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NORDISK MUSEOLOGI 1993•2, S. 51-60

THE GREAT EUROPEAN

Kenneth Hudson

Recently, I had to spend a few days in the beautiful French town ofDinard, which is a very fine museum in itself I hope you noticed that I said 'museum: not 'museum piece: which would have indicated that Dinard is frozen in the , with no useful part to play in todays world. Dinard is not like that at all. It is a prosperous, attractive, well-maintained town, which has shown great skill in adapting itselfto changing social habits and in making full use ofits splendid location, on the Atlantic coast, facing St Malo across the estuary ofthe Rance. King Edward VII loved it and the modern boat-people love it, and in both cases one can understand why.

Why do I call it 'a fine museum'? Partly formal in the Twenties or Thirties? Most because it preserves its past so admirably, of the people who were there with me in partly because it is such a tempting and August 1993 were distinctly on the elderly satisfactory place for sorting out and iden­ side. Would it have been the same in tifying the different layers in its man­ August 1933 or August 1903? Has the made past, and for understanding the national mix stayed the same, with a lot of contributions which each decade has English, German and Dutch and rather made to the appearance and functioning fewer French? How do the food and drink of its streets and buildings and gardens. today compare with what was available in Understanding is not a passive process. It one's father's or grandfather's time? Today implies curiosity, personal effort, know­ all the rooms have bathrooms. How many ledge and a willingness to break away bathrooms were there in the hotel in from conventional thinking. Suppose, for Edwardian days? One on each floor, per­ instance, that one is staying in a hotel of haps. When was electricity first installed? the modest 50-bed, two-star type, such as How superior would the accommodation Printania, which had the privilege of and have been at the four-star accommodating me. A great range of George V Hotel along the road? interlocking questions came to my mind Every type of building and every street throughout my stay there. How much of stimulates its own complex of questions, the hotel furniture that surrounded me but one has first to assume that, to the was there 50 or 100 years ago? How, if at enthusiast, all questions are equally inter­ all, had the atmosphere changed? Would esting and equally relevant. It is pure everything have been a good deal more snobbery to think that Dinard's ornate KENNETH HUDSON

52 casmo is interesting and the little houses but its effects are none the less real, round the corner are not. The Casino, powerful and widespread. How can with its successive generations of rich and improve the situation? To a cer­ foolish people with a passion for gambling tain extent museums are in the same posi­ who have formed the clientele of the tion as television or newspapers. If some­ Casino for nearly a century, is no better thing, a fact or an opinion, has appeared evidence of life and work of the town than on television or in a newspaper, it is offici­ the houses and apartments where the ally interesting and therefore respectable. Casino staff have lived generation by It has been pulled from the darkness into generation. The Great Dinard Museum the light. Similarly, if a museum organises necessarily includes them both. an , the subject of the exhibi­ tion has been graded up and made worthy INTERESTING AND of attention, achieved a breakthrough. OFFICIALLY INTERESTING There are, of course, complicating factors. No modern society is homogeneous and But, in order to understand what one is look­ one is likely to enlarge the range of one's ing at, two things are essential. The first is an sympathies and interests only if one's par­ adequate supply of information, of clues, and ticular peer-group is not hostile to the the second and much more difficult to achie­ process. Few people possess either the ve is an unfettered mind. Let me explain courage or the stamina to depart widely what I mean by 'an unfettered mind'. from the code of what one feels to be one's "Man is born free, but everywhere he is peer-group, which is the main reason why in chains", wrote Rousseau, and it is as the habit of museum-going is so limited. true now as it was in 1762. One is temp­ It takes a very powerful incentive to persu­ ted to paraphrase Rousseau by saying that ade people to cross the peer-group line. In small children are interested in everything, general, the majority of Europeans are not but adults in only a very small range of museum-goers at the present time, and I subjects. Children's natural wide-ranging doubt if any considerable change is likely curiosity is gradually stifled by to take place in the future, at any rate to such an extent that those who receive among adults. Children are another mat­ the longest and most thoroughgoing edu­ ter. School groups who attend muse-urns do cation often finish up by being interested so as conscripts. They may enjoy the in the fewest things. museum more than school, but that is a dif­ This is particularly caused by extreme ferent story. The choice as to whether they specialisation, but even more by a set of go to the museum or not is not theirs. It is social conventions which progressively made for them and I should be surprised if condition people to believe that one conscript-visiting among children has any should concern oneself only with those more effect on later adult behaviour than things that are, so to speak, officially compulsory churchgoing does. interesting and leave the rest to eccentrics A common feature of both churchgoing and misfits. An education which encoura­ and museum-visiting is that it almost ges this is, of course, a bogus education, invariably involves crossing a threshold, TH E GREAT EUR O PEAN MUS E UM

