Reviews

doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq021

National and Notional Spaces

Daria Santini
Peter McIsaac, Museums of the Mind. German Modernity and the Dynamics
of Collecting (The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park,
2007).

This study of the relationship between museum culture and

modern German literature begins with a discussion of the
sthetik des
opening passage of Peter Weisss novel Die A
Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975 81). The
setting is the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where a group of
young militant antifascists is standing in front of the
Pergamon Altar. In a famous example of ekphrastic prose,
Weiss describes the ancient frieze as the characters see it
and his sentences, which reproduce on the page the
movements of the statues and the fragmentation of the
marble, convey the spectacle of the great battle between
gods and giants in all its compelling dynamism. As McIsaac
points out, Weisss narrative makes the reader into [. . .] a
person who can challenge the myths constructed by the
museum display in order to nd Herakles in the minds eye
(p. 5). The idea of the mythical hero as we see him in our
mind is a suggestive one. It is also an apt introduction to
the central premise of this book, since it evokes two
concepts of crucial importance for any examination of
the role of museal imagery in the literature of the
German-speaking world: the signicance of Bildung as the
cultivation of the self according to the neo-humanistic
tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
the existence of an internalised vision of external reality
which is comparable to the organised environment of a
museum space.
The theme of the presence of the museum as a cultural
paradigm (p. 11) guides the author through a series of
literary texts that span from Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Afnities, 1809) to the work of the contemporary
poet and essayist Durs Gru
nbein. McIsaac applies to
Germany a set of categories that has already been
employed to illustrate the links between visual and literary
culture in England and France. In his rst chapter, he
acknowledges these antecedents1 and explains the
distinctive features of his own project:
What distinguishes my work from these allied approaches are
three related points: the German-speaking traditions I work on,
the time frame of my study (1800 to the present), and the
theoretical framework (the museum function) I develop to gain
access to inventoried consciousness in the age of the public
museum (p. 11).

The author is right to underline the peculiarity of the

German context, and his book is the rst extensive study on
this subject. As his research shows, the discourse of
collecting and museum culture was central to the
construction of a German national identity in a way which
only partly resembles similar developments in the rest of
Europe and still reverberates today. As for the period on
which McIsaac has chosen to concentrate, his main guides
are Goethe and Walter Benjamin, thanks to their
contributions in the elds of aesthetics and the cultural
history of collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, respectively. In order to illustrate the theory
behind the idea of a modern philosophy of collecting, in his
introductory chapter, he refers not only to Benjamin but also
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010 241

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denitions of modernism here. For some of the contributors,

nostalgia and excess are all part of the modern seaside; for
others, these are in conict with a more avant-garde vision
of austerity and abstraction. There is a distinction, too,
between the sociable world of the seaside holiday,
celebrated in many of the contributions, and the elemental
world of sand and water which gures in others.
Inevitably, the contributors to the volume nd much in the
cultural milieu of the twentieth-century seaside that is not
modern. For the novelist and art critic Michael Bracewell, it
is characterised by an intense, endlessly renewing contract
with nostalgia (p. 43); while the earliest seaside memories
of lmmaker Andrew Ko
tting were of old people shufing
around with cups of tea, Rod Hull and his Emu, Brass
Bands, Toby jugs and winceyette tights . . . not modern
(p. 45). David Bradshaw points out that, by the end of the
First World War, the seaside was associated with a
discredited, patriotic view of history, which made it less than
appealing to many modernist writers. Alan Powers essay on
the background to the Aldeburgh Festival presents it as the
arrival of modernism, but it had its origins in Benjamin
Brittens reading of George Crabbes poem, The Borough,
rst published in 1810. On the other hand, Paul Rennie
shows effectively how the idea of the seaside as the ideal
modern space made it a suitable model for the Thames-side
walk of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Its carnivalesque
egalitarianism also produced an art of excess in lms such
as Hindle Wakes (1927), discussed by Lara Feigel.
Some of the essays in Modernism on Sea are quite slight,
others are closely argued and scholarly, but all are readable
and thought-provoking. The collection closes with an
impressively interdisciplinary essay by Alexandra Harris which
draws on art, music, literature, and lm to argue that the
ongoing battle between man and the elements at the seaside
breeds a tradition of ritual ordering, of semi-magic practices
that serve to dene the limits between the human world and
uncontrollable nature as if invented to hold back the tide.
This essay refers back to many of the writers and artists
covered by earlier chapters, but also introduces new
examples, including the seaside surrealism of Paul Nash,
Derek Jarmans garden at Dungeness, and Graham Swifts
1996 novel, Last Orders. It provides a tting conclusion to a
stimulating and wide-ranging volume. Sargent and the Sea is
much more narrowly focused, but no less enjoyable, both as
a visual feast and as a thorough exploration of an important
episode in the history of marine painting.

