Engines of Culture

Engines
of Culture
Engines
of Culture
Philanthropy and
Art Museums
p» ”’ ” *
DANIEL M. FOX
With a new introduction
by the author
Originally published in 1963 by The State Historical Society of Wisconsin for
the Department of History, University of Wisconsin.
Published 1995 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 94-11045
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fox, Daniel M.
Engines of culture : philosophy and art museums I Daniel M. Fox with
a new introduction by the author.
p. em.
Originally published : Madison : State Historical Society of Wisconsin
for the Dept. of History, University of Wisconsin, 1963.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-56000-173-9
1. Art patronage-United States. 2. Art and state-United States. 3. Art
museums-United States-Management. I. Title.
N5205.F69 1994
708.13'079-dc20 94-11045
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-173-7 (hbk)
Contents
Author’s note vii

Introduction to the Transaction Edition 1
1. Museums for the Public 25
2. Impulse and Justification 31
3. Sources of Patterns of Museum Philanthropy 43
Some Patterns of Voluntary Giving 43
Voluntary Service 49
Government Support 51
4. Philanthropy and Museum Policy 59
Museums and Education 59
Museums and Contemporary Art 69
5. Private Desires and Public Welfare 75
Notes 81
Index 93
Author’s Note
I wrote Engines o f Culture in 1961 and 1962 for the History of

American Philanthropy project sponsored by the Ford Foundation at
the University of Wisconsin. The text of the 1963 edition is un
changed, except for the correction of typographical errors and a few
changes in the citations.
The new edition is the result of advocacy by several colleagues; Ri
chard Magat, Peter Dobkin Hall and Stanley N. Katz. Irving Louis
Horowitz, president of Transaction publishers, recommended that I write
a substantial introduction to the new edition.
In the first edition I said that my “greatest obligation is to Professor
Merle E. Curti: without his wisdom, kindness and generosity this essay
would have been neither begun nor completed.” For reasons I describe
in the Introduction, this obligation persists after three decades.
Daniel M. Fox
March, 1994
Vll
Introduction to the Transaction Edition
When the first edition of Engines o f Culture appeared, in 1963,

neither museums nor American philanthropy were important subjects
for research. Those who studied the visual arts considered artists and
the objects they created to be their proper subjects. Scholars of social
policy emphasized the state and the organized groups that sought to in
fluence it.
Three decades ago I was eccentric to insist that the linkage of philan
thropy and the state in city, state and federal politics was the central
theme in the history and contemporary situation of museums of art. Since
then it has become conventional to consider art a major American in
dustry, like health care, education and defense. In art as in these other
industries, the distinction between private and public action is now am
biguous. Considerable scholarship and journalism describes how public
and non-profit museums have influenced the private market for works
of art, how the education programs of these museums have diffused the
taste that elite Americans wanted people in other social classes to share
or admire, and how both museums and their donors have acquired enor
mous government subsidies.
Because so much has been published on the subject since 1963, I
hesitated when Transaction Publishers, on the recommendation of sev
eral experts on the history and politics of philanthropy, invited me to
introduce a new edition of Engines o f Culture. What had I said so many
years ago that should be reprinted? What could I say in an introduction
that might be helpful to scholars who, unlike me, continue to give close
attention to museums?
I persuaded myself that a new edition of Engines would be an oppor
tunity to write for a new audience about the central theme of my career
in government, universities, foundations and scholarship. This theme is
that how power is mobilized and used is the principal problem in public
affairs. I have explored this theme as an activist and scholar in the are
nas of health and social policy. For several months in the early 1960s, I
1
2 Engines of Culture
had a commission that permitted me to learn about the theme of power

in the history of America’s public museums of art.1
In the 1950s, research on the arts, especially by academics, excluded
political analysis. A famous Harvard professor of American literature,
for instance, taught me in 1956 that “art is not life; art is better than
life.”2
Although there is now a substantial literature about the history, soci
ology and economics of the arts and arts institutions, it is still conven
tional for academics to dismiss politics. Many scholars describe politics
as a tedious and routine activity, in the subjects they study as well as in
the organizations that employ them. Similarly, in health affairs, the arena
I know best, many intellectuals deplore politics because it impedes what
they consider to be rational responses to incentives and disincentives
that would make Americans healthier at less cost.
The rejection of politics among intellectuals often takes the subtler
form of what I call technocratic solutionism. Experts who practice
solutionism insist that problems have technical solutions even if they
are the result of conflicts about ideas, values and interests. Solutionists
often assume that people who run for office and meet public payrolls
need their help to decide what to tax and subsidize or how to regulate.
They need help, certainly, but hardly ever to identify social problems or
potential remedies for them. Leaders in government are grateful for as
sistance in mobilizing support for new policies among contending inter
est groups. This is not help that most technocratic solutionists are eager,
or able, to provide.
Engines was my first essay about politics that employed the methods
of intellectual history. By the time I finished writing the book, though
not when I began it, as I shall recount below, I rejected the solutionist
stance that museums had been and should continue to be agents of a
benign arts policy promoted by their advocates.
Engines was also a minor contribution to a major change in the inter
ests of social scientists. This major change was a new interest in re
search on philanthropy (subsequently called “non- profit organizations”
or the “independent sector”).
Philanthropy became a focus of scholarship in the 1950’s and 1960’s
mainly because foundations made grants to study it, but also because
many intellectuals were becoming skeptical about the assumptions of
the centrist coalition that dominated decisions in government and the
economy. Some intellectuals lost faith in the liberal New Deal dogma
that a national welfare state on the European model, which included
public subsidies for the arts, would be legislated in increments. Others
doubted that pluralistic bargaining involving large corporations, unions
and professional associations, and advocates for a variety of causes would
produce steady economic growth, a rising standard of living, and social
justice. Many social scientists became increasingly dubious about the
efficacy of the state and curious about other sources of creativity and
social reform. These alternatives included the private philanthropy that
had created what they regarded as uniquely American hospitals, univer
sities, foundations and museums.
The clumsiness of Engines can also be instructive. Like other young
scholars, I often misunderstood the difference between new ideas and
fashionable ones. I also assumed that my teachers and other leading
secondary sources were correct.
This introduction is autobiography that aspires to be history. First I
place Engines in its personal and intellectual context. Then I assess its
strengths and weaknesses and its influence on subsequent scholarship.
Finally, I comment on the present state of knowledge about museums
and power in American communities.
The Commissioning of Engines
The scholarly and autobiographical accounts of why Merle Curti com

missioned Engines have much in common. According to a recent essay
by Peter Hall, until the “advent of the Cold War,” philanthropy, and
especially foundations, had been 4immun[e]’ from Congressional in
quiry” and thus comfortable in its exemption from taxation. The inves
tigation of Alger Hiss in 1948, after he had become president of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was, Hall writes, “only
the beginning of steadily broadening political and regulatory challenge
to the autonomy of grant-making foundations.”3
Foundations, he continues, took the “initiative for creating a public
record” of their activities. In 1955 the Ford Foundation awarded Merle
Curti of the University of Wisconsin “its first grants to encourage the
scholarly investigation of the role of philanthropy in American life.”
Hall then lists what he calls “pioneering volumes,” among which he
includes Engines o f Culture*
Curti has been an extraordinarily influential historian. His many books

include The Growth o f American Thought (1943), for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize. He was also a successful professional politician, esteemed
by peers and students. Curti was one of the youngest presidents ever
elected by the American Historical Association. His reputation as a car
ing teacher featured the legend that he displayed a map of the United
States on which pins designated the location of scholars whose disserta
tions he had supervised. The legend has some basis: the first time I met
Merle Curti, in 1961, he volunteered that he had directed 110 doctoral
dissertations.
Curti also described himself to me in 1961 as a democratic socialist
with pacifist inclinations. He said that he was appalled by the callous
ness of contemporary politics and social policy. The history of philan
thropy, in contrast, offered evidence of the most generous impulses in
American life. Voluntary action could be an antidote to the enmities of
the Cold War at home and abroad and the limited compassion of both
modem Republicanism and a Democratic Party that was dominated by
conservative Southern members of Congress.
The Ford Foundation had chosen its grantee well. They had Curti
precisely where he wanted to be.
When Curti invited me to spend a summer researching and writing a
monograph on philanthropy for art museums, I had recently been taught
that voluntary action had great significance in the shaping of American
character and its institutions. The existence of a unique American char
acter was self-evident to many historians and other social scientists in
the 1950’s. This unique national character, they taught and wrote, was
the result of the shared experience of immigrants, of abundant natural
resources and of political, economic and educational institutions that
encouraged opportunity.
Voluntary associations, textbooks and professors agreed, had an im
portant influence on the national character. America transformed immi
grants, whatever their country of origin. They became notorious joiners,
for example: churches, ethnic associations, lodges and social clubs flour
ished here as nowhere else.
Americans were also benevolent in their voluntary action. Because
of local work and money, schools, colleges, hospitals, museums and
organizations of artists and scientists flourished in the United States.
Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting from France in the 1830’s, called atten
tion to Americans’ unique commitment to voluntary associations in a

passage that became assigned reading for millions of undergraduates a
century later. James Bryce, visiting from Britain a generation after de
Tocqueville, praised American philanthropy in contrast to what he de
scribed as the venality and inefficiency of urban machine politics.
I learned about national character and the uniqueness of American
voluntarism from my teachers at Harvard—from Fred Merk, Wilbur K.
Jordan, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, Donald Fleming and es
pecially from Oscar Handlin.5 In his books and lectures, Handlin, I
think now, romanticized the American experience. Men and women,
he insisted, remade themselves and created new institutions to assist
their efforts. Americans used their political and economic institutions as
instruments and then emblems of personal transformation. To Handlin,
as I understood him when I was an undergraduate and beginning
graduate student, liberty provided the context in which Americans
achieved their aspirations. Liberty had been more important to Ameri
can history than the institutions of capitalism or even those of republi
can democracy.
Although Handlin’s interpretation of American history excited me, I
was also fascinated by the details of politics that he rarely mentioned
and never analyzed. At about the same time I was mortified because I
wrote a mediocre hour exam in Frank Freidel’s course on American
political history. About once a year until his death in 1993,1 found a way
to tell Freidel that I was still eagerly learning facts about American
politics.
My dual interest in American character and politics caused me to
write a senior honors thesis on the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project.
For most of a year I lived vicariously both the politics of the late 1930’s
and the concept of regional and national character in the Project’s major
work, the American Guide Series. As a result of this research, I decided
that I wanted to become an expert on arts policy.
Arts policy in the late 1950’s meant public policy, in which the United
States seemed to lag behind other countries. The New Deal Arts Projects
had been defeated by controversy, mainly because they tried simulta
neously to promote the arts and provide work relief for the unemployed.
The new practical task was to invent, enact and implement policies that
would subsidize living artists as cultural, not employment, policy. My
task for research and advocacy was to understand why, in the arts as in
health, education and housing policy, the American welfare state was
incomplete.
Although foundations spent more for the arts than the federal govern
ment did in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, most advocates of arts policy
regarded philanthropy as an inadequate substitute for public policy.
In the arts as in other arenas of social affairs, most intellectuals assumed
that there was a well-established general pattern of policy development.
New social policies began with actions by individual donors and advo
cacy groups. Then several donors united within communities to create
philanthropic organizations. Next, municipalities and the states shared
some of the financial burden with the philanthropists and their organiza
tions. Finally, the federal government made national policy.
Many years later I realized that most Americans in the early 1960’s,
maybe even most academics outside the elite universities, did not par
ticularly want an expanding welfare state. However, like many intellec
tuals, I believed that Roosevelt’s New Deal had been desirable but
remained incomplete. Sometime soon Americans would enact proper
subsidies for the arts and education at all levels, national health insur
ance, and an expanding social security system to replace means-tested
public welfare. We complained that the United States did not have these
attributes of a modem state because of the selfishness of business and
professional interest groups and because many people in the middle and
upper classes lacked sufficiently generous regard for less fortunate
persons.
These views set my interest in arts policy in a broad political frame
work. My interest and convictions were reinforced during a year of re
search on arts policy in Europe on a travelling fellowship from Harvard
College. The titles of my earliest articles in scholarly journals made my
polemical point, though at the time I was persuaded that they were en
tirely objective: “Federal Writers and the National Portrait,”6 “The New
Arts Patronage in Europe and the United States,”7 “Artists in the Mod
em State: the 19th Century Background.”8
The normative bias in my scholarship on arts policy reinforced my
adherence to the assumption that philanthropy preceded the welfare state,
in present politics as in the historical past. The institutions of philan
thropy helped people who needed money, or housing or education be
cause they were unemployed or sick or members of a stigmatized religion,
race or ethnic group. But philanthropists were eventually overwhelmed

by the size and complexity of the problems of modem society.
The unavoidable failure of philanthropy to meet escalating need cre
ated constituencies and hence mandates for public policy. This had hap
pened in Great Britain, beginning in the early nineteenth century. It
occurred notoriously in the United States in the early 1930’s when phi
lanthropy could not cope with the human misery of the Great Depres
sion.
The arts had a claim on philanthropy and public policy. Artists who
could not prosper in a market economy deserved to be subsidized be
cause their work had aesthetic and educational value. Philanthropy made
major contributions to the incomes of artists and to creating access for
the general public to their work. But state subsidies were now required
to assure that artists had proper incomes and to make their work avail
able to a broad public.
The claims of the so-called high arts for public subsidy were not,
however, as convincing to me as those of health care or income security
or housing. Advocates for arts subsidies had difficulty justifying the use
of public funds for cultural activities when many people were ill-fed, ill-
housed, or just ill. Moreover, the marketplace handsomely supported
the arts that the general public enjoyed most, popular music and the
movies. Public subsidies for the arts, in contrast, promoted activities
that were patronized and enjoyed mainly by the wealthiest and best-
educated persons. As a result, government funding to democratize the
audiences for painting, sculpture, ballet and classical music, even dur
ing a period of national prosperity like the 1960’s, lacked the compel
ling moral logic of building hospital intensive care units or colleges of
engineering.
My doubts about the purposes of arts policy informed the research
that became Engines o f Culture. On the one hand, I believed that arts
policy was essential to an unfolding welfare state. Culture was good for
everyone, like adequate income, appropriate housing, and affordable
health care. On the other hand, I suspected that advocates of arts policy
often used the rhetoric of general welfare to mask special pleading on
behalf of collectors, entrepreneurs and artists. I was not sure if my re
search would lead to conclusions about the American variant of the wel
fare state or, instead, about interest group behavior in a pluralist society.
Thirty years later, having expressed my skepticism about both the

welfare state and interest group pluralism in both action and print, I am
embarrassed by my innocence. But I am impressed by the extent to which
the discipline of scholarly work made my normative conflict irrelevant
to Engines o f Culture. Objectivity is a notoriously slippery issue. Among
social scientists, however, there is a loose community standard of objec
tivity that, when it operates effectively, makes ideology subordinate to
information.
Engines meets that community standard. Despite my normative in
clinations, I described in considerable detail the politics by which pa
trons and politicians accommodated each other in American cities from
the 1870’s to the 1950’s. The state and elite interest groups made deals
for which philanthropy provided money and ideological sanction. The
accommodation was so successful in satisfying interests that were po
tentially in conflict that few contemporaries claimed that these deals
violated the public interest.
There were, however, very few people in 1963 who cared very much
about an argument by a young historian that art museums were a special
and instructive case of the accommodation of public and private inter
ests. Curti was persuaded, and so were some of his colleagues in the
History of Philanthropy project, notably Irvin G. Wyllie, also a profes
sor at the University of Wisconsin. The only other historian doing re
search on art museums was Neil Harris, now professor of history at the
University of Chicago, then a graduate student working with Handlin.
Harris and I helped each other, despite our very different approaches to
the issues. Professor Donald Fleming, sensing my ambivalence about
subsidy for the arts as social policy and my fascination with the relation
ship between ideas and politics, encouraged me to do my next research
on another subject.
Assessing Engines
Five years earlier, Engines would not have been commissioned. The
study of philanthropy was not sufficiently advanced before the first pub
lications from Curti’s project. Five years later, Engines could not have
been written, by me or anybody else. By the late 1960’s, what had only
recently seemed to be a cumulative and reasonably stable accommoda
tion of patrons and politicians had become volatile. The establishment
of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 made federal money
available to museums in unprecedented amounts. In the same years, and
partly in response to this infusion of public funds, major museums in
vested more heavily than they had earlier in exhibits that were intended
to attract publicity and large numbers of visitors. Museums also became
more entrepreneurial. Encouraged by their trustees, their staff bought
and sold more works of art than ever before and established profitable
retail outlets for reproductions and souvenirs.
Museums became controversial as a result of their surging income
and publicity. Public officials and the media criticized the role of muse
ums in marketing both old masters and contemporary art. In some cities
and especially in New York, the center of the nation’s arts industry, poli
ticians, the press and advocacy groups accused museum leaders of in
sensitivity to issues of race, ethnicity and poverty.
Scholarship on museums had new missions and audiences by the late
1960’s. The public issues raised by museums had become much too
visible and complicated to assign a graduate student to address them in
a few months.
Engines had achieved a modest purpose, for the Ford Foundation, for
Curti and for me. I did not open it for thirty years. Before I reread it, I
expected to find it appalling, especially the prose. I remembered Donald
Fleming telling me in 1963 “you’ll never be a stylist” (and my pleasure
a dozen years later when he thanked me for sending him a reprint of an
“exceedingly well-written paper”). But I also worried that I had taken
philanthropists too seriously, mistaking their rationalizations for reasons.
Engines has faults, but they are different from the ones I had imag
ined. The prose is adequate, though at times cluttered. I was adequately
cynical about the motives of philanthropists. More important, I stated
clearly and supported with data my thesis about the inseparability of
philanthropy and government, of private and public. I had done a credible
job of writing historically about the political economy of art museums.
I had not, however, sufficiently separated myself from my teachers
and from the leading secondary sources of the time. For instance, I em
phasized differences between American museums and those in Europe
more than the evidence required. Moreover, I sharply differentiated cul
tural institutions before and after the Civil War because of what I had
read in the literature, not because I had examined primary data. Simi
larly, I overemphasized the utilitarian purposes of museum founders,
understating their veneration of works of art, mainly because practical

benevolence was the central motive described by the authors of other
monographs in the Curti project.
I certainly did not know enough, or have enough imagination, about
American society in the nineteenth century. Years later, Harris would
compare museums with department stores and international fairs.9 I
missed this completely, though I caught the analogy between museums
and supermarkets in the twentieth century. Harris also subsequently cor
rected my overemphasis on utilitarian purposes, arguing persuasively in
1981 that I should have used the metaphors of temples or asylums as
well as of engines.10
Most important, I ignored almost completely evidence about other
arenas in which philanthropists and public officials collaborated in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I neglected to study in any detail the
mutual accommodation of public and private interests in the history of
hospitals and higher education. The facile explanation for this neglect is
that I was unread and rushed. It is much more likely that I was a captive
of the conventional belief that the purpose of philanthropy was to pre
cede or substitute for government action. According to this belief, phi
lanthropists and public officials collaborated temporarily, as a stage in
progress toward the mature welfare state
Many years later I realized that philanthropists and public officials
have complemented each other throughout American history. An inti
mate linkage of public and private has been the norm of policy and poli
tics. I reached this conclusion mainly as a result of studying the history
of public health, of hospitals, and of medical education, and by follow
ing the work of colleagues who work on contemporary aspects of these
subjects in adjacent social sciences. I also experienced the linkage every
day as an employee of federal and state agencies, an academic medical
center and a foundation. When I studied museums, on the other hand, I
did not seek data about how patrons and politicians used each other in
other arenas because I did not believe it was a central theme of Ameri
can history.
I got somewhat more than half the story right. The “mythology of
American philanthropy,” I wrote in the conclusion of the third chapter,
“has long been an extension of assumptions about private economic
enterprise.” These assumptions included “blindness” about the interpen
etration of government and the private sector. But I did not appreciate
how pervasive this interpenetration has been, or the full political signifi
cance of ideological claims that government, or business, or philanthropy
had different domains.
I am embarrassed in retrospect that I relied entirely on printed pri
mary sources and did not consult museum archives. In the 1950’s and
1960’s most intellectual historians gave priority to printed texts, unless
they were writing biography. They defined the principal subject of intel
lectual history as public discourse; in contrast to social, political or dip
lomatic history, which had to rely on unpublished documents. After the
1970’s, when intellectual historians’ prestige had declined in relation to
their colleagues in social history, many of them routinely used archival
sources.
I am delighted in retrospect that I organized Engines thematically
rather than according to chronology. The three main chapters of the book
are about philanthropists’ motives, public and private funding for muse
ums, and museum policy. Each of these chapters discusses data perti
nent to its theme for the century preceding 1960. As a result of this plan
of organization, my argument stands out clearly and has been reason
ably accessible to subsequent scholars.
I took Curti’s advice in choosing thematic organization. My teachers
at Harvard insisted that historical monographs should be organized chro
nologically. A long letter from Curti criticizing my first, chronological
draft began, “What are they teaching at Harvard these days?”
Curti’s goal, though I realized it dimly at the time, was that historical
research should be useful to other social scientists. He urged historians
to communicate with colleagues in adjacent disciplines, particularly
economists, political scientists, and sociologists. A monograph organized
thematically would be more accessible to these colleagues than one or
ganized chronologically, even though the narrative would sometimes be
repetitive. Most of my mentors at Harvard did not think much of the
adjacent social sciences, when they thought of them at all.
Engines, like so much scholarship in every discipline before the 1970’s,
underestimates the role of women. I described great women collectors
of old masters, for example Louise Havemeyer, Isabella Stewart Gardner
and Edith Rockefeller McCormick. I mentioned women in the twentieth
century who created museums as patronage for avant-garde artists, no
tably Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. But Kathleen McCarthy properly
concluded in 1991 that “most of standard institutional histories [in which
list she includes Engines] either mention women in passing or provide

only scattered references to their donations.”11
I did not neglect women because I was ignorant of their role in the
history of museums. While I was writing Engines, I was also preparing
biographies of women in art philanthropy for the first edition of Notable
American Women. Similarly, though I committed the conventional big
otry of using the masculine pronoun as the norm throughout the book, I
consciously wrote about both women and men in several passages.
The problem was again the absence of models. I wrote less than I
should have about the role of women in the history of museums for the
same reason that I missed the mutual dependence of philanthropy and
government. Beginning scholars know more about what they read in
books and hear from their teachers than they do either about life or pri
mary data.
Engines was quoted in support of contradictory interpretations from
the 1960’s to the 1980’s. Here are examples of its use to support centrist,
Marxist, and conservative interpretations of the history of museums.
The most influential use of the research and interpretation in Engines
was by Germain Bazin, a curator at the Louvre whose book The Mu
seum Age, originally published in France, appeared in English in 1967.
Engines is the only American monograph he cited in his chapter on “The
New World.” Quoting Engines, Bazin argued that “American patterns
of philanthropy, education and government” created distinctive func
tions and audiences for museums. But he insisted, contradicting this
point, that “from the beginning the American museum depended prima
rily on private patronage.” He did not mention the enormous contribu
tion of public funds to museum construction, operating expenses and,
through tax expenditures, patronage itself. American museums, he in
sisted, are “private organisms managed like corporations” that have “been
spared the sclerosis of state control.” In sum, they are the “spontaneous
product of American life.” Most subsequent histories of museums by
journalists and museum employees have repeated Bazin’s description
of philanthropy as a benign middle course between government and
business.12
Engines assisted two art historians writing in a British journal in 1980
to document a Marxist history of museums. Museums, they wrote, “em
body and make visible the idea of the state.” In New York City, for
example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a “monument” that per
mitted its founders to “symbolize their class’s domination of the state.”

