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Europe
It was during the second half of the 19th century that museums began to proliferate in Europe; civic pride and the free education movement were among the causes of this development. About 100 opened in Britain in the 15 years before 1887; some 50 museums were established in Germany in the five years from 1876 to 1880; and, with the opening of the magnificent Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1891, most of the imperial Habsburg collections were finally housed and displayed in one place. This was also a period of innovation. The Liverpool Museums in England, for example, began circulating specimens to schools for educational purposes; panoramas and habitat groups were used to facilitate interpretation. As first gas lighting and then electric lighting became available, museums extended their hours into the evenings to provide service to those unable to visit during the day.
South America
The increase in the number of museums was not, however, a peculiarity of Europe or North America. In South America particularly, new museums were founded both in the capital cities and in the provinces. Some of these were provided by universities, as in the case of the Geological Museum in Lima, Peru (1891), or the Geographical and Geological Museum at São Paulo, Brazil (1895). Others were created by provincial bodies: the regional museums at Córdoba (1887) and Gualeguaychu (1898), both in Argentina, and at Ouro Prêto, Brazil (1876); the Hualpen Museum in Chile (1882); and the Municipal Museum and Library at Guayaquil, Ecuador (1862). New specialist national museums also appeared in certain countries, while at Tigre, in Argentina, a maritime museum was founded in 1892. Early in the following century, memorial museums were created, including those dedicated to Bartolomé Mitre, a former president of Argentina, in Buenos Aires (1906) and to Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela (1911).
Asia
By this time the Indian Museum, in Kolkata, and what is now the National Museum, in Jakarta, were well-established institutions in Asia, but a number of new museums were appearing as well. In Japan a museum to encourage industry and the development of natural resources was opened in 1872; this provided the basis for the present-day Tokyo National Museum and National Science Museum (also in Tokyo). Although some learned-society museums existed in China in the late 19th century, the first museum in the strict sense of the word was the Nantong Museum in Jiangsu province, founded in 1905, to be followed within a decade by the National Museum of Chinese History in Beijing (the museum merged with the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in 2003 to create the National Museum of China) and the Beijiang Museum in Tianjin (now Tianjin Natural History Museum). The collections established in the Grand Palace at Bangkok in 1874 eventually became the Bangkok National Museum. The National Museum of Sri Lanka, in Colombo, opened to the public in 1877; the Sarawak Museum (now in Malaysia) opened in 1891; and the Peshawar Museum, in Pakistan, opened in 1907.
Africa
In central and southern Africa, museums were founded early in the 20th century. Zimbabwe’s national museums at Bulawayo and Harare (then known as Salisbury) were founded in 1901, the Uganda Museum originated in 1908 from collections assembled by the British District Commissioners, and the National Museum of Kenya (now part of the National Museums of Kenya) in Nairobi was commenced by the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society in 1909. Mozambique’s first museum, the Alvaro de Castro Natural History Museum in Maputo, was founded in 1913. Meanwhile in North Africa the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (founded 1835) had been relocated to its new building in 1902, and certain of the collections had been transferred to form two new institutions: the Museum of Islamic Art (1903) and the Coptic Museum (1908). In South Africa there was steady museum development in a number of the provinces—for example, in Grahamstown (1837), Port Elizabeth (1856), Bloemfontein (1877), Durban (1887), Pretoria (1893), and Pietermaritzburg (1903).
The 20th and 21st centuries
Early period of reassessment
The first half of the 20th century saw the profound social consequences of the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and periods of economic recession. For museums in Europe this was a period of major reassessment. Governments, professional associations, and other organizations reviewed the role of museums in a changing society and made a number of suggestions to improve their service to the public. In some countries new approaches were developed, in others museums continued to reflect their diverse ancestry, and some decades were to pass before resources generally became available for the implementation of major changes.
