Collecting has for long occupied a particular place in cultural history and reflections on the significance of material culture within the humanities. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries, research on collecting is situated at the intersection of the history of art and taste, knowledge and connoisseurship; as well as of studies on historic socio-economic determinants, often touching upon some aspects of cultural anthropology or psychology. These studies, definitely more established in Western discourse, with their origins in structuralism and post-structuralism, have gone through various phases and, to some extent, correlated with the currents of postmodern studies on consumerism or the ‘material turn’ and theory of the agency of objects. From an initial interest in mere factuality and the anecdotally framed biographies of collectors, the study of collecting has become an important part of postmodern reflection on key concepts of culture: one of which is identity and the way it has been shaped. Due to the political and historical conditions after 1945, this reflection took a very different course in the Western and Eastern areas. The demolished art market, the radical social restructuring and the degradation of the role of the hitherto elites in the Eastern Bloc countries, significantly influenced the development of collections research. Although adopted by many communistic states in a non-orthodox and even critical manner, the Marxist optics with its reluctance towards the ‘possessing class’, as well as the vast post-war losses in archival resources at the institutional and private ego-documents level, made it difficult or even impossible to reconstruct knowledge about former collections in Eastern Europe. The circumstances mentioned above also impacted the development of methodological discourse, which under Western conditions could naturally evolve as a part of studies on consumerism and the past of the still existing elite and upper middle class.
The central question posed in this volume about the relationship between collection and identity echoes classical semiotic thinking about culture understood as a network of meanings (Max Weber). Is this question still relevant and worth reflecting on in the age of fundamental redefinitions; among other, the emergence of posthumanism and the non-anthropocentric paradigm? Certainly, to face the challenges posed by contemporary humanities with all its ideological entanglements, it is necessary to constantly define the condition of the human being as a producer of culture and signifiers, also in the non-distant historical perspective. The need for this type of research is also evidenced by the multitude and diversity of cases assembled in the following volume, as well as the importance of the social problems analysed within them. They create a pan-European panorama of the collecting phenomenon in its various facets. The detailed analysis of the individual cases proves that the phenomenon of collecting focused, as in a lens, all the socially and culturally essential problems of the modern era. This book addresses issues such as the culture-creating meaning of ethnic minorities, women’s art collecting as a tool in emancipating, colonialism or the instrumentalisation of museums in the imperial age. Analysed in the context of private collections, these problems gain clarity, revealing at the same time the complexity of the cultural processes that have underpinned many of the social issues that remain under discussion to this day. The biographical micro-perspective is inevitable in posing questions about the past; but also in framing the contemporary paradigm of cultural history studies, and as such, constitutes the main axis of the reflection proposed in this book.
This volume is the outcome of the international conference Collection, Modernism and Social Identity. Art Collecting in Europe Between 1880–1940, which took place in September 2021 (online) and was organised by the editor of this book. Researchers from Poland, Germany, France, Portugal, Russia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Czech Republik and the United States took part. The main aim of the conference was to initiate an exchange between researchers representing diverse scholarly approaches (defined by the differing historical and cultural experience of the country of origin); and to indirectly bridge the distance between Western and Central-Eastern European collecting studies. The conference was thought to be not only an opportunity for an exchange in terms of historiography, but most of all as platform for sharing concerns of a methodological nature. At the same time, academics from various countries endeavoured to create frames of a transnational discourse and a critical overview of the paradigm of collecting studies in Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The book presents a selection of texts chosen from almost thirty conference presentations. Most of the texts have been significantly expanded and modified from the original papers. The content of this volume has been divided into five overlapping and intertwining sections and was designed to serve as a coherent synthesis, focused on the main socio-cultural aspects of collecting. The essays cover a broad scope of issues relating to individual identity strategies in the late modern era, encompassing history of museums, exhibition policy, art market history, history of taste shaping and provenance research.
