Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Franz Schulze

Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930, by Ingrid A. Steffensen-Bruce, Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell University Press, 1998; 265 pages, $60.

Dubin and Staniszewski lament that the growing influence of corporate funding over museum programming has prompted retreats fro innovative display and provocative subject matter.

The extraordinary number and variety of art museums built in the United States and abroad during the last three decades have prompted critics and historians to devote increasing attention to the museum as a major architectural genre. Two recent studies that rank among the most instructive and carefully researched, especially when considered together, are Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930 by architectural historian Ingrid A. Steffensen-Bruce, who teaches at Brookdale (N.J.) Community College, and Towards a New Museum by the independent scholar Victoria Newhouse of New York City.

The most obvious difference between the texts is, as their titles imply, chronological. Steffensen-Bruce is concerned with the large museums that went up in American cities from the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th, while Newhouse concentrates on buildings that have materialized thereafter, particularly in the last 30 years. These two writers share the view that art museums tell us as much about the societies that created them as about the art inside them. Both books, that is, are concerned as surely with social as with architectural history.

Steffensen-Bruce begins with the assertion that Americans of the late 19th century saw the museum not only as an instrument that might narrow the cultural gap between themselves and their European counterparts, but one that possessed a moral dimension. Such an outlook clearly addressed esthetic ends but also transcended them, calling for an architectural language "imbued with history and culture, one which in whatever milieu it found itself could speak of art and its refining and uplifting influences."

That language, she goes on to say, was "the monumental classical, executed with Beaux-Arts sophistication." Thus a fundamental stylistic similarity, derived from a commonality of purpose, applied to virtually all the major museums erected in the United States during the 40 years embraced by her study. The Metropolitan Museum in New York is, if not a blood brother, surely a family relative of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as a legion of other institutions given to the preservation and exhibition of objects that did double duty as art works and conveyors of moral values.

These museums altered the civic environment. While their stylistic origins were for the most part French, they grew out of the great international fairs of the period, which were often conspicuously embellished with buildings designed for the display of art. Much of Steffensen-Bruce's discussion is directed toward the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, "arguably the single most influential event in the history of American fin-de-siecle culture." Not only was its Fine Arts Palace the sole building of the Fair constructed in semi-permanent form (the walls were brick, the exterior covering made of reinforced plaster), the layout of the fairgrounds themselves constituted a major innovation in urban planning that in turn affected the City Beautiful movement--a dual accomplishment instrumental in the development of the American art museum during the last years of the century.

The unfolding of that drama occupies several chapters in Steffensen-Bruce's book. She demonstrates how museums came to be customarily located in parklands, where they might take advantage of a presumably salubrious atmosphere, and how the increasingly formal layouts of parks and malls reflected the standards of the City Beautiful movement, thus further contributing to the museum's classicist appearance. What's more, the perceived need to improve the life of city people, especially the economic underclass, lay behind the progressivist ideology of the turn of the century, only adding to the moral imperative associated with contemporaneous American art museums.

Newhouse briefly recapitulates the entire history of museums in the early part of her book, with summary references to Renaissance cabinets of wonders, aristocratic private collections and Enlightenment "teaching" institutions. But in discussing the changes in museums since the early 19th century, she downplays the moral purpose Steffensen-Bruce identifies with the old marble palaces. Instead, she remarks on a more nearly spiritual factor: art as a modern form of religion. "Gradually," she writes, "museums built for the worship of art replaced churches built for the worship of God." However, as this development transformed the museum into a secular "sacred space," it exacted a high price. For many of the objects exhibited had been removed from their original surroundings in temples, churches and palaces--from their birthplaces, as it were. While the motive behind such a move was usually considered benign--the communal preservation of valuable objects--the effect was often to disconnect the work on display from a context relevant to its full social intent.