.

Museums have the power to influence behaviours, foster change, improve lives and establish partnerships between different individuals and communities. Nevertheless, some would argue that museums are gradually losing their power. Disempowerment can be traced back to several factors, from financial restrictions to the current political situation. A very recent example is the Brazil’s National Museum fire, where insufficient financial resources from the Brazilian government was a significant factor in the permanent loss of invaluable museum collections.

What does power (or lack of power) in museums look like today? And how does this impact their social role?

We welcome submissions around the topic of museums and power, whether that be empowerment or disempowerment. Topics include, but are not limited to:

-        Museums and contested histories

-        Re-interpretation and/or repatriation projects

-        Activist practices in cultural institutions

-        Decolonising the museum

-        Diversity, representation and inclusion in museums

-        The role of social media/activist campaigns

-        Museums without collections and permanent displays

-        Participatory museums

-        Radical museology

-        Museums and political attitudes

There are several ways to engage with Museological Review this year: an academic article, an exhibition or book review, a visual submission. Please see the attached document for more information.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts/reviews/visual depictions is Monday 3rd November 2018, 17:00 GMT. Submissions can be:

· emailed to: Museologicalreview@leicester.ac.uk
OR
· uploaded through the online form: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/forms/museological-review-articles-submission-form

The authors of the selected abstracts will be contacted by the editorial team in late-November 2018. The deadline for the submission of the final articles is mid-January 2019.

Art on the Move: Mobility in the long nineteenth century conference

12-13 January 2018, Birmingham (Ikon Gallery and Barber Institute)

Keynotes: Pamela Fletcher (Bowdoin) and Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Centre for the Study of Social Science, Calcutta)

Registration is now open for this 2-day conference exploring visual art and its nineteenth-century mobility. To register, and for the full programme, please visit: https://artonthemove19.wordpress.com/

Postgraduate funding opportunity:

Publishers Taylor and Francis have generously offered a Bursary for a postgraduate student (currently enrolled in MA or PhD courses anywhere in the world) to attend the conference. The Bursary is offered in memory of Helene Roberts (1925–2008), former editor of the journal Visual Resources. All conference expenses to the Bursary holder will be waived and they will receive a contribution of £150 for their travel and accommodation. In addition, the Bursary holder will have the opportunity to write a 500-1,000 words conference report for Visual Resources. 

If you are interested in applying to the Helene Roberts Bursary, please write to the conference’s email address (artonthemove19@gmail.com) by Monday 18th December 2017, with the subject heading “Helene Roberts Bursary”, and a 250 word statement on how the conference intersects with your research interests.

Please contact the conference organisers, Barbara Pezzini and Kate Nichols, artonthemove19@gmail.com for any further information.

Under the skin of Leeds Art Gallery

Working for Leeds Museums and Galleries over the last year has been a privilege in so many ways, not least the opportunity to witness the transformation of Leeds Art Gallery and the unfolding of its histories. Due to reopen to the public on Friday 13 October, visitors will see the extent to which the galleries benefit from the new roof and its glazed lanterns that illuminate the interiors in ways that, in some cases, have not been seen for over a generation. Much has already been written about the revealed Central Court on the first floor, with its impressive glazed, barrel-vaulted ceiling now visible after around forty years in the dark. In this short blog I would instead like to focus on the subtler but no less important refurbishment of what is now known as the Ziff Gallery (formerly the Queen’s Room) on the ground floor.

    The building works created opportunities to revisit the earliest years of Leeds Art Gallery and to think about how we might be informed by the late Victorian architecture and its many subsequent layers. Paint scrapes over the years had never provided conclusive evidence of the original colours of the walls, but a report on the opening of the gallery in the Illustrated London News in October 1888 noted the following scheme: ‘All the new rooms forming the Art Gallery are lighted from the roof, and their walls are coloured in maroon, of dead texture, which shows off the pictures and their gilt frames to the best effect, and which contrasts agreeably with the ivory white of the ceilings and lanterns’. The accompanying wood engravings showed vertically-striped walls and for a long time this was assumed to be either a confection of the illustrator or perhaps a patterned wallpaper. What became clear when work began to strip the walls was that beneath successive layers of paint, wallpapers and cladding, lay the original wooden tongue and groove wall covering, still coloured a maroon that that perhaps darkened over time to an aubergine colour. These boards were found across the galleries and for the first time in living memory, provided a tangible sense of their appearance in their opening years; their purpose to allow pictures to be fixed directly to the walls rather than hung from a picture rail. We decided to take our cue from this original colour scheme in the Ziff Gallery, which will be hung with a selection of works acquired for the collection before 1900, alongside a display of marble and bronze busts depicting the local philanthropists, industrialists and politicians who shaped the cultural life of late Victorian Leeds. We look forward to installing these works from the collections in the coming weeks and sharing them with our visitors in October.