Reviews

In order to form a series of places in memory [. . .] a building is

to be remembered [. . .] the forecourt, the living rooms,
bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other
ornaments with which rooms are decorated3

This picture of a building interior, in which notable places

and objects correspond to different sections of knowledge,
reminds the modern reader of the structural properties of a
museum. Interestingly, McIsaacs discussion of Schinckels
museal aesthetics in eighteenth-century Berlin4 introduces a
similar notion of the importance of architecture and inner
spaces as symbolically connected to the memorisation of
knowledge. In the chapter on Durs Gru
nbein, he does
indeed allude to the legend of Simonidess contribution to
mnemonics, and even goes as far as recognising the
relevance of the theory of memory for every writer in his
study,5 but a more focused discussion of the classical and
neo-humanistic roots of this inuential idea would have
provided this book with a clearer and more solid frame of
242 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010

reference. Instead, the authors theoretical focus falls rmly

on the twentieth century, with Walter Benjamin being a
recurring presence in every chapter.
Another possible resource on the theme of the memory of
place is the work of Pierre Nora, the French historian whose
monumental project Les Lieux de memoire (Realms of
Memory, 19841992) explores the concept of a spatial
understanding of memory by studying the symbolism of a
geographical space (France), in which landscapes and
objects are given meanings beyond their original historical
context and where cultural memory crystallizes and
secretes itself.6 Indebted to the Foucaultian deconstruction
of ofcial memory, Noras arguments offer some illuminating
points of comparison with McIsaacs meditation about
German literature and museum practices. One example is
that of the role of nature and of regionalist movements in
the construction of a national culture in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century France7 as opposed to the predominantly
philosophical background behind the founding of the rst
German public collections as reections of cultural identity.
The importance of neo-classical aesthetics in the
formation of German museum culture cannot be
underestimated. In Museums of the Mind, a reference to
the emergence of new ideas regarding the perception of art
and the dynamics of collecting in the second half of the
eighteenth century would have helped in understanding
more clearly this particular museal landscape after 1800. In
his chapter on Goethes Elective Afnities, McIsaac does
provide a thorough analysis of the origins of museums in
Germany from the 1790s onwards, but an earlier, signicant
phase of the contribution towards a modern way of
collecting and exhibiting in the previous decades goes
unmentioned. In this respect, it is important to remember
that, since 1779, the rst purpose-built public museum in
continental Europe to house, among other things, a large
collection of classical antiquities was the Fridericianum at
Kassel, an imposing example of neo-Palladian architecture
in the style of the British Museum and to this day one of
the most important German exhibition venues. It would have
also been worth mentioning the legacy of Winckelmanns
aesthetic theory, the enduring impact of Lessings ideas
about the relationship between literature and the visual
arts, and the role of the imagination as an important aspect
of the national identication of the Germans with the
ancient world. Winckelmanns experience in Rome, where
he became an authority on classical antiquities without
having ever been to Greece, marks a turning point in the
German understanding of art. Some passages of his History
of Ancient Art (1764), in which the encounter with ancient
artworks res his imagination and inspires a vivid literary
reconstruction of the past, could indeed be read as early
examples of a museum of the mind in the modern period.8
It is also interesting to note that in the essay entitled
Winckelmann, which he wrote in 1805 (four years before the
publication of Elective Afnities), Goethe emphasises
Winckelmanns imaginative understanding of antiquities and
describes Rome as a place to be experienced through the
inner sense of fantasy and illusion.9

