Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s
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Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s
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| ISBN-13: | 9780253002846 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2009 |
| Series: | Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Buying Respectability
Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s
By Thomas Adam
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Thomas AdamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35274-3
CHAPTER 1
Cultural Excursions: Museums, Art Galleries, and Libraries in a Transatlantic World
Since the German social welfare state entered a period of crisis and reconstruction, both Conservatives and Social Democrats have encouraged the revitalization of private funding for public cultural institutions such as art galleries and museums. The reconstruction of the Frauenkirche is the most visible sign of this new political climate. Destroyed in World War II, the ruins of the church in downtown Dresden were left untouched because the East German government declared this pile of rubble a powerful monument to the horrors of war. After German unification in 1990, the newly elected government of the state of Saxony under its conservative premier, Kurt Biedenkopf, decided to resurrect the Frauenkirche in an attempt to revive a regional identity and create a civil society in which the citizens and the state share responsibility for cultural icons. A private foundation was created to secure two-thirds of the construction costs from private sponsors. Between 1993 and 2005, roughly 600,000 individuals contributed 100 million Euros to this project.
Inspiration for the current privatization of cultural sponsorship is drawn from a perceived American model. Since the early 1990s, German politicians, intellectuals, and social scientists have looked admiringly to the United States and its privately funded museums, universities, and libraries. However, as in all cases of intercultural transfer, the perception of a foreign model is highly selective and, as Gabriele Lingelbach has argued, guided by the interests of those who advocate changes. References to a "prestigious" foreign model often serve just as an instrument for achieving reforms and are not always connected to any actual transfer of ideas. This is not to suggest that such an intercultural transfer is highly unlikely, as Lingelbach seems to imply. The cultures and societies of Central and Western Europe and North America were connected by large-scale migration and cultural exchange and borrowing. As Daniel T. Rodgers notes, none of the cultures within the transatlantic world developed in isolation. Migration and travel were the engines of intercultural exchange, transfer, implementation, and assimilation of cultural institutions. The experience of traveling in Europe influenced well-off Americans, as Neil Harris has suggested:
Many Americans learned abroad to look at their own country for the first time, and many were unhappy with what they saw. Out of their sense of native deficiencies grew a new respect for European institutions and commitments to the artistic enterprise in America. Americans once had idealized individualism and pluralism, attempting in their polity to control the effects rather than the causes of faction; they now sought new means of engineering consent and molding the opinions, as well as the actions, of their fellow citizens.
The enjoyment of museums, art galleries, and libraries in Europe as well as the many letters and reports about these institutions sparked interest in establishing a similar cultural life in American cities. It will be suggested that the creation of museums, art galleries, and libraries in North America was influenced by the observation of similar European institutions by wealthy American and Canadian travelers who became agents of intercultural transfer. These travelers returned with ideas regarding how to organize a museum, how to arrange an exhibition, how to house an exhibition, and how to finance and support a museum and its construction. The founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City were inspired by the Dresden and Leipzig art galleries. Toronto's museum makers sent emissaries to New York and Leipzig to explore the organization, architecture, and financing schemes of museums. Boston's Public Library would never have been founded if George Ticknor (1791–1871) had not been so impressed by Dresden's Royal Saxon Library. Major cultural landmarks in this country owe their existence to wealthy Americans who studied cultural institutions in Europe and founded museums, art galleries, and libraries employing European strategies, exhibition techniques, and financing schemes. However, intercultural transfer is never a one-way street; instead, it involves multiple transfers (both failed and successful) in multiple directions. At the end of the nineteenth century, German social reformers visiting the United States were impressed by the democratic character of museums and libraries. Often unaware of the German roots of these institutions, they returned home arguing that German cities needed to adopt these "American models."
While we have some information on the application of American ideas in Germany, such as the free public library, the inspiration of German and British concepts for the creation of cultural institutions in North America has nearly remained terra incognita. One notable exception is Kathleen D. McCarthy's reference to the inspiration that Julius Rosenwald and John G. Shedd received from German museums for the founding of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Rosenwald and Shedd had "commissioned studies of similar European ventures before publicly pledging their gifts, augmenting the investigators' findings with personal observations of their own." Munich's Deutsches Museum became the blueprint for the Chicago museum. Even though Rodgers reminded historians of the interconnected character of European and American history, the investigation of intercultural transfers across the Atlantic has not attracted larger attention among German and American historians of the nineteenth century. Using the example of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Public Library, and the Toronto Art Gallery, the following pages will shed light on how major American and Canadian cultural institutions were created under the influence of their European predecessors. It will be argued that German museums, founded and funded by art associations (Kunstvereine), provided the organizational blueprint for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in return became a model for subsequent museum projects in other American and Canadian cities. Ironically, the very same North American cultural institutions served, in some cases, as models for the (re)organization of museums and libraries in Germany around 1900 and again in the 1990s.
