‘Old-Fashioned’ Museums and Why I Like Them

 

Far away from ‘Museum Mile’, nestled in a Beaux Arts complex on Audubon Terrace  near the top of Manhattan, the Hispanic Society of America is from a bygone era, which is exactly what drew me to it.  Between its museum and library it has the finest collection of works from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, but it was really the museum building itself and the idea of it as an institution that I was enamoured with.

 

The Hispanic Society fits firmly within the category of late 19th/early 20th century philanthropic collection museums, and is in fact one of a dozen established by its founder, Archer Milton Huntington, including institutions devoted to numismatics, geography, archaeology, American Indian collections, and golf.  It was founded in 1904, and is still located in its original building, with a central gallery and mezzanine with built-in display cases, rooms branching off for different secondary collections, and the Sorolla Room, devoted to Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s  1911-1919 mural Visions of Spain celebrating regional Spanish customs.  Its collections cover Old Masters, furniture, applied arts, architectural fittings, religious art, ceramics, mosaics, and ancient sculptures, and the works on view, as well as the display itself, looks virtually unchanged in photographs from a century ago.

 

What is it about this very traditional museum, then, that it liked so much?  I think a lot of it had to do with what the building and the collection say about the particular historic moment in which it came to exist, the vision of its founder, and the now outmoded faith in Enlightenment ideals.  It is a bastion to learning and the elevation of culture.  The museum is not a ‘white cube’ which aims to decontextualise and neutralise the presentation of works of art, but rather has intricate stonework, strong colours on the walls and a healthy number of items to compare and contrast.  It was designed with an aim of educating and enlightening, and no fear of doing so with an authoritative voice, as it was founded when the majority of people still had confidence that the world could be classified and unambiguously understood, and that this was necessary for Progress with a capital P.  Despite being born into the post-modern world, I feel a kind of nostalgia for this other time.

 

That is not to say that I would wish all museums to be like this.  I believe firmly in the potential of museum collections to engage communities and break down barriers of social exclusion.  I believe in the importance of multiple narratives and transparency of the curatorial voice.  But there is still a part of me that walks into somewhere like the Hispanic Society of America, or the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, or the taxidermy collections of the Otago Museum in Dunedin, and responds to the sense that they will interpret the world for me, and make it knowable. There is certainly something to be said for the aims of the Enlightenment after all, if not always the methods.

There’s a great online resource about the Hispanic Society, put together by the Media Center for Art History at Columbia University.