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to the works of Michel Foucault. Whereas the former reects

upon the double dynamics of collecting as both a way of
organising the chaos of contemporary reality and a moment
of disorder, the latter recognises museums as part of an
original power system which governs the display of collected
objects and inuences our perception of them a priori (for
example, by excluding the possibility of alternative views of
history such as the one suggested by Peter Weiss in his
Aesthetics of Resistance).
The theoretical framework for this study rests on the
polarity between inventoried consciousness, as the activity
involved in ordering concepts and objects in our mind, and
museum function, which concerns the processes involved
in the organisation of objects in the world at a specic
social and historical junction. The arguments presented in
the introductory chapter, in which McIsaac provides the
theoretical underpinning for his analysis of the link between
literary writing and museum practices since 1800, are at
times convoluted. And the ambitious claim, expressed at the
end of the introduction, that this type of interpretation could
be applied to more literary works than the ones included in
the book is left unexplained. Despite the authors insistence
on the relationship between literature and museums as a
modern phenomenon, the notion of the museum visitors
who nd the image of the exhibits in their minds or, more
generally, the correspondence between the mental image of
an architectural space and a written text could also be
elucidated by referring to an older tradition. In her inuential
study The Art of Memory (1966), Frances Yates, in tracing
the roots of mnemonics back to classical Greece, to Roman
Rhetoric, and to the neo-Platonic tradition of the Italian
renaissance, mentions Ciceros acknowledgment of the
Greek poet Simonides as the inventor of mnemonics: an art
which uses contemporary architecture2 for places (loci) in
which to situate a visual image of the knowledge to be
remembered (images). In his Institutio oratoria, the Roman
rhetorician Quintilian also describes the process of
constructing architectural memory. In Yatess words:

Reviews

Notes
1. See: Eric Gidal, Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the
British Museum (Bucknell University Press: Lewisburg, 2001), Barbara J. Black,
On Exhibits: Victorians and Their Museums (University Press of Virginia:
Charlottville, 2000), and Catherine E. Paul, Poetry in the Museum of Modernism:
Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2002). But
see also Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories. History, Technology, Art (Stanford
University Press: Stanford, CA, 1999).
2. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (AVK: London, 1984), p. XI.
3. Yates, p. 3.
4. See Museums of the Mind, pp. 60 61.
5. See Museums of the Mind, p. 33.
6. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History. Les Lieux de memoire, trans. by Marc
Roudebush, in Representations 26 Spring 1989, p. 7.
7. See Pierre Nora (ed.), Rethinking France. Les Lieux de memoire, vol. 2, Space,
trans. directed by David P. Jordan (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago
2006), esp. pp. VII, 152, 174, 296 and 393.
8. See, for example, the passages about Winckelmanns imaginary flight to
the olympic stadium at Elis in the second chapter of his History of Ancient Art
trans. by G. Henry Lodge, vol. 2 (James Monroe: Boston, 1849), pp. 256.
9. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, Erich Trunz
(ed.), vol. 12 (DTV: Munich, 1988), p. 108. The passage is a quotation from a
letter written to Goethe by Wilhelm von Humboldt on 23 August 1804.
10. See also Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of
Contexts (Blackwells: Malden, MA, Oxford, 2004), p. 8.
11. Museums of the Mind, p. 183.
12. Museums of the Mind, p. 224.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq018

Hypermodernism in the Boondocks:

Photo/Montage and the Czech Book
Derek Sayer
Vtezslav Nezval, Alphabet, trans. by Jindrich Toman and Matthew
S. Witkovsky (Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor, 2001), 25
b + w illns, 69pp., paperback ISBN 0-930042-88-3, $42.
Jindrich Toman, Kniha v ceskem kubismu/Czech Cubism and the Book
(Kant: Prague, 2004), 212 color and b + w illns, 206pp., hardback
ISBN 80-86217-67-1, Kc. 790.
Jindrich Toman, Foto/montaz tiskem/Photo/Montage in Print (Kant:
Prague, 2009), 410 color and b + w illns, 375pp., hardback ISBN
978-80-86970-92-9, Kc. 1350.
Matthew S. Witkovsky (ed.), Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918
1945 (Thames and Hudson: Washington: National Gallery of Art/
London, 2007), 166 color and b + w illns, 278pp., hardback ISBN
978-0-500-54337-5, paperback ISBN 978-0-89468-334-3, 32.
Let me begin with a book that is not under review here, but
can hardly be left out of this discussion. Steven
A. Mansbachs Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the
Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890 1939 was advertised by its
publishers in 1999 as the rst coherent narrative of the
modern art movements of Eastern Europe. Across the region,
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010 243

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McIsaacs study is at its most effective in the chapters

devoted to works of ctional prose, especially those in which
the illustration of the cultural modes of contemporary
museum architecture and display becomes central to an
understanding of the texts. This is possibly due to the fact
that prose is more closely related to the linear narrative of
memory (rather than to the cyclical mode of poetry),10 and
to the idea of a correspondence between a story and the
vision of an imaginary space in which the mind wanders as
if going from one room to another. In this respect, the
chapter devoted to Rilkes Neue Gedichte (New Poems,
1907/08), in which the author argues that the poet was
adopting a peculiarly museal gaze rather than establishing
a straightforward relationship to a single object or museum
setting11, is perhaps less convincing. On the other hand,
the link between the literary texts and a theory of collecting
is established most persuasively in the sections about
Stifters Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857) and
Raabes Keltische Knochen (Celtic Bones, 1861), as well as
in those about Bachmanns Malina (1971) and Lenzs
Heimatmuseum (The Heritage or, literally, The Homeland
Museum, or Local History Museum, 1977). The authors
familiarity with the works under scrutiny as well as with a
wide range of secondary literature is impressive, and his
discussion often opens new ways of reading some of the
major titles in the German and Austrian literary canon. In
the case of Stifters novel, for example, the evolution of the
protagonists pursuit of Bildung through the progressive
growth of his private collection is shown in the light of
Stifters own belief in the educational role of museums.
McIsaacs textual analysis allows the reader to follow the
ascending curve towards the gaining of knowledge and
personal improvement in the life of the protagonist by
highlighting the symmetries between the formal elements of
Stifters prose and the most distinctive architectural features
of contemporary museum buildings, such as Schinkels Altes
Museum in Berlin and Leo von Klenzes Alte Pinakothek in
Munich. His critical reading of Lenzs Heimatmuseum is also
illuminating. The main character in this novel, Zygmunt
Rogalla, deliberately burns down the museum he had
helped to establish in Masuria in order to save historical
memory from an ideological exploitation of the past (once
part of East Prussia, the province of Masuria became Polish
after the Second World War). In one of the most interesting
sections of the book, McIsaac draws signicant parallels
between Rogallas act of destruction and the idea of
counter- or antimonuments which, as he explains,
proliferated in Germany and Austria in the 1980s and
1990s as strategies designed to challenge the materiality,
permanence, and limitations of the traditional monument in
the name of promoting improved remembrance of the
Holocaust.12 Despite certain unnecessary complexities, it is
the principal merit of this study to have highlighted the
connections that bind the process of internalisation of
memory in German literature with the tangible nature of
museums as both objective and imaginative structures.