As evidence, they cited data from Engines that the “museum building
would be located on city land and owned by the city...the museum
collection would be owned and controlled by the concerned citizens
who made up its board of directors.”13
The most sophisticated use of the argument and data in Engines was
by Edward C. Banfield in 1984, in a monograph opposing public subsi
dies for museums that was commissioned by the Twentieth Century
Fund. Banfield, a distinguished political scientist, interpreted Engines
exactly as I had intended. “Contrary to public opinion,” he wrote in his
opening pages, “taxpayers have given substantial support to the arts for
at least a century.” Moreover, “that so many precious objects should
be forever buried in some of the most valuable land of the great cities
would be inexplicable but for the fact the museums did not bear the
costs.”14
Banfield’s conclusion was, however, precisely the opposite of that of
the Marxists and entirely different from my normative position in 1963.
Public subsidy forced museums to reject “aesthetic expression” in order
to “present art as entertainment, psychotherapy, material for historical
studies....” Subsidy neither honored capitalists nor assisted them in
fixing the prices for the art they collected. Quoting data from Engines,
Banfield wrote that museum philanthropists’ only interest in education
was “to make a claim on state or local government.” But their reliance
on government deflected them from the “proper function of an art
m useum ...to collect and display works of art.” As a result, by the
1980’s, museums had become distracted by the need to attract crowds in
order to justify subsidies from cities and states. Federal subsidies served
to “benefit special interests” in the “culture industry,” including those of
professors in search of grants. The history of public subsidies for muse
ums was yet another on Banfield’s long list of unintended consequences
of liberal policies.15
Engines, in sum, still has some value. Because it was the work of a
novice in scholarship rather than a forgotten masterpiece, it is a reveal
ing primary source for assumptions about methods and politics that in
tellectual historians of the United States once considered obvious.
Because it was for some years the only historical study of the political
economy of art museums it was read and cited by scholars who then
adapted its evidence and argument to their own needs.
Engines and Contemporary Scholarship
Like other products of Curti’s History of American Philanthropy

Project, Engines was incorporated retrospectively into the field of what
is now called non-profit or voluntary action or independent sector stud
ies. Every new field needs a history to complement its funding, journals
and professional associations. Peter Hall, Stanley Katz and a few other
scholars have provided this history for the study of non-profit organiza
tions. But most of the social scientists in the field have ignored then-
efforts to create ancestors.
I am an ancestor in non-profit studies and a contemporary in the study
of health policy. For a decade, John Simon, Peter Hall and their col
leagues at the Yale Program on Non Profit Organizations have regularly
invited me to talk about my current work and have kept me informed
about the history and present politics of their newly created field.
From Hall, I learned that Lester Salomon, a political scientist at Johns
Hopkins University, had independently discovered the thesis of Engines.
According to Hall’s account of a 1986 paper by Salomon, the “failure
of scholars and policymakers to acknowledge the interpenetration of
government and the private non profit sector” is a result of both
the failure of research and the limitations of theory. Salomon faults wel
fare state theory for its “failure to differentiate between government’s
role as a provider of funds and its role as a deliverer of services.” He
criticizes voluntary sector theory “because of its tendency to justify the
voluntary sector in terms of failures of government and the market.”
Salomon reached this conclusion as a result of analyzing the problems
created for non-profit organizations by budget cuts in the first Reagan
Administration.16
I was surprised by Salomon’s sense of discovery but not in the slight
est because he had ignored Engines o f Culture. Why was the interpen
etration of government and non-profit organizations news to anyone in
the 1980’s? As a participant in the health care industry I live with the
facts of interpenetration. My news about art museums in 1962 and 1963,
generalized, is a fact of life for the more then ten percent of the Ameri
can workforce who are employed in the health and human services
industries.
I have little interest in knowing how scholars who study the non
profit sector in general have reached their conclusions. What interests
me is how people who lead public, non-profit and investor-owned orga

nizations have related to each other in particular cases. Turning from
theory to empirical research, I was pleased to find a rich literature on art
museums by historians, sociologists, political scientists and economists.
Historians have contributed substantial knowledge about museums
as institutions through which wealthy Americans have communicated
their tastes and values, mainly to members of the middle classes. Neil
Harris has continued to study museums and to compare them with other
institutions. In a 1990 collection of his articles from two decades, Harris
combines vast knowledge about the interconnection of ideas and insti
tutions in American culture with his enthusiasm for museums.17 Helen
Lefkowitz Horowitz’ book about cultural philanthropy in Chicago from
the 1880’s to 1917 was the first examination of a major museum in its
full socioeconomic context.18 Kathleen McCarthy’s Women’s Culture:
American Philanthropy and Art 1830 1930, expands the history of mu
seums to include institutions founded and governed by women to pro
mote crafts, folk art, and the work of avant-garde artists.19 Joel Orosz,
writing about museums before 1870, describes an “informal museum
m ovem ent...gu id ed ...b y the imperatives of American culture.”20
Daniel Sherman’s book about art museums in nineteenth-century France
contributes to general museum historiography a distinction among “an
ecdotal,” “schematic” and “contextual” studies.21
Sociologists, and especially Paul J. DiMaggio, have made the history
and present situation of museums an important subject for research.
DiMaggio has emphasized two themes in many publications since the
late 1970’s: the unique role of non-profit organizations in mediating
between culture and the marketplace; and the interplay of local and na
tional issues in the behavior of both social elites and museum profes
sionals. He combines research in primary data, including historical
sources, with facility in organizational theory. Moving with care from
scholarship to prescription, DiMaggio has recently warned that, as a
result of demography, the general economy, the state of the art market
and changes in upper class behavior, “Art museums can no longer count
on steadily increasing demand for their services.”22
Another important contribution by a sociologist to the literature on
museums is Diana Crane’s study of the New York art world between
1940 and 1985. Following DiMaggio and other scholars Crane argues
that control over museums has shifted from social elites to government
and corporations. She describes how this shift occurred in the New York
art world, “which retained its position at the center of the gatekeeping
system” through which artists are selected for prestige and profit. Over
four decades, she argues, New York museums sought broader constitu
encies and simultaneously became “less responsive to emerging art
styles.”23
Several political scientists have written cogently about recent arts
policy, of which museums have been the leading beneficiaries. Milton
C. Cummings published in 1982 an indispensable study of the political
background of the creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and
Humanities.24 A 1991 Cummings article is a sophisticated historical
analysis of government and the arts in the United States.25In 1987 Kevin
Mulcahy made a balanced case for an argument similar to that of Ed
ward Banfield in his polemic of 1984. American arts policy, Mulcahy
concluded, has been characterized by “an inability to define a public
cultural interest.”26
Economists’ analysis of museums begins with a theoretical choice.
Those economists who prefer to define museums as firms criticize them
for misusing public funds to benefit a small segment of the population.
The museum-as-firm engages in accounting practices that self-servingly
ignore the value of its capital, in land and buildings, usually provided by
government, and in objects of art, donated by philanthropists.27 Most
economists, however, justify public and philanthropic subsidies because
they decide that museums are public utilities (natural monopolies) or
merit goods (goods that people should have more of than they will pur
chase in the market). Economists who decide that museums operate
outside the market analyze their operations as a problem in public fi
nance and describe how they could reduce the losses that result from
their public mission. These losses are caused by what economists call
market failure, public policy and consumer opinion that limits their free
dom to buy and sell objects of art under the most favorable conditions.
Notable contributors to the economic literature on museums have in
cluded Tibor Scitovsky,28 Dick Netzer,29 Bruno S. Frey and Wemer W.
Pommerehne,30and recently a group of nationally prominent economists
assembled by Martin Feldstein on behalf of the National Bureau of Eco
nomic Research.31
Most scholarship on museums has separated the institutions and their
collections. Art was one subject; how museums operated and what they
aspired to another. This assumption persisted even in studies, like those

of Harris, McCarthy (and, of course, Engines), that described how mu
seum leaders wanted members of the public to benefit from particular
kinds of objects.
Art historians have been comfortable with this separation, at least
until recently. A vast art historical literature of the past century describes
and analyzes particular objects without offering very much information
about where they were hung or stored, and with hardly any attention to
how and for whom they were displayed. Social scientists have been def
erential to art historians, just as most of their colleagues who studied
science once assumed that their proper subject was its social setting
rather than how knowledge is produced.
Museum professionals have usually reinforced the separation of art
and institutional life. They have found it useful to define themselves as
the coordinators of the interconnected worlds of artists, dealers, collec
tors, government and foundation officials, and visitors.
The official definition of museums makes this separation appear to
be self-evident. A handbook published by the Association of Art Museum
Directors defines a museum as a “permanent non profit institution, es
sentially educational or aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff.”
This formulation dichotomizes education (or the search for attention
from the public) and any purpose involving the “aesthetic” (or a reac
tion to an object, lay or learned). Professional staff, the definition im
plies, are essential for managing the dichotomy. The directors then list
the activities of this non-profit institution, which “acquires objects, cares
for them, interprets them and exhibits them to the public on some regu
lar schedule.” Each activity requires special expertise and coordination.32
The museum trade press and the writings of leading directors rein
force the assumption that art and institutional life are separable. A no
table example is a 1989 monograph by John Coolidge, former director
of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, on the relationship between patrons and
architects in designing art museums in the twentieth century. In sequence,
Coolidge celebrates the brilliance and beneficence of private collectors,
complains that many of them have been dominated by powerful and
famous architects, praises the collaboration of architects and professional
staff, criticizes museum trustees for having more “sympathy” for “cre
ative artists” than for either the “average man” or those who “govern
and administer the people,” and, finally, criticizes museums for “disre
gard for visitors” and making their collections inaccessible. A book that
began by celebrating elites ends with the recommendation that public
libraries should be the model for art museums. Like any good profes
sional who is required to negotiate among many constituencies, Coolidge
adroitly comes down on all sides of every controversial issue.33
Thomas Hoving’s 1993 account of his service in the late 1960’s and
1970’s as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art described his re
jection of the dichotomy between art and the museum.34 Whatever
Hoving’s faults and achievements, he blurred what had long been ortho
dox distinctions among art, its purchase, sale and display and political
events within and outside museums. As many critics insisted, Hoving
did not originate the blockbuster exhibition, or dramatic bidding by
museums at public auctions, or deaccessioning works of art. But he vio
lated professional norms by explicitly claiming every aspect of museum
activity as a proper subject for his expertise.
Like museum directors, hospital executives insisted for decades on
separating the roles of medical staff, trustees and administration. The
job of the director, in a hospital as in a museum, was, according to or
thodoxy, to mediate among persons carrying out their assigned roles. I
know from personal experience (as well as from reading social science)
that every day in every hospital many people violate the norms of the
tripartite separation of work and authority. These norms were once use
ful principles to cite during the first stages of conflict resolution. But
their usefulness has declined as changes in how hospitals are financed
rearrange the stakes and the accountability of physicians, managers and
board members.
Similar changes seem to be occurring in museums. Hoving may be
an example of premature professional innovation. During the 1970’s
and early 1980’s, for example, hospital directors could lose their jobs
because they tried to make physicians more sensitive to costs and trust
ees more interested in market share. Such behavior is now rewarded.
In health affairs, scholars wrote about the interpenetration of money,
politics, science and technology before medical and hospital professionals
discussed it in public. A similar example of academics’ freedom from
the constraints of industry seems to be occurring in the study of museums.
DiMaggio, Harris and Crane, for example, have been more explicit than
any museum professionals (except Hoving, of course) in describing the
effect on museums of changes in their external environment.
A few scholars have begun to insist that the study of museums be

entirely reconceived. To them, museums are sources of data to study
more important issues. Scholars who ask, for example, how museums
are influenced by ideas about the arts, or education or gender or the
interests of social elites, or changes in demography have misconceived
the issue. Like the social scientists who have insisted that illness and
responses to it are socially constructed, revisionist scholars criticize their
predecessors for assuming what has to be proved. In the metaphor of
statistics, museums are not dependent variables.35
Two books published in 1991 make these points. A collection of es
says, The Poetics and Politics o f Museum Display, makes the study of
museums a subject for the recently organized field of cultural studies. In
the introduction, Ivan Karp claims for the social constructionist point of
view every subject bearing on art and its display:
All exhibitions are inevitably organized on the basis of assumptions about the in
tentions of the objects’ producers, the cultural skills and qualifications of the audi
ence, the claims to authoritativeness made by the exhibitors and judgments of the
aesthetic merit or authority of the objects or settings exhibited.36
Svetlana Alpers describes what she calls the “museum effect,” which
makes museums themselves creators of objects of art.37 Carol Duncan
goes even further, making museums central to the politics that results
from how people see objects: “To control a museum means precisely to
control the representation of a community.”38
To Philip Fisher, in Making and Effacing Art, museums are a “tech
nology.” They have become part of the process by which art is made.
Paraphrasing a 1923 essay by the French poet and critic Paul Valery,
Fisher claims that museums engage in a “violent resocialization in which
the objects of the past [are] stripped of their worlds and resettled chro
nologically in the land of art.” Andre Malraux, novelist and politician,
borrowed and extended Valery’s insight. Museums, he said, “estrange
the works they bring together from the original functions.” Museums,
Fisher writes, became “storage areas for authenticity.” As a result artists
now create so that their “work will find itself eventually within a mu
seum as part of what the future w ill...take to be the past.”39
The new scholarship of cultural studies makes obsolete by implica
tion Engines o f Culture and most of the subsequent work on museums
that I have described. The evidence that is most important to these revi
sionists reveals how and why people have represented and displayed
what they saw. They accuse the social scientists who have analyzed
museums as educational, business, scholarly, or political institutions of
missing a fundamental point: that the significance of works of art is the
result of ongoing social negotiations. These obsolete scholars missed
the point by taking for granted objects of art, much as most of the social
scientists who studied medical science wrongly assumed that there is a
universally applicable pathophysiological classification of diseases. Such
scholars cede the authority to examine central questions to self-inter
ested experts who claim a particular domain.
I hope that scholars of art museums as institutions in American soci
ety do not react defensively and derisively to such attacks. In my proper
field of health affairs, the insights of people who are influenced by cul
tural studies (or its principal method, social construction) have potential
practical importance as well as enormous intellectual interest. These
insights are, for example, having a small influence on the definition and
content of primary care practice and the management of chronic dis
abling illness.40
Moreover, advocates of cultural studies may discover that research
on museums by social scientists in the past has more pertinence to their
work than they currently believe. In the study of the arts as of health
affairs, the best primary data about what people saw and thought are
often what they said about matters of politics and money.41
My faith that scholarship is cumulative remains intact, perhaps in
nostalgic tribute to the professional education that I described earlier in
this essay. That faith sustains me as I again offer Engines o f Culture for
critical review.
Notes
1. For my exploration of power see most recently Daniel M. Fox, Power and Ill
ness: The Failure and Future o f American Health Policy (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1993).
2. Perry G.E. Miller, English 7, Harvard College, Fall, 1956. Miller was, of course,
a distinguished intellectual historian as well as a professor of literature.
3. Peter Dobkin Hall, “Dilemmas of Research in Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Non
profit Organizations,” in his Inventing the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 245.
4. Ibid., 245, 337.
5. Neil Harris properly ascribes enormous influence on the study of institutional
history to Bernard Bailyn’s 1960 book, Education in the Forming o f American
Society (Cambridge, Harvard University Press). Bailyn’s book was especially