entering a building, leaving the outside urban. For many centuries man has been 53 world behind. With the Great Dinard actively engaged in putting his thumb­ Museum, the Great Moscow Museum, or print on the rural areas as well and it is the Great Swiss Museum, however, the evident that the man in the street is just as circumstances are quite different. One poorly equipped to make sense of the his­ enters the Great Museum, whatever its tory of the countryside as of that of the boundaries may be, simply by being born. towns. A little ruthless testing during One is surrounded by its collections and drives or train journeys through, say, displays all the time and one escapes from , or is likely to them only by moving somewhere else or reveal that sadly few of one's fellow travel­ by staying inside one's own house all the lers have much, if any, idea of what crops time. Membership of some part of the are growing in the fields or what jobs the Great Museum is virtually compulsory and tractor-drivers are doing. Few of them, free, but this does not mean that everyone also, can name common trees or distingu­ who moves around in the Great Museum is ish between one breed of cow or another. in a position to take an intelligent, infor­ They are visually illiterate. What they are med interest in what it has to offer. Most of looking at means almost nothing to them. its customers are vaguely aware of what they And if they cannot understand the are looking at, to fit the bits and pieces into countryside today, what point is there in meaningful patterns. trying to explain to them the changes to Several museums in - which each field and village have been museums which set out to tell the story of subjected during the past 100 years or a city in all its aspects - have a programme more, in what ways the cropping patterns of guided city walks around selected areas and cultivation methods are different, why of the city. These aim at bringing the city fewer people are required to work the land alive by means of on-the-spot interpre­ now than in previous generations, the tation. The museums of Barcelona and ways in which man's need to earn a living do this particularly well, either has transformed the landscape generation by following a theme or by concentrating after generation. on one particular area at a time. During these tours, what might be called the nor­ WHAT MAKES EUROPE SPECIAL? mal or stereotype museum is doing its best to make a piece of the Great Museum It is interesting to try to identify the fac­ interesting and to give those members of tors which have combined to give Europe the public who take part sharper and more its special charcter, distinguishing it from widely-ranging eyes than they had before. all other continents. This amounts to Often, perhaps usually, curative treatment asking why the Great European Museum is necessary for a lifetime of bad habits, is different from, say, the Great American chief among which is the belief that one Museum or the Great Chinese Museum. should give one's attention only to famous One can and should break these big regi­ and therefore untypical buildings. ons down further. The Great European The Great Museums are not necessarily Museum is made up of the Great Dutch KENNETH HUDSON