Change was notably radical in Russia, where collections and museums were brought under state control following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Vladimir Lenin’s belief that culture was for the people and his efforts to preserve the country’s cultural heritage led to a trebling of the number of museums in 20 years. Not only was much of the country’s artistic, historic, and scientific heritage brought together in museums, but other types of museums emerged as well. Particular attention was given to amassing material related to Russia’s three revolutions. The earliest museum to result from such collections opened in 1919 in the Winter Palace at Petrograd (St. Petersburg); after 1924 the Central Museum of the Revolution in Moscow became the focal point for these collections. Another type was the memorial museum housing the personal effects of well-known figures. Sometimes, as with the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow (1936–93), they were means of communicating political propaganda.
In Germany a large number of regional museums were established after World War I to promote the history and important figures of the homeland, and they undoubtedly encouraged the nationalistic tendencies that led to the Nazi era.
In the main, however, museums were not well organized to meet changing social conditions. In Britain a diversity of providers—government at both national and local levels, universities, societies, companies, and individuals—did not encourage cohesive policy making at a national level. In central Europe associations attempted to develop and run individual museums, but they were unable to provide the necessary resources. Outside Europe the influence of social change was less marked, and there was little evidence that museums were being organized as a national force. In the United States museum development was influenced by a desire to establish a coherent past—a movement that was widely encouraged through private patronage.
In the industrialized world new types of museums appeared. Some nations made conscious attempts to preserve and display structures and customs of their more recent past. Examples, following Sweden’s pioneering re-erection of significant buildings, include the open-air museums at Arnhem, Netherlands (Netherlands Open Air Museum; opened 1912), and at St. Fagans, Wales (the Museum of Welsh Life; opened as the Welsh Folk Museum in 1948). The preservation and restoration of buildings or entire settlements in situ also began; particularly well known is Colonial Williamsburg, founded in Virginia in 1926. A new type of science museum also emerged, in which static displays of scientific instruments and equipment were replaced with demonstrations of the applications of science. London’s Science Museum, founded in 1857, eventually was moved to specially built premises in 1919 and is now one of three museums that constitute the National Museum of Science and Industry. Similarly, the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich was transferred to new premises in 1925, and its growth continued throughout the century. Both established worldwide reputations for excellence in interpreting science and technology for the general public.
Post-World War II era
Museums and the public
The years immediately following World War II were a period of remarkable achievement for museums. This was reflected both in international and national policy and in the individual museums as they responded to a rapidly changing, better-educated society. Museums became an educational facility, a source of leisure activity, and a medium of communication. Their strength lay in the fact that they were repositories of the “real thing,” which—unlike the surrounding world of plastics, reproduced images, and a deteriorating natural and human environment—could inspire and invoke a sense of wonder, reality, stability, and even nostalgia.
In Europe particularly there was a period of postwar reconstruction. Many art treasures had been removed to places of safety during the war, and they now had to be recovered and redisplayed; buildings also had to be refurbished. In some cases museums and their collections had been destroyed; in others collections had been looted (though in some cases restitution followed). Reconstruction provided opportunities for the realization of some of the ideas that had been advanced earlier in the century. A new approach emerged in which curators in the larger museums became members of a team comprising scientists as conservators, designers to assist in exhibition work, educators to develop facilities for both students and the public, information scientists to handle the scientific data inherent in collections, and even marketing managers to promote the museum and its work. There was a perceptible shift from serving the scholar, as befits an institution holding much of the primary evidence of the material world, to providing for a lay public as well. As a result of such innovations, museums found a new popularity and attracted an increasing number of visitors. Many of the visitors were tourists, and governments, particularly in certain European countries, soon acknowledged the contribution of museums to the economy.
Statistics from the United States give an indication of the increase in the number of museums and in museum visiting. Of some 16,000 museums reported in the early 21st century, almost 90 percent had been founded since 1950 and more than 70 percent since 1970. According to the American Alliance of Museums, American museums had nearly 850 million visits in 2008; in 1988 the recorded figure was 566 million. Some of the oldest established museums in Europe—such as the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Hermitage—each regularly attract more than 5 million visitors a year. Some science and technology museums are even more popular.