influential at Harvard in the 1960s. I was generally aware of it but unfortunately
did not read it carefully because I was uninterested in Early American History.
This error must be described as silly. Neil Harris, “Cultural Institutions and Ameri
can Modernization,” Journal o f Library History, Winter 1981, 16: 28-47, re
printed in Harris* Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes
in Modern America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), 100-101, for
the discussion of Bailyn’s influence.
6. D.M. Fox, “The Achievement of the Federal Writers’ Project,” American Quar
terly, Spring 1961, 13: 3-19.
7. D.M. Fox, “The New Arts Patronage in Europe and the United States,” South
Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1962, 61: 223-234.
8. D.M. Fox, “Artists in the Modem State,” Journal o f Aesthetics and Art Criti
cism,” Winter 1963, 22: 135-148. Reprinted in M.C. Albrecht, J.H. Barnett, and
M. Griff, eds., The Sociology o f Art and Literature (New York, Praeger, 1970).
9. Neil Harris, “Museums, Marketing and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influ
ence,” in Ian M.B. Quimby, ed., Material Culture and the Study o f American Life
(New York, W.W. Norton, 1978), 140-174. Reprinted in Cultural Excursions,
56-81.
10. Neil Harris, “Cultural Institutions” in Cultural Excursions, 108. To my delight,
Harris has made generous use of Engines in the essays collected in this book; see,
for example, pages 20, 23, 56, 108, and 253.
11. Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women *s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830
1930 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), 245.
12. Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York, Universe Books, 1967, translated
from the French), 243, 250, 261, 278. For the influence of Bazin’s book and its
point of view see, for example, Nathaniel Burt, Palaces fo r the People: A Social
History o f American Art Museums (Boston, Little Brown, 1977), Karl E. Meyer,
The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics. A Twentieth Century Fund Report (New
York, William Morrow, 1978), and most recently, Kenneth Hudson, Museums o f
Influence (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1987).
13. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History,
December 1980, 3: 448-469.
14. Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest.
A Twentieth Century Fund Essay (New York, Basic Books, 1984), 4, 101-102.
15. Ibid., 92-116.
16. Peter Dobkin Hall, Reflections on the Nonprofit Sector in the Postliberal Era,” in
Inventing, 100-101.
17. Harris, Cultural Excursions.
18. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chi
cago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1976).
For Engines see 244.
19. McCarthy, Women's Culture.
20. Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America,
1740 1870 (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1990).
21. Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics o f Culture
in 19th Century France (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989).
22. Paul J. DiMaggio’s publications on art museums include, “Cultural Entrepre
neurship in 19th Century Boston, Media, Culture and Society, 1982, 4:33-50,
reprinted in Paul J. DiMaggio ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in
Mission and Constraint (New York, Oxford University Press, 1986); “The Non
Profit Instrument and the Influence of the Marketplace,” in W. McNeil Lowry,
ed., The Arts and Public Policy in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
Prentice-Hall, 1984); “Classification in Art,” American Sociological Review,
August 1987, 52:440-455; and “Constructing an Organizational Field as a Pro
fessional Project: United States Art Museums, 1920-1940,” in Walter W. Powell
and PJ. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26.
23. Diana Crane, The Transformation o f the Avant Garde: The New York Art World,
1940 1985 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987).
24. Milton C. Cummings, “To Change a Nation’s Cultural Policy: The Kennedy Ad
ministration and the Arts in the United States, 1961-1963,” in K.V. Mulcahy and
C.R. Swann, eds., Public Policy and the Arts (Boulder,CO, Westview Press, 1982),
141-168.
25. Milton C. Cummings, Jr., “Government and the Arts: An Overview,” in Stephen
Benedict, ed., Public Money and the Muse: Essays in Government Funding for
the Arts (New York, W.W. Norton, 1991), 31-79.
26. Kevin Mulcahy, “Government and the Arts in the United States,” in Milton C.
Cummings and Richard S. Katz, eds., The Patron State: Government and the Arts
in Europe, North America and Japan (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987).
Other books about arts policy are of interest. Alan L. Feld, Michael O’Hare, and
J. Mark Davidson Schuster, Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts
Policy. A Twentieth Century Fund Book (New York, New York University Press,
1983), is an excellent analysis that applies to the arts the theory of tax expendi
tures formulated by Stanley Surrey and his disciples. Edward Arian, The Unful
filled Promise: Public Subsidy o f the Arts in America (Philadelphia, Temple
University Press, 1989), is a polemic against cultural elitists by a professor of
political science who served as an officer of a state arts council. In his view the
interest groups of a “performance culture” which includes art museums unfortu
nately capture an unfairly large share of public funds.
27. See for example William D. Grampp, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Eco
nomics (New York, Basic Books, 1989). Grampp’s views have infuriated many
scholars who are unsympathetic to the rigorous application of the theories of the
Chicago School of economists. Nevertheless, his analysis offers insights into the
behavior of museum donors and officials and makes good use of his knowledge
about the visual arts as well as economics. I do not share Grampp’s taste for using
models of ideal markets to judge the mess of human experience. And as the chief
executive officer of a nonprofit institution I cannot agree with him that I am not
fully accountable to my colleague trustees. But his views are less patronizing, to
risk a pun, than those of economists who want to subsidize museums because
ordinary people need larger doses of the high arts than they will purchase volun
tarily.
28. Articles by Scitovsky and other economists are anthologized in Mark Blaug, ed.,
The Economics o f the Arts (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1976).
29. Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support fo r the Arts in the United
States. A Twentieth Century Fund Study (New York, Cambridge University Press,
1978, 1980).
30. Bruno S. Frey and Werner W. Pommerehne, Muses and Markets: Explorations in
the Economics o f the Arts (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989). A chapter on “Muse
ums and Art Galleries” (61-77) attempts an international comparison of sources

of financing for art museums. The authors’ statistics are flawed as they apply to
the United States because they ignore tax expenditures in the analysis of museum
budgets and operating costs, though they acknowledge that these expenditures
(ie. tax collections foregone as a result of exemptions, exclusions and deduc
tions) account for a third of all public funds for art and culture. They also seem to
ignore local and state taxation as a source of funds for museums. As a result they
perpetuate the mythology that public subsidy of museums in the United States is
around 10% of their expenditures, compared with 70-95% in the countries of the
European Union.
31. Martin Feldstein, ed., The Economics o f Art Museums (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1991). This vol
ume includes an excellent article by DiMaggio and a provocative article by Peter
Temin, “An Economic History of Art Museums,” (179-193).
A Journal o f Cultural Economics has been published for some years, but it is
not indexed with standard economic literature or subscribed to as a matter of
course by major university libraries. My sampling suggests that its papers are
written by social scientists from a variety of disciplines most of whom are con
vinced that more subsidy for cultural work is in the public interest. A sampling of
such papers can be found in the proceedings of an international conference: Ruth
Towse and Abdul Khakee, eds., Cultural Economics (Berlin, Springer Verlag,
1992) .
32. The official definition is quoted in Sherman E. Lee, ed., On Understanding Art
Museums (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall for the American Assembly, 1975),
6. The article on the history of museums in this volume is a richly detailed ren
dering of the centrist position articulated by Bazin (Joshua Taylor, “The Art Mu
seum in the United States,” 34-67).
33. John Coolidge, Patrons and Architects: Designing Art Museums in the 20th Cen
tury (Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Museum, 1989).
34. Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance (New York, Simon and Schuster,
1993) . For some of the more temperate attacks on Hoving see Robert Hughes,
“Masterpiece Theater,” The New York Review o f Books, March 4, 1993, 8-10;
Calvin Tomkins, “More and Less True Confessions,” The New Yorker, February
8, 1993. In “Making the Fossils Frolic,” The Economist, June 5, 1993, 101-102,
that newspaper’s anonymous journalists gets Hoving*s point: “what a spanking
investment the politicians are making with every cent of public money they put
in to ...b ig museums.”
35. My sympathies with social construction and cultural studies are described in a
book that tries to bridge art history and the history of medicine: D.M. Fox and
Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain
and America Since 1850 (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1987).
36. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., The Poetics and Politics o f Museum Dis
play (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 11-12.
37. Ibid., 26. The title of Alpers’ article is “The Museum as a Way of Seeing.”
38. Ibid., 101-102.
39. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of
Museums (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991), 10-11, 24.
40. There is a growing literature on patients’ and professionals’ perceptions of ill
ness and on how people in different cultures interpret the international knowl
edge of biomedical science. I examine the consequences for policy of a relativist

view of disease in Power and Illness, note 1 above.
41. See for example Roger Cooter, Surgery and Society in Peace and War:
Orthopaedics in the Organization o f Modern Medicine (London, Macmillan,
1993). Cooter has for many years been writing the history of medicine as a social
constructionist of Marxist inclinations. For an elaboration of this paragraph see
my review of Cooter*s book in the Times Literary Supplement [London], January
15, 1993, 7.
1
Museums for the Public
The development of art museums in America since the 1870’s has

been a function of their involvement in the philanthropic process and, to
a lesser extent, of their need to justify additional support from govern
ment funds. The earliest American art galleries, in the eighteenth and
first half of the nineteenth centuries, were, for the most part, either busi
ness enterprises or the static property of learned societies; after the Civil
War, changing sources and patterns of financial support modified mu
seum goals and policies. The public museums established in the past
ninety years had their origin in creative philanthropy—benevolent ac
tion by groups of private individuals who had a complex vision of the
potentialities of the institutions they supported. As the American muse
ums matured, the actions and ideas of these individuals were colored by
the public character of the institutions they founded and supported.
The influence of philanthropy and public support on museum devel
opment is evident in several areas. Donors and administrators carefully
articulated moral and social justifications for benefactions and for the
institutions’ existence and expansion. One result of this social concern
on the part of philanthropists was that American art galleries, dependent
on philanthropic and municipal support, combined the functions of ac
quisition, exhibition and exposition at an earlier date than most muse
ums in Europe, which were conceived mainly as national or local treasure
houses. Moreover, the combination of public and private funds, which
created and sustained most American museums, made them extremely
sensitive to public opinion and to national and local crises in politics,
economics and social thought. Despite the egotism and short-sightedness
of some leading benefactors, art museums have moved with a changing
America from 1870 to the present day to become the largest and perhaps
25
the most significant voluntarily supported cultural institutions in mod

em history.
In 1845, William Dunlap, historian of art and design in America, saw

no indication of any effort to create public art galleries.1A quarter-cen
tury later, public museums were being founded across the nation, al
though the Middle-Atlantic and North-Central states contained about
seventy-five percent of museum property until the third decade of the
twentieth century.
The public museums founded in America in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries differed from earlier American galleries in hav
ing specific programs for public service, enunciated and administered
by independent corporations. These institutions were inspired by and
borrowed their techniques for exhibition from European museums. But
motives and methods developed in Europe were modified by American
patterns of philanthropy, education, and government.
European museums were the product of eighteenth and nineteenth
century educational theory, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In some
cases, France particularly, they were made possible by violent social
revolutions. These galleries were repositories of national and interna
tional treasures, symbols of national prestige, even emblems of the middle
class’ victory over the aristocracy in struggles for power. Their educa
tional function was conceived in limited terms; the past teaching by ex
ample. They were often forbidding, dark, disorganized and cluttered.
Few efforts were made to publicize the collections or to develop coher
ent educational programs until the twentieth century. European muse
ums were always maintained by the public treasury; private philanthropy
aided, but neither created nor sustained the Louvre or the National Gal
lery of London.2
American public museums contrast sharply with this description. In
the nineteenth century, American philanthropists did not believe the
country had a national art treasure worthy of museum exhibition; our
national prestige could not be measured in terms of a lengthy past which
yielded glorious examples of a high level of civilization.* Our private
*The terms “philanthropist” and “museum philanthropist” are used in a broad sense through
out this essay; attitudes and values ascribed to them refer to statements and actions by
donors of funds and art objects and to opinions expressed at the donors* request by their
spokesmen, professional museum administrators and personal art advisers.
Museums for the Public 27
art collections had been made in one generation; there were no aristo
cratic family collections to compare with those in Europe and to inspire
similar envy and hatred among the newly-powerful middle class.
Founders of American public museums were concerned about the qual
ity of culture in America and the role of taste in civilized life. The insti
tutions they created were conceived as instruments of direct and indirect
education, and American museums benefitted from the fact that their
founding coincided with a revolution in educational thought.
The most important difference between Europe and America was the
role of private citizens in creating and sustaining the institutions. Mu
seum growth in America had a double dynamic: on one hand, the direct
and subtle influence of the need for approval, concessions, funds, and
services from municipal and state governments; on the other, the chang
ing goals and methods of private philanthropists. Private collectors and
self-appointed guardians of culture were transformed into public bene
factors by the interaction of their own concern for public welfare with
the need to co-operate with the elected and appointed representatives of
the people. Nineteenth-century philanthropists, usually able to forge their
own policies, condescended to representatives of local government only
if they desired. But in the twentieth century, changes in American soci
ety and politics combined with changes in the means and ends of philan
thropy to make prospective benefactors more sensitive to the needs and
desires of the public, less willing and able to convert the living into the
dead hand.
European visitors have described the uniqueness of American art
museums. They have emphasized the central importance of private bene
factors, the excellence and size of museum buildings, the attractiveness
of exhibits, the resourcefulness of museum directors who must serve
philanthropists and communities as well as art, the scope and variety of
museum educational programs, and the desire of almost every public
museum to possess a collection from all parts of the world and all
periods of history. These points were made in detail by the French art
historian, Rene Brimo, whose study of the history of taste and art insti
tutions in America appeared in 1938. Brimo explained that American
public galleries were created to serve both a social and intellectual elite
and the general public, and that reliance on private philanthropy made
American museums more subject to changes in public taste than those
in Europe.3
Brimo also described some indirect results of dependence on private

funds. Perhaps the most important result, from his point of view, was the
close collaboration between museums and private collectors who were,
of course, potential donors of funds and objects. Significant also were
the activities outside the visual arts undertaken by American museums,
particularly concert programs and lecture courses in music, literature,
drama, and history. European museums, Brimo asserted, favored the
elite while those in America encouraged “social concern as philanthropy
for social profit, as patronage to instruct...not only an elite but the
great public toward an ideal of perfection.” In the course of their devel
opment, he concluded, American museums became “the center and the
personification of the intellectual life of the United States.”4
The public museums described by Brimo and other Europeans were
founded in most major American cities between 1870 and 1920 and
have several common characteristics: dependence for support on gifts
and bequests and, in most cases, on municipal tax funds; a name which
reflects collective rather than individual action, though a donor’s name
may be used for a wing or a special room; and a self-perpetuating Board
of Trustees which formulates policy and is responsible for selecting pro
fessional administrators. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadel
phia Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of
Chicago are the leading examples of this form of museum organization.
These museums view themselves as requesting support by and as serv
ing the broadest possible public.
This dominant type of museum has had a pervasive influence. Many
galleries created from the collections of single individuals or historical
societies have been transformed into public museums.5 Others, founded
to promote particular points of view, particularly the modem art move
ment, have obtained tax exemption by claiming that special pleading for
modem art is an educational activity.
There are at least eight other types of art museums in America, founded
by philanthropists or public institutions, but differing from the public
museums in origin or goals.6 The simplest ones are the private galleries
left to the public as monuments to their donors. Static in character, they
rely on only one philanthropic act; the Gardner Museum in Boston and
the Barnes collection in Philadelphia are examples, A similar type are
the museums bearing the name of a single donor, but with capacity and
funds for growth; the Corcoran Gallery in W ashington and the
Museums for the Public 29
Guggenheim and Whitney Museums in New York, for instance. A third

type initiated by a single philanthropist is closely related to the public
museums: in Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, one man, industri
alist Stephen Salisbury, provided the initial funds for a museum in the
hope that the community would take responsibility for the institution’s
growth. A fourth variety is the university museum founded by a single
benefactor, with the university taking responsibility for maintenance and
growth; the museum at Stanford and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard
are illustrations.
Most American museums, however, like the public galleries, were
founded and are sustained by collective action. Some were organized as
community activities by academies or historical societies; a few of these,
such as the galleries in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Portland, Oregon, be
came public museums; others, like the museums of the New York and
Wisconsin Historical Societies remained limited in size and aspiration.
A number of museums were founded by direct government action; the
New York State Museum and the St. Louis City Museum come to mind.
A seventh type are those founded by private philanthropy which have
become government agencies, examples of which are the National Gal
lery, endowed by Andrew Mellon, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, origi
nally organized by private citizens. Finally, there are several museums,
like those in Newark and Jamestown, which were initially administered
by public libraries.
Although museum philanthropy is in some ways a new departure,
intimately related to changing patterns of both art patronage and educa
tion, it has several characteristics in common with other kinds of bene
factions. Like gifts to social welfare agencies and higher education in
the past century, museum philanthropy was grounded in an urge to in
struct and uplift the American people. It shares with religious charity
a desire to promote and disseminate knowledge of certain eternal veri
ties; in fact, museums were often viewed as surrogate churches.7 Muse
ums, like other objects of voluntary benevolent action in America,
reflected philanthropists’ belief that there are unique values in nongov
ernmental operations. Moreover, museum philanthropy shares with ev
ery other modern American charitable cause the conviction that
growth and progress are necessary in society and in charitable institu
tions; few public museums have been considered complete. In addition,
although museum philanthropy, more than most other causes, engaged a
donor’s personality, museums were affected by the twentieth-century

shift in emphasis from individual small gifts to organized, large-scale
benefactions.8
By the end of the nineteenth century, most museum philanthropists
and administrators had developed a mythology about their role which
has persisted to the present day. They viewed themselves as consecrated
enthusiasts bringing taste and truth to the vulgar. This was a convenient
justification for ignoring the facts about municipal appropriations and
the unvarnished egotism of many gifts and bequests. Their self-satisfac
tion was reinforced in the twentieth century by the international reputa
tion acquired by American public museums.
In the nineteenth century, American philanthropists did not believe
our museums could ever rival major European galleries. But great feats
of private art collecting, the prelude to almost every large benefaction,
continuous European social and political upheavals, and the growing
excellence of American art gave them the opportunity to equal Euro
pean galleries by the third decade of the twentieth century. By that time,
however, instead of merely rivaling European treasure-houses most
American public museums were moving in two directions; toward ac
quisition of increasingly valuable collections and toward community
service, mainly as educational institutions.
What Russell Lynes describes as the “Art World,” somewhat suspect
to many Americans during the nineteenth century, became both respect
able and a big business in the same years that public museums were
maturing.9 These two developments are related: museum growth stimu
lated the art market, and the opportunity to convert whim into charity
provided a moral justification for private collecting on any scale. To put
it another way, a desire to consume conspicuously and to shine in the
glory reflected from possessed masterpieces was often stimulated and
justified by the moral and ethical impulses of American philanthropy
over the past three-quarters of a century.
2
Impulse and Justification
Lewis Mumford has argued that public museums are “a manifesta

tion of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory cul
ture.”10 But the impulse to create and contribute to art museums was
more complex. For better and for worse, museum philanthropists were
“curious” in order to moralize, “acquisitive” for the sake of social and
educational ideals, and “preyed” on an older culture in order to stimu
late a younger one. Their benefactions were encouraged and justified by
nineteenth century anxieties about the quality of American life, imported
and domestic ideas about progress, improvement and spiritual educa
tion, and, perhaps most important, personal altruism and involvement
with works of art.
Concern for improvement and uplift involved many philanthropists
in a paradoxical justification of their activities: museums were viewed
as both utilitarian instruments and antidotes to life in modem America.
Similarly, disinterested altruism was often complicated by yearning for
social status and prestige and, in the twentieth century, by a desire to
control the destiny of surplus funds and estates rather than to allow the
government to do so.
Most benefactors were moved by several motives; it is difficult to say
which one was the most telling. Art philanthropy, unlike most other
kinds of charity, has often represented the extension of an individual’s
most satisfying avocation into public service. Perhaps it enabled a man
to have his cake and his conscience at the same time, to combine aes
thetic delight with good works. The glamour and adventure of art col
lecting by the merchant princes and princesses of the Gilded Age and
after have been recorded elsewhere in considerable detail.11However, it
is necessary to analyze and summarize the anxieties, intellectual and
31
social assumptions, and personal considerations which were reflected in

the institutions there men and women founded and sustained.
Although the first genuine public museums were founded in the de

