252 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

THE MARRIAGE OF MUSEUMS

By LEWIS MUMFORD
NEW YORK CITY
I
HERE is something symbolic in the proposal, possibly soon
to be effected, to join by a direct path the museums of
art and natural history in Manhattan; for it points to a new
kinship between these two instiutions that lies much deeper
than their supposedly common purpose in fostering learning
and spreading culture. Were the tie of education the only one
that bound them together there would be no greater fitness in
the plan for a connecting walk through Central Park than
there would be in one for cutting a driveway between New York
University and the American Geographical Society. It is not
the aims of the two museums being alike, but their becoming
complementary, that gives the proposal a significance. The
physical connection will serve to emphasize a cultural borrowing
which has at once introduced the presentments of graphic art
into the nature museum, and the organic conception of life
into the art museum: with the result in certain galleries that
the absent-minded visitor will be at loss to recall which museum
he is making an inspection of.
The transformation which is taking place in our museums
may be roughly described as that from storehouse to power-
house. The healthy disorder one finds in these institutions to-
day gives evidence of a conflict of traditions which marks this
change from a passive
"
showing off
"
to an active education,
from the uninformed miserly tradition of an earlier day to the
directed socialized spirit of the opening age. On the one hand
the museum bears all too plainly the stamp of its primitive
origin. It is either the robber's cave, the receptacle for princely
loot, or the hunter's cache, the repository for animal skins and
bleached bones. In both of these capacities it is the function
of the museum to acquire as much loot as possible, or as many
bones, and to display as great an amount of these in its halls,
hit or miss, as space and time will allow. In general, this sub-
ordinates esthetic values to those of cash, and scientific values
to those of sportsmanlike interest: and to follow this tradition
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THE MARRIAGE OF MUSEUMS 253
is not so much to promote science and art as to add renown to
the hunter and the warrior, as
they existed in their
past naked-
ness or in the various thin disguises of
to-day: commercialist
and art collector, country gentleman and
explorer.
Nominally instituted to further science and art, the mu-
seums have been at the mercy of
every rich
ignoramus who
has cared to perpetuate his name to posterity through a respect-
able interest in cultural activities; and while this handicap has
not worked grievously in the domain of natural science, it has
spelt disaster in the arts, where such bequests as the Stewart
Gallery in the Public
Library and the biblical
supplement gal-
lery in the Brooklyn Institute swamp those of our Altmans
and Morgans in the ratio of about three to one. We may laugh
at the savage for burying the trophies of chase alongside the
deceased hunter; but on closer inspection the savage has the
advantage over us. He at least buries the trophies. We can
only remove the dead, whilst, through the operation of legal
processes, we allow the trophies an ascendancy over us we
would never permit the living to enjoy.
Now the museums can not slough off the
trophy-collecting
convention by overtly refusing gifts, especially when these are
accompanied by funds, and when the slightest hint of aversion
would withdraw the support of some pillar of society; but they
can nullify the effects of indiscriminate collection by reconsti-
tuting the very ends, and therewith the methods, of museum
exhibition, so that no
object need be kept on view for purely
honorific reasons. It is possible to avoid invidious selection by
creating a certain environment within the museum and then
trusting to the processes of natural selection to weed out ob-
jects which are exotic to the environment. I do not say that
this is what the museum authorities are at present consciously
attempting; but I do say that their efforts come practically to
this conclusion. And it is the
tendency to abandon the tradi-
tions of the warehouse and the treasure
vault, and to make the
museum a concrete theater of
history, as one follows life from
region to region and from period to period, which has given it
a new social
orientation, and which
promises that in pursuing
the same goal the two museums will tend to approach within
hailing distance of each other. Given a common social basis,
collection and presentation will have a common social end: for
it is chiefly owing to the absence of any serious purposes that
the art and nature museums have seemed to be at cross pur-
poses. Once it is granted that both seek to enrich the mean-
ing of contemporary life by showing men, in colloquial phrase,
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254 THE SCIENTIFIC
MONTHLY
where they are at, in relation to ages past and present, and
lands far and near, and ancestors, living and dead: once this is
granted, the museum is equipped with a criterion of selection to
supplement (and in many cases reinforce) the criterion of
beauty which prevails in one place, or that of truth-furtherance
which holds in the other.