54 Museum, The Great Spanish Museum, very great. It has, unfortunately, been The Great Bulgarian Museum and so on, associated with widespread persecution of just as the Great Iowa Museum and the the Jews, on a scale not found elsewhere Great Texas Museum are among the ingre­ in the world. Europe has also been mar­ dients in the Great American Museum ked by great suffering caused by , pudding. The English person who is not nationalism and power-drunk conquerors aware of what makes England peculiar is who had dreams of becoming masters of not well placed to understand the Europe. And, as a result of its energy and European mix of qualities. its technical superiority, Europe gradually One can argue for ever about the essen­ acquired vast overseas possessions. From tial features of Europe, those which give Roman times onwards, Europe created the continent a flavour of its own. Here colonial empires to an extent not matched are some of the ones which seem to me to by any other continent. be the most important. They can be It was in Europe, too, that the first added to and refined without too much museums were born. Museums are very difficulty. First, Europe is, on the whole, a much a European , established at green continent, blessed with a substantial first to allow royalty and aristocrats to rainfall. Its surface area contains little in show off the collections which their power the way of deserts and droughts lasting for and wealth had allowed them to assemble several years are rare. Second, and arising and then as part of the process of public partly from its absence of extreme heat, education. All the aspects Europeanness Europe is an energetic continent, one where which I have mentioned are illustrated by work can usually be carried on without museums. We have museums which show undue exhaustion all day and throughout the achievement of and of the year. Without energy, technical and , Jewish museums, technical scientific inventiveness are unlikely to and industrial museums, natural occur, and Europe has been a world-sour­ museums, agricultural museums, military ce of technical innovation for a long time. and naval museums, empire museums, It has produced, among other new ideas, Napoleonic museums and transport the steam-engine, railways, the power­ museums. A high proportion of Europe's loom and the technique of smelting iron and grand country houses have with coke, developments which com­ been turned into museums and the bined to make the industrial revolution collections of kings, dukes and princes possible. For better or worse, Europe was have become public property, accessible to the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. the general public. Other important and unifying items in What has taken place in every European the European mix have been Romani­ country over the past two hundred years sation and the language, Christian has been essentially a process of putting thinking and practice, and an interlocking Europe's history into the safety of what framework of royal and aristocratic famili­ are in effect cultural banks or fortresses, es. The Jewish contribution to European where precious relics can be both presen­ and economic growth has been ted and conserved, in an attempt to pre- THE GR E AT EUROPEAN MU SEUM

vent or at least delay the destructive influ­ From a museum point of view, I see eve­ 55 ence of time. The comparison with a bank ry town, village, landscape, country and or fortress is strengthened by the presence even continent as a Great Museum in in the museum of alarm systems, warders which everyone can discover their own (museum policemen) and foe protection roots and see how they fit into the chain devices. One could also use the word of human activities which stretches back 'island'. Museums are carefully defended over the centuries. Scattered over the islands in a turbulent sea infested with Great Museum are the institutions which sharks and pirates. we have chosen to call museums, deman­ The first serious attempt to break down ding that their cultural importance shall the fortress mentality was made by the early be recognised and insisting that they shall , particularly Le Creusot, which be given an ever-increasing supply of pioneered in the 1960s the concept of a dis­ public money in order to do what they trict as a museum. The was not conceive to be their job, that job being, to required to own its territory, but to hold use the professional phrase, 'acquisition, 11 cultural power over it. "At Le Creusot , said conservation and display'. This, one could Marcel Evrard, its first director, 11 every tree, fairly say, has been the motto of the miser every cow, every building is an exhibit in throughout the ages and it is, in my view, the museum. I myself is an exhibit in my a totally inadequate and discredited reci­ own museum. 11 The museum which really pe, both for success and for public esteem. mattered at Le Creusot was therefore not The real reason for a museum's existence the interpretation centre in the 18th centu­ is to make life more interesting and more ry chateau but the area of countryside rewarding for its customers. One could around it and everything it contained. This say exactly the same about a school or a might be termed the Great Le Creusot church, neither of which exists for its own Museum, with its houses, farms, factories, sake. workshops and people with family and memories. The primary objective of Mr THE MUSEUM AS AN Evrard and his colleages was to make the ATTITUDE-CHANGER past and present of this area meaningful and interesting to the people who lived and A museum, like a school or a church, justi­ worked in it, to help them to discover the fies its existence much more for its success clues that would make better sense of it all. in changing people's attitudes than by And that, I am suggesting, is what most adding to their stock of information. One museums should be doing. What is impor­ or two examples will illustrate what I mean. tant is not what is in the museum, but the In , Niki Goulandris was appalled power of its collections and displays to by the fact that her fellow-countrymen increase and enrich people's understanding appeared to take practically no interest in of the world outside and around them, of wild creatures or in the natural environ­ the Grest Museum. The museum which ment as a whole. As in most other parts of regards itself as a self-contained entity has the , the Greek attitude to­ failed. wards is at best indifferent and at KENNETH HUDSON