"Yet beyond the Sea ...": George Fiske Comfort and the Founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
For several decades, wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians traveled to Germany to enjoy the rich social and cultural life in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. The art galleries, libraries, universities, and concert halls of Dresden and Leipzig attracted large numbers of Americans who found there what they lacked back home. William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) and George Ticknor spent much time in Dresden's art gallery, the Grünes Gewölbe, and the Royal Saxon Library. Back home, both advocated the establishment of similar institutions in New York and Boston. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Public Library were the results of their advocacy. After decades of having to cross the Atlantic in order to enjoy a rich cultural life, New York's leisure class became impatient with the quality of urban life in the New World. At the end of the 1860s, members of the elitist Union League Club took a lead in the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Union League Club was one of the most exclusive social clubs of New York. Founded in 1863, this club represented New York's exclusive society. Like the Union Club and the Knickerbocker Club, the Union League Club was modeled on London's social clubs. It differed from the Union Club and the Knickerbocker Club only in its political character. According to the standard account of the Union League Club's history, "The only requisite for membership" was an "unblemished reputation, [...] an uncompromising and unconditional loyalty to the nation, and a complete subordination thereto of all other political ideas." The members of the Union League Club came foremost from the old Dutch and English families, who had arrived on the shores of the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of its members were "men with colonial names" who belonged to New York's leading circles and had made their money in real estate and banking. To ensure the social exclusivity of this political and social club, membership requirements limited access. Candidates for admission had to "be proposed by one member, seconded by another, and bulletined, before reference to the committee whose business it [was] to investigate as to qualifications or eligibility. At every monthly meeting of the club, it [was] the duty of this body to report upon the names of candidates submitted to its consideration, after which the members vote[d] by ballot upon names thus recommended."
The admission fee was set at $100, the yearly dues at $60. Clearly, the members of the Union League Club belonged to New York's wealthiest and most exclusive circles. The European Grand Tour for cultural education was a shared experience among its members. William Cullen Bryant, one of the founders of the Union League Club, made several visits to the Old World and inspired other members to follow his example by traveling to Europe or sending their children. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, who gave us detailed accounts about their European experiences, shed some light on the custom of American travels in Germany.
In 1835 and 1836, Americans like George Ticknor stayed for several months in German cities, and thanks to a favorable exchange rate they enjoyed a lifestyle they would never have been able to sustain back home. For wealthy Americans, this transatlantic Grand Tour "was a way of affirming the respectability of one's race, class, or gender." Thus wealthy New Yorkers spent much time in Europe enjoying museums, art galleries, and libraries. From May through November 1845, Bryant visited the European continent. After arriving in Liverpool, he visited Cologne, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig in August and September. Bryant was especially impressed by the art museums found in the small Kingdom of Saxony. After John Jay suggested the establishment of a Metropolitan Art Museum in New York in his speech to Americans in Paris celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of American independence in 1866, Bryant became involved in the attempts made by the Union League Club to popularize such an enterprise among his peers. He accepted George P. Putnam's invitation to preside over a meeting on November 23, 1869, in the Theatre of the Union League Club to which all individuals interested in establishing such an art museum were invited. Some three hundred members of the Union League Club, the National Academy of Design, the New-York Historical Society, the Century, the Manhattan, and other social clubs attended this meeting. In his introductory speech, Bryant reminded his fellow citizens that in terms of cultural life and atmosphere New York could not compete with even the tiniest European city or kingdom:
Yet beyond the sea there is the little kingdom of Saxony, which, with an area less than that of Massachusetts, and a population but little larger, possesses a Museum of the Fine Arts marvelously rich, which no man who visits the continent of Europe is willing to own that he has not seen. There is Spain, a third-rate power of Europe and poor besides, with a museum of Fine Arts at her capital, the opulence and extent of which absolutely bewilder the visitor. I will not speak of France or of England, conquering nations, which have gathered their treasures of art in part from regions overrun by their armies; nor yet of Italy, the fortunate inheritor of so many glorious productions of her own artists. But there are Holland and Belgium, kingdoms almost too small to be heeded by the greater powers of Europe in the consultations which decide the destinies of nations, and these little kingdoms have their public collections of art, the resort of admiring visitors from all parts of the civilized world.