Dr Rebecca Wade, Assistant Curator (Sculpture) and MGHG Website Officer

Why study museum history?

This question, which seems an excellent way to begin the MGHG blog, was also the essential question posed at a roundtable discussion at the Leicester University School of Museum Studies 50th anniversary conference, Museums in the Global Contemporary: Debating the Museum of Now (20-22 April 2016), organised by the MGHG. For me, although this conference was over a year ago, it raises issues which are still valid and reveals some potential problems and opportunities for the group as it seeks to ‘promote the study of the history and theory of museums’. A key problem, or potential problem, was the very title of the conference which prompted the roundtable: the museum of NOW. Do museums, and museum studies as a discipline, have any interest in the past of museums, and should they? Museums in general do not devote a great deal of attention to investigating their own past despite the fact that they use it on an almost daily basis, working with accession numbers and indeed entire collections which were assembled sometimes considerable time ago, and often inhabiting buildings designed for earlier understandings of display. Of course, in most cases such a lack of interest in the past is a result of practical constraints, above all on curatorial time and energy; but is it also produced by a growing rhetoric (emanating from funding and governmental bodies, not museums themselves, I think) tending to equate change with progress and to reject a good deal of museums’ pasts as elitist? Graham Black has accused museums today of a certain ‘amnesia’ about what they were actually like in the past in order to throw into relief their current democratic, inclusive and useful credentials, but it can seem like an article of faith that museums are throwing off the outmoded practices of the past in order to be relevant to contemporary society.

For the roundtable, a number of academics and practitioners, and practitioner-academics, gave their thoughts on the value of studying museums’ history. I introduced the discussion with my own thoughts on the issue; as a historian not a museologist or curator, I see self-evident value in museum history as part of the cultural history of the period. But I don’t think the value stops there or that museum history doesn’t have value for museums now. Conal McCarthy, of Victoria University Wellington (NZ) spoke next, and highlighted what he felt was a problematic lack of knowledge among museum practitioners about museum history – he argued that they had no sense of their institutions as having a past which shaped their present, and that more emphasis on museum history in training programmes would allow professionals to understand how practices have evolved and are contingent. Bronwyn Labrum, of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, was also concerned with what she described as the ‘amnesia’ of current museums, leading to a lack of awareness of the possibility of doing things differently. Provocatively, she suggested that museums today were more interested in bling buildings than in history of any sort.
Chris Whitehead, of Newcastle University, suggested rather that museums and galleries were worried that they might seem to be navel gazing if they investigated their own history; there was a perceived need to be forward-looking. Yet, he suggested, if we see museums as places (and, I would add, as communities), then they needed to be understood as coming into being historically. Alan Crookham, of the National Gallery, tackled an issue maybe more true for art galleries, that institutional history needed to be investigated to prevent the creation of hagiographies around important donors, founders and directors. He argued that reflection on institutional history could prevent a somewhat regressive attitude whereby the past acted as a ‘dead hand’. For him it was not just about paying attention to museum history, but about paying critical attention to it. Simon Knell, of Leicester University, was similarly interested not just in investigating museum history, but in investigating it for specific purposes – using it to counter reductionism and to enable or de-essentialise groups who had been excluded.

Overall, then, there was a sense that if as a museum you know your own history, then you ‘know thyself’ in important ways. Such historical understanding, though, needs to be approached in the right way, and not just used to shore up existing attitudes. One comment on the session suggested that the point of museum history had not been nailed down – ‘it depends’. I’m pretty happy with this as the answer – I don’t think that history should have a preordained job to do with regard to museums and galleries; that way lies poor history and a failure to leave room for what we could know if we looked further. Although the same response suggested that it wasn’t enough to do museum history for the sake of it, I disagree – I’m happy to see some instrumental work which is focused on particular contemporary problems, but I think where there is the time and resource for ‘blue sky’ museum history research, it can reveal the full richness of a past which could help current institutions in ways we can’t yet imagine. But does the ‘luxury’ of such research mean only academics and large institutions can undertake it, and what does this mean for small institutions and their lively history of making do and managing with little?