56 worst abominable. There are, for example, eum/ which would illustrate the story no guide dogs for the blind in Greece, of life on earth, and equip its visitors to because people refuse to allow them on to take an intelligent interest in wild creatu­ buses and trains. 20 years ago there was res and to understand how man and ani­ no museum in the whole ma ls ca.n inhabit the world more satisfac­ of Greece, so Mrs Goulandris and her torily together. The Noorder Dieren-park husband decided to establish one, using is where they come - nearly two million of their own money, at Kifissia, on the out­ them each year - in order to develop a skirts of Athens. It was large and designed modern, constructive and, on to international standards and, once it was subsequent visits, to recharge their batteries. open, Greece had, for the first time, a Aleid Rensen-Oosting has broken down the National Museum of Natural History. barriers between academic subjects and con­ Later, she set up a branch museum on structed which approach from Corfu and a forestry reserve in the north many different angles the problems and of the country. Her aim was to interest opportunities involved in building bridges children in natural history, and after a between man and the natural world. slow start, she has succeeded remarkably Niki Goulandris and Aleid Rensen­ well. A generation of schoolchildren has Oosting have very similar motives and now grown up understanding why and . They see themselves as mis­ how Greece should protect its natural sionaries who want to send people away environment and take pleasure in obser­ from their museums better than they ving and caring for wild creatures. Greek found them, believing that the Great children are now keeping pets, a revolu­ Greek Museum and the Great Dutch tion in itself. The main point of creating Museum will be better places to live in as the museum was to change children's atti­ a result of their efforts. In a completely tudes and this is gradually being accom­ different field, the Building of Bath plished, and a new dimension is being Museum is trying to do something equally added to the Great Greek Museum. The important. Bath likes to think of itself as primary target was children. Greek adults the finest of all Europe's 18th-century were felt to be settled in their ways, too and there is quite a lot to be said in deeply conditioned - corrupted according support of this claim. But the internatio­ to modern standards - by the habits and nal reputation and tourist success of the beliefs of their ancestors. city owes much to snobbery and to an Niki Goulandris has always regarded her exaggerated respect for as museum as a working tool, not as an insti­ such, especially Georgian architecture. tutional end in itself and this, too, has The Building of Bath Museum represents been the view of another of Europe's great an attempt to put the city's personalities, Aleid Rensen­ and architects in their place. It emphasises Oosting, the creator and director of the that the carpenters, joiners, masons, tilers Noorder Dierenpark at Emmen, in the and plasterers were the real builders of north of Holland. Her aim for more than Bath and that without their skills the 20 years has been to establish a mus- architects, who have received all the ere- TH E GR EA T EUR O P E AN MU SEUM

dit, would not have been able to make lently conceived exhibition about the local 57 their reputations. The there­ Jewish community. It is not built around fore shows its visitors the tools, techniques generalisations about the persecution of and materials used by craftsmen who, in Jews by the Nazis, but on the story of the real sense, built Bath. After this intro­ what actually happened to individual Jews duction and re-emphasis, it organises gui­ and Jewish families in Goppingen, show­ ded tours around the city in order to ing at the same time the place where each demonstrate the practical aspects of Bath's Jewish family had established themselves 18th and early 19th-century buildings and within the community. This is a museum to show how the architects and the buil­ about real Jews. ding tradesmen depended on one another. Briefed in this way, one can take a walk The tours, like the Museum itself, aim at around the town, looking at the houses arousing curiosity and at providing people where the Jews used to live and thinking with a wider, deeper and more ciritical about the people, who, in one way or understanding of the buildings which they another, gained possession of the property have often crossed the Atlantic to see. of the people who met their end in the There are many different ways of regar­ concentration camps, about the present ding towns, history and the countryside inhabitants of this part of Goppingen and and one would certainly not want or about the days when the local Jews were expect everyone to be interested in the regarded and treated as normal citizens. same things. What is important is, first, to One can also walk around the beautifully­ recreate childhood curiosity and, second, maintained Jewish cemetery, looking at to satisfy it. An excellent of dates and the names of families, noting this process is to be found in and around which people were obviously grand and the small town of Goppingen, near which more humble and observing when Stuttgart. Until the Nazis got to work, the traditional Jewish custom of never Goppingen had a substantial Jewish com­ burying males and females in the same munity, mostly living in an area on the grave began to be abandoned. southern outskirts of the town. There are It would be difficult to find a better no Jews left in Goppingen, but their hou­ example of how within-a-building ses, shops and workshops are still there, museum can help to develop a better together with a former Jewish inn and a understanding of the Great Museum. Left well-preserved Jewish cemetery. Recently a to their own devices, how many visitors to Jewish museum has been set up, in a Goppingen or, for that matter, how many superannuated Protestant church. The people who live there would realise the slight shock of finding a Jewish museum historical significance of this street in the in a 16th-century Christian church is very town or know why the inn was called the useful, because the curiosity and interest King David? How many of them could see of visitors to the museum are aroused them just as ordinary houses after learning from the time they open the door. about the fate of their inhabitants during Inside the church, on both the ground a visit in the museum? floor and in the gallery, there is an excel- Information is most valuable, of course, KENNETH HUDSON