cades after the Civil War, the mood which led to their creation had its
roots in the first half of the century. In the midst of material prosperity
and national expansion, many men were concerned about the spiritual
side of American life. This concern, reflected in literature and in agita
tion for religious, social, and educational reform, was also expressed by
people interested in art. The founders of the National Institute, the fore
runner of the National Gallery of Art, for example, declared in 1840 that
“the sons of the intelligent and enlightened and virtuous men who
achieved the independence and secured our freedom” were “less intelli
gent, less enlightened...than their sires.”12
The beneficent influence of art on manners and morals was a major
theme for many orators and journalists in the decades before the Civil
War. To cite a single example which might be duplicated many times,
Frederick A. P. Barnard, the well-known educational leader, declared in
1854 that “our territorial expansion and physical power have outstripped
the march of our intellectual cultivation and our social refinement.” Art
provided a remedy for this deficiency, he continued; it promoted public
and private morality. Barnard admonished those whose “tastes have risen
above the dead level that characterizes our country” to promote the cause
of art.13
These anxieties about American taste and refinement were intensi
fied after 1865. More important, they were rallying points for men inter
ested in creating public museums. Charles C. Perkins, a founder of the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, expressed the continuity of ideas with the
prewar years when he told the American Social Science Association in
1870 that museums of art give the people sorely needed “means of form
ing a standard of taste through knowledge of the masterpieces of the
past.”14 The persistence of this concern for American cultural life is il
lustrated by the fact that even in 1910 an orator was applauded for de
claring that museums “lend coordination and cohesiveness to our national
idea.”15
New anxieties about American society affected philanthropists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many museum founders
shared the concern of other prominent Americans that the family and
Impulse and Justification 33
the church were losing much of their civilizing and stabilizing power
and the fear that millions of immigrants would modify the physical,
social, and political structure of American cities beyond recognition.
These anxieties motivated many art collectors and enthusiasts to con
tribute to a variety of charitable causes, and they stimulated the conver
sion of public art museums into semi-religious and educational causes.
The elevation of art to the role of a surrogate religion was reflected in
museum architecture, membership programs, and educational ideals. At
the turn of the century, for example, a museum director declared that his
temple was built with the intention of impressing “upon persons enter
ing the building that they were going into a great monument, a place of
importance, an institution worthy of consideration and thought.”16Anew
member of the Chicago Art Institute in the 1890’s declared, “I feel as if
I had joined the church.”17 As late as 1922 the trustees of the Philadel
phia Art Museum pointed out that, “A large number of our visitors are
foreign bom or of foreign parents. To them the museum must take the
place of the cathedral.”18
It was a short step from this view of museums as instruments of cul
tural stability and continuity to their use as instruments of the American
ization of immigrants. However, donors, trustees and other spokesmen
for museums differed from many of their contemporaries in asserting
the positive values of pluralism over the eclectic uncertainty of the melting
pot; the historical and international character of public museum collec
tions usually reinforced pluralistic values.19
The desire for an original and authentic American culture, expressed
from the earliest days of the Republic, was not ignored by the founders
of public museums. Many of them hoped that public galleries would
stimulate native artists. Although some philanthropists felt that a mu
seum was not the proper place to hang the work of living artists, others
believed that public exhibition of the art of the past was a necessary
foundation for a glorious future of American artistic achievements.20
These hopes and aspirations were in large part derived from and stimu
lated by several currents in nineteenth-century political, social, and edu
cation philosophy. The aspects of nineteenth-century social thought which
were of central importance to the history of museum philanthropy can
be summarized in a few words: progress, improvement, culture and public
service. These concepts have European, particularly English and French,
roots. Although the influence of these ideas on art museums was ini
tially evident in England, they had a greater impact in late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century America. Only in the past forty years, under
the influence of European Social Democracy and the achievements of
American museums, have the European galleries re-oriented their pub
lic service programs.21
The idea of progress had several implications for American museums.
Philanthropists declared that the institutions must be oriented toward
the future and that knowledge of the past was necessary for progress.
Worship of the past for its own sake did not receive much support in
nineteenth-century America from the leaders of business and social life
who engaged in philanthropy. An illustration of the concept of progress
through the proper use of the past is an 1870 statement by the Executive
Committee of the Metropolitan Museum: “No progress is possible which
is not based on what has gone before. This knowledge must not only be
possessed by artists, but by the public also, as a condition of the growth
of art with us.”22
Another implication of the idea of progress was the conviction that
decay was the “natural” result of maximum growth. “A finished mu
seum is a dead museum, and a dead museum is a useless museum,” said
the Director of the United States National Museum in a widely publi
cized address in 1891.23
Nineteenth-century meliorism, the doctrine of improvement, played
a major role in providing museum philanthropists with justification and
encouragement. This concept, based on the idea of progress and a be
nevolent view of human nature, was reflected in two assumptions sub
scribed to by most museum leaders: the belief that men can be improved
if the correct methods are found and supported, and the conviction that
human beings will make a rational choice among alternatives when their
self-interest is at stake. Improvement based on the fine arts would, most
philanthropists agreed, be moral and spiritual; uplift through museum
exhibitions and educational programs might succeed where churches
and schools had failed. Individuals confronted with objects of aesthetic
and moral value would compare them with objects of inferior value and
modify their ideas and actions.24 Furthermore, it was asserted, museums
were more democratic than other educational and welfare institutions
because the uplift that museums provided was reflected in “the cultural
side of life” which was a necessity for every class. Most of these men
had a generous view of human, and especially American, nature; they
were convinced that “the love of beauty is not restricted to the aristoc
racy of wealth and education.”25
Museum donors and administrators did not, for the most part, share
the concern of such philanthropists as Josephine Shaw Lowell and An
drew Carnegie that their assistance to the less fortunate classes might
militate against efforts for self-help. For museums obviously could not
help the unfit to survive in the struggle for existence; they avoided dan
gerous benevolence because they provided Culture, which was a result
and symbol of the separation of certain moral and intellectual activities
from the driving forces of society. A recent writer, Raymond Williams,
has described this attitude toward the arts as an attempt to establish a
“court of human appeal to be set over the processes of practical social
judgment and y e t...a mitigating and rallying alternative.”26 Culture
and its useful manifestation, taste, were conceived by many museum
men as rewards for the strong and the fit; something tangible which
could be bought on the market, internalized, and then freely bestowed
on the community. In this view, museum philanthropy could not be any
thing but constructive charity.
However, museum philanthropists, and their spokesmen in the late
nineteenth century were unable to fight clear of all the philosophical
dilemmas embodied in the dominant ideas of their time. These dilem
mas were reflected in conflicting statements about the aims of museum
philanthropy. The aims were conceived in two very different ways: as a
contribution to the broad education and welfare of the American people,
raising taste, manners, morals, and standards of craftsmanship, and as a
service to the religious and contemplative side of human life. The first
view implied acceptance of the contemporary world and a desire to im
prove it; the second, dissatisfaction with a civilization in which material
things were elevated to a higher place than products of the human spirit
and imagination.
The first, more utilitarian, view of museums attracted those philan
thropists who, not completely satisfied with justification by taste, sus
pected that museums might, in fact, “serve to kill time for the idle” of all
classes.27 Museums, these men felt, must avoid giving mere solace to
the unfit, especially if these unfortunates were also poor.28 Thus, they
emphasized the importance of promoting good industrial design by en
couraging artisans to look at masterpieces; and spoke of the dignity and
tourist trade that public art collections would bestow on their cities.29
Most important, they hopes that museums, by stimulating undiscovered

geniuses to become great artists, would heap glory on our much ma
ligned nation.30 Art galleries would even serve practical purposes for
men of average fitness and little craftsmanship: for example, by foster
ing the habit of collecting which, like thirst, “induces habits of neatness,
order, and skill.”31
To another group, art was mainly an antidote in cultural and moral
terms. Three examples, which span fifty years of museum history, clarify
this point. In 1870, William Cullen Bryant, poet, editor, and civic states
man, told the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that “we
should counter the temptations to vice by...the influence of works of
art [which] is wholesome, ennobling, instructive.”32 Thirty-five years
later, Benjamin Ives Gilman, director of the Boston Museum and a very
practical man when dealing with philanthropists, lamented that “art aims
to offer u s .. .sights that are satisfying, moments that we would wish to
delay... but the imperative necessities of practical life have so ingrained
within us habitudes of thinking and striving for the morrow, that the best
of us are unable to accept the gift.”33Although most museum leaders of
the nonutilitarian group had accepted industrial civilization by 1920,
new dangers had appeared. Paul M. Rea, Director of the American
Association of Museums was worried about anarchists and Bolsheviks
when he declared that, “Disquieting tendencies...cannot be counter
acted by suppression or force. The task of America is to inspire and
cultivate more wholesome and saner interests and truer ideals.”34
Although Museum donors and their spokesmen shared common anxi
eties, hopes, and assumptions about American life, personal consider
ations were probably more important than general ideas for stimulating
gifts and bequest of objects and funds. Who were the wealthy men and
women who contributed to public museums and what special signifi
cance did art have in their lives?
Most of the great benefactors of public art museums were men and
women who had inherited wealth.35 They had the leisure, the education,
the money to travel and collect works of art for their own pleasure and
prestige. But many museum philanthropists had created large fortunes
themselves. The first multi-million dollar bequest to an American mu
seum came from the estate of Jacob Rogers, a self-made locomotive
manufacturer from New Jersey. One of the greatest collections ever given
to an American museum belonged to Benjamin Altman, an immigrant
who became a department store magnate. Despite their origin, men like
Rogers and Altman had a great deal in common, because of their inter
est in art, with such inheritors of wealth as Martin Ryerson and Mrs.
Potter Palmer of Chicago and Robert deForest and J.P. Morgan of
New York.
The importance of personal considerations in museum philanthropy
was reflected in the fact that American philanthropists were more con
cerned with art museums than with historical and scientific collections
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.36 Americans had
inferiority feelings about their cultural achievements, not about their
industries, natural resources, geological and ethnological wonders, or
science. Moreover, scientific concerns were closer to those of business
and industry, less pleasant, refreshing or ennobling in the philanthro
pists’ eyes than the fine arts. Science was painfully close to being real
capital; art provided social and moral as well as aesthetic capital. It was
also more difficult for both untutored men and men with gentlemen’s
educations to understand science than for them to develop at least a
passable knowledge about art. Furthermore, one cannot ignore the aes
thetic joy provided by objects of art.
The personal appeal of art collecting and philanthropy was frequently
reinforced by more utilitarian considerations. Art was a form of investment,
either secure or speculative, for many men. Art philanthropy seemed to be
safer than patronage for music and the theater: genuine masterpieces do not
fluctuate widely in value, they require very little upkeep and museums, once
established, will not fail for lack of customers.37
The amount of disinterested altruism in museum philanthropy cannot
be measured. However, it was probably less important than in benefac
tions for other causes. Art collecting became a means of self-expression
and self-glorification for many wealthy men and women. It often seemed
to guarantee some kind of immortality to individuals whose names were
identified with the possession of great works of art. One writer has re
marked in this connection that, “What the rich men had accumulated
was slipping away from them ...as they felt futility and hostility clos
ing in around them, they longed passionately for the happy company, in
the even darker regions ahead of these magical and secure and vivid
[works of art].”38
Philanthropists took considerable pride in their personal art col
lections. J.P. Morgan, for example, was proud of having a finer art
collection than many European royal families. Like many other col
lector-philanthropists, Morgan regarded his great feats of acquisi
tion as a form of market-cornering, both of objects and immortality.39
Many men and women derived considerable pleasure from collect
ing in one lifetime what European aristocrats had acquired over many
generations. Possession of great works of art, especially when the
collector did not have lifelong familiarity with the fine arts, seemed
to represent “a natural instinct” for the best. Their collections often
confirmed their somewhat egotistic view of the natural superiority
of American business heroes, no matter how many professional ex
perts the collectors employed.40
The special significance of objects to philanthropists was reflected
in the fact that very few major benefactors gave museums cash with
out kind. It has been suggested, by Henry James, for example, that
Americans worship objects and that material piety is one of the more
questionable manifestations of an acquisitive society.41 But this is
not a complete explanation of aesthetic accumulation. A more cyni
cal, though still inadequate suggestion, made and documented by S.N.
Behrman in his biography of Lord Duveen, is that art dealers like
Duveen persuaded their clients to donate objects to museums in or
der to avoid worrying about their pictures “being dumped on the
market at a difficult time.”42 A more complete explanation, rooted in
nineteenth-century moral dilemmas, is that many museum philan
thropists tried to combine the role of Renaissance prince with the
Christian concepts of altruism and the stewardship of wealth; by giv
ing objects as well as cash, they could demonstrate their own acu
men and benefit the public at the same time. In the twentieth century,
many philanthropists operated in the same context while playing the
more dangerous game of gambling on the futures of living artists
and donating their works to museums. Collector-philanthropists have
been able to benefit the public without parting permanently from their
beloved objects by lending works of art for temporary exhibitions
since the earliest days of the public museums.
Museum philanthropy also enabled men and women to belong to an
exclusive group and at the same time have the satisfaction of serving the
Great Public. This paradox appeared in many appeals for funds and in
creased membership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For ex
ample, Edward S. Morse, a curator at the Boston Museum, told a group
of prospective donors in 1892 that, “In this plea for the widest and most
generous support for the M useum ...I am speaking of an institution
organized and supported mainly by a few men of wealth and culture.”43
As recently as 1950, museums still based their appeal on a subtle com
bination of snobbery and democracy: A “Dear Collector” letter sent by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the Book of the Month Club to
potential buyers of paintings reproduced as stamps for pasting in an al
bum used the same argument Morse had made almost sixty years ear
lier; collectors belong to a select group which intends to remain select
while increasing in size.
Another factor motivating large gifts and bequests to museums was
the desire on the part of businessmen to do something special for the
cities in which they had lived and prospered. This motive, with deep
roots in the Anglo-American charitable tradition, was exemplified in
American educational philanthropy by the bequests of such men as
Stephen Girard, Peter Cooper and Andrew Carnegie. However, bequests
of art objects to museums by local businessmen presented a different
problem in justification than most educational and welfare donations. In
justifying most welfare and educational philanthropy, it was usually not
considered necessary to demonstrate that the money had been earned
with an ultimate charitable use in mind. But donors to museums appar
ently did not like to admit that their collections had been gathered ini
tially for aesthetic or mimetic reasons. For instance, although it would
appear that Benjamin Altman had acquired his great collection for a
variety of personal reasons, these motives were subsumed in an asser
tion of complete disinterest when his bequest to the Metropolitan Mu
seum of Art was described: “It was Mr. Altman’s ambition,” the Director
of that museum wrote in 1913, “to leave to the people of the city with
which his success in life had been identified.. .a collection of works of
art of the highest possible standard.”44
However, most museum philanthropists did not rely on this form of
activity alone to establish reputations for public service. Many, if not
all, of them were active participants in welfare, religious and educa
tional causes. For example, Robert deForest of New York was both a
leader in numerous welfare causes and a moving spirit in the Metropoli
tan Museum of Art, which he served as trustee and president. His career
is an illustration of the way many wealthy men in this period balanced
their social consciences and the aesthetic inclinations.45
New factors have stimulated art philanthropy in the past generation.

As the American people became intolerant of excessively conspicuous
consumption, and concentrated wealth declined under the pressure of
income and estate taxes, millionaires’ palaces became almost extinct.
Smaller mansions meant less wall-space for collections. This, combined
with the tax laws, encouraged collectors to part with a great many art
objects. But many large benefactions were made before income and in
heritance taxes became major problems for wealthy men, and the direc
tion and extent of giving are still decided by individuals, not by the
Commissioner of Internal Revenue. A desire for personal prestige as a
member of a cultured group and for a kind of immortality through asso
ciation with works of art, highly personal factors, are still dominant in
museum philanthropy.
Another new stimulus has been a more permissive attitude on the part
of philanthropists toward their children. The nineteenth-century desire
to acquire aristocratic status for one’s family through possession of works
of art meant that a number of great collections were kept intact into the
twentieth century. In some cases, however, the desire to keep a collec
tion intact was combined with a desire to create a public monument; the
collections of Henry Clay Frick in New York and the Taft family in
Cincinnati, for example, became separate museums. However, many
children of great collectors were forced to dispose of inherited and un
wanted art objects, sometimes in great haste, under the pressure of credi
tors and the tax collector: this seems to have been the case with the heirs
of J.R M organ, Mrs. H. O. Havem eyer and Edith M cCorm ick
Rockefeller. Sometimes this dispersal took the form of museum philan
thropy, as with the Havemeyer collection; more often it resulted in both
hurried sales and philanthropy, as in the instances of the Morgan and
McCormick-Rockefeller collections.46 Since the Second World War,
collectors have been more liberal toward their children. As one promi
nent collector declared, “A m an.. .shouldn’t force his taste on his chil
dren; and his children shouldn’t have to pay a tax in order to own some
pictures they don’t want.”47
Although appeals for museum funds have gradually been extended to
a broader segment of the population over the past seventy-five years,
the nature of the appeal has remained basically unchanged. Prestige and
fashion seem to have predominated over altruism and social concern in
the motivations of most museum philanthropists. In 1870 an art expert
predicted that, “it will become fashionable to visit museums, be ac

quainted with art—and this fashion will cause money now spent on luxu
rious living to be devoted to adorning the walls of our houses with works
of art.”48 Fifty years later a museum director declared that painting and
sculpture had “prestige” as a heritage from the past, that interest in art
was “the thing to do,” and that culture was supposed to have “a refining
and uplifting influence”: his order of motives is instructive, particularly
since his position required constant interaction with philanthropist-
collectors.49
Nevertheless, philanthropic motives were complex and many factors
entered into the impulse, the appeal, and the justification. This complex
ity was revealed whenever museum leaders from across the nation gath
ered to publicly pat themselves on the back. The following statements,
exemplifying divergent attitudes towards museums, are culled from
speeches given by philanthropists and administrators representing the
major public museums at the opening of the Cleveland Museum of Art
in 1916:
The museum will ever be found a safe retreat from the annoyance and perplexities
of routine life...an example of the best...an educational agency.... Art must
still be nourished by the few who appreciate its value__ Art is a luxury for the
rich, but a necessity for the poor.... Let us dedicate this museum...to the ser
vice of humanity.... Museums...must be fostered and supported by a few con
secrated enthusiasts...in truth a vital civic need...does give a broadening of
opportunity, and that this opportunity is appreciated is shown...by the figures of
the turnstiles, by the money that the municipalities are willing to expend for the
support and maintenance of the institutions.50
3
Sources and Patterns of Museum

Philanthropy
Public Museums have been a partnership between men of wealth and

the representatives of the people since they were first established in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many men have denied this fact,
although the story of this partnership is revealed in the annual reports of
every public museum. Even where municipal or state governments make
no direct contribution to operating expenses, museums have benefitted
considerably from tax-exemption and gifts of land. In return for govern
ment support, museums have expanded their educational programs,
granted the public free admission, and provided advisory services to
municipal art commissions.
Private philanthropy, however, has dominated the partnership. The
base of museum philanthropy has continually broadened since the 1870’s.
Gifts and bequests from wealthy individuals have been most important,
but contributions from membership drives, foundations, and business
corporations increased in the twentieth century.51 By mid-century, new
varieties of individual, collective, and institutional philanthropy had
appeared, stimulated by Federal tax laws and the importance of muse
ums as community cultural centers.
Some Patterns of Voluntary Giving
In general, museum philanthropists in the nineteenth century had no

intention of limiting the base of their support. Quite the contrary: most
museum founders anticipated a generous response from the general pub
lic. This point is indicated by the progressive increase of the member
ship of every public museum, the texts of a large number of fund-raising
43
speeches which have been preserved, and the social range represented
by donors to loan exhibitions. As early as 1870, a committee of the
Metropolitan pointed out that it is possible to find “art of value” in homes
“not otherwise luxurious.”52The democratizing influence of government
support and the educational ideals of museum leaders reinforce this in
terpretation. The conception of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
museums as institutions created primarily by and for a social and
intellectual elite is a distortion by historians with an animus against the
Gilded Age.
Gifts of money and objects have been the major source of museum
income and endowment. The proportion of gifts to bequests and the
ratio of accessions by purchase to those by gift vary so much among
different museums that it would be misleading to attempt more than
descriptive remarks. Money gifts of amounts under twenty-five thou
sand dollars have accounted for the major part of the income and en
dowment of most public museums.53 Museums west of the Mississippi
seem to have been more dependent on either government support or a
few large donors than those in the East. But there are exceptions: muse
ums in San Francisco, Santa Fe and Portland, Oregon, for example, have
been dependent on medium- and small-sized gifts.54
Bequests have also followed varied patterns. Jacob Rogers, whose
bequest to the Metropolitan at the turn of the century has been men
tioned, had never given that institution more than his annual member
ship dues. Rogers’ motivation was not clear, and his bequest took the
Metropolitan by surprise.55 Conversely, Mrs. Potter Palmer, queen and
cultural leader of Chicago Society, left four hundred thousand dollars to
welfare charity and permitted the Art Institute of Chicago to select only
one hundred thousand dollars worth of paintings from her collection.56
Mrs. Palmer’s conscience may have inclined her to shift her charitable
emphasis in her will; it is also possible that, like other philanthropists,
she felt that her heirs would continue her museum philanthropy by gifts.
In the twentieth century a number of techniques developed for col
laboration between philanthropists and museum staffs which insured
that museum growth would be planned. In 1916, for instance, the Cleve
land Museum announced that purchasable objects had been secured for
a loan collection in the hope that they would be bought for presentation
to the museum.57 In the 1920’s, a new form of collective philanthropy,
with a specific appeal to people of moderate wealth appeared: organiza
Sources and Patterns of Museum Philanthropy 45
tions called Friends of the Museum or Print Clubs at most public muse
ums contributed toward the purchase of objects which the museum staff
desired for the permanent collections. These organizations expanded as
tax problems and museum growth reduced the number of large indi
vidual benefactions and great collections in private hands.58 In addition,
many museums have invited general public subscriptions for the pur
chase of specific works of art or exhibited objects taken from dealers on
consignment until the purchase price was contributed.59
After the Second World War, museums developed techniques which
enabled collectors to deduct art philanthropy from their income tax re
turns and keep the objects in their possession for life or for stipulated
periods of time. In many cities, museum directors became unofficial
advisers to local collectors and encouraged them to purchase objects
which the museums wanted.60 Since 1934, when Andrew Mellon con
vinced the Treasury Department that the pictures whose value he had
deducted from his income tax returns were actually destined for the pub
lic, the federal government has not interfered with deductions for art
philanthropy.61 However, the government has required that appraisals of
works of art given to museums be made by recognized outside experts,
not museum officials.
Restrictions on gifts and bequest of money and objects were deplored
by museum leaders, but reluctantly accepted in most cases until the
1930’s. The most common restriction was the request that an individual’s
collection be hung as a unit in perpetuity. Occasionally collectors were
even more demanding; one New York collection was placed in a gallery
of the Metropolitan designed as a replica of the benefactor’s ballroom.
However, many collectors were more liberal; Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer
and James G. Johnson, for example, permitted museums to show their
paintings in any way they desired.62 Museums began to decline re
stricted gifts after the mid-1920’s: the most notable incident was the
Metropolitan’s refusal to accept Senator Thomas Clark’s collection in
1925.63
The attack on restricted gifts began through the collaboration of
museum leaders and individual philanthropists, and, from the 1920’s,
museums acted together to persuade benefactors that the projection of
personal tastes into an indefinite future is not in the public interest. In
1917, Robert deForest persuaded Isaac D. Fletcher to attach no restric
tions to his important bequest to the Metropolitan.64 Similarly, at the
close of the First World War, the first president of the Cleveland Mu
seum established a firm policy that no restricted gifts would be accepted.65
Since the 1920’s, the American Association of Museums has tried, with
some success, to enforce a national policy based on the principle that,
since restrictions impede growth and freedom, museums should “accept
no gifts or bequests of exhibition material upon which any conditions
are attached.”66 However, because the institutions still compete for gifts
and bequests, many of them continue to accept restricted gifts in order
to augment mediocre collections.67
Other factors, perhaps more important than the Association’s policy
statements, have diminished the intensity of the restriction problem in
the past thirty years. As museums became wealthier and more aware of
their public role, they could refuse gifts with less fear of offending local
philanthropists. Another liberalizing factor was the increased humility
and distaste for public censure on the part of museum philanthropists in
the 1930’s; in 1937, for example, the Hanover Bank’s philanthropy de
partment advised potential contributors that “some restricted gifts stand
out today more as memorials to the pride and egotism of the donors than
to their devotion to art or to the public.”68 Most important of all was the
increasing role of museums in shaping collectors’ standards for acquisi
tion; it has become somewhat difficult for pupils to tell their teachers
what to do with collections bought on the teachers’ advice.69
Local social conditions and individual preferences also influenced
the nature and extent of gifts and the relation of philanthropists to their
museums. Detroit is a good example. At the same time that some of the
wealthiest men in Detroit were helping the Art Institute to acquire a
notable collection, Charles Lang Freer, although a resident of that city,
gave his great collection of oriental art to the Smithsonian Institution
and only a mediocre group of prints to the Institute. After 1919, when
the Institute became a branch of the municipal government by the deci
sion of philanthropists, a Benefactor’s Society was organized to acquire
objects for the permanent collection. Prominent citizens like Edsel Ford
served as trustees for an institution which lacks the policy-making au
tonomy of other museums, especially in questions of the tenure of per
sonnel and the allocation of funds to various museum services.70A similar
situation would probably have been regarded as an affront to philan
thropic liberty by leading citizens in Cleveland or Boston. Explanations
for these local patterns can be attempted only by local historians.
Museum members have been an increasingly important source of in