Bryant's emotional speech was followed by an enthusiastic but informed talk about art museums and the organizing principles of art collections by George Fiske Comfort (1833–1910), an 1857 graduate of Wesleyan College who had spent nearly five years (1860–1865) in Europe. He traveled extensively from Trieste to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Great Britain. Not much is known about this travel or about how much time he spent in each country and which universities and museums he visited. However, we know from his letters and notes that he spent years in Germany. In a letter to Reverend John Makan (Allegheny College) in 1866, Comfort stated that he had spent "nearly five years in traveling through most of the classic lands of ancient and medieval art, studying the monuments and museums, and devoting nearly half of my time to formal study in the German universities."
In his speech, Comfort pointed to the museums in Kensington and Berlin as possible blueprints for the Metropolitan Museum of New York City:
The Kensington Museum has been organized within twenty years, and it contains a large number of casts of works of sculpture and architecture and many works of art that are owned by wealthy people in England, left there as loans for the inspection of the public without cost. They may be reclaimed by them or their heirs, but probably the larger portion will be given or bequeathed to the museum. This museum also contains a large collection of works, illustrating the application of the arts to industry. And there are schools connected with the museum — it is an institution of science as well.
As this passage shows, Comfort favored the connection between the display of artistic work and artistic education. More important, he was very concerned with the property rights of the artistic works. And although the South Kensington Museum provided some inspiration for the founding of the Metropolitan Museum, Comfort's eyes were fixed on the museums in Berlin and other German cities. He continued his speech with high praise for the museums of Berlin as the largest and most impressive cultural institutions of his day:
The foundation of the old museum building was laid in the year 1828; and the building was finished some four years after. The foundation of the new museum building was laid in the year 1852, and was finished two or three years after. This building contains to day the largest collection of casts of works of Sculpture of any museum in the world. There is no place where a person can study to more advantage the progress of Sculpture, from its first appearance in Egypt down to its appearance in Greece and through the middle ages, and through the modern times, than he can in Berlin, and by all means of this valuable collection of casts. The casts that are in that museum, if I am rightly informed, cost about 300,000 thalers, which is equivalent to about 300,000 dollars in our present paper money.
Comfort learned to appreciate both museums during his extensive study in that city between 1863 and 1865, "where he pursued his studies in the University, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Library. He was received in social circles of leading artists, critics, connoisseurs, and the professors of art and archeology of that great literary capital of the world, as Cornelius Keinlbach, Lepsius, Waagen, Gerhart, Piper, Von Ranke, and others." In the aforementioned letter to Makan, Comfort pointed out that he had "paid much attention to the organization of academies of art and museums of art." While he studied in Berlin, Comfort visited art museums in Nuremberg, Munich, Leipzig, Dresden, Posen, and Bremen in order to collect information about the organization of art institutions in these cities and the objects shown.
Traveling to these cities, Comfort encountered a rich, cultural urban life that included art museums, private exhibitions, and art associations. As Manuel Frey pointed out, by 1850 nearly every German city had its own art association. Wealthy citizens founded these associations to organize exhibitions, support artists, and create art museums independent of royal/ducal control. Within the context of nineteenth-century German society, art associations represented the drive for bourgeois emancipation from a feudal monopoly over art. By establishing their own art scene, burghers claimed a leading position within urban society, and by financing artistic endeavors, they proved their economic power and their desire to produce a new culture. Such art associations represented a collective approach to philanthropy, since they could easily bring together several hundred members. The Leipzig Kunstverein, for example, received support from 980 members in 1837.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 3
Part 1
Chapter 1 Cultural Excursions: Museums, Art Galleries, and Libraries in a Transatlantic World 13
Chapter 2 Heavy Luggage: The Intercultural Transfer of Models for Social Housing Enterprises 39
Part 2
Chapter 3 How to Become a Gentleman: Philanthropy and Social Climbing 89
Chapter 4 Bountiful Ladies: Philanthropy and Women's Place in Society 126
Chapter 5 Giving for Good: Philanthropy and Religion 153
Conclusion 181
Notes 183
Index 229