II
While the natural history museum has always nominally
kept in mind the conception of a habitat, the idea of art's being
presented in its social background was for long quite foreign to
museum authorities. Art was something apart; by its nature
divorced from this world of shadows and at home only in the
heaven of platonic ideals; and the museum existed solely to
conserve and consecrate objects of art so that men might com-
mune with them within its walls as their fathers in an earlier
age communed with God. There was no notion here of the
arts being as closely bound to life as the shell to the snail: not
to be severed without causing death to the creature or making
futile the thing it had erected for its comfort and delight.
Rather, it was felt that snails could not only live without shells,
but that roundworms could by careful imitation create shells
like those snails had once deposited. This attitude toward
art, baldly put in metaphor, was the outcome, not of any real
break between art and life (for they are joined even in dissolu-
tion) but of a divorce between life and those who patronized
art; and until a very late date, when the old teachings of Ruskin
and Morris began to take effect, the idea of art's being irrele-
vant to its environment was reflected in the museums. The
showcase or the gallery was the exhibition unit; the aim was to
admire art as a thing in itself; the subsidiary instruments for
satisfying historical curiosity were the guidebook and the pro-
fessional treatise.
Unfortunately this detached view of art defeated the very
aim it thought to serve. There is indeed something to be said
for not hedging the esthetic mood with all sorts of secondary in-
tellectual interests, and on the surface the introduction of the
social background might seem to provoke a discordance; but
this no more holds in
reality than (as I shall show) the con-
trary practise in the museum of natural history. Putting ob-
jects of art into what is approximately the environment out
of which they have been plucked actually heightens the savor of
the art itself, the esthetic note being only fully sounded when
every object in the vicinity takes up the note and vibrates in
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THE MARRIAGE OF MUSEUMS 255
sympathy with it. This is what is done in the Swiss, the
Georgian, and the Queen Anne rooms in the Metropolitan Mu-
seum. Were the gallery tradition followed each bed, picture,
mirror, or table in these rooms would have been presented, so
to say, in severalty: and had the museum been able to put
seven fourposters side by side,
or a dozen consoles, the supposi-
tion would be that the museum was so much the richer. And
this would be true from a mercenary and miserly point of view;
but it would be a banal distortion from the standpoint of art.
Three double beds by Robert Adam in the same room would
give the impression that the Walpole ministry had a housing
problem in Portland Square; a dozen mantels in one dining
room would give currency to the notion that every one used
to "eat off the mantelpiece." A plethora of discrete objects,
especially when they are the same or similar objects, prevents
one from seeing a single object: when the eye is overwhelmed
with a horde of creditors crying for attention, it despairs of
meeting any demand at all and goes bankrupt. Hence the wis-
dom of putting art in its proper setting, which means putting
it in its place. It is the scientific, environmental presentation
that meets all the demands of art. For only when the proper
surroundings have been established to provoke the esthetic
mood will the esthetic mood lift the observer out of his sur-
roundings.
Plainly this naturalist treatment of the arts, at once his-
toric and esthetic, is but yet in its infancy; and the museum has
still many a dusty corner to sweep away before every art collec-
tion will have its environment. Certain periods, it goes with-
out saying, can never be done minutely in the grand style, with
rooms to illustrate amply phase after phase of significant social
life: this would be the true pinnacle of attainment, and a
"
con-
summation devoutly to be wished "; but to accomplish so col-
lossal a work of reconstruction at present staggers the imagina-
tion, and as a compromise the miniature period stage, as indi-
cated in the models that the Metropolitan is acquiring, enters
with an air of importance.
Models have long played no little part in museum exhibi-
tion. Those of the Parthenon and of Notre Dame at the Metro-
politan are especially well known; and because of their solidity
and four-squareness they have a place in the study of archi-
tecture that could never be completely usurped by pictures and
working drawings. But the new use of models is theatric; it
aims at embodying a whole period in a scene. The model-maker
takes the scattered materials that have survived the ages, here
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256 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
a chair and there a table and yon a wall, and he reconstructs
in little the details of the society whose relics have been gath-
ered, bringing together on his stage elements that have been
widely scattered and showing in concrete, relations which would
otherwise have only been dimly perceived. This art, or rather
its fresh bias, is not yet sufficiently familiar to permit a final
word to be pronounced upon its possibilities: its present status
is due to the fine craftsmanship of a single man, Mr. Dwight
Franklin. But one can not study the already attained suc-
cesses with lighting and vividly depicted action without coming
to the conclusion that the mimetic representation of past epochs
will annex for itself a wide territory in the reconstituted mu-
seum, and that the time may come when people, plain and so-
phisticated, will have opportunity for a glimpse of ancient art
and manners (and therewith of social history) through the
direct medium of the vision, without being forced to rely solely
upon the attenuated descriptions of the printed word. Not
as substitutes for the "real thing," but as a method of making
real things less strange will models like those foreshadowed in
the English Hall or the entrance to St. Sophia's finally be made
for every period of significance. Their appearance in the Mu-
seum of Art is surely a token of that nascent social interest to
which reference has been made. They introduce the notion of
the arts as a natural flowering of healthy societies, rather than
as a mysterious irruption that somehow, despite a popular love
for the false, the vile, and the hideous, intrudes itself upon a
society. To see the arts in their proper setting is to restore the
organic conceptions of the arts, and the organic conception is
that of natural history.