come. Moreover, they form an interested audience that can be counted
on to feel responsibility for the institution in financial matters and act as
a pressure group when municipal appropriations are at stake. In addi
tion, many men were stimulated to make large gifts and bequests by
their experience as members. Membership has always been organized
by classes, based on the amount of dues paid, but it is important to note
that the cost of membership, particularly in the lowest classes, has re
mained unchanged since the late nineteenth century. Thus, considering
the change in the value of a ten dollar payment over the past twenty
years, the number of people who could afford museum membership has
increased markedly. In fact, however, while the number of members has
grown, the percent of increase has not equalled the population growth of
the largest cities.71 Perhaps this lag is more a reflection of the large num
ber of cultural and philanthropic institutions competing for attention and
funds in the twentieth century than evidence for the exclusiveness of art
museums.
Membership dues were regarded ambiguously until the period after
the Second World War; sometimes as philanthropy, but often as a fee for
such special privileges as admission to exhibition openings, special lec
tures and social events.72 In the past fifteen years, the popularity of in
come tax deductions for charitable contributions has resolved the
ambiguity of membership dues. In most cases, only the lowest class
membership is not regarded as philanthropy, while the fees for the upper
classes are divided into two parts; a small portion is considered to be a
fee for special services, and the bulk is regarded as a tax-exempt contri
bution. The class system is completely accepted at the present time, and,
as in the past, only the highest classes have the privilege of electing the
trustees.73
The most important innovation in museum philanthropy in recent years
has been corporate giving, either directly or through community trusts.
Precedents for business support can be found in the nineteenth century;
the earliest business contribution seems to have been an offer of a tem
porary gallery to the Metropolitan by Tiffany and Company in 1871.74
In 1909, the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis persuaded local
manufacturers to buy admission tickets for their employees in order to
finance and exhibition of Saint Gaudens’ sculpture.75A decade later, the
museum in Columbus, Ohio, held “Art Smokers” to which businessmen
were invited through Rotary and Kiwanis clubs.76Nevertheless, in 1939

Laurence Coleman, official historian of American museums, concluded,
rather pessimistically, that “businessmen rightly expect value for their
money, and the best way to handle their support, if desired, is through
payment for a specific service.”77
The entry of business corporations into unrestricted museum philan
thropy and support for museum education was in large part a result of
the corporate income tax law of 1935, which allowed a five percent
deduction for philanthropy, and of the difficulty encountered by the Pepsi
Cola Corporation when it tried to support museum exhibitions directly
during the Second World War. The five percent deduction encouraged
industrial memberships and gifts in cash and kind. For example, one
manufacturer contributed flooring and bricks to the Museum of Modem
Art. The Pepsi-Cola exhibitions were criticized for being a sorry mix
ture of advertising and philanthropy; most of the cooperating museums
withdrew from the program after one year.78 This criticism influenced
the postwar emphasis on business contributions of unrestricted funds,
industrial memberships, and gifts for educational programs.
Thus, when Laurence Coleman returned to the problem of corporate
philanthropy in 1952, he found that of all forms of giving to museums
“only corporate giving is now on the rise.”79 One of his examples was
the art museum in Akron, Ohio, which derived one-quarter of its income
from one hundred and eighty industrial and commercial firms in 1951.
Corporations’ desire to improve their public image and young execu
tives’ cultural aspirations became new and increasingly important mo
tives for museum philanthropy.
Other varieties of museum philanthropy developed after World War
II. Cultural Community Chests and local Fine Arts Funds stimulated
gifts to museums, as well as to symphony orchestras and theaters. Con
tributions from Junior Leagues, Chambers of Commerce, and local foun
dations increased. Museums earned money from special entertainments
like fashion shows, card parties and rummage sales and from retail trade
in art books and reproductions.80 New fund raising experiments were
reported at the end of the 1950’s: the Museum of Modem Art realized
more than eight hundred thousand dollars from an art auction held over
a closed television circuit; a new museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
was sponsored by twenty-five manufacturing concerns; the Jersey City
Fine Arts Council planned to establish a museum financed by public

subscription and foundation grants.81 But museums continued to derive
most of their funds from individual gifts and bequests, endowment funds
and municipal government appropriations.
In the past generation, museums became increasingly independent of
the whims of individual philanthropists. In the 1920’s, the American
Association of Museums cautioned small museums to exercise diplo
macy and tact in dealing with local philanthropists; by 1957 the Asso
ciation advised firmness and dignity:
It is better to lose an important addition to the collection than it is to mortgage the
museum’s future in order to avoid offending a potential donor...Most museums
receive offers of long-term or permanent loans of objects. Avoid such entangle
ments at all costs...It is possible that the owner is seeking social prestige by
having materials on display in the museum. It is probable that the owner wishes to
place discarded but cherished objects in a safe but rent free storage warehouse.82
Similarly, some museum leaders at mid-century were concerned about

increasing profits from sales of books and reproductions compromising
the public character of their institutions and others deplored the possi
bility of museums becoming “supermarkets of culture.”83 Thus, muse
ums became stable public trusts with a sense of dignity and concern for
their public image that was analogous to the attitudes of great founda
tions and universities.
Voluntary Service
Gifts of time, though less important in museum philanthropy than in

welfare and religious causes, cannot be neglected. Several museums
organized women’s auxiliaries to collect funds and perform volunteer
services, especially in connection with educational programs. More im
portant were the trustees, who devoted considerable time to the affairs
of public museums, although the actual details of museum administra
tion were handled by professionals since the end of the nineteenth cen
tury. Trustees were the bridge between private and public contributions.
Trustees’ abilities and influence have been as varied and changing as
those of more passive museum philanthropists. In general, trustees have
taken an active interest in their museums; the man who served two years
on a committee for purchasing works of art and never visited his
museum’s collection seems to have been an exception.84 Until the First

World War, philanthropists alone formulated the policies of the institu
tions they had created; museums’ staffs were the servants and not
the equals of the trustees. But the development of a museum pro
fession which took its motives and methods from both scholarship and
social work modified the role of the voluntary leaders.85 Since the 1920’s,
professional staffs, many of them trained in the Fine Arts Departments
of Harvard and Princeton, increasingly influenced policy decisions
and inspired new varieties of philanthropy. In 1914, Benjamin Ives
Gilman suggested that art experts sit on museum boards: “The men
of means and the men of ends must join forces for the best achievement
of their common purpose.”86 Gilman’s goal was achieved in the next
generation, though not without considerable accommodation by both
sides.
Trustees left their mark on museum organization and administration.
They instituted rigid accounting procedures within museums, led fund
raising campaigns, and handled the complex legal and political details
involved in circumventing restrictions in city charters, wills, and deeds
of gift.87 Perhaps the most significant contribution of the trustees was
the rationalization of administration and procedure in terms of the ideals
of the public museums; the careful organization and balance of facilities
for exhibition, acquisition and exposition. As in other areas of American
philanthropy, a business-oriented culture created charitable trusts in its
own image.
The interaction between trustees and professionals created patterns
of behavior which differed markedly from patterns in European muse
ums, where the trustees have advisory powers only. American trustees
wanted their museums to make brilliant acquisitions, increase their at
tendance, have popular educational programs and attract new philan
thropists.88The pressure to obtain large collections or money gifts and at
the same time publicize and popularize museums conditioned the prac
tices of museum professionals. Many of them played the social game,
made special promises to collectors and dealers and, in the case of mod
em art, occasionally speculated in futures on the art market.89Thus, phil
anthropic influence, represented by benefactors and trustees, was
stimulated and reinforced by egotism and desire for prestige among col
lectors, professionals, and trustees. This combination of factors has been
a major source of energy for the growth and development of the public
museum.
Government Support
Alfred Hoeber, a staff member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

declared in 1892 that the Museum “was founded...by a little band of
public-spirited men and sustained out of their private purses.”90 A little
later, Hoeber listed the grants made by the City of New York for build
ing and maintaining the institution. This paradoxical explanation of the
sources of funds for public museums has been a central element in the
philanthropists’ self-image. Historians of the public museums tend to
emphasize private support and ignore contributions by municipal gov
ernments. According to a writer in 1927, the growth of American muse
ums was due entirely to “the backing they have received from generous
citizens.”91 More recently, Walter Pach, a noted art critic and museum
historian, went so far as to suggest that heroic private citizens have saved
the taste of the American people from control by annoying and ignorant
politicians.92
Although the initiative for founding art museums was not taken by
government agencies, and educational programs were not entirely a tool
for prying funds from legislatures, governments have been involved in
museum development since the 1870’s. Of approximately thirty-seven
million dollars spent for museum buildings between 1870 and 1910,
municipal and state governments contributed sixteen million, or about
forty percent of the total.93 By 1930, the income of museums from gov
ernment appropriations was slightly more than fifty percent of their in
come from private citizens and foundations combined.94 In 1953, city
governments provided eight million, four hundred thousand dollars for
operating expenses alone—about fifty percent of total operating costs.95
It is impossible to determine accurately how much governments have
provided in building subsidies and gifts of land.
The early history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art illustrates the
interaction of philanthropists and politicians. The founders of the insti
tution declared in 1870 that,
We do not anticipate that it will be possible to create such an institution by private
means alone. Our hope is that when private effort and private beneficence have
demonstrated the value of the enterprise and shown the way to its accomplishment,
the public will demand the means for its fulfillment at their legislative source.96
The story of Boss Tweed’s henchman Sweeney telling the Metro

politan’s trustees in 1872 that the museum must be a public institution
has been repeated many times.97 But the trustees would have lobbied for
a piece of the purse without Tammany Hall’s encouragement. Early an
nual reports praise European government appropriations for museums
and the Board was confident that “at no very distant day the taxpayers
will support the museum.”98 The Metropolitan, they declared in 1875,
was “entitled” to government support as “one of the educational institu
tions of the State.”99
The municipal government retained an influence in the Metropolitan’s
affairs even though New York philanthropists wrested the initiative for
making plans and decisions about museum buildings from the Park Com
missioners by the 1880’s.100 In 1892, the same year that Hoeber glori
fied the self-sufficiency of the “little bands of public men,” a cut in
appropriations by the City Board of Estimate caused “a crisis in the
finances of the Museum so grave that the executive Committee...
requested” an emergency meeting of the trustees.101 The year before,
pressure from the City Government had forced the museum to open on
Sundays. However, it is important to note that the new Sunday opera
tion was paid for by a combination of city funds and private contribu
tions from Benjamin Altman and H.O. Havemeyer.102
The City’s contribution to the Metropolitan increased in the first two
decades of the twentieth century. In 1920, however, Robert deForest,
president of the museum, worried about a decline in the percentage of
costs covered by municipal appropriations. In 1909, he claimed, the City
contributed sixty-eight percent of the Metropolitan’s expenses; by 1919
only twenty-eight percent. These figures suggest that deForest was a
victim of the mythology about the noble bands of public-spirited men;
according to other Metropolitan records for the same years, the City had
provided fifty percent of the operating cost in 1915, and, after two years
of war mobilization, the percentage had fallen to forty, not twenty-eight
percent.103
Despite his attack on the City and his statistical juggling, deForest
recognized the importance of government support to the museum. He
declared that fears of government control had proved groundless and
that the Metropolitan’s role in the community was explained by the reci
procity of public service and government support; more public service,

he argued, had elicited more government support, while the use of pub
lic funds tended to increase the emphasis on public service in the mu
seum.104As another spokesman for the Metropolitan remarked in 1920,
“let us give Tammany Hall the credit due it for the support it has given to
the Metropolitan.”105
The New York State Legislature provided indirect support for the
Metropolitan by permitting the City to appropriate funds for the mu
seum and by granting the institution tax-exempt status on the condition
that it conduct educational programs and admit the public free of charge
on certain days. The legislation was the model for similar action in other
states, although there were some variations; direct state contributions to
the Chicago Art Institute and permission to set aside a portion of the real
estate tax in St. Louis, for example.106 In addition to indirect support,
several states established art museums in cooperation with private phi
lanthropists. The first public museum founded by a combination of state
and private funds was the Utah Art Institute, established in 1899; in the
1940’s, state museums in Virginia and North Carolina were initiated by
joint action.107 Although a number of states, particularly in New En
gland, were hostile to even indirect support for public museums for many
years, the Association of Museums has not found it necessary to lobby
for basic museum legislation in recent years.108
The Federal government gave public museums little more than vague
and sporadic encouragement until the 1930’s. The 1876 Bureau of Edu
cation Report on Public Libraries suggested that art museums be founded
as a partnership between municipal governments and men of private
wealth. Fifteen years later the Director of the National Museum, a branch
of the Smithsonian Institution which received little Congressional atten
tion until the twentieth century, told an audience of museum philanthro
pists and administrators at the Brooklyn Museum that “unless a museum
be supported by liberal and constantly increasing grants from some state
or municipal treasury, it will ultimately become suffocated.”109 How
ever, the federal government did give some indirect aid to museum phi
lanthropy in the 1880’s by exempting from the tariff objects of art
imported by museums.110
Museum response to the crisis of the 1930’s, stimulated by federal
legislation, reinforced the partnership between private citizens and gov
ernments. Federal contributions to museum construction and WPA Art
Centers and Museum Projects persuaded most municipal governments

to restore and in some cases increase contributions cut in the 1930-1934
period. Although municipal appropriations for museums were lower in
1939 than in 1930, support from municipal funds was the second largest
source of museum income in the nation as a whole and Laurence V.
Coleman, Director of the American Association of Museums, declared
that “the regime of the wealthy benefactor and socialite is giving place
to that of democratic support.”111 A decade of economic crisis and
readjustment forced museum philanthropists to accept the fact that
“public support must be regarded as the enduring financial bulwark of
museums.”112
There was very little opposition to government support among mu
seum philanthropists in the 1930’s. The philanthropy department of the
Hanover Bank, for instance, expressed the hope that government arts
funds would “not be withdrawn too rapidly and too completely.”113Rec
ognition of the need for a mixed cultural economy resulted in such de
velopments as philanthropists’ support for New York’s abortive plan to
give the Museum of Modem Art a new home in a Municipal Art Center.114
Andrew Mellon’s gift of a National Gallery of Art could easily have
been made in the form of a public museum, with autonomous control by
trustees; but Mellon chose partnership with the federal government.
Nevertheless, despite fear of government domination on the part of a
minority of philanthropists, private citizens continued to bear a heavy
share of the cost of art museums. Even the WPA Art Centers, embryonic
public museums, received half their total funds, approximately three-
quarters of a million dollars, from private contributors.115
The trend in the period since the Second World War has clearly been
toward an increased public share in the partnership with private philan
thropists. Art News predicted in 1946 that in the future “public funds...will
be called upon to assume a still larger share of the burden.”116 In 1948,
the Director of the Los Angeles County Museum declared that govern
ment support predominated over private philanthropy west of the Mis
sissippi River.117Other museum leaders asserted that museums, as public
institutions, should not “have to subsist on charity.”118 Private philan
thropy was even used to finance campaigns for public appropriations. In
1954, Laurence Coleman reported a two-thirds increase in municipal
support over the past fifteen years.119 A more recent statement on the
question of public support was made in March, 1961 by Daniel Catton
Rich, Director of the Worcester Art Museum: “No society in the past has
been more generous in its educational and charitable programs than
ours—both in private giving and in civic governmental support. But all
at once we find that the present level of generosity is not enough.”120
Although the partnership between governments and philanthropists
has existed since the 1870’s, there have been dissenting voices: several
cities were reluctant to contribute to public museums, and a number of
philanthropists preferred pure voluntarism. Philadelphia, for example,
did not provide a building for proffered art collections until the 1920’s.
When J.P. Morgan was under attack for his financial activities, the City
of New York refused to contribute towards the Morgan Wing of the
Metropolitan.121 James Jarves, the noted collector and critic, who of
fered his collection to Boston only to have it refused, nevertheless as
serted in 1864 that appropriations for museums “are as much a duty of
the government as for any other purposes connected with the welfare of
the people.”122 But in the following decades, Jarves’ missionary zeal
was tempered by the failure of his efforts to influence the taste of the
American people and by his role as an adviser to wealthy collectors. He
wrote to Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1884 that he wanted museums to be
privately run organizations working in the public interest rather than
public institutions subject to chicanery.”123 Similarly, Charles C. Perkins,
one of the founders of the Boston Museum, declared that the growth of
American museums “must be accomplished by...private munificence
if at all” and not by a “paternal government.”124
Several major museums received only indirect support from govern
ment funds. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is an illustration. The
museum’s founders had the advantage of initial support from established
institutions: Harvard College, the Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Insti
tute of Technology. Nevertheless, the land at Copley Square, the first
site of the museum, was donated by the City on the condition that the
museum be open free of charge to the public one day each week.125 In
1891, even though there was some tension between the patricians and
Irish political leaders, a few philanthropists suggested that the Boston
Museum, like its New York and Chicago counterparts, should obtain
municipal support. However, the trustees took great pains to point out
the uniqueness and wisdom of totally private support; the Boston Mu
seum, they implied, was successful while being different from every
other American public art gallery.126
Despite this firm policy, Boston staff members argued in favor of

municipal support. S.R. Koehler, Curator of Prints, declared in 1882
that national, state, and municipal patronage is not necessarily evil “in
the light of history.”127 By 1917, although the Museum still received no
government support, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Director of the institution
and defender of the vested rights of Society in public art galleries, de
clared that, “The permanent collections established in American cities
find no difficulty in obtaining exemption from taxation in return for a
measure of free admission. They are classified with our churches as
public benefactors.” Gilman even claimed that the same argument could
be used to obtain “positive” financial aid from municipalities.128
Cleveland was the only other major public museum without direct
support for operating expenses from public funds. It is unique in the
Middle West where the Detroit and St. Louis Museums are branches of
municipal governments and other galleries receive large government
appropriations. Nevertheless, when the Cleveland Museum was founded
in 1916, the Trustees expected the City to make gifts of land for addi
tions to the original building.129
Government support, like voluntary action, influenced the policies
and goals of American museums. Perhaps most important, it forced phi
lanthropists to translate their zeal for improvement and culture into a
guarantee of free admission to the general public. Moreover, there has
been a close connection between municipal support and educational pro
grams. J. P. Morgan, president of the Metropolitan, was saying nothing
new in 1904 when he pointed out that, “The museum is looking for city
support and it is good politics as well as good policy to make its rela
tions close with the public school system.”130 In 1908, the Director of
the Minneapolis Museum declared that a museum “is an extension of
the educational system which every city supports at present. It is more
far-reaching in its effects since it offers educational facilities to adults as
well as to children. If a city desires to have such an institution it should
be willing to pay for its maintenance.”131
After 1906, when the American Association of Museums was orga
nized, the relation between educational programs and municipal sup
port was clarified by statistics. In 1916, for instance, the Association
reported that of fifty-one museums reporting organized educational work,
thirty-eight received financial support from the people in the form of tax
funds, broadly based membership or both. Twenty-nine of these institu-
tions received direct municipal support.132 Twenty years later, an Asso