I presume as MGHG members you’re all already convinced of the value of museum history – but why? Where does it lie? Who or what are we doing it for? And is there a dichotomy between present-focused and antiquarian historical research in this area?

Dr Kate Hill, Chair of the Museums and Galleries History Group

Gendering Museum Histories: A Recap of the 2016 MGHG Conference by Dr Stephanie Bowry

Daniel Mytens’ pendant portraits of Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, 4th Earl of Surrey and 1st Earl of Norfolk, and Alathea, Countess of Arundel and Surrey (both c. 1618), frame the sitters in their (idealised) sculpture and portrait galleries at Arundel House in the Strand. Both Thomas and Alathea were prominent collectors and patrons of the arts, but Thomas has received the most scholarly attention to date. By kind permission of The National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 5292 and NPG 5293)

Our recent conference, Gendering Museum Histories, held on 7-8 September 2016, addressed the relationship between museums, galleries and gender from the eighteenth century to the present, and was superbly hosted by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. This event attracted almost fifty delegates from around the world, and from a variety of backgrounds, including museum professionals, academics, early career scholars and students. Our sessions and roundtables were accompanied by eight poster presentations, a networking lunch for postgraduate students hosted by our new Postgraduate Officer, Phil Deans, and our Annual General Meeting attended by our members and President, Helen Rees Leahy. What follows is a brief recap of the event, and what stood out for me as both an organiser and a delegate. 

Planning for the 2016 conference began in early December 2014, and the issue of gender arose as a subject which spoke immediately to the research interests of our Chair, Kate Hill, and Secretary, Sarah Longair, but which also had many subtle resonances across the wide variety of fields and disciplines pursued by our board members. Our conference would follow such notable events as the Space Invaders: Women Museum Leaders conference at the Imperial War Museum in March 2016 and the Inclusive Museum conference at the National Science Centre, Delhi, India, in August 2016, but would differ significantly from them by analysing the construction of gendered identities in museums and galleries from an historical perspective. We invited proposals which addressed the full spectrum of gender representation, and our speakers addressed issues of gender roles, identities and sexuality and their changing relationships to acts of representation, interpretation, (curatorial) knowledge construction, authorship, collecting, connoisseurship and performance.

I was sorry to miss part of our first panel on women at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945, in which Alison Petch, Frances Larson and Jaanika Vider, chaired by Elizabeth Hallam, examined the gendered history of this richly-documented collection at a granular level, as well as the careers of a number of women who served as field collectors for the institution, including Beatrice Blackwood (1889-1975), Winifred Blackman (1872-1950) and Maria Czaplicka (1884-1921). I was, however, delighted to welcome our speakers and delegates at the reception desk on Day One, and was amply supplied with coffee by the generous Ashmolean staff. I completed my MA internship at the Ashmolean during its 2009 redevelopment, so it was wonderful to be back and see the displays without dust covers and Tyvek, and the objects I had helped install still in situ. 

Particular highlights of the conference for me included Ana Baeza Ruiz’s study of a young female stenographer who worked at the National Gallery between 1949-50 and who was dismissed on the grounds of her so-called emotional ‘invert’ – or, lesbian – nature. Ana’s presentation skilfully illuminated the constructed nature of the archive, an historical artefact in its own right, and how we risk uncritically reproducing the (gendered) logics of the archive in our own work. Similarly, Liz Mitchell’s presentation on Mary Greg’s (1850-1949) collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘bygones’ – objects chosen by Mary to represent traditional crafts, as well as toys, clothing and domestic life – uncovered changing perceptions of value and worth within Manchester City Galleries, as well as the fact that many of the museum’s records pertaining to Mary (in contrast to those relating to her husband Thomas and his pottery collection) had later been ‘weeded’ (disposed of). The choice of wording suggests both an anomaly and an irritant within the institution, something it could not understand and consequently refused – initially – to engage with. While museums have limited resources, this is a powerful reminder that our conditions of worth are subject to a presentism which has the capacity to silence voices in the future as well as in the past. 

