The classical model of the public art museum

Museums

Hamburger Bahnhof and the "Classical Model" of the Public Art Museum

What has come to be known as the "classic model" of the public art museum is rooted in the evolution of art museums in Europe throughout the last few centuries. The classical model has, over time, served not merely a philanthropical purpose, but also a political one. The work of McClellan has emphasized the role of the museum as a proponent of national ideologies:

Public art museums in the West serve the cause of nations in two ways. First, they foster feelings of collective belonging by providing a space dedicated to shared enjoyment of treasures in the public domain and in which equality of access renders citizenship transparent. Second, through their contents and strategies of display, museums identify the nation-states that sponsor them as heirs to Western civilization and adherents of the modern tradition. (in an age of increasing multiculturalism they are beginning to embrace non-Western visual cultures as well.) Frequently the presence of native artists in the collection transforms a passive inheritance of mainstream values into an active participation in and contribution to that civilization (McClellan 1996, 29).

It would be false to believe, however, that museums have strictly served the purpose of propaganda throughout history - nor is it correct to assume that the nationalistic function of museums is inherently sinister. To the latter dismissal, one could affirm that the sense of collectivity that the public art museums have fostered among citizens has helped reinforce positive notions of national identity where such notions have been lacking. As for the claim that the famous museums have merely served to reinforce the whims of the status quo, one can object that public art museums also serve to educate and inspire the public-at-large, and do not limit itself to any one particular audience.

With all of these thoughts in mind, then, we will now go on to examine the ways in which Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof - a museum whose building was initially constructed for quite different purposes, for use as a train station, in 1847 and currently houses the German National Gallery's collection of contemporary art - play into this conception of the museum?

To answer this question, we must first take a closer look at the classical museum model. Perhaps there is no better example to start with than the Louvre, widely regarded as one of the most important public art collections in the world. While the Louvre was initially formed with some of the nationalistic ideology described above in mind, the Louvre was also unique in its mission to foster the production of new art through a variety of commissioning programs.

In addition to displaying recent French efforts in painting, the museum was intended to play a part in producing that art, for, in accordance with contemporary art theory, a universal style in painting must be grounded in a knowledge and assimilation of the best art of the past. In theory the museum would sustain the grand manner by presenting regional artistic traditions, including the French, and making them accessible to aspiring young artists for the purposes of study and copying. In an important sense the museum shaped the future even as it represented the past (McClellan 1996, 35).

As such, the Louvre embarked upon an ambitious project of not only preserving and presenting the splendors of the past, but also of providing a showcase of the best new art that was being produced in the present.

The Hamburger Bahnhof has in many ways conformed to this aspect of the classic museum model. The museum's permanent collection, which is constantly rotating, features works by many "contemporary" (i.e. living or recently-lived) artists, representative of the major trends in western art, from the 1960s to the present day. But a vast portion of the Hamburger Bahnhof's ample exhibition space is devoted to temporary exhibitions by younger, up-and-coming artists who, on both a national and international scale, are widely considered to be producing work that is emblematic of the future of art.

Unlike the claims made in the first quotation by McClellan above, however, the Hamburger Bahnhof manages to refute claims of national favoritism by refusing to play into the "grand narrative" curatorial techniques that so many national collections are rooted in. With the sole exception of a permanent exhibition room solely devoted to the work of Joseph Beuys - widely considered to be among the most important German artists of the post-war period - the Hamburger Bahnhof features a fair balance of works by contemporary artists from all over the world. As a matter of fact, many of the more important names of German art from the last few years are noticeably absent from the exhibition spaces. In the words of Forster-Hahn, writing shortly before the Museum's opening in 1996:

Amid increasingly fervent discourse on the possibility or impossibility of nationhood in the postmodern world, the vast space of the reconstructed railroad station installed with works by artists such as Joseph Beuys - but also with the flickering images of Nam June Paik - does not conjure up allusions to a static, permanent staple of art. Here, trains and railroad station come to signify mobility and connections, and seem to contradict the very idea of a national gallery. The National Gallery's new project therefore evokes the vision of a museum in a global rather than in a national context, producing a new narrative for the architecture of the railroad station as well as for the art it contains (Forster-Hahn 1996, 96).

This brings us to our next discussion: the unusual architecture of the Hamburger Bahnhof. As the museum's name reminds us ("Bahnhof" means "train station" in German), the Hamburger Bahnhof was not constructed for use as a museum. Rather, it was initially constructed in the mid-19th century to serve as the terminal for the Hamburg-Berlin railway line. The refurbishment of the building to suit the museum's purposes has purposefully retained several traces of its previous purpose, most notably in the form of the monolithic main hall that strikes visitors upon entering; this is where the trains would have arrived and departed. Thus, Forster-Hahn's description of the project is certainly apt in its description of Hamburger Bahnhof's architectural challenge to the classical museum model.