ciation report indicated that “museums with more than twenty-five per
cent of income from public funds make more educational contacts in
their communities.”133
These figures made museum trustees and directors more aware of the
responsibilities and results of mixed private and public support. In 1917,
John Cotton Dana, Director of the Newark Museum, predicted, rather
after the fact, that “the growing habit of cities to maintain their own
museums...will surely tend to democratize them.”134 The next year, a
special committee of museum directors admonished their colleagues that,
“The disposal of public funds involves an additional responsibility upon
the administration of the museum since the interests of the visiting pub
lic have to be maintained.”135
During the Depression Decade and the Second World War, museum
leaders’ consciousness of community responsibility was sharpened, partly
as a result of the increased share of costs borne by taxpayers. Museum
spokesmen reflected this trend in their statements about education; for
instance, Edsel Ford, a trustee of the Detroit Institute of Art, declared in
1940 that,
The museum of tomorrow may have to depend more and more upon governmental
subsidy rather than endowments... If the museum is to receive public financial
support, it must play an essential part in the recreation and enjoyment of people
who have ever more leisure.136
Theodore L. Low, an expert on museum education, put it more suc

cinctly in 1942: “City fathers.. .are not going to support a cultural Fort
Knox.”137
Thus, the history of public museums indicates a growing acceptance
of the necessity of public support and even a belief in its positive value.
At the same time, many museum leaders have minimized the influence
of government funds; some have even ignored it altogether. This curi
ous blindness seems to have been the result of fear of government con
trol of museum policy combined with uncritical acceptance of the vast
amount of philanthropic rhetoric about the glories of voluntarism and
free enterprise. A great many statements on the subject, often rather
contradictory, may represent a conscious or unconscious effort on the
part of trustees and staffs simultaneously to state the facts and assure
philanthropists of the importance of their benefactions. The mythology
of American philanthropy has long been an extension of assumptions

about private economic enterprise.
The importance of municipal support to public museums can be illus
trated by comparing them with private colleges and universities. Like
the colleges, autonomous public art museums have viewed themselves
as products of private philanthropy. But in 1950, when art museums
received approximately fifty percent of their income from the public
purse, private colleges and universities received less than twenty-five
percent of their income from government funds. It seems clear that by
mid-century museums belonged to the people far more than did private
institutions of higher education.138
4
Philanthropy and Museum Policy
In two areas of museum activity, education and the exhibition of con

temporary art, programs developed for reasons that were both altruistic
and practical. Developments in both areas are an index of changes in the
goals and methods of museum philanthropy since the 1870’s. The growth
of educational programs was stimulated by the need to obtain approval
and funds from local governments, a desire to increase attendance, and
an interest in making collections more useful. Museum educators were
influenced by public libraries, settlement houses, foundations, new ideas
about the educational process, and new challenges during two World
Wars and the Great Depression. Similar stimuli account for the increas
ing emphasis on exhibitions of contemporary art since the 1920’s. In
addition, the growth of modem art as a major object of museum philan
thropy reflects changes in the nature of art collecting and a new public
attitude toward living artists.
Museums and Education
Although nineteenth-century philanthropists and museum directors

spoke about educating the public and improving the aesthetic quality of
manufactured goods, they did not believe that art education needed much
of a helping hand. Mere contact with fine objects, they asserted, would
immediately improve public taste: those who could would help them
selves.139Museum education thus reflected the laissez faire implications
derived from a view of education based on faculty psychology.
The reports of the Metropolitan Museum in the last decades of the
nineteenth century list a number of gifts and bequests to establish art
classes and schools. The trustees’ desire to “convert the useless gold [of
59
Wall Street] into things of living beauty” elicited a response from sev
eral men who were well-known for their general educational philan
thropy.140 F. T. Reed, for example wrote to the president of the
Metropolitan, “I feel a little shy about making fees and charges [at the
art school] as they would deter just the young men whom I am most
interested in; those who are smart and poor.”141This attitude is similar to
Andrew Carnegie’s rationale for his public library benefactions. An
other nineteenth-century approach to the problem of making museums
serve a broad public stressed informal instruction. Charles L. Hutchinson,
a prominent contributor to the Chicago Art Institute, expressed this view
when he argued that the museum should be “a three ring circus rather
than a mausoleum.”142
Education seemed rather dull to many art collectors whose museum
philanthropy was motivated by a combination of altruism and egotism.
Thus, it is not surprising that the early educational programs had lan
guished by the beginning of the twentieth century. As Henry W. Kent,
the man who created the Metropolitan’s direct education program, re
called in 1940,
The trustees [before 1905] had planned to meet the Charter’s demand for popular
education. They had organized an industrial school and an art school... they had
set a gallery apart for the exhibition of industrial arts... The schools had been
given up long before I came to the museum and the lectures were spasmodic.143
The educational programs developed by Kent and his colleagues were

financed mainly by municipal governments and private foundations, al
though the income from these sources was supplemented by funds from
unrestricted endowment, contributions from industrial corporations, and
a few private gifts and bequests for educational purposes.144
Two other objects of American philanthropy, libraries and settlement
houses, were similar to public museums in purpose and achievement. In
many cities these three institutions were the only engines of culture with
a bias toward a broad public; perhaps the only educational institutions
which did not emphasize the benefits of competition and material suc
cess in almost every program. Libraries and settlements had an influ
ence on museums through both individuals and ideas.
The social and educational aims of museums and public libraries were
similar, despite the fact that the glamorous traditions of art patronage
involved in museum philanthropy differentiated it from library benefac
Philanthropy and Museum Policy 61
tions. The difference between museums and libraries was reflected in

the opposition of many museum leaders to proposals for joint fund-rais
ing campaigns and combined boards of trustees;145their similarity in the
fact that the two most influential museum educators, John Cotton Dana
of Newark and Henry W. Kent of New York, were trained as librarians.
Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, Dana and Kent
acted, spoke, and wrote in the field of museum education. Dana’s mu
seum grew out of his desire to expand the community services of the
Newark Public Library. Kent, on the other hand, came to the Metropoli
tan thirty-five years after it was founded; unlike Dana, he had a great
collection to work with and some difficulty convincing prominent phi
lanthropists that education (“exposition,” he called it) is as important to
museums as acquisition and exhibition.
The settlement houses nurtured and demonstrated the belief of many
philanthropists that art could be made a part of the daily lives of all
Americans—if only some efforts were made to reach the people. In the
twenty years before the First World War, settlements, more than librar
ies, held an element of glamour for many American with both cultural
and philanthropic inclinations. Settlement workers were still dedicated
amateurs at this time, while museum workers were becoming increas
ingly professional. The settlements emphasized participation in the arts;
they were not satisfied with a passive view of cultural education. In
every city, these centers demonstrated that first and second generation
Americans could understand, enjoy, and practice the fine arts. Settle
ment leaders conveyed their beliefs to museum philanthropists through
their writings, pressure group activities, and, in some cases, by actual
work in museum educational programs.146
Art museums were slow to adopt the lessons of settlement art pro
grams: but when they did, they achieved greater success than the settle
ments because they possessed the actual objects of art, which made art
education more meaningful. In several areas, particularly neighborhood
branch galleries, concerts of live music, and children’s education, mu
seums were twenty years or more behind the settlements. Programs in
these areas were organized and directed in the third and fourth decades
of the twentieth century by ex-librarians like Dana and Kent and by
former settlement workers like Louise M. Dunn, Associate Curator of
Education at the Cleveland Art Museum and David Marines, who orga
nized concerts of live music at the Metropolitan.147As museum educa
tion expanded in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the settlements decreased their
emphasis on direct art education and appreciation.148
The explanation for the settlements’ greater initial success in art edu
cation than public museums may lie mainly in the different attitudes of
the philanthropists who supported the two institutions. Settlement work
itself was regarded as a form of philanthropy; most settlement workers
in the early twentieth century were educated middle-class men and
women who dedicated considerable time and energy to the programs in
the houses. The dominant museum philanthropists, on the other hand,
were either passive donors or trustees whose only contact with visitors
and students was indirect—through policy making. Moreover, while the
attraction of settlements to philanthropically-minded individuals was in
the work itself, the main attraction of museum philanthropy was in the
works of art that were collected and donated. However, by the 1920’s,
when the educational programs of both institutions were increasingly
directed by professional social workers and teachers, and the museums
reaped the pedagogical advantage of possessing original works of art,
the eventual dominance of museums in the field of popular art educa
tion was clearly foreshadowed.
Like the settlements, museum education achieved its greatest success
with children. Many parents were more concerned about their children
receiving culture and displaying approved taste than they were about
adult education. A writer on museums in the Nation in 1889 expressed
the typically American concern for children’s aesthetic sensibilities that
became a central principle of museum education: “It is from the chil
dren now growing up, from their children and their children’s children
that the deeper results are to be expected.”149Although museums tried to
develop adult education programs from the beginning of the twentieth
century, their lack of success, compared with programs for children,
was viewed as damning evidence of museum elitism by left-wing critics
in the 1930’s.150
The First World War had a marked influence on American museums
and hastened the adoption of goals and techniques developed in librar
ies and settlements. Art museums were regarded, to quote a representa
tive spokesman in 1917, as “life giving oases in a desert of war talk and
war fear.”151 Museum leaders wanted to supply “peace and inspiration”
for the troubled times, and to mobilize cultural values in the service of
democracy.152 In practice this meant that museums sought new mem
bers and worked to influence more people through expanded educa

tional programs, concerts of live music, art-recreation activities for the
armed services, and special patriotic exhibitions. American manufactur
ers, deprived of the services of European designers, became “aware of
their shortcomings in industrial art.”153 In order to help manufacturers,
museums, led by the Metropolitan, made special efforts to educate and
stimulate American craftsmen and designers: the nineteenth-century hope
of museum philanthropists that their institutions would benefit indus
trial design was realized.
Museums also tried to play a part in making the world safe for “the
democracy of the things of the spirit.”154 One manifestation of this atti
tude was the fact that museums became conscious of the special needs
of first-generation Americans during the war. Lectures and classes in
the arts, crafts, history, and literature of various countries began to ap
pear in museum programs—supported by gifts from leading collector-
philanthropists. More important, museums made use of the settlements’
discovery that music was the art closest to the experience of most immi
grants; museum concert programs, in most cases initiated during the
war, and supported by such men as John D. Rockefeller and Robert
deForest, attracted many new visitors.155
Museums, it was argued at this time, could aid the Americanization
of immigrants by providing object lessons in pluralism. As Ella Lyman
Cabot, a noted philanthropist and educator, told the American Associa
tion of Museums Convention in 1918,
America after this purging war must become a unified nation. It must not be like a
melting pot with all the treasure of each nation fused and lost.. .Rather it must be
like an orchestra of many different pieces playing under a skilled leader and in an
harmony richer for the ordered gift of each contributor. In the spiritual reconstruc
tion of America the Museums shall play their part.156
Museum leaders added another argument: as products of voluntary ac

tion, their institutions were symbols of the American way of life, an
“example... of the unqualified generosity and public-mindedness—an
example of the true American spirit.”157
The explanation for the new departures in museum education during
the 1930’s lies mainly in the realm of ideas, although economic pres
sures should not be entirely discounted. Under the influence of a revolu
tionary new government arts program and the increasing interest of
private foundations in the arts, public palaces became primarily centers

for community cultural services. The belief that everybody can appreci
ate and enjoy the arts if sufficient access and encouragement is provided
became, with occasional reservations, the accepted philosophy of pub
lic museums and many philanthropists until, in the 1950’s, a new wave
of prosperity and its attendant middle-class sophistication gave the elit
ists their first opportunity in more than a generation to disparage the art
for the people movement.
It has been argued that economic losses during the Depression led to
philanthropic appeals to a broader segment of the population and in
creased municipal appropriations, and that the need to justify this new
income gave new impetus to already expanding educational programs.158
But this is an overstatement. If the years from 1930 to 1939 are consid
ered as a unit, a different picture emerges than if the worst years of the
Depression are treated separately. It is true that 1933 was a bleak year
for museums and that municipal appropriations were cut sharply be
tween 1931 and 1935; and there is no doubt that many citizens sympa
thized with the Detroit legislators who wished to sell the Art Institute’s
collection and use the proceeds for home-relief.159The larger museums,
however, increased their wealth from 1930 to 1939, while the smaller
institutions’ resources remained rather stable throughout the period. No
public museums went out of existence in the 1930’s and, although mu
seum directors lamented the disappearance of great collections, some of
them made strenuous efforts to secure the Mellon, Widener, Bache, and
Kress bequests.160
Although the growth of museums was slower than in the 1920’s, the
decline in museum income, even in the worst years of the Depression,
never equalled the percentage of national decline in business activity.
Museum income in 1930 was sixteen million dollars; in 1938 it was
eighteen million. When museum income was at its lowest point, in 1933,
the Nelson Gallery of Art was opened in Kansas City.161 Surely the mu
seum director who saw public museums in the future financed and di
rected from Washington was exaggerating.162
The overemphasis on the economic roots of educational programs in
the 1930’s was a result of a myth created in that decade; the belief that
museums had shirked educational responsibilities throughout their his
tory. Museum men “gape and do nothing about underprivileged visi
tors,” an influential writer declared.163Another critic suggested that many
museum philanthropists did not support genuine popular art education

because they were afraid of disturbing their monopoly of cultural, eco
nomic, and political power.164 This attitude, based on aversion towards
men of wealth and the economic determinists’ critique of philanthropic
motives and the bourgeois ideal of service, was completely contradicted
by an American Association of Museums statistical survey in 1934 which
concluded that,
The philanthropically inclined have been supporting museums, have been taxing
themselves to pay for the museums* educational services to other men’s children.
But as these services have grown and as their importance in the educational scheme
has been recognized, the work has reached proportions where it has obviously
become a public charge.165
Museum education has been an important concern of many philanthro

pists and municipal governments since the nineteenth century. It did not
begin with the New Deal, although it was certainly stimulated by it.
Museum education received greater impetus from foundations and
from the federal government than from these attacks. The Carnegie Foun
dation, beginning in the late 1920’s, financed educational experiments
in museums and, more important, distributed art appreciation kits (slides,
reproductions, and books) in an effort to prepare college students to
enjoy museums.166 In 1938,167 the Kress Foundation donated paintings
to small museums across the country, a program which enabled these
museums to devote more funds to educational activities. Foundation
support was also primarily responsible for the opening of the first au
thentic branch museum, in Philadelphia in 1933, and for the first mu
seum-sponsored exhibition in a settlement house, in New York in 1934.
The WPA Arts Programs provided funds and personnel for museum
education. Community Art Centers, initiated by the WPA but dependent
on local philanthropy, brought instruction in technique and appreciation
to many towns without public museums. In several instances these Cen
ters later became public museums, deriving support from private citi
zens and municipal governments.168The WPA Museum Project paid the
salaries of several thousand new guides, lecturers and instructors in public
museum educational programs. Although museum service to industry
was curtailed during the Depression, programs for public school chil
dren, financed by the WPA, municipal governments, and foundations,
were expanded.169 Many museum leaders agreed with their colleague
who declared that the new sources of stimulation hastened the achieve
ment of “what we have all been preaching for a quarter of a century.”170
The educational progress of the 1930’s was preserved and expanded
to some degree as a result of demands made on museums during the
Second World War. As in the First World War, museums were conscious
of the role they could play on the home front and more funds were avail
able for education because the European crisis curtailed the supply of
art objects.
Museum education during World War II had a different emphasis than
in 1917-1918, however; patriotism and incitement against the enemy
was replaced by relaxation and humanitarian values. In 1918, a spokes
man for the Cleveland Museum called the War “the greatest chivalric
enterprise of all time,” and railed against “the brutishness of the Hun.”171
His successor took a different position in 1942: “Art is among the ideal
values which we fight to preserve__ The museum has thus become a
symbol of enlightened, unselfish democracy.”172 The goal of museum
education during the Second World War was very similar to the goal
during the Depression: to help people “forget their worries for a time”
through “a brief reminder of eternal values.”173 The ideal museum was
still compared to a church; in the nineteenth century both these institu
tions were considered places for worship; by the mid-twentieth century
they were more often described as oases for relaxation and meditation.
However, it is probable that the ideal museum and the emphasis on eter
nal values existed mainly in the rhetoric of enthusiasts and administra
tors. There are no grounds for ascribing other motives than curiosity and
desire for knowledge or entertainment to the majority of visitors to pub
lic museums.
The concept of museums as popular universities, developed during
the War, had an important influence on museum education after 1945.
This new view of the social function of the institutions was a synthesis
of the various trends in museum education since the beginning of the
century. It was stimulated by the painful contrast between cultural aspi
rations and the destructiveness of war. Francis Henry Taylor, Director of
the Metropolitan and a leading museum educator, expressed this new
development in 1945 when he asserted that, “The museum must be
come the free and informal liberal arts college for the whole generation.
Our soldiers and sailors...will be the first to demand a return once
more to the humanities.”174
There was little public criticism of emphasis on education in the De

pression and war periods. After 1946, however, the conflict between
exhibitors and expositors, which had first appeared among museum men
in the first two decades of the century, was revived. In the earlier stage
of the debate, the two poles of thought among philanthropists and their
spokesmen were represented by Benjamin Ives Gilman, who declared
that museums should serve the elite before the masses, and John Cotton
Dana, who railed against temples of culture in the name of progressive
democracy.175 Similar positions appeared after World War II, with
Francis Henry Taylor speaking for the forces of education and James J.
Sweeney of the Guggenheim Museum and Meyer Schapiro of Colum
bia University as outstanding proponents of aesthetic purism.176 The
educators were accused of being more interested in public relations than
in the arts; they responded by suggesting that their opponents were anti
democratic, and that museums could serve both the intellectual and the
social elite and the Great Community without compromising the offer
ing to either group.
Although a practical compromise between the extreme positions in
the debate has been achieved, there have been no unambiguous state
ments of the aesthetic philosophy underlying museum education pro
grams. In the past thirty years, new elements in museum leaders’ thought
about art and society have modified the terms of the earlier debate be
tween Gilman and Dana. These new elements seem to have been in
some measure the result of the aesthetic theories John Dewey and Albert
C. Barnes enunciated in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Museum leaders, how
ever, have not accepted all the implications of the new theories.
The aesthetic and social ideas expressed in the two periods of contro
versy reflect different conceptions of the function of art and the nature
of society. Gilman argued that since the primary function of a museum
was to collect and exhibit great works of art, it must be organized to
serve mainly those people who were most sensitive to art. Although he
made some reservations, Gilman usually identified wealth and formal
education with proper sensitivity to art. Dana wanted to expand the com
munity services of museums; but only in order to inculcate the moral
and ethical values explicit in museum publications and programs since
the 1870’s.177
Although Dewey and Barnes, like Dana, sharply attacked academic
“antiquarianism” in art education, their goal was to “break through the
crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness,” not to create and