58 when it is available at the place to which it building-by-building model of the princi­ relates. The best situation, I suppose, pal shopping street in Aarhus. The history would be one in which each street had its of every building had been carefully rese­ history panel. I once stayed at a hotel in arched in order to show, during the 19th the Pyrenees, run by an elderly English­ and 20th centuries, who had owned and woman, in which each room contained a run each shop. From this information, it list, fixed to the wall by the light switch, was then possible to discover how many of of the international celebrities who had these shops and what kind of shops had slept in the bed which I myself was later ever been run by women. The next stage to occupy. The Queen of the Belgians, I was to construct a mock-up of a number remember, was one of them. To lie there of the interiors of these shops, using wher­ in the knowledge that she had looked at the ever possible original material from the same ceiling that I was looking at was a curi­ shop. The effect was extraordinary. Visitors ous experience. But in order to make such a to the museum were unable to look at the powerful impression on the hotel guests, the street in the same way again. They had, in list of one's predecessors had to be actually effect, been given new eyes and a new attitu­ there in the room. Old visitors' , kept de to history. This, of course, is what the downstairs at the reception desk, would not museum feels its mission to be, to encourage have been at all the same thing. and help people to see Danish history from a We are talking about ghosts and the woman's point of view, to interpret the envi­ evocation of ghosts is an extremely impor­ ronment in a different way. tant element in the understanding of his­ tory. The art of interpreting the Great THE MUSEUM AS A MARRIAGE Museum consists to a large extent of hel­ OF HEAD AND HEART ping one's contemporaries to call up ghosts from the past. The ghosts are Providing new eyes with which to see and necessary in order to bring history alive. understand familiar things is, one would In Goppingen, the true function of the have thought, the prime duty of every Jewish Museum is to give today's people museum, as of every educational instituti­ the wish and the power to feel the presen­ on, but it is, alas, a duty that by no means ce of yesterday's persecuted and murdered all museums appear to accept and welco­ Jews when they walked through the old me. There are, I believe, two things which Jewish quarter of the town. In the hotel in make so many museums sterile and, in a the Pyrenees, the list of names in the real sense, dead. The first is that museums bedroom made it possible to see the are thought of primarily as intellectual Queen of the Belgians doing her hair at places, where the primary appeal should the dressing table by the window. be to the head not the heart. The second Three years ago, one of my favourite is a corollary and a consequence of the museums, the Women's Museum in first. Museums are staffed by too many Aarhus, put on a marvellous exhibition scholars and too few poets. Scholars as we which bridged the museum and the city in know, are people who mistrust the emo­ a most interesting way. There was a large, tions, pride themselves on objectivity and TH E GRE A T EUROP E AN MU SEUM