III
But if the art museum is espousing the methods of science
with its emphasis upon the continuity of living things, and the
relation of organism to environment, and craftsman to period,
it is no less true that the science museum is taking advantage of
the synthetic vision of the artist. So far from being occupied
with the purely cognitive aspects of the natural sciences, the
American Museum has been increasingly eager to develop their
emotional aspects and to further their application to the arts.
This has been done in three ways. In the first place, art
workers have been encouraged to make use of the primitive
patterns created by the indigenous American craftsmen of the
loom and the potter's wheel. The result of this has been to
lengthen our historical perspective and to detach the workers
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THE MARRIAGE OF MUSEUMS 2a7
from a perhaps too close apprenticeship to European models.
These borrowings from a more primitive culture break down
the ancient Greek antithesis between nature and art by means
of the arts created by the so-called nature-peoples; and by
bridging the gap between the two separate fields it has brought
the museums that represent these fields into a closer working
community.
The second phase of the museum's artistic activity has been
in the reconstruction, first in drawings and then in single cases
and now in whole galleries, of the natural habitat of the wild
creatures whose lives are to be portrayed. No mention of this
return to nature in the study of nature could be made without
reference to the work of Mr. Charles Knight. Combining
scientific penetration and artistic insight in a remarkable de-
gree he has in his drawings, from the first water-color sketches
of our saurian ancestors, divined from the meager evidence of
a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair, to the last sweeping mural
of the hairy mammoth, effaced by the synthesis of his own per-
sonality the ill-conceived antagonism between science and art
that was handed down from an earlier age. That without the
love and the beauty of nature there can be no geography or no
nature study worthy of the name has already been urged by
the eminent botanist, and art critic likewise, Patrick Geddes.
But conventional practise sterilized this love and made abortive
this beauty by isolating art in a peculiar building, as though it
were a contagious disease, at the same time that it reduced nature
study to a mere grind of names. From this paralyzing prac-
tise the artist-scientist is cutting loose. He places his art at the
service of science, and he uses his science as a frame for his art:
and he has thus to no little extent given back to the artist the
opportunity for public service which disappeared with the de-
cline of the middle ages and the usurpation by the leisure
classes of the artist's talent for the gratification of idiotic
whimsies.
The decoration of nature backgrounds for animal groups is
but the recovery for the new cosmogony of those religious inter-
pretations which have a hallowed place in medieval churches.
And the fact that the interest in nature per se is contemporary
with the development of landscape painting (due in both cases
to the arousal of a new, non-invidious curiosity in things) is
perhaps an indication of the essential reasonableness in calling
in the landscape painter as an aid to the naturalist. This is a
new field of the artist of realist tendencies: it opens the way for
an escape from
"
gallery art," while it gives the photographer
VOL. vii.-17.
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258 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
of contemporary esthetic derision a fresh raison d'etre and a
refurbished purpose in life. Here is also at last a place for
those academics and scholiasts who in the teaching of art insist
upon truth values, those of anatomical perfection and fidelity
to exterior form, as the salvation from slackness, laziness,
meretriciousness and the like. Losing their foothold inch by
inch in the art galleries, they may at least find refuge without
compromise in our museums of natural history. I do not point
out this possibility in irony. The classicists in art have still a
place left for them in society, as the creators of decorations
that aim to establish a moral, a civic, or a scientific truth
through the medium of art. And it is only within the very
narrow sanctuary of pure esthetic being that the incense they
offer on the altar of truth pours upward in a heavy fume that
conceals all the delicate beauties of the little temple. In the
museum of natural history their craft is not to be despised; for
the technique of naturalism is largely an objective technique;
and its logic is the single one that will accommodate itself to
values extraneous to those demanded by an absolute esthetic re-
sponse. Despite the difficulties offered by walls whose surface
is marred with useless windows and by galleries which were
never meant to serve the ends of esthetic contemplation, the
artist has much in the nature museum to spur as well as hinder
his technique. And beyond doubt the new additions to the
Natural History Museum will be planned in full recognition of
the artist's coeval interest with the scientist in the most effective
display of a collection in its manifold aspects.
