An Introduction To Collection Museums
Collection means at once the activity of accumulating and the totality of the Works of Art assembled, both of which are crucial to a Collection Museum. At its most active, a Collection is always personal. The ultimate Collector is an Art Collector. The ultimate Collection Museum is necessarily an Art Collection Museum, with each Collection Museum unique, serving as a monument to an individual founder or founding couple, memorializing their distinct personal taste in art.
A study of historical records reveals that the greatest Private Collectors commencing the mid-19th Century started amassing art in order to create Museums of their own, Museums that preserved not only objects but also an individual vision of how art should be experienced and thus, in an era of unlimited acquisition opportunity, some of these Collectors purchased immortality. The great Collection Museums were opened within fifty years of each other, commencing from somewhere around the year 1890 through 1940.
Like professional curators, these Collectors wanted to and did acquire the very best art they could find and afford and thereafter, installed their “homes” after they had decided to found public institutions. They were infact, designing homes for their Collection rather than for themselves, introducing the near magical effects of domesticity such as to provide future audiences with an intimate experience of art, consistently referring to their installations as their creations with Founders protecting and securing such “homes for art” with complex Legal Wills.
Time, place, and circumstances, as well as the personalities and situations of Founders of these Collection Museums, all caused variations among basically similar Collection Museums. Despite the dissimilarity of their respective Collections, each Founder was primarily dedicated to creating a Museum focused on the art that was valued in their time. At the core of each, however, were and continue to be two crucial qualities: the personal character of the Art Collection and it’s even more personal installation. However, all Collection Museums in general, share the intention to preserve the spirit of the original so-very-personal Collection. Inadvertently, founders of Collection Museums, had by fossilizing their Collections, fossilized history.
Mostly built in as-close-to-nature locations, Collection Museums were and continue to be built such as to allow Museum-loving audiences to unparalleled experiences which Collection Museums alone can provide as they wait for the audience to re-enter what the great critic Walter Benjamin, writing about Collections, called “a profound enchantment” in which “the thrill of acquisition” casts “a magic circle” around objects.
(Source: Anne Higonnnet, “A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift”, Periscope Publishing Ltd, 2009)”