In the historical dimension, this post-conference volume is devoted to art collecting in Europe from approximately 1860 to 1940, with sporadic references to the Second World War and the post-war period. It was a special chapter in both general history and the historiography of collecting itself. For centuries, collecting had been mainly perceived as the privilege of the aristocracy and landed gentry. The era of industrialization, followed by significant social changes, led to shifts in power, both in politics and culture. As a result, a new class arose in Europe – the bourgeoisie. Collecting enabled members of the bourgeoisie to gain access to the circles of art lovers who hailed from the upper echelons of society (Eva Rovers). This practice had, in general, an imitative character and paradoxically, at the same time, each collection was unique and personalised; therefore, often used to distinguish the collector. Indeed, many of the collections were instrumentally used by merchants and bankers who manifested their status and created a distinctive group identity to differentiate themselves from the traditional aristocratic collectors. This sort of collecting – appealing to collecting traditions and at the same time trying to break with them – could be seen as a subversive strategy on the part of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, which simultaneously gave art collecting a modern character. Their interest in mainly contemporary art supported new art movements, whereas legacies provided the core collections of many of today’s most significant museums. Also importantly, some collections focused specifically on non-European cultural artefacts, contributing to the establishment of an expert knowledge that emerged in public universities and museums in close interaction with those object collections. The rise of this new and extensive collecting scene in Europe at the end of the long nineteenth century took shape in various ways. Thanks to a comparative approach applied in this book, we can retrace similarities that make it more possible to define some of the essential and common aspects of European collecting. We can also observe differences and local endemic variations and analyse the reason for this differentiation. For the most part, however, there are clear patterns proving that collectors were driven by similar cultural and social motives. Moreover, each case presented in this volume reveals also the complexity of the mechanisms of art amassing on the individual level; which represents a significant contribution to a better understanding of collecting as a universal phenomenon framed within cultural anthropology.
The book opens with a methodological introduction by Thomas Stammers, a valuable analysis of the influence of psychological concepts on the previous and current collecting studies. Stammers looks critically at classic publications by, among others, Krzysztof Pomian, Jean Baudrillard, Werner Muensterberger, James Clifford and analyses the process of a gradual shift away from the psychoanalytic concept to its revival in new research on material culture. In this study field, a redefined psychoanalytic approach opens new perspectives and enables an exploring of the relationship between collecting and consumption, the gendered relationship to objects and the form of sentimental attachment to collected objects. By undertaking this brilliant, critical literature overview, Stammers has provided a theoretical framework for an in-depth analysis of the cases discussed in this collection.
The first section of the book, Aristocracy: Collecting in the Twilight Era consists of texts referring to the assembling and preserving of aristocratic collections in the context of maintaining the social and historical role of the magnates. This problem is thoroughly analysed by Kamila Kłudkiewicz, whose article looks at the collection of the Polish count, Edward Raczyński. Kłudkiewicz analyses why art collecting among aristocrats was characterized by a mainly conservative artistic taste; and how such preferences served a preseration of the social status of this stratum.
Maria Ponomarenko, in her paper about Prince Wladimir Argoutinsky-Dorgoloukov, offers an insightful look at the collecting scene of St. Petersburg’s aristocracy, a much more conservative collecting milieu than Moscow, which boasted famous Modern French art collectors like Siergiei Shchukin or Ivan Morozov. As Ponomarenko states, the prince’s Armenian origin was a reason for his partial exclusion from the higher sphere, whereas his European art collection gained a compensatory meaning and helped to bring the outsider Afgoutinsky-Dorgoloukov in from the cold.
Whitney Dennis writes about the collection of the Spanish Alba family and its matriarch Countess María del Rosario Falcó y Osorio, thanks to whom her son Jacobo, the 17th Duke of Alba, would inherit her passion for the archive and the art collection itself, thus preserving the collection for posterity, and protecting the legacy of the Alba family.
The second and the largest section of the book, Collecting’s Modern Reinterpretations, features a number of essays on various aspects of the collecting of newly arisen social elites. Agnieszka Kluczewska-Wójcik describes the practices of Feliks Jasieński, a prominent Polish collector active in Warsaw and Kraków. Jasieński’s multifaceted activities, including the acquisition of Japanese prints, the popularisation of Far Eastern art through independently organised exhibitions, and finally, his numerous publications, made him an advocate of Japanese and modern art in Poland and Europe.