The third manner in which the museum has utilized the
artist is by employing him to render models in plaster and wax
of animals, man for one, that defy the most adept efforts of the
taxidermist. Here is a province that the sculptor of highest
rank need not disdain to tread. Consider the opportunities of-
fered by one of the life-sized or slightly reduced groups of
peoples engaged in their native occupations; such a group as
that of the Pueblo dwellers, for example. In many ways the
ethnic casts made by the museum workers are beyond approach:
they are faithful in all the minutiae which patience and manual
skill can take care of, and they appear against such ably con-
ceived backgrounds that it is not easy to detect wherein they
fall short of the highest. Examining with more critical eye
the figures themselves, however, one gets the sense of a lost
opportunity, and one feels that in order to measure up to the sci-
entific accuracy of the setting as a whole the figures should have
been done by as skilled a hand as knows how to use modeling
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THE MARRIAGE OF MUSEUMS 259
tools-that here is a subject which might tempt the genius of
Phidias or Praxiteles or which might in our own day have en-
listed the hand of such a many-faceted master as Rodin himself.
Is it too much to expect that the museum of the future will
include along with its numerous and capable artists of the brush
an array of naturalist sculptors whose quality will be little, if
any, below the finest offerings of their contemporaries?
The interest of the age is above all scientific: why then
should it not use art creatively for its purposes? The great
statues of Greece and Rome were found in the baths and gym-
nasia and theaters; for there the cultured life of the time was
centered, and the artist was called upon to enrich the meaning
of that life by transfiguring its quality in marble. To-day we
have not lost these interests, but we have added to them the
impassioned curiosities of science; and the Milesian Venuses
and Indian Bacchuses of another day have a niche awaiting
them in our museums of natural history. Who but the sculp-
tor with undisputed mastery should perpetuate for us the subtly
molded human figure, differing as it does from race to race and
climate to climate. The present figure groups in the museum
are but a beginning. They do no more than represent the
grosser divisions of the human race, as between Bushman and
Kaffir, between Chinaman and European. And even here, in
lieu of a robuster ideal of art, there is a perpetual baffling of
the scientific interest by differentiating not between men as
animals, but between men as the lay figures of civilization, a
Chinese farmer being placed alongside a Norwegian matron,
each in the regalia of daily life, as though the sculptor had been
dismayed by his deficiencies and had thought to conceal them
under the obvious camouflage of clothes. Further than this
naive revelation of types the museum must soon go; but it can
obviously not travel far until the highest range of artistry is
incorporated in its staff. This is not to disparage present
achievements: it is rather to acknowledge their worth by show-
ing to what heights they draw the imagination. Once let the
scientific impulse get hold of the sculptor (who is an anatomist
by current practise anyway)
and a new horizon of possibility
will open up for both science and art.
In the statuary exhibited last year by Mr. Charles Knight
there is a hint of how deep the communion of purpose may be
when once it is realized that knowing and feeling are not
warring " faculties" of the mind, but diverse attitudes which
men assume at appropriate times in their endeavor to have
commerce with the things that lie about them. Any emphasis
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260 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
of antagonism is more than banal: it is ignorant. Both science
and art are means of opening that oyster, which is the world;
and if the one seeks chiefly to dissect the bivalve while the other
loses itself in contemplation of the pearl, this should not ob-
scure the fact that they must open the same oyster, and that
they may well, for the attainment of this mutual end, take hold
of the same instrument and use their forces jointly. It is this
truth that is coming to be recognized in our museums as they
abandon their primitive reasons for existence and seek to jus-
tify their further extension by activities which harmonize with
the democratic sympathies of the present order. Hence the
environmental treatment of the arts in the art museum; hence
the artistic presentation of nature in the nature museum; hence
the shift in accent, but not in aim, as one passes from one
museum to the other. This perception of a common and com-
plementary purpose indicates, I believe, something like a mar-
riage between the two kinds of museum; a union which might
well be sanctified by civic authority in a connecting pathway.
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