whose education and training cause them The Great Museum is inescapably a 59 to know more and more about less and museum with a very large public. That less. Poets, on the other hand, are essenti­ public is certainly not homogeneous and ally irreverent, uncontrollable people, who to satisfy it and get it to appreciate the instinctively sense and try to put into museum demands very special skills and a words the relationship between superfici­ rethinking of the role of the museum-in­ ally incongruous ideas, objects and events. a-building. What are nowadays termed, They have retained and cultivated the not always accurately, community muse­ 's ability to be curious about every­ ums mark a move in the right direction, thing and interested in everything. They but, in my experience, they usually have do not see life in terms of facts and they too limited a view of their field of action. tend to be impatient with those who do The real problem, I believe, lies with and are often contemptuous of them. The museums and museums of ethno­ best museums, in the sense of the most graphy, both of which overemphasise their effective museums, are those which contri­ value as institutions and react very strong­ ve, either by accident or as a result of deli­ ly against any suggestion that the concept berate policy, to employ a fruitful mixture of the Great Museum has anything to of the two types of person. But this is rare. offer them. They can see possible links By tradition and as a result of snobbery between natural history museums, muse­ and pressure from professional associati­ ums of industry and and ons, the scholarly temperament and scho­ museums of the applied on the one larly habits have come to dominate the hand and the Great Museum on the other, museum scene. I am convinced that this but they seem, to themselves, to inhabit a has to change, although I would admit world apart. I believe this view to be that the situation is better in some coun­ unnecessarily conservative and pessimistic. tries than in others. The artist's raw material is the world of What is gradually bringing about a the Great Museum. It cannot be anywhere change is, firstly, an increasing shortage of else, unless he is working solely in part­ money - scholars are expensive people to nership with God. The 's employ - and, secondly, the need to incre­ business is to show how the artist has dis­ ase the size of the museum-going public. tilled his experience of the Great Museum What I have called the poetic approach is and it can succeed in this only by making much more likely to achieve this than the constant forays into the Great Museum scholarly approach, precisely because a outside. It is quite possible that the days great many more people in any country of the traditional kind of art museum, the are governed by their feelings than by museum that earns its living by hanging their intellect. One could express this in pictures on walls, are numbered. One is another way by saying that in order to tempted to say, 'and a good thing too'. transmit facts and ideas it is necessary first The modern, worthwhile function of an to build an emotional bridge across which art museum may cons.ist much less of they can cross. Nobody ·ever learnt any­ accumulating closely guarded collections thing from a they disliked. and much more of broadening the taste of KENNETH HUDSON

60 the inhabitants of the Great Museum, in the Soviet Union, which we all miss so encouraging and helping them to put pictu­ much, still existed, I happened to be res into their homes and in monitoring the attending a conference in Helsinki. results, in going to the people, in fact, rather During a break in the proceedings, I was than in expecting the people to come to taking a walk around the city in the com­ them and to revere their judgement. The pany of a lady who was the director of temple approach is long outdated. what I had better call a large art museum Similarly, any ethnographical museum in Moscow. We had reached the square in in Europe which deliberately follows a front of the old Parliament building, whe­ come-and-see-our-exotic-wonders policy re there are statues of a couple of Russian is committing suicide, quite unnecessarily. Czars. 'Ah', I said to the Russian lady, 'we Whatever the situation may have been a are surrounded by the ghosts of the old hundred years ago, there is no country in Russian province of . I can feel Europe today which does not contain a Russians here and I am sure you can too.' variety of non-Europeans among its popula­ - 'I don't understand what you mean', she tion. These people, their homes, their occu­ said, 'there are no Russians here!' In the eve­ pations, their habits, their physical characte­ ning we were invited to dinner on the island ristics, their ways of amusing themselves, of Suomenlinna, where there was a fortress their religious beliefs and practices are just and a rather unpleasant prison in Czarist as interesting and just as worthy of study times. 'No Russian ghosts here either?' I said and display by museums as the characteris­ to her, as we stepped ashore from the boat. I tics and customs of yesterday's black, brown got much the same reply as before - 'I don't and yellow people in their original habitats, believe in ghosts', she said, 'not even Russian which still form the staple diet of most of ghosts.' Europe's ethnographical museums and The main purpose of the Great Euro­ museum de-partments. For them, as for the pean Museum is to help people to raise art muse-urns, their future success must Europe's ghosts from the dead, to believe depend on their willingness and ability to in them and to make friends with them. push their fingers into the ethnic communi­ ties aro-und them in their own countries and to act as interpreters and mediators with these communities. The waves of both white and non-white immigrants that Europe has somehow managed to accom­ modate, if not absorb, during the present century constitute an important part of the Kenneth Hudson, viilkiind och kontroversiell fo1fatta­ Great European Museum. re, foreliisare och debattor med en niirmast encyklope­ Finally, I should like to offer you a disk kunskap om viirldens museer. Sedan 1977 leder depressing story, told in order to illustrate han arbetet i den kommitte som delar ut det !irliga that there are some Europeans who need a europeiska museipriset (EMYA). little education in the matter of the Great Adr: EMYA, PO Box 913, Bristol BS99 5ST, European Museum. Ten years ago, when England. FAX +44 272 732437.