The Art Museum: From Boullee to Bilbao

"For anyone interested in the history of museums, I’d put it first for good reason. For me it’s the gold standard of books about museums, very comprehensive, very thoughtful and very well informed. McClellan is an historian of museums who I know and admire, and I’ve had an inscribed copy of The Art Museum: From Boullée to Bilbao since it came out. Even if I didn’t actually refer to it explicitly in my book, I was very aware of Andrew’s work throughout the process of writing my own book, which was about museums, individually, and quite deliberately as a set of case studies. The challenge was firstly to construct my own narrative, and then I had the difficulty of choosing an appropriate title to convey it. To call it The Modern Art Museum , for example, risks confusion with the building in New York, while something like Art Museums might convey a mistaken impression about its scope. I settled on The Art Museum in Modern Times , although early proof readers pointed out, ‘but hang on a minute, there’s already a book called The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao ’! After a moment’s anxiety lest I be accused of lifting his title, I wrote to Andrew, and we have since been in friendly correspondence. It turns out that he is in fact working on a sequel or supplement to this historical analysis which appeared in 2008. Our titles may be similar, but in mine the analysis is drawn out from case studies rather than following an analytic framework as he does. I am trying instead to understand what makes a specific museum work in each particular instance, rather than analysing general issues in the main body of the text, which I only do at the end. As it happens, I’ve reread McClellan’s book after completing my own research and I am still very admiring of it. It has reaffirmed its place as the gold standard in my view – incredibly well informed. It tells you an immense amount, both of what is well known about museums but also a lot which has been forgotten, the civic responsibility of museums in the 20s and the 30s, for example. That’s right. Partly because his first book was called Inventing the Louvre , and because he was trained as an historian of 18th century painting, McClellan is really deeply informed about the longevity of these issues and debates and discussions. So naturally, you realise that there are very few of them which haven’t already been live in the past. In re-reading this book it struck me that many people often think that the pre-war museum was rather dull. I very much agree with Andrew that this was far from the case. Indeed my chapter about the pre-war museum, demonstrates that there was a very lively and vigorous museum community not only in Britain and America especially, but also for example in Germany , which wrestled with these very debates that we are carrying with us into the twenty first century."