This emerging theme of institutional memory and self-censorship was complemented by Martina D’Amato’s fascinating study of forgotten female collectors of Renaissance art during the Belle Epoque. By focussing on the careers of women such as Marie-Louise-Jeanne Peyrat, Marquise Arconati-Visconti (1840-1923), a philanthropist and collector of Renaissance art and furniture who engaged in acts of overt cultural performance and identity construction, photographing herself in male Renaissance attire against carefully staged backdrops and in a variety of poetic poses, Martina was able to reconstruct the important role these women played in what is now seen as a primarily male-dominated arena. 

As an early modernist, I was strongly reminded of Alathea Howard (née Talbot), Countess of Arundel (c.1590 -1654), a collector, traveller and patron of the arts to whose activities less attention has been paid than those of her husband, Thomas Howard (1585-1646). It also calls to mind Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Marchesa of Mantua – referenced by Martina as a model for the Marquise – a seminal female collector and patron who was described, astonishingly, by a V&A text panel in 2011 as ‘intellectual and snobbish’; something I have never been able to forget. Moreover, I spent the night in Oxford University’s Wadham College, founded in 1610 by a woman, Dorothy Wadham (1534/5 –1618), albeit in accordance with the wishes of her husband, yet women were not admitted to the college as full members at all levels for another 364 years (Wadham College 2016). Although Wadham was one of the first colleges to admit women, there is something rather poignant about the length of time it took for attitudes and conditions of worth to change, particularly in a building emblazoned and adorned with Dorothy’s image in paint, stone and stained glass. 

One of our delegates, Hadwig Kraeutler, who also contributed an intriguing poster, In A Rough Voice. Alma S. Wittlin (1899-1992). A Case Study, noted the larger presence of women than men at the conference, and introduced us to the German concept of Leidensdruck – which loosely translates as the burden, or pressure, of suffering, which implies that it is only when this pressure becomes severe that we give it consideration and engage with it. Could this, she asked, be why more women than men attended the event, bearing in mind the same was true of Space Invaders?

Mark Carnall also raised the thorny question of male-female ratios in the museum workforce, and in museum studies programmes. However, as the recent Incluseum blog post notes, we need to distinguish between equality and equity. The mere profusion of one gender in a single field of practice does not amount to equity. Moreover, ‘the field needs to stop using “gender” as a synonym for “women” and “gender equality” as a synonym for “equality between men and women.”’ As Sonya O. Rose observes in her 2010 book What is Gender History?, ‘Often […] gender has been interpreted as meaning “women”, as if “men” were not gendered beings’. The social construction of gender throughout history has been one of the core means by which power relations have been represented, and justified (Scott 1999; Cott and Faust 2005). As such, gender can be understood as a fluid process as well as a state or category of being, which is performed in a cultural setting (Wharton 2012: 9).

Museums and galleries play a critical role in negotiating power relations and the construction of identities. Fiona McGovern’s examination of the display of art by lesbian, gay and transsexual artists from the 1970s to the present highlighted the challenges of curating art shows which aim to engage with and showcase the work of minority groups. For many artists, this has meant a public coming out, and the risk of being placed into a curatorial black box, rather than allowing their work to speak for itself. Furthermore, McGovern asks whether such shows are truly representative of minority groups within these minority populations, which has implications for the practice of gender mainstreaming – the assessment of the implications of a policy action or programme upon different gender groups. 

Our keynote speaker, Merete Ispen, Director of the Women’s Museum in Denmark, delivered a truly powerful presentation on the challenges of presenting exhibitions on challenging and traumatic subjects such as rape, but also dispelled the myth that boys and men are not welcome or represented in the Museum. Rather, as Ipsen argues, their presence is essential, for how can we talk about girls without boys, or women without men? I would argue that one of the reasons for this museum’s continued success is its ability to define the nuances of gender in broad terms which supports both its core mission and inclusive ethos. 

At the 31st General Assembly of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in Milan in 2016, a second resolution was adopted pertaining to ‘Inclusion, Intersectionality and Gender Mainstreaming in Museums’. In the light of recent developments in the museum sector, in particular a number of calls to arms to tackle gender equality (Khan 2016), as well as political events around the world, our understanding of the social construction of gender and how museums have engaged with this issue in past eras and in the present would seem to be more relevant than ever, with Guardian journalist Paul Mason citing the outcome of the US presidential election as a triumph for sexism as well as racism. It is clear there is more work to be done, and it’s not just about battling discrimination against women. It’s about how we represent ourselves to ourselves, who we choose to give a voice to, what we choose to censor and recognising how the mechanisms by which we achieve all this – consciously or unconsciously – always privilege one set of values over another. In this struggle we must become more aware of our history than ever, so let’s keep this important conversation (and its historical mythbusting) going!

