The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition.

Francis Haskell The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. Yale University Press, 208 pages, $25

The precipitous decline in museum standards over the course of the last quarter century has many sources, the most immediate of which is the uncritical absorption of politically correct values from other so-called disciplines in the humanities. This journal has chronicled these developments with manifest dismay. It is thus with a certain pathetic glee that one can now point to the two titles under review as corroborating evidence of the sheer drop we have witnessed. Of course, those who would benefit most from these fine studies are unlikely to consider their lessons.

In this context, the primary lessons are that we have effectively forsaken the enduring rationale of public museums and that we have foolishly replaced a tragic sense of history with a more playful, experimental approach to exhibiting art. By a tragic sense of history, I mean to suggest the attitude toward the past that motivated earlier generations of museum directors and curators to be sensitive to the extreme fragility of unique objects, as well as their ignorance of today's temptations of PR coups and the financial pressures that put a premium on multi-destination loan exhibitions and blockbuster shows. Works of art are perishable, and slackened museum policies enabling them to be sent hither and yon court disaster.

The late Francis Haskell, Edgar Wind's successor at Oxford, was one of the very few advocates of restraint regarding lending from one collection or institution to another. He, more than many in the upper reaches of the contemporary museum world, was an outspoken defender of the preciousness of the works themselves; he also understood that massive monographic exhibitions, and their catalogues, often have unintentionally negative results distorting the state of research for a generation or more--largely because the opportunities and tradeoffs involved in museum lending at any given time present potentially artificial, or at least arbitrary, reference points. When the word is out that the Met is mounting a major show on "X" uninvolved museums and curators tend to look in other directions for subjects.

The tale Haskell tells is that of the emergence of temporary exhibitions of Old Master paintings, a tale that begins with the display of private paintings during feast days in seventeenth-century Italy. From these civic demonstrations, the temporary arrangement of pictures (the "ephemeral museums") came to serve more explicitly political and commercial purposes, which only accidentally helped to stimulate the close scrutiny of established artists and their oeuvres, first through criticism and later through connoisseurship and scholarship. Chapters on the unconscionable propagandistic uses to which art was subjected under Napoleon's reign, the commercial vectors involved in the international dispersal of private and princely collections in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the rise of more explicitly political and nationalistic pretenses for such exhibitions offer a richly instructive series of episodes that condense his larger themes into discrete events. This has always been a hallmark of Haskell's scholarly approach: exactingly concrete examinations of the social dimensions of artistic practices without a hint of what is now de rigueur--leftist ideological sermonizing.

Of course, the core element of Haskell's story is the concomitant emergence of an entire category of art objects ("Old Master" paintings) and its intellectual corollary, high art. While the notion of an Old Master and the modern concept of art came into being contemporaneously and reinforced one another in many ways, an account of these intellectual forces remains terra incognita.

Haskell's point of view is an inductive, object- and event-based account. James Sheehan's fine survey provides a welcome balance to Haskell not only by addressing the "History of Ideas" head on, but also by tracing how ideas shaped the evolution of museums as institutions, and how they effected the design and experience of museums as buildings.

A certain difference in focus and weight, however, prevents these two volumes from being considered ideal pendants. The first issue is Sheehan's exclusively German focus in contrast to Haskell's more internationalist, and therefore more synthetic, enterprise. At the same time, Sheehan, the Dickason Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, operates as a conventional historian treading carefully into the domains of art and architectural history. While he has done a laudable and indeed necessary job of bringing together and properly ordering a wide range of material concerning the intellectual and institutional premises of the changing role of museums in the German art world, his account of the buildings' relative merits and formal properties is rather thin and derivative. And where he ventures into sociological discussions of museum administrators and visitors, he strays just far enough into tendentious ideological territory to weaken his more factually sound arguments. To dilate on the class divisions of the museum public in the mid-nineteenth century as if one is saying anything meaningful is, frankly, silly; a simple statistical breakdown would have sufficed. His discussion of the personalities of men like von Bode, Tschudi, and Lichtwark, while not offering new insights, finally brings this vitally important material to an English-speaking audience. To read sympathetically about the divisive issues that had the museum world in an uproar a century ago is to see just how anachronistic and retardataire today's shock-seeking artists--and museum officials--really are. How fitting that the "progressive" aesthetic and economic arguments of the left, placed in historical context, are in reality old fashioned by their own standards!

As Sheehan approaches twentieth-century themes, such as the legacy of Nietzsche or the conundrum of historicism, he is less trustworthy a guide. Much of my disagreement with him stems from his passive acceptance of the prevailing attitudes regarding the transition from so-called historicism to modernism. Conceptually, the opposition of these two has become utterly threadbare; it supports making superficial arguments about the appearance of styles and neglects far more important strands running through a wide variety of styles, especially in the work of individuals just before and after the First World War. Sheehan is right on target, however, in his evaluation of the significance of the neo-baroque--a very popular style of museum design in the late nineteenth century. The fact that the baroque could be successfully disengaged from its original ideological moorings is an absolutely critical phase in the history of the perception of style as such--both in terms of the value of stylistic arguments by historians, practicing artists, and architects and for the public at large. Again, marshalling all this material between two covers, without profoundly distorting it with today's tendency to view everything predating Hitler's ascension to the power as somehow leading inevitably to that moment, makes it a rare and salutary achievement.

One of the more interesting leitmotifs in Sheehan's account is the gradual move toward the experience of art as an autonomous aesthetic entity, as a group of objects increasingly pulled away from devotional and dynastic functions and set aside as vehicles of contemplation. The museum, as the backdrop for this cultural, political, and commercial change, "shaped the conventions within which artists defined their tasks" Today, this axiom has been effectively stood on its head and the inmates are running the asylum.

J. Duncan Berry writes on architecture regularly for The New Criterion.