Léo Rivaud Chevaillier describes the collecting practices of Paul Gallimard, a great Parisian figure, and a culture entrepreneur. Rivaud Chevalier categorises Gallimard as a dandy collector, who acted in the manner of Charles Baudelair, and was associated with the elite and artistic bohemia of the French capital at the time, including the bibliophilic milieu of Paris. Gallimard exemplifies the modern, metropolitan collecting that was part of late nineteenth-century Parisian culture.
Pauline Guyot presents the life and activities of Adele Caussin, a demimondaine collector. Guyot touches on the extremely interesting gender aspect of collecting, where art became an essential element of social advancement and the emancipation of women in the nineteenth-century Paris.
In her paper on Camille Gronkowski, the descendant of a Polish noble family, Agnieszka Wiatrzyk analyses the collector’s activities in the Parisian fields art and culture, as well as his donation to the Polish Historical and Literary Society in Paris. Wiatrzyk stresses that the bequest represented Gronkowski’s concern about Poland’s condition in the new geopolitical situation after 1945, and ultimately contributed to a restoring of the prestige of the Polish Society in Paris.
The essay by Felix Steffan aims to describe the reasons for the revitalisation of Max Bram’s traditional and figurative art collection under Nazism. The elevation of Bram’s bourgeois amassing by the regime, originally created for educational purposes, reveals the mechanisms of culture’s instrumentalisation in the era of National Socialism in Germany.
Marcela Rusinko proposes a theoretical approach and a study concept which involves analysing old and new middle-class collecting identities. Based on categories drawn from sociology (including classical Marxian definitions of classes), particularly studies pertaining to the development of the Western middle stratum, Rusinko examines collecting patterns in the grand and petit bourgeoisie in Central Europe and the Czech Republic in order to define sociological regularities.
Section three, entitled Art and the Art of Collecting, focuses on tracing the relationship between collecting and art, as well as on the question to what extent collecting influenced the development of modern art. Bénédicte Garnier, while analysing the collecting practice of Auguste Rodin, makes recourse to the classification category of artist-collector. Garnier demonstrates how Rodin’s collection inspired him and how the antiquities he possessed were incorporated and used in art creation. Garnier notes that collecting sculpture is combined with a peculiar sensual pleasure, also present in the case of Rodin.
Fiona Piccolo examines the market development of print portfolios and their influence on collecting practices in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1930. Piccolo argues that portfolios, as a popular art form in the German middle-class culture (Bürgerkultur), revealed a bourgeoisie relationship to art and the art object. As a result, portfolios became a representation of collectors’ artistic education, serving as a symbolic and material marker of social identity and status.
Debra DeWitte, in her essay on the Exhibition of Drawings from Private Collectors, which took place in L’École des Beaux-Arts in 1879, describes a particular sort of culture rivalry between France and England in the late nineteenth century. Art collections and exhibitions became instruments not only for building personal prestige but also for imperial politics; and demonstrating cultural superiority.
The fourth section, Art and Acculturation: Jewish Collectors concerns Jewish collecting as an element of establishing a socio-national identity within an acculturation process. It begins with Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz’s text, in which she describes the Gutnajer brothers’ art collecting and trading in Warsaw before 1939. The article looks to show, by way of analysing the cases of Abe and Bernard, that although each of them amassed art in a different manner and with a varying business approach, they could both be characterised by their genuine passion for collecting Polish art.
Milena Woźniak-Koch presents Warsaw art collecting between 1880 and 1939 basing on three study cases: Edward Reicher, Gustaw Wertheim and Bronisław Krystall. The article explores the relationship between acculturation and visual culture while reconstructing the variety of strategies for creating Jewish-Polish identity. Woźniak-Koch’s text highlights the immense role of Polish, as well as Jewish art, as means in defining the new position of Jews within Polish society.