With many thanks to Kate Hill, Sarah Longair and the entire MGHG conference team, all our wonderful speakers and delegates, and the staff of the Ashmolean Museum for making this event such a success.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 

Because I was not a Trade Unionist. 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 

Because I was not a Jew. 

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

References

Cott, Nancy F, and Faust, Drew Gilpin, ‘Recent Directions in Gender and Women’s History’, in OAH Magazine of History 19.2, (2005), 4-5

ICOM, ‘Resolutions adopted by ICOM’s General Assemblies, 1946 - to date’, Milan 2016, http://icom.museum/the-governance/general-assembly/resolutions-adopted-by-icoms-general-assemblies-1946-to-date/milan-2016/ [accessed 10 November 2016]

Khan, Yasmin, ‘Museums must dust off old ways and address gender equality in leadership’, The Guardian, 1 April 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2016/apr/01/museums-gender-equality-leadership [accessed 11 November 2016]

Mason, Paul, ‘Globalisation is dead, and white supremacy has triumphed’, The Guardian, 9 November 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/globalisation-dead-white-supremacy-trump-neoliberal [accessed 10 November 2016]

Rose, Sonya O., What is Gender History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)

Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, ‘Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Socialists...”’, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392 [accessed 11 November 2016]

University of Oxford, Wadham College, History, https://www.wadham.ox.ac.uk/about-wadham/history-and-archives [accessed 9 November 2016]

Wharton, Amy S., The Sociology of Gender: An Introduction to Theory and Research, 2nd edn (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Wittman, Aletheia, Middleton, Margaret, Trivedi, Nikhil and Bailey-Sun, Erin, The Incluseum, ‘Gender Equity and Museums’, https://incluseum.com/2016/02/08/gender-equity-and-museums/ [accessed 9 November 2016]

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Photographs courtesy of Hadwig Kraeutler 

Antique Dealer Project Conference

The British Antiques Trade in the 20th Century - A Cultural Geography

Temple Newsam House, Leeds

14 and 15 April 2015

This two-day conference is an opportunity to hear about the AHRC funded 32 month research project focused on the history of the British Antique Trade in the 20th century, and a celebration and thank you to the many participants in the project.

Full programme click here

Flyer here                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Book online here

Enquiries: antiquedealers@leeds.ac.uk or 0113 343 8919

Anatomical Modelling Symposium, Royal College of Surgeons, 30 January 2016

Covering the full scope of anatomical modelling across multiple materials and species, this study day offers the opportunity to learn more about the design, creation and use of anatomical models. Delegates will also have the opportunity to engage with makers and modellers to discover the creative process involved in the modern creation of anatomical models. Featuring speakers from across the heritage sector and a keynote by Dr Elizabeth Hallam; editor of the new RCS volume Designing Bodies: Models of Human Anatomy from Wax to Plastics (http://shop.rcseng.ac.uk/1250-1668/Books/Designing-Bodies.aspx).

Speakers: Dr Elizabeth Hallam (Aberdeen/Oxford), Miranda Lowe (Natural History Museum), Dr Anna Maerker (Kings College London), Annette Townsend (National Museums Wales), Eleanor Crook (Sculptor), Clare Rangeley (Modeller). Chair: Dr Sam Alberti (RCS).

See full details including programme and abstracts: http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian/events/special-events.

Tickets £38/£26 (concessions: students, RCS fellows, members & affiliates.) Includes all refreshments and delegates lunch. Booking is essential on 020 7869 6568.

Royal College of Surgeons of England, London WC2A 3PE

MGHG AGM 2015

On 27 October the Museums and Galleries History Group held its Annual General Meeting at the Art Fund's Museum of the Year 2015, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. Head of Collections David Morris gave us a fascinating talk on the Clough Collection of Prints and the innovative ways in which they were displayed at the then Whitworth Institute. David then kindly led us on a tour around the building, taking in both the refurbished historic spaces and the impressive new galleries and educational facilities. 

Look out for forthcoming announcements about the MGHG 2016 Conference and exciting new content for members on the website.