expand art museums. Indeed, Dewey, by arguing that beauty can be found
in the commonest and meanest things, and Barnes, who defined art edu
cation as learning to perceive the common factors in all aesthetic expe
riences, seemed to suggest that museums were operating with several
false premises.178 If a ray of moonlight could produce an aesthetic expe
rience, why spend large sums collecting Old Masters? If the art of all
periods expressed the same human experiences, why organize museum
collections historically or by national schools? These views seemed to
threaten the aesthetic convictions and material interests of many collec
tor-philanthropists and museum administrators.
Moreover, the social aspects of museum policy seemed to betray the
rhetoric museum leaders had borrowed from Dewey and Barnes. Mu
seum spokesmen talked as if a clearly defined public, a Great Commu
nity willing to respond to art already existed; they apparently ignored
Dewey’s insistence that America had too many shadowy and formless
publics. While museum directors appealed for funds, dealt with trustees
and politicians, assembled collections, and talked vaguely about educat
ing whole communities, Barnes used his magnificent collection as a pri
vate educational museum. Dewey’s belief that common aesthetic
experience is a necessary preliminary for the “consummation” of the
Great Community, was apparently forgotten by museum directors in their
scramble for more funds and public attention from their communities.179
Thus, while Barnes successfully preserved the purity of his purpose,
museum leaders compromised; they refused to probe too deeply into the
implications of Dewey’s ideas. Many museum directors may have wanted
to break down the separation between art and life; but they also needed
financial support from the social elite and politicians. Although Andre
Malraux’s concept of “the museum without walls” might have been con
genial to Dewey as a logical extension of his views, it would have been
career suicide for even the most education-minded philanthropists and
politicians. Men like Francis Henry Taylor, who used many of Dewey’s
phrases, were primarily professional administrators, not philosophers.
When academics like Schapiro accused administrators like Taylor of
intellectual shabbiness, the educators’ only defense was to point to ris
ing attendance figures and expanding educational services.180Thus, the
debate has had a paradoxical conclusion: both the elitists and the fol
lowers of Dewey and Barnes have had tighter cases, but their opponents
have won the field by dropping their poorly assimilated philosophy and
using the two arguments, attendance and growth, which have been the
major justification of museum philanthropy since the 1870’s.
Museums and Contemporary Art
In the last half of the nineteenth century artists were either suspicious
or dangerously attractive characters to many businessmen and men of
leisure. This suspicion was sometimes carried into their art collecting
and museum philanthropy. The Reverend Dr. Henry Bellows, a promi
nent New York clergyman and a member of the committee of the Union
League Club which took the lead in organizing the Metropolitan Mu
seum of Art, declared in 1870 that artists were “a brooding, dreamy,
meditative class, closed to the world...seldom men of practical wis
dom, push and enterprise.”181 Similarly, the first president of the Metro
politan, John Taylor Johnston, felt “very apprehensive of the effect of
inviting the disaffected artist element” to the opening of the museum in
1872. Johnston did not specify why the artists were “disaffected;” per
haps it was because the Metropolitan had decided to ignore living Ameri
can artists in favor of the art of the European past.182
The birth of public museums coincided with the decline of private
patronage for contemporary artists in Europe and America—a develop
ment noted by observers at the time who were both favorable and op
posed to it.183 Most collectors preferred investing in objects of secure
and permanent value to gambling on the contemporary market. Nine
teenth-century social upheavals placed a large amount of pre-eighteenth-
century art on the market; new historical and critical techniques endowed
these objects with cultural and moral value.
The early public museums reflected in some degree both the desire of
American millionaires for approval from European aristocrats and con
noisseurs and their interest in public enlightenment. Uncertain about
their own tastes and anxious to avoid embarrassment or to reveal im
proper education, many men seemed to prefer donating casts and repro
ductions of works of demonstrable value to speculating on original work
by unproven contemporary artists. In other words, their identification
with Renaissance princes was not complete; to nineteenth-century mer
chants and industrialists, only the art of the past seemed to have perma
nent value, to confer prestige, and to be a safe investment. Their expert
advisers, who, ironically, were often artists themselves, did not dare to
recommend that they become patrons as well as collectors. Moreover,
shrewd international art dealers with overstocked inventories of Old
Masters, like the Duveens, and museum directors anxious to develop
historical collections, played on the collector-philanthropists’ social and
aesthetic insecurity.184
By the turn of the twentieth century, a few far-seeing museum leaders
realized that this focus on the past might choke the growth of American
art. S. R. Koehler of Boston and John Cotton Dana were outstanding
critics of the focus on the past. Dana attacked art collectors’ attachment
to “cultural fetishes;” their desire to collect only what other rich men
had collected.185 Koehler, more specific in his indictment, deplored the
fact that “modem artists are manufacturers of pictures... which they
paint on speculation and for which they must seek a market” among a
small group of interested patrons.186
But there were exceptions to this pattern. Artists and their children
loaned and donated original paintings and sculpture to museums. As
early as 1882, the Metropolitan exhibited a painting by Albert Pinkham
Ryder, on loan from Mrs. J. H. DeKay.187 In Chicago, paintings by
Bierstadt, DeHaas, Johnson, and Neal were exhibited in 1873.188Twenty
years later, a wealthy Chicagoan established a trust fund, administered
by the Art Institute, to commission works by American sculptors.184Al
though public museums were hostile to native impressionists like Maurice
Prendergast until the 1920’s, works by the French Impressionists were
donated to the Boston Museum as early as the turn of the century.190
Such artists as Samuel F.B. Morse and Daniel Chester French were of
ficers of the Metropolitan in the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, Koehler was essentially correct when he concluded that
museums have “only a secondary bearing” on the creation and stimula
tion of “a truly American school of art.”191 The dominant attitude of
museum philanthropists and administrators was expressed by another
Boston staff member, Benjamin Ives Gilman, just after the turn of the
century; “The ideally best collecting for museums consists in acquiring
from the user, not the maker.” The museum’s duty, he asserted, was to
collect and exhibit the best art—after it had been approved by experts
and collectors.192
The early attempts to hang works by contemporary artists in muse
ums had little success. The small group, led by John Quinn, who spon
sored the Armory Show in 1913 were severely attacked by many of then-
fellow philanthropists.193The same year that the Armory Show informed
those Americans who care to look that an aesthetic revolution had oc
curred was also the Metropolitan’s most successful year in obtaining
gifts and bequests of the art of the past.194
Contemporary art still presented a problem in the 1920’s, even though
it was hard to escape the fact that there was contemporary European and
American work worthy of permanent exhibition. Some philanthropists
and museum directors were worried about making hasty judgments; they
did not want to “waste” money donated in the public interest on what
might turn out to be inferior art. Others declared that patronage of living
artists was the proper concern of private individuals, who could exer
cise their whims without compromising their public consciences. Sev
eral museums leaders advised patience; the private taste of their
generation, they asserted, would become gifts to public museums in the
future. As the president of the Metropolitan declared, museums wanted
some means to “test out for the community all the vagaries of contem
porary genius.”195Apparently museum philanthropists still clung to the
nineteenth century beliefs that culture and taste could be defined and
bestowed and that properly tested judgments would enable men to dis
cern the difference between great and mediocre art.
If museums could be tastemakers for the art of the past, what pre
vented them from directing public attention to meritorious contempo
rary art? The difficulty of defining aesthetic quality is only a partial
explanation. Another important obstacle was the fact that museums and
artists still did not have the same vested interests. As late as 1929 the
American Association of Museums lobbied to defeat “efforts of certain
artists” to secure a tariff on contemporary works of art and, even in
1937, after philanthropists’ attitude toward living artists had undergone
a considerable change, the public museums acted together to defeat an
artists’ boycott of museums which refused to pay rental fees for bor
rowed paintings.196 Perhaps an additional obstacle was the ethical con
flict between philanthropists, who advocated art for the community’s
sake, and those artists and critics who espoused art for art’s sake.
The dominant attitude of public museums toward contemporary art
did not change until two new factors entered the situation: the idea that
public interest in the arts, an expanded audience, was not possible with
out recognition and encouragement for contemporary artists, and the
decreasing number of Old Masters on the art market. These factors be

gan to have a more than sporadic effect on philanthropists in the 1920’s
and 1930’s. Only at this time did they realize that their ideals had con
tained a dangerous contradiction: the idea that museums must continu
ally grow through accessions from periods which could produce no more
works of art.
The interest of museums in expanding their audience through the
publicity value of contemporary art began in the 1920’s. Perhaps this
development was a delayed reaction to the publicity received by the
Armory Show combined with the interest excited by exhibitions of pa
triotic art during World War I. In the 1920’s, many museums instituted
annual exhibitions of modem art with a purchase prize for the best works,
while others began to set aside a small sum each year for gambling on a
few contemporary works. In the late 1920’s, several leaders declared
that museums had an obligation to artists who lived and worked in their
metropolitan areas and the first museum exhibitions of contemporary
local and regional art were held at this time.
Public interest in contemporary art, combined with solicitude for art
ists, increased markedly in the 1930’s. The Museum of Modem Art claims
most of the credit for stimulating this interest; but trends carried over
from the preceding decade and the WPA Arts Projects seem to have had
a more significant influence. Contemporary art had glamour and public
appeal for the first time in American history. In addition, many people
realized the extent to which artists’ means of livelihood depended on
general prosperity. Museums, interested in broadening the base of their
support and expanding their community services, capitalized on this new
interest. Acquisitions of contemporary art increased and the battle be
tween the modernists and the traditionalists provided educational de
partments with a new function—convincing the public that the museum
was not mistaken in its purchases of controversial works of modem art.197
Although philanthropists were frequently criticized in the 1930’s for
being defenders of the status quo, contemporary social protest painting
was included in several exhibitions and permanent collections. The San
Francisco Art Museum, for instance, received gifts from the Friends of
Diego Rivera, and the New York Museum of Modem Art exhibited sev
eral caricatures of business heroes despite protests from some philan
thropists that the painting were “offensive.”198
The second factor which stimulated philanthropy for contemporary
art was the problem created by the diminishing amount of art of the past
on the market.199 Largely as a result of museum philanthropy, the “cir

culation of elites,” in Pareto’s phrase, as far as collecting Old Masters
was concerned, had come to a dead stop in the public museums—at
least temporarily. This problem, recognized in the 1920’s, did not be
come acute until the Depression years, when collectors had less money
to spend on art.
The collectors’ dilemma was exploited by crusaders for modem art
and resulted in a new kind of public museum: the patronage museum.
Galleries supported by philanthropists and devoted solely to stimulating
interest in contemporary art were established in New York, Chicago,
and San Francisco in the 1930’s. In other cities, public museums with
general collections devoted galleries to twentieth-century art and in
creased the scope of their annual exhibitions of modem art.
The history of the Whitney Museum of American Art provides a case
study of the antipathy of public museums to contemporary art in the
early twentieth century and the successful conversion of private tastes
into public trusts in the 1920’s and 1930’s.200 Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, a sculptor herself, established a Studio Club in Greenwich Vil
lage in 1910 in order to provide exhibition facilities and companionship
for neglected American artists. A list of the artists who had their first
shows at Mrs. Whitney’s gallery is almost an outline history of Ameri
can art in this century. Mrs. Whitney and her assistant, Juliana Force,
refused to admit that they were engaging in philanthropy, even after the
Club had evolved into a museum; the word had too many depressing
connotations for American artists.
The Studio Club became a museum in the early 1930’s, for several
reasons: by establishing a charitable trust Mrs. Whitney insured the per
manence of her collection and the continuation of her patronage to liv
ing artists; a museum lent prestige to artists whose paintings it bought;
and by becoming a public trust, the collection could receive gifts from
other philanthropists. But the Whitney was a museum in name more
than in practice until the 1940’s when it decided to become “an impor
tant member of the museum world.”201 Although there were no direct
educational programs, gifts were accepted from any source, business
men were added to the artists who composed the first board of trustees
and, in the 1950’s, a group of collective contributors (the Friends of
the Whitney Museum) was established. Contemporary American artists
and their patronage museum had become respectable in the museum
world.
The new relationship between living artists and museum philanthropy

was discussed at a conference in 1950 attended by outstanding repre
sentatives of both fields. A spokesman for the artists complained that
“the functions and policies of museums have been an unknown quan
tity.”202 In reply, Lloyd Goodrich, Director of the Whitney Museum, de
clared that,
One of the museum’s most important functions would be to help bring about con
ditions in which living artists can create to the best of their ability... Museums
often have to pay big premiums to acquire works of artists whom they neglected
when they were alive...To put it baldly, buying a living artist’s work has two
advantages—the museum pays less and the artist eats.203
Other museum leaders suggested that artists serve as trustees, persuade

their patrons to support museums, and join pressure groups working to
obtain more government funds for museums. As a result of the confer
ence, artists secured agreements protecting their rights at museum exhi
bitions and in sales of their work by museums.204 The new spirit was so
widely accepted by the mid-1950’s that Francis Henry Taylor, director
of the Metropolitan, an institution long equivocal about contemporary
art, declared that “the task of the museum is to try to narrow the breach
that already divides the artist from the public.”205
Purchases and gifts of twentieth-century art dominated museum phi
lanthropy after the Second World War.206This development is explained
by the new ideas of the 1920’s and 1930’s, the diminishing supply of
Old Masters, public and critical acceptance of many modem styles which
were fiercely attacked a generation earlier, and the persistent belief among
American philanthropists that failure to grow means imminent decay.
The patronage museums were initially planned to maintain only tempo
rary collections; by the 1940’s they had become treasure-houses rather
than clearing-houses.
However, a few museum directors and philanthropists still questioned
the propriety of speculating on the modem art market. Opposition to the
policies of the patronage museums was expressed by several men, nota
bly by John Canaday, art critic of the New York Times, who argued that
the Museum of Modem Art was too insulated from the broad public
interest to make reasonably unbiased decisions in matters which affected
the value of works of art.207
5
Private Desires and Public Welfare
Several historians have charged that public museums, particularly in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were primarily instru
ments for displaying and reflecting the elitist aspirations of the urban
aristocracy. In this view, the exclusiveness of the institutions was clearly
demonstrated by the erection of palatial and forbidding buildings and
their location in remote parks. Some critics have argued that the “social
strategy involved in securing museum philanthropy impeded the devel
opment of pure scholarship which made use of public art collections.”208
These views cannot be supported by unequivocal evidence. Most
public museums were conceived as institutions for the masses as well as
citadels for the classes. The presence of municipal support, the need to
justify tax exemption, and the appeal of museums as philanthropies rather
than as objects of luxury expenditure were factors which democratized
and popularized American public museums. This judgment is based on
evidence from charters, annual reports, and architectural history.
The charter of every public museum was broad enough to permit the
philanthropists of each generation to modify goals and practices. In many
cases, charters were deliberately vague and ambiguous because the
founders did not want to hamper future administrators of the public trusts
they had established. Neither government support nor philanthropic dog
mas imposed rigidity on public museums; yet most charters provided
for educational programs and free admission for the public on at least a
few days of each week.209
Annual reports indicate that many nineteenth-century trustees favored
central locations, and in several cases succeeded in obtaining them. The
first buildings of two of the greatest institutions, the Chicago Art Insti-
75
tute and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, were erected on downtown
sites. The problem of museum location was complex, however, involv
ing practical as well as idealistic factors.
This complexity is revealed in the records of the Metropolitan Mu
seum of Art. The Committee which planned the museum in 1870 rec
ommended consideration of the possibility of locating it in Central Park,
but the Executive Committee preferred a site closer to the heart of the
city—where the New York Public Library was later erected. The pro
posal was rejected by the City Park Commissioners.210
The records of the negotiations between the trustees and the Com
missioners indicate that Central Park was chosen for its practical advan
tages, not because of its distance from lower class districts or the moral
symbolism of a natural setting. The major considerations affecting the
final decision were the ease of future expansion for a museum in the
Park, the fire hazard in congested districts, the difficulty of protecting
the collections from dirt and industrial smoke, and, most important, the
desire on the part of the municipal government to donate park land rather
than more valuable property further downtown.211 This solution was not
eagerly accepted by all the trustees; in 1878 several of them complained
that “the distance of the new building from the residences and places of
business of many of the trustees will make it difficult for them to con
tinue that personal attention to various departments which is now given
by them in Committees.”212
With all their disadvantages, both to the public and to the trustees,
park locations had advantages which businessmen-philanthropists could
not ignore. Speaking in 1908, Robert Koehler, first director of the Min
neapolis Museum, declared that a “natural setting” enhanced the beauty
of works of art. But he emphasized the fact that parks were “ideal and
practical at the same time”:
All practical businessmen will suggest that it be centrally located, easily accessible
from all parts of town. This, however, at once implies a temporary location, an
unavoidable removal as soon as the business interests of the city expand. The proper
location... would be in some city park to permit of expansion without entirely
destroying the original purpose of the park.213
In the last generation, many museum leaders used park locations as

evidence for the elitism of their predecessors. These men were influ
enced by the severe attacks on the allegedly elitist “guardians of cul
Private Desires and Public Welfare 77
ture” by writers in the Progressive and New Deal periods. Edsel Ford, a
leading trustee of the Detroit Art Institute, for example, wrote in 1940
that,
The selection of a busy avenue in the heart of a metropolitan area as a museum site,
the discarding of the forbidding monumental building...the easier accessibility from
the street.. .all play their part in the breaking down of barriers between the visitor
and the new museum.214
Even Laurence Coleman, official historian of American museums, as

serted in 1950 that trustees had been forced to realize that “sites in re
mote parks are now outside the pale.”215
Ironically, twentieth-century urban growth and the automobile have
made museums in parks accessible to more people than museums in city
centers. Although museum founders did not consciously plan for this
development, it is hard to believe that men renowned for foresight in
their business activities lost this quality completely when they turned to
philanthropy. The wisest philanthropists, like the most sensible busi
nessmen, refused to limit the future expansion of their creations or to
ignore the potential growth of their cities. Moreover, an index of the
“success” of every public art museum, no matter where it is located, has
always been the number of visitors it attracted; museum philanthropists
have expressed more concern about falling attendance than about the
danger of the working classes defiling works of art.
Museum architecture has often been cited as an indication of exclu
siveness. Palaces of art—buildings with heavy baroque or classical
facades and tenement-house rears—have excited somewhat unreason
able anger among architectural and social reformers.216 The only mod
els for American museum architects in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were converted palaces, like the Louvre and the Uffizi,
or mock temples like the British Museum. In addition, the desire of
philanthropists to create public institutions which contained or reflected
the cultural wealth of their cities led them to choose the approved style
for public buildings of their time. Perhaps the architectural critics have
ignored the high cost of museum buildings and the reluctance of
municipal governments to condemn what the taxpayers had underwrit
ten just because it had become fashionable. Nevertheless, new architec
tural styles and the importance of museums as educational institutions
were reflected in buildings erected since the second decade of the twen
tieth century; the Cleveland Museum, completed in 1916, is a notable

example.217
The charge that the “social strategy” involved in museum administra
tion impeded the development of sound scholarship ignores the fact that
philanthropy made possible the expansion of museum collections and
the employment of specialized museum staffs. It also assumes that good
scholarship and conspicuous consumption are mutually exclusive. Cer
tainly Duveen, Morgan, and other princes of commerce and art used
museum experts as runners, tipsters, or, more politely, consultants. But
collectors’ desire for correct attributions encouraged increasingly accu
rate scholarship in museums218 and, as the museum profession became
more competitive, graduate training in art history became a necessity
for ambitious directors and curators.
At a time when museums were deeply involved in the philanthropic
process, other arts institutions were largely the private property of a
social elite.219 Although museums have never been a mass charity, they
have had a broader base of support and more interaction with public
agencies than symphony orchestras, opera companies, or theaters. The
latter institutions did not become philanthropies until the 1930’s; but
museums reflected the changing goals and semantics of American phi
lanthropy long before that decade. On the eve of the First World War,
museums, like welfare causes, began to emphasize the nature of their
programs rather than the source of their funds; “community service”
rather than “charity.” Another indication of the difference between mu
seums and other arts institutions is the fact that when museums began to
sponsor concert programs, in the second decade of the twentieth cen
tury, they carefully explained that they were acting to provide good music,
which was desired by, but denied to, the common man.220
Thus, public museums, institutions created by joint voluntary and

public action, became centers for public education and enjoyment. Most
of the philanthropists were motivated by a desire to bring the benefits of
art, as they saw them, to more people. In their desire to expand and
utilize these public collections and merit government support, museum
leaders developed educational and publicity programs on a scale which
has had few parallels in the history of cultural institutions. Two World
Wars and a Great Depression forced museums to realize more sharply
that they had a significant role to play in community life. Ideas and
Private Desires and Public Welfare 79
techniques developed by libraries and settlement houses influenced mu

