Simon J. Knell - National galleries : the art of making nations

NATIONAL GALLERIES

National Galleries is the first book to undertake a panoramic view of a type of national institution sometimes called national museums of fine art that is now found in almost every nation on earth. Adopting a richly illustrated, globally inclusive, comparative view, Simon Knell argues that national galleries should not be understood as great galleries but as peculiar sites where art is made to perform in acts of nation building. Privileging the situatedness of each national gallery performance, and valuing localism over universalism, Knell looks in particular at how national art is constructed and represented. He ends with examples that show the mutability of national art and by questioning the necessity of art nationalism.

The book fundamentally rewrites the history of these institutions and encourages the reader to dispense with elitist views of their worth, revealing in the process an unseen geography and a rich complexity of performance. It considers the ways national galleries entangle art and nation, and the differing trajectories and purposes of international and national art. Exploring galleries, artists and artworks from around the world, National Galleries is an argument about how we think about and study these institutions.

Simon Knell is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicesters School of Museum Studies, UK.

NATIONAL GALLERIES

The art of making nations

Simon Knell

First published 2016

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2016 Simon Knell

The right of Simon Knell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Knell, Simon J., author.

National galleries : the art of making nations / Simon Knell.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. National museumsPhilosophy. 2. Art museumsPhilosophy.

3. National museumsSocial aspects. 4. Art museumsSocial aspects.

5. Nationalism and art. I. Title.

N430.K59 2016

707.5--dc23

2015026492

ISBN: 978-0-415-72514-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-18223-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-69220-3 (ebk)

This book is the first to undertake a global comparative analysis of the extraordinary phenomenon of the national galleries. It may be the first to do so for any genre of museum. For such a project to be possible, and to give it purpose, it was necessary to give it still further focus and so I chose to look at national galleries as nation-making institutions. I adopted the same interdisciplinary approach I have used to study other quite different disciplinary, professional and museum contexts. This involves standing back from the institution so as to experience its strangeness. In other words, to remove myself from those taken-for-granted and normalised practices and perceptions that define, shape and blinker institutional forms, processes and actions. It is an approach that can make even the most mundane of things seem extraordinary. I came to it as a geographer, historian and museologist, but it is similar to that used by European ethnologists.

The majority of those studying the museum do not adopt the vantage point I have just described but rather place themselves in a close relationship with professionals and together they develop research that leads to improvements in museum effectiveness. A great deal of work, for example, has been done in recent years on inclusiveness and the role of museums as instruments of social justice. My own approach is rather different. I am not interested in improvement but rather in gaining a new understanding of the constructive acts of in this case national galleries. As I say, I have undertaken these kinds of study on numerous subjects, all of which relate to my formative years. My interest in art and especially national forms of art goes back some forty years but it was only in 2010 as I embarked on a study of Europes national art museums as part of the European Commission-funded EuNaMus project that I saw potential for a comparative study of national picture galleries. Over the intervening years I broadened my study from Europe to the world.

Much of this book was written or mapped in the galleries themselves during an extraordinary period of travel, aided by fortuitous invitations to collaborate with museum and gallery workers and scholars in many parts of the world. This took me to most of the national galleries in Europe, North America, parts of Asia and Australasia. The result is a book that might at first sight seem to capture a series of ephemeral moments in the life of these galleries, because so much about them is so easily changed. That, however, was not really my concern. I did not set out to write a series of mini institutional biographies but rather to express the diversity of national gallery performances; to gain a panoramic insight. My aim was to write a book of observations and ideas, particularly with the student in mind, my hope being that just as the last generation of researchers investigated art museums in Paris, Rome and Vienna so the next might be stimulated to write on those in Harare, La Paz, Manila and countless other places.

Although I cannot deny that to visit so many national galleries was a delight, I did not do so casually. I locked myself in these institutions for days on end, rigorously and comprehensively documenting them photographically and considering their performances. What appears here is only a partial distillation of what I observed and discovered. It was my intention at the outset to look at the displays of painting, concentrating particularly on the permanent collections. My research approach was composed of seven methodological elements: comparison, inclusivity, situatedness, relativism, empowerment, construction and cultures. I adopted a comparative approach that permitted each institutional performance to act as a lens, one on the other. This exposed similarities and differences that raised questions of causality but also of local values, distinctiveness, and acts of negotiation and identification. Comparison offered an overarching methodological approach that opened up the possibilities of observing relativism, power relations and so on.

To be effective, this approach required complete inclusivity. This meant regarding all national galleries as being equal and so I made no distinction on account of their size, age or wealth. As soon as one begins to distinguish between these institutions on the basis of their possession of international masterpieces, for example, as most workers have, so the possibility of really understanding them disappears. This non-discriminatory outlook is easily justified by privileging the