1.3 The Decorative Arts Museum and the Modern Art Museum

“The Museum is intended to be used, and to the utmost extent consistent with the preservation of the articles; and not only used physically, but to be taken about and lectured upon. For my own part, I venture to think that unless museums and galleries are made subservient to purposes of education, they dwindle into very sleepy and useless institutions.”96

Administered eventually under the auspices of the Board of Education, the museum was officially dedicated to the service of an extended and undifferentiated public with opening hours and an admissions policy designed to maximise its accessibility to the working classes.97 It proved remarkably successful attracting over fifteen million visits between 1857 and 1883, over six million of which were recorded in the evenings, the most popular time for working class visitors.

The establishment of the V&A has relevance to the subsequent development of the design museum as it served to reinforce the idea that objects can, and should be, divorced from their original context of ownership and redisplayed in a different context of meaning. In addition, the museum provided a safe and neutral environment in which to display and mediate objects. The V&A was intended as an instructive demonstration to students and manufacturers of what design could achieve. The developing role of the design curator is most visibly seen in the history of the V&A. Here the curator’s function was understood to be in the service of a collection. The curator brought to a public or private collection a recognised skill-set around specialist subject expertise such as furniture, glass or ceramics.

1.3 The Decorative Arts Museum and the Modern Art Museum

Another important precursor to the design museum was the modern art museum and the decorative arts museum in the twentieth century. Alice Rawsthorn, a design critic and former director of London’s Design

96

Henry Cole, Report to the Department of Practical Art, 1854 in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, London: Reaktion Books, 1989: 8.

97

Anthony Burton, Anthony, Vision & Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum: London, V&A Publications, 1999.

Museum, has explained how historically objects found their way into museums through two distinct museological avenues. The first approach involved decorative arts museums that focused on furniture, ceramics and fashion, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and which inspired the first iteration of what is now the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna, which opened in 1864. Emerging in the twentieth century, a second approach saw museums of modern and contemporary art take a keen interest in industrial design. In this respect, the pioneering institution was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where the world’s first curatorial department devoted to architecture and design was established in 1932.98

A number of influential museum directors pioneered new methods of displaying objects that borrowed from the contemporary art museums of the time. Writing in 1910, John Cotton Dana, the pioneering founder and first director of the Newark Museum in New Jersey, observed:-

“Ancient conventions have museums firmly in hand; …most museums tend to become storehouses, used more to please and educate curators than to entertain and instruct the public; that they are quite averse to change; and that few among them exercise an influence on their respective communities at all commensurate with the cost of founding and maintenance.”99

Dana advocated the museum as an alive and active institution offering entertainment, enlightenment and education. In a series of short pamphlets published between 1917 and 1920, he conceptualised the new museum, promoting them as instruments for popular education and recreation; “a good museum attracts, entertains, arouses curiosity, leads to questions - and thus promotes learning.”100

98

Alice Rawsthorn, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013: 36-37.

99

John Cotton Dana, The New Museum: Selected Writings by John Cotton Dana, edited by W.A. Peniston, Washington DC: The Newark Museum Association, New Jersey & The American Association of Museums, 1999: 157.

Ibid.: 65.

100

Dana hesitated calling the Newark a ‘museum’ preferring instead to describe the ideal museum environment as being “an open workshop of delight and learning” and an “institute of visual instruction.”101 His many special exhibitions stretched the boundaries of conventional display by featuring applied and industrial arts, textile and clay products manufactured by local firms, immigrant’s handicrafts and “inexpensive articles of good design.” Dana hoped that these exhibits would draw new visitors like housewives, workers, immigrants and others who might have a natural interest in the objects on display. More important to Dana than what was displayed, was how objects were used. He established new practices such as loaning objects to school classrooms, shops and hospitals; creating a teacher-training course at local colleges; opening a junior museum only for children and establishing branch museums in local libraries.102

Similar curatorial practices were introduced by Alfred H. Barr at MoMA in New York during his tenure as Director in the 1930s. Curator Philip Johnson’s 1934 exhibition, Machine Art at MoMA elevated design to the level of art by investing the object with an almost auratic status. In the exhibition, everyday machine-made objects such as airplane propeller blades, ball bearings, coils, springs, laboratory flasks and a ball bearing were placed on cedar and walnut pedestals like pieces of sculpture, or under glass cases and displayed in front of walls covered in oil cloth, stainless steel, aluminium and natural Belgian linen. A humble tupperware container was elevated to the status of a modernist icon by putting it on a pedestal and emphasising the simplicity of its form. A single ball bearing was appreciated for its sculptural quality. This display technique ensured that the objects were highlighted as works of art and communicated as exemplars of modern design to be admired as much for their formal

101

John Cotton Dana, The New Museum: Selected Writings by John Cotton Dana, edited by W.A. Peniston, Washington DC: The Newark Museum Association, New Jersey & The American Association of Museums, 1999: 65.

102

Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997: 61.

beauty as for their functionality.103 The display strategy deliberately divorced the object from its everyday, utilitarian context, separating it from its social function and meanings and enabled the object to be seen and understood afresh.104

Visitors were invited to vote for their favourite exhibits and the exhibition catalogue included a price list and manufacturer’s contact information encouraging visitors to purchase the objects for display in their own homes. A selection of the objects from the exhibition would later form the foundation of the design collection at MoMA. The innovative display strategy adopted by the curators of the Machine Art exhibition would also influence the way in which objects were presented in the newly established design museums.

Fig. 10: Machine Art at MoMA, New York, 1934. Curated by Philip Johnson.

103

Zoë Ryan (ed.) As Seen: Exhibitions that made Architecture and Design History, The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017: 18.

104 Ibid.: 18.

From the late 1980s, in response to a series of rapid political, social and cultural changes, museums become more aware of their audiences and entered a seemingly feverish dynamic attempting to make their venues more attractive, their exhibitions more didactic and their names more

appealing.105 During the 1990s there is a noticeable shift in focus as design museums attempt to redefine themselves by changing their names and shifting the focus of their acquisition policies. Research by Javier Gimeno-Martinez and Jasmijn Verlinden has documented the impact of this shift.106 In 1995 the Museum voor Sierkunst (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Ghent changed it name to Museum voor Sierkunst en Vormgeving (Museum of Decorative Arts and Design). In 2001 the institution’s name underwent a further change and became the Design Museum Gent. For trustees at the the Design Museum, Ghent, design reflected a wider concept of which decorative arts formed only a part. The term decorative arts was seen to be archaic and did not reflect the museum’s acquisition and exhibition policies. In 2002 the Taideteollisuudmuseo (Museum of Applied Arts) in Helsinki, Finland changed its name to Designmuseo (Design Museum). In the same year New York’s American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design.

Gimeno-Martinez and Verlinden argue that the name changes addressed two key concerns. Firstly, that museum directors wanted to raise the institution’s profile and secondly, that they wanted to gain international status and, because of a rising public interest in design, felt that the word ‘design’ helped them to achieve both of these aims, a factor that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.107 Veteran institutions with decorative art collections, like the V&A in London and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, began to call themselves

105

Eileen Hooper-Greenhill has charted this shift in museums in a series of studies including: Museums and their Visitors, London: Routledge, 1994 and The Educational Role of the Museum, London: Routledge, 1999.

106

Javier Gimeno-Martinez and Jasmijn Verlinden, ‘From Museum of Decorative Arts to Design Museum: The Case of the Design Museum Gent’, Design and Culture, Volume 2, Issue 3, 2010: 259-283.

Ibid.: 272.

107