seums’ efforts to expand and humanize their community service pro
grams. A new attitude toward living artists and the place of art in the
lives of the people, which was stimulated in large measure by Federal
programs in the 1930’s, modified museum policies and led to the cre
ation of a new kind of institution, the patronage museum.
Public museums reflect their dependence on voluntary action for most
of their leadership and funds. It could be that the establishment and growth
of these institutions after 1870 was made possible as much by the so
phistication of philanthropic techniques as by the accumulation of large
private collections and increasing public interest in art. Throughout the
history of the public museums, new services were provided, to indi
vidual philanthropists and to communities, partly to justify and attract
continuing voluntary benefactions. Reliance on local philanthropy and
municipal support made it imperative that museums be constantly aware
of changes in their communities. In addition, museum staffs had to re
gard publicity, fund-raising, and political activity as important tasks.
One of the major goals of nineteenth-century philanthropists was
achieved by the mid-twentieth century: public museums had become
significant arbiters of contemporary taste. Although the average family
still purchased paintings and reproductions to match its carpets and cur
tains, museums had influenced taste in industrial design, architecture,
advertising, and, through exhibitions and the sale of fine reproductions,
private homes. Moreover, many museums assumed or accepted respon
sibility for approving and disapproving works by living artists, a role
that was often justified by the argument that museums, as public institu
tions representing the traditions of art, have a vested interest in trying to
express balanced judgments.
Although museum philanthropy has come from a relatively small seg
ment of the population, the history of public museums indicates that the
money and interest of the few can serve the education and pleasure of
the many. The great achievement of American public art museums has
been their ability to further public welfare while serving private desires.
Notes
Chapter One
1. William Dunlap, A History o f the Rise and Progress o f the Arts o f Design in the
United States (Boston, 1918), 278.
2. For European background see Edward Edwards, The Administrative Economy o f
Fine Arts in England (London, 1840); Wilhelm von Bode, Mein Leben (Berlin,
1930); Jean Laurent, La Republique et Les Beaux Artes (Paris, 1955). Rene Brimo,
L*Evolution du GoutAux Etats Unis (Paris, 1938), 171ff.; Francis Henry Taylor,
Babel’s Tower (New York, 1945).
3. Brimo, VEvolution du Gout aux Etas Unis (Paris, 1939), 172-180
4. Ibid, 185-86; cf. Robert C. Smith, “The Museum of Art in the United States,”
Art Quarterly, XXI, Autumn 1958, 297-316.
5. Frick Collection Ruled Free of Accept Gifts, “Museum News, XXVI, September
15, 1948, 1.
6. For a more detailed discussion of various types of American art museums see
Paul M. Rea, The Museum and the Community (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1932),
11-19.
7. “More and more they are taking over the function of Community Centers...
and...of the Cathedral.” Quoted in Robert B. Harshe, “The Museum and the
American Art Renaissance,” Creative Arts, IX, November 1931, 386.
8. The generalizations about American philanthropy in this essay are drawn mainly
from Robert Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago, 1960), and Merle Curti,
“American Philanthropy and the National Character,” American Quarterly, X,
Winter, 1958, 420-37, “Tradition and Innovation in American Philanthropy,”
Proceedings o f the American Philosophical Society, CV, April 1961, 146-56.
9. Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York, 1954), 275ff.
Chapter Two
10. Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (New York, 1955), 150.
11. S.N. Behrman, Duveen (New York, 1952), R.L. Duffus, The American Renais
sance (New York, 1928), Aline B. Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (New York,
1958), D. and E. Rigby, Lock, Stock and Barrel (Philadelphia, 1944).
12. Richard Rathbum, The National Gallery o f Art (Washington, 1961), 26.
13. Frederick A.P. Barnard, Art Culture (New York, 1854), 28, 38, 31.
14. Charles C. Perkins, Art Education in America (Cambridge, 1870), 21.
15. Robert U. Johnson, “The Establishment of Art Museums,” Proceedings o f the
First Annual Convention o f the American Federation o f Arts, (Washington, 1910),
88 .
81
16. Quoted in Laurence Vail Coleman, Museum Buildings (Washington, 1950), 67.
17. Newton H. Carpenter, “The Value of Members to Museums,” Proceedings o f the
American Association o f Museums, IV, 1910, 94.
18. The New Museum and Its Service to Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1922), 16.
19. The attitude toward immigrants of most museum philanthropists seems to have
been a compromise between the polar positions expressed by factions of the
Immigration Restriction League: most museum leaders did not believe that Anglo-
Saxon culture would absorb all other cultures or that the United States would
eventually be composed of autonomous national groups. Museum leaders tended
toward a kind of pragmatic pluralism and avoided contention on the issue. Nev
ertheless, since most members of the League were anti-pluralist, the education
policy of public museums ran counter to the League’s dominant sentiments. For
a discussion of the restrictionist attitude toward cultural pluralism see Barbara
M. Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge, 1956), 131.
20. Report o f the Executive Committee o f the Metropolitan Museum o f Art to the
General Committee (New York, 1860), 21. Hereafter cited as Metropolitan,
Report. . . .
21. These concerns were major motives for the establishment of the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London after the Great Exposition of 1851. The utilitarian
aims of this museum had an influence on American museum founders. For de
tails see Winifred E. Howe, A History o f the Metropolitan Museum o f Art, I,
(New York, 1913), 134. For what may be an overestimation of French influences
see Walter Pach, The Art Museum in America (New York, 1948), 25ff. For Ameri
can influences on Europe, see Brimo, 182.
22. Metropolitan, Report..., 10; cf. Guido de Ruggiero, The History o f European
Liberalism (Boston, 1959), 410.
23. G. Browne Goode, The Museums o f the Future (Washington, 1891), 445. This
idea is curiously parallel to one of the leading ideas of American Imperialists of
this period: what Albert K. Weinberg calls “the pseudo-biological doctrine of
natural growth.” This is another indication of the depth of museum philanthro
pists’ commitment to the major assumptions of American thought of their time.
See Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, (Baltimore, 1935) passim.
24. Theodore L. Low, The Education Philosophy and Practice o f Art Museums in
the United States (New York, 1949), 26-63; Grace Fisher Ramsey, Educational
Work o f Museums o f the United States (New York, 1938), 25.
25. William B. Ashely, “The Promotion of Museums,” Proceedings o f the American
Association o f Museums, VII, 1913, 39, 44.
26. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Garden City, 1960), xvi.
27. Quoted from the remarks of Joseph H. Choate at the opening of the Metropolitan’s
Central Park Building in 1878 by Howe, I, 199.
28. Ibid., 196, 204.
29. William C. Prime, an officer of the Metropolitan, said in 1888: “Yes, there is
money in teaching people to love beautiful objects.” Quoted in Low, 13. Simi
larly, Howe, I, 196, quotes Choate: “Truly Republican art...is...th e vital and
practical interest of the working millions.”
30. Metropolitan, Report..., 10.
31. Edward S. Morse, “If Public Libraries, Why Not Public Museums?” reprinted
from the Atlantic Monthly, July 1893, 774. It is of some interest that Morse
(1838-1925) was a zoologist and President of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science before he became curator of Japanese pottery at the
Notes 83
Boston Museum of Fine Arts (DAB [New York, 1934], XIII, 242-43). Richard
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, 1955), 19, notes
that Morse was a prominent Darwinian. The extent of the influence of Social
Darwinism on American businessmen in the period had become a matter of some
dispute. The view generally followed in this essay, which minimizes the influ
ence of Social Darwinism on American philanthropy, is expressed in Irvin
G.Wyllie, “Social Darwinism and the Businessman,” Proceedings o f the Ameri
can Philosophical Society, CIII, October, 1959, 629-635.
32. William Cullen Bryant, The Life and Works o f William Cullen Bryant (New York,,
1884), II, 265.
33. Benjamin Ives Gilman, “On the Distinctive Purposes of Museums of Art,” re
printed from the Museums Journal, January, 1904, 12.
34. Paul M. Rea, “The Future of Museums in the Life of the People,” Museum Work,
III, March, 1921, 48.
35. For the data in this paragraph see Saarinen and Howe, passim.
36. On the predominance of art over science museums see Central Hanover Bank
and Trust Company, The Fine Arts in Philanthropy (New York, 1937), 23.
37. Behrman, 27.
38. Ibid, 297.
39. Saarinen, 72ff.
40. Behrman, 248. Morgan’s views were well represented by Edward Robinson,
Director of the Metropolitan, in his introduction to Guide to the Loan Exhibition
o f the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection (New York, 1914), vii: “Had such an as
semblage represented the results of several generations of a family of collectors,
it would have been a most remarkable achievement, but formed as it was by one
man, and during a comparatively short period of his life, it is probably without
parallel in the history of collecting.”
41. Henry James, Preface to The Spoils o f Poynton, in Richard Blackmur, ed., The
Art o f the Novel (New York, 1950), 123.
42. Behrman, 237.
43. Edward S. Morse, Museums o f Art and Their Influence (Salem, 1892), 4,6-7,13.
44. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Handbook o f the Benjamin Altman Collection (New
York, 1914), xi; for a fictional merchant prince and his museum philanthropy,
see Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York, 1932), 98, 101-02, 105.
45. An interesting sketch of deForest’s philanthropic career can be found in Henry
Watson Kent, What I am Pleased to Call My Education (New York, 1949), 140ff.
46. See Howe and Saarinen on Morgan and Havemeyer; Daniel M. Fox, “Edith
Rockefeller McCormick, “ in Notable American Women (Cambridge, 1971).
47. Thomas B. Sherman, “Art and Taxes,” The Saturday Review; XXXIX, July 7,
1956, 26.
48. George F. Comfort, “Art Museums in America,” Old and New, I, April, 1870,512.
49. Erwin O. Christensen, “Art Museums for the Public,” Museum Work, V, July-
August, 1922, 36.
50. The Bulletin o f the Cleveland Museum o f Art, III, July 1916, passim.
Chapter Three
51. Since foundation grants were most important for museums’ educational pro
grams, they will be discussed in more detail below.
52. Metropolitan, R eport..., 21.

53. Statistics on gifts and bequests to museums can be found in John Price Jones,
The Yearbook o f Philanthropy (New York, 1942,1943,1946,1948); also Laurence
Vail Coleman, The Museum in America (Washington, 1939); Frederick R. Keppel
and R.L. Duffus, The Arts in American Life (New York, 1933), summarizes sta
tistics on the value of works of art imported from abroad by museums in the
twentieth century. Statistical tables indicating the proportion of gifts to bequests
over a twenty-five year period can be found in John Price Jones.
54. James H. Breasted, “Who Pays for Museums and How Much?” Archaeology, I,
September, 1948, 123.
55. Howe, II, 71.
56. Saarinen, 23.
57. Bulletin o f the Cleveland Museum ofArtt II, September, 1916, 1.
58. This middle-class collective patronage first appeared in Western Europe and the
United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Organizations like the
German Kunstvereine, the French Societe de Amis d ’art, and the American Art
Union flourished until the great collectors began to dominate the art market and
art philanthropy in the second half of the century. The levelling influence of the
First World War, the Depression and, later, the Second World War created a
situation in which middle-class collective patronage again became possible.
Museums on both sides of the Atlantic have encouraged similar organizations
for collective patronage in recent years.
59. “Public Support,” Art News, XXXIII, May 25, 1935, 12.
60. For American museums and Federal income taxes see Sherman, 6ff. An excel
lent survey of American tax deductions for art-gifts can be found in The Econo
mist, CXCV, May 28,1960, 869. For financial and tax pressure on collectors see
Francis Henry Taylor, “The Moral and Intellectual Responsibilities of Expand
ing Collections,” Proceedings o f the American Philosophical Society, XCVIII,
August, 1954, 348.
61. Behrman, 260-65. Another factor which stimulated tax-deductible philanthropy
was the increasing cost and value of works of art, which was in part a result of
museum purchasing and philanthropy.
62. On Mr. Bishop's ballroom see Robert deForest, “Museum Policies and Scope,”
Museum Monographs, No. 3, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1930,3. On Johnson
and Havemeyer see Saarinen, 116, 171. For other descriptions of the develop
ment of restrictions policy see Howe, and Coleman, Museum in America, I,
passim.
63. Howe, II, 83.
64. Robert W. deForest, “The Notable Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher,” Museum Mono
graphs, No. 1, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917, 3-4.
65. Coleman, Museum in America, II, 238-39.
66. N. H. Carpenter, L.E. Rowe, G.H. Sherwood, “The Administration of Museums:
Committee Report to the A.A.M.,” Museum Work, I, June, 1918, 17-21; for the
same problem in the next generation, cf. “Resolution of the A. A.M. on Gifts and
Bequests Policy, 1945,” Museum News, XXII, February 15, 1945, 1.
67. Carle E. Guthe, So You Want a Good Museum, (American Association of Muse
ums Publications, New Series, No. 17), November 17, 1957, 3; also Sherman.
68. Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, 31.
69. Harshe, 386; Taylor, 349; also Philip Rhys Adams, Director of the Cincinnati Art
Museum, to the Author, Conversations, March, 1960
Notes 85
70. On Detroit Museum: Maurice Grosser, “Art,” The Nation, CXCI, July 2, 1960,
16-18; Clyde H. Burroughs, “Benefits of a Supporting Society,” Museum News,
XXII, February 15, 1945, 7; on Freer, see Rathbun, 102ff.
71. Burroughs, 7; Newton H. Carpenter, “The Value of Members of Museums,”
91-97; American Association of Museums, Reports o f Director (Washington,
1928 et. seq.).
72. The average tenure of individual memberships is four to six years. It is not clear
why members drop out, but one hypothesis is that most members have always
regarded their dues as philanthropy, to be discontinued at will, rather than as
payment for desired services. If the services were felt to be necessary, member
ship would probably be more stable. This argument is reinforced by the fact that
free admission to museums undercuts the basic privilege of membership. The
importance of special programs for members was undercut by new trends in
museum education after World War I.
73. Guthe, 30.
74. The museum rejected the offer; it is not clear exactly why. Howe, I, 163.
75. Proceedings o f the First Annual Convention o f the American Federation o f Arts,
108.
76. Willian M. Hekking, “Art Smokers for Business Men,” Museum Work, VI, Janu-
ary-February, 1924, 163.
77. Coleman, Museums in America, I, 184.
78. Lynes, 296-298.
79. Beardsley Ruml, ed., The Manual o f Corporate Giving (Washington, 1952), 121.
This judgment conflicts with Coleman’s discovery two years later that munici
pal appropriations had increased more than any other source of museum income
in the past fifteen years. Perhaps Mr. Coleman had slipped into mythology about
private men in order to improve his case before the businessmen.
80. Guthe, 20.
81. John Price Jones Company, Philanthropic Digest, V, April 15, 1959, n.p.; VI,
May 4, 1960, May 18, 1960, n.p.
82. Guthe, 3.
83. “Art Museums Take on a Commercial Hue,” Business Week, May 26, 1956,
45-46;l Daniel Catton Rich, “Museums at the Crossroads,” Museum News,
XXXIX, March, 1961, 38.
84. Henry L. Ward, “Trustees and the Executive Officers of Museums,” Proceed
ings o f the American Association o f Museums, VI, 1912, 80.
85. Early museum trustees chose directors very carefully, but not necessarily for
their knowledge of art. In 1904, for example, J. P. Morgan told his fellow trust
ees in New York that a director should have “courtesy and those qualities of a
gentleman and man of the world which will enable him to put the Museum in
relations of respect and sympathy with the different classes of the com
munity ... It is unlikely that these ideal qualifications can all be found united in
any single man. Executive capacity and gentlemanly qualities are essential.
Museum experience can be acquired.” (My italics.) Quoted in Robert W. deForest,
“Museum P olicies...,” 5.
Several early directors had given their museums generous gifts—the first
directors of the Metropolitan and the Fogg Museum at Harvard, for example.
Directors were expected to avoid rocking the cultural, social, and political boat.
An early Cincinnati director was eulogized as “a vital member of a choice group
of men at his club which comprised commercial as well as intellectual leaders.
These have testified to the scope of his knowledge and the soundness of his
opinions on every question of public importance.” In Elizabeth R. Kellogg, Memo
ries o f Joseph Henry Gest (Cincinnati, 1937), 44.
By the First World War, however, standardization of museum techniques and
ethics, the regular flow of ideas between museums, and the creation of a profes
sional job market gave trustees a new factor to contend with: professional vested
interests. By 1921, for example, the Director of the American Association of
Museum could say that the “vision” of museum professionals was ahead of the
vision of “the corporate bodies by which we are employed.” Cited by Paul M.
Rea, “The Future of Museums in the Life of the people,” 54. The year before, an
Association committee had even attacked businessmen-trustees for not appreci
ating the peculiar problems of cultural-philanthropic institutions. Carpenter,
Rowe, Sherwood, 19.
86. Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals o f Purpose and Method (Cambridge,
1922), 356.
87. Public accounting procedures, however, have not always been admirable. Per
haps the sketchy, imprecise figures in the early reports of every museum repre
sent the disdain of an in-group for the public or lack of interest in exact accounting.
More likely this vagueness was the result of an ambiguity peculiar to private
philanthropy in the public interest. Museums, like the great foundations, prefer
to be responsible only to their trustees for detailed explanations of financial
circumstances and policy formulation. As art museums became more dependent
on broad public support and money from municipal taxes, the figures in the
annual reports became more precise and revealing. But for a long time many
trustees were able to ignore the accountability inherent in their public role.
88. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 392; Edsel B. Ford, “The New Public Museum
From the Standpoint of a Trustee,” Museum News, XVIII, September 1, 1940,9;
Pach, 70.
89. Lynes, 260, 265; Alfred Frankfurter, “On Trustee Interference with Professional
Standards,” Art News, LAX, September, 1960,19. Philip R. Adams, and Bartlett
H. Hayes, Jr. (Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art), to the Author,
March 1960; for a statement on professional ethics in 1921 see “The Cause,”
Museum Work, IV, July-August, 1921, 2: “Those who administer the affairs of
museums should conserve at all events the high character of the work of their
museums and refuse any offer of aid which may jeopardize the service that the
museum may render to the cause to which it may be dedicated.”
90. Alfred Hoeber, The Treasures o f the Metropolitan Museum o f Art (New York,
1892), 9.
91. E. E. Lowe, A Report on American Museum Work (Edinburgh, 1928), 10.
92. Pach, 216.
93. J.A. Udden, “Museum Buildings in the United States,” Science, New Series,
XXXVI, July 26, 1912, 110.
94. Laurence Vail Coleman, “Recent Progress and Condition of Museums,” Bien
nial Survey o f Education in the United States (Washington, 1932), Chapter XXII,
10.
95. Laurence Vail Coleman, “City Support of Public Museums,” Museum News,
XXXII, May 15, 1954, 3-7.
96. Metropolitan, R eport..., 17.
97. For example, in Howe, I, 139.
Notes 87
98. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Annual Reports (New York, 1871-1902), 24.
99. Ibid., 146.
100. Howe, I, 217.
101. Metropolitan, Annual Reports, 538.
102. An interesting indication of the involvement of museums in the general his
tory of American philanthropy is the fact that part of the cost for the new
Sunday operation was raised through newspaper subscription campaigns—one of
the banes of the New York Charity Organization Society in the 1890’s. Howe, 1,225.
103. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration (New York,
1921), 41. For the figures on which deForest based his inaccurate percentages
see Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Review o f Fifty Years Development (New
York, 1920), n.p.
104. Metropolitan, Fiftieth Anniversary..., 36-37.
105. Ibid., 31.
106. Laurence Vail Coleman, Manual fo r Small Museums (New York, 1927), 324ff.;
Coleman, Museum in America, 1,187ff. For an instance of a State Supreme Court
upholding a legislative act chartering a public museum and providing municipal
funds see, St. Louis City Art Museum, Annual Report, 1912.
107. Report o f the Utah Art Institute fo r the years 1899 and 1900 (Salt Lake City,
1900); Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, 84th Con
gress, 2nd sess., Report #2409, July 7, 1956, 223-24; Commission on Fine Arts,
Arts and Government (Washington, 1951), 98ff.
108. Coleman, M anual..., 324; for State of Massachusetts offer to Metropolitan
Boston Arts Center see John Price Jones Company, Philanthropic Digest, VI,
February 24, 1960, n.p.
109. Goode, 438.
110. On the benefits of tariff reduction first to museums, later to collectors, see Alfred
Frankfuter, “Fifty-five Years of American Museums,” Art News, LVI, Summer
1957,51; Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 52nd Con
gress, 2nd sess., 1892, “Free Art,” passim; for a study of the entire subject of the
tariff on art and a useful bibliography see Vincent Henry Demma, American
Patronage o f the Fine Arts in New York City (Unpublished Master’s Essay, Uni
versity of Wisconsin, 1961), Chapter III.
111. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 182.
112. Ford, 9.
113. Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, 54.
114. A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum o f Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New
York, 1943), 126.
115. Daniel C. Rich, “The Art Museum and the Community Art Center,” Museum
News, XVIII, September, 1940, 10; Thomas C. Parker, “Community Art Cen
ters, Museum News, XV, October 15, 1937, 7-8.
116. “Museum Income Sources,” Art News, XLIV, January 1, 1946, 32. According to
this article, the same trend could be discerned in symphony orchestra philan
thropy; in 1946 a third of the major American orchestras were supported by both
private and public funds.
117. Breasted, 124.
118. Bruno Gebhard, “Other People’s Money: A Case History of Museum Financ
ing,” Museum News, XXVI, December 1, 1948, 6.
119. Coleman, “City Support...,” 3-7.
120. Rich, “Museums at the Crossroads,” 38.

121. For details see Saarinen, 82-87.
122. James Jackson Jarves, The Art Idea (Cambridge, 1960), 263.
123. Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives o f James Jackson Jarves (New Haven, 1951),
284.
124. Charles C. Perkins, Art Education in America (Cambridge, 1870), 8.7
125. Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Fifteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1891),
8; Arthur Dexter, “The Fine Arts in America,” in Justin Winsor, The Memorial
History o f Boston (Boston, 1881), 405.
126. Museum of Fine Arts, 4.
127. S.R.Koehler, Art Education and Art Patronage in the United States (Philadel
phia, 1882), 20.
128. Gilman, 384, 387-88.
129. Bulletin o f the Cleveland Museum o f Art, III