Shir Gal Kochavi proposes an analysis of three collections: Isaac Strauss, Reuben David Sassoon and Hadji Ephraim Benguiat. These collections, studied in the context of the secularisation and urbanisation of European Jews in the nineteenth century, demonstrate how material objects representing Jewish tradition became collectors’ objects. As Gal Kochavi argues, by exhibiting and researching Jewish themes, these collectors paradoxically used ritual art objects to shape secular Jewish identity and foster the view of the educated, ‘assimilated’ Jew.
In the conclusion of this section, Tomasz Dziewicki describes the collecting activities of Róża Aleksandrowicz, the owner of a stationery and art shop in Kraków. While running her business, Róża had the opportunity to interact with the artistic milieu of Kraków and became a muse and patroness who amassed a substantial collection of modern Polish art.
The last part of the book is dedicated to the broadly understood relationship between collecting and museology. In his essay, Dariusz Kacprzak recalls the story of Heinrich Dohrn’s antique sculpture collection in Stettin (the former German name for today’s Polish Szczecin). Its donation to the Museum der Stadt Stettin was a reminder of the ancient roots and humanistic values of European culture and symbolically inscribed the region of Pomerania in the area of this ancient heritage.
Marina Beck’s article aims to juxtapose the history of Kunsthalle in Hamburg with that of Städel Museum in Frankfurt. As Beck puts it, by the foundation of those museums, the bourgeoisie contributed to creating a national and local identity while simultaneously emphasising its importance as the new leading social group.
In the final article, Laurie Kalb Cosmo presents the history of three Dutch museums: the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The author analyses whether and if yes to what extent institutions established with the great support of the bourgeoisie influenced the development of new art movements and museum reforms. Cosmo examines the period of the Second World War and the institutions’ policies towards the Nazis.
The materials in this collection present various examples of art collecting at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The authors have established their attitudes to analysed cases and referred to events through the prisms of their own interpretations of cultural texts (including the collections themselves), taking into account epistemological and ontological approaches. Particular essays tend to represent a variety of methodological attitudes that have been developed within the interdisciplinary field of collecting studies, museology, sociology and culture studies. An element common to all the cases included in this book is the biographical perspective, which makes it possible to analyse collections in a post-semiotic spirit as aforementioned cultural texts. As Mieke Bal puts it,
collecting is an inalienable human trait, derived from the need to tell stories, for which it is impossible to find a suitable form in words or any other conventional narrative model. Collecting is, therefore, storytelling; everyone has a need for such storytelling, which, at the same time, does not mean that every person is or can become a collector.1
According to Mieke Bal, amassing things begins to mean collecting when a series of random acquisitions or gifts suddenly becomes a meaningful sequence. It is from this point that the collector begins to consciously ‘telling his/her story’ and becomes a narrator, creating a personal and ephemeral kind of semiotics for a narrative dedicated to identity, history, passing etc. At the same time, Ball emphasises that there is a huge difference between the discourse of language and material culture because, unlike words, objects have an inalienable physical form, occupying their own place in space-time. This means that objects (for instance non-European artefacts), unlike words always retain and contain a connection to the original context from which they come, they are a content in themselves no matter how many times and how they are reinterpreted.
A microbiographical perspective is necessary not only to gain an intimate insight into the collector’s psychological constraction and detect his or her motivation for collecting, which compensated for any social mismatch. It allows us to perceive the dynamic of the sociocultural procesesses which are mediated by art and artefacts. Regardless of whether we view collections in terms of history and the development of taste or the production of knowledge, they are an intrinsic part of the cultural landscape of modern Europe. The aim of this book, as a whole, is to show the complexity of collecting and, indirectly, to reveal the infinite dimension of the dependencies and entanglements of culture and social contexts. These relations, specified in the postmodern era, are not only of historical significance. Touching on essential issues to the definition of culture in general, they remain relevant, generating current questions and becoming subject to new reinterpretations within contemporary discourses in material culture studies.
M. Bal, Telling Objects. A Narrative Perspective on Collecting, in The Cultures of Collecting, J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds.), London: Reaktion Books, 1994, p. 103.