Design museums chart the history of design movements and influence design principles and contemporary taste because the objects that make up their collections are considered to be exemplary works.
They not only exhibit the history of design by displaying objects, they are also a public forum for the dissemination and discussion of new design developments. Design museums function as educational establishments, as technology museums, and as a driving force for local business development.
“Museum” originally referred to a temple or shrine erected in antiquity to honor the muses, the female personifications of literature, music, and dance. However, the most famous of these, the Museum of Alexandria, was more acclaimed for its legendary library than its collection of objects.
This storehouse of knowledge was a meeting place for scholars and the center of a social and intellectual community. Besides collecting, preserving, and procuring objects, one of a museum’s priorities is stimulating a collective production of knowledge, whether in the form of talks, research projects, or publications.
Yet ancient and contemporary museums have something else in common: both were created to preserve objects that are so treasured they need to be removed from daily use and economic circulation.
Initially, these objects were sacrificial offerings to the gods; now it is the evidence of past cultures, artworks and design objects considered exemplary by experts, or simply those things accumulated by an obsessive collector who has then founded a museum, hoping to defy the passing of time and to leave a record for posterity.
The Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, began as a vision of H.J. Lutcher Stark and his mother, Miriam Lutcher Stark, an enthusiastic collector of art, furniture, and decorative items from around the world. The Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, houses one of the nation’s most significant collections of American Western art.
Critics have always made an issue of the fact that museums transform things into aesthetic cult objects by removing them from their social, functional, religious, and economic contexts. Theodor W. Adorno polemicized against the “family sepulchers of works of art” and Karl Hillebrand, Heinrich Heine’s secretary in Paris, called for the abolition of museums as early as 1874 in his anonymously published Twelve Letters of an Aesthetic Heretic, because they wrench artworks from their true contexts, robbing them of much of their significance.
This was quite a risky assertion especially in Paris, where the royal collection was opened to the public in 1793 as part of a “revolutionary celebration of unity and fraternity.” On the other hand, the history of the Louvre shows that museums in fact are quite capable of creating new contexts. Napoleon Bonaparte cleverly used the Louvre as a political instrument by declaring it a national museum and also a “school for patriots.” Napoleon increased his (and the museum’s) fame by packing the Louvre with art looted from European estates during his military campaigns.
Napoleon let it be known that he appropriated these trophies from the ancien regime for the purpose of social enlightenment. For the first time, luxury goods, previously reserved for a privileged few, fulfilled a service for the public at large: they became material for the education of a nation.
Applied and decorative arts museums also owe their existence to the quest for national supremacy, as demonstrated by the history of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. It was founded in 1852 to improve the quality of consumer goods and make them more attractive to the international market. Great Britain became a free-trade area in the 1840s, which allowed it to compete economically with other countries, in particular with France.
In this context, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, the consort of Queen Victoria, advocated a reform of British Arts & Crafts. Guided by consultants, he was a driving force behind the first world fair, the “Great Exhibition of 1851,” held in Hyde Park at the Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton. The profit generated by this event flowed into collecting applied arts, especially for the Museum of Manufacturers that was affiliated with the Government School of Design.
The museum was moved to its present location in South Kensington in 1857 and was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. Henry Cole, as its first director, was responsible for the museum’s collection policies. As he had also been a joint organizer of the Great Exhibition, it is not surprising that some of the museum’s first acquisitions were products shown at the Great Exhibition that proved to be particularly innovative and cutting-edge artifacts.
Henry Cole believed that the aim of a decorative arts museum was not only to display the skills of the designer, but also to educate all the social classes and to establish a new criterion of taste. With this in mind he introduced Sunday and evening opening hours, so that the working classes would be able to visit the museum.
For rest and relaxation, Cole introduced museum cafes (refreshment rooms) in 1866, one of which was designed by William Morris (Arts & Crafts). Cole’s ambition was to improve the quality of British products by showing students, designers, manufacturers, and users the physical reality, functionality, and production technology of British craftwork using historical examples.
He also integrated new products into the collection that he thought continued these traditions. Cole’s initiative soonfoundemulators around the globe fromthe Museum für angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna (1864), to the Deutsches Gewerbemuseum (German Museumof Applied and Industrial Art) in Berlin (1867), the Leipziger Kunstgewerbemuseum (Leipzig Museum of Decorative Arts) (1874), the Nasjonalmuseet for Kunst, Arkitektur og Design (Museumof Decorative Arts and Design) in Oslo (1876), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1870).
After Cole retired in 1873, his followers lost sight of the role that a museum could play as a bridge between the past and the present, and resorted to expanding their inventories of historic works. It was not until the 1960s that the V&A remembered its wonderful history and, by researching cutting-edge examples from the past, inspired contemporary production.
Retrospective exhibitions featuring Alfons Mucha (1963) and Aubrey Beardsley (1964) had a significant influence on Pop Art, especially on the graphic design used for Beatles album covers, and provided many of the motifs and inspired the design practice that surrounded psychedelic art.
By this time the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York had long become the epitome of a culturally, politically, and economically influential design museum. MoMA was founded in 1929 for “encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life, and furnishing popular instruction,” as stated in its founding charter.
Its first director, Alfred H. Barr, justified his focus on mass-produced articles of daily use with an argument similar to that behind the establishment of the nineteenth-century decorative arts museum in Europe, namely, that of developing new markets.
Consequently, attempts were also made in the United States to campaign against the “miserable mediocrity” of products designed and produced in America.
Modern art was given the task of making designers and users more aware of an aesthetic sensitivity to form that should be present in every facet of life, including typography, clothing, furniture, kitchen utensils, tableware, and architecture. Everything designed in the twentieth century was to serve the beauty of mathematics, mechanics, and purpose. After studying art history and philosophy at Harvard, Alfred H. Barr traveled to Europe in 1927 and became an enthusiastic advocate of Bauhaus principles.
Like Walter Gropius, Barr was convinced that the Bauhaus program precluded placing modern design in a decorative arts museum. The desired unity of the arts and, in particular, the orientation toward the requirements of industrial production, represented too radical a break from the applied and decorative arts tradition.
When admiration for individual creativity and esteem for the skills required for individual handiwork with challenging materials was replaced by respect for the inventive spirit and the elevation of machine aesthetics, Arts & Crafts and design were seen as incompatible opposites whose products could never be placed under one roof. Modernity which made fetishizing the original and bourgeois conventions things of the past needed its own home, one that was dedicated to future visions of “new men” and not to relics of the past.
New York’s MoMA, a model institution for the entire world, happily took on this challenge. Right up to the 1940s, European modernity was accepted as mainstream culture, especially as it was possible to point out that the United States was willing to guarantee this modernity, particularly when it could be shown that it was supported by migrants like Mies van der Rohe or Herbert Bayer who had been persecuted and exiled by fascism.
With clear, didactical concepts, Alfred H. Barr and curator Philip Johnson campaigned against the conservative tastes of the “uneducated” masses and directed them toward an interest in contemporary design. With exhibitions such as “Objects: 1900 and Today” (1933), Barr and Johnson unapologetically showed the public what objects should be removed from the modern home because they were “decorative,” and thus aesthetically repetitive (for instance any imitations of natural forms and any objects by Guimard and Tiffany), and what could be shown to be “useful” (Functionalism). Labeled in this way, an object was venerated when its form was motivated by function and that identified and celebrated its practical purpose.
This included an anonymously designed welders’ protective mask, a watering can by Christopher Dresser, and a table clock by Marianne Brandt. Embracing modernity had more to do with a mental attitude than bulging moneybags, a fact demonstrated by MoMA in 1938 with exhibitions such as “Useful Household Objects under $5,” a selection of inexpensive, well-designed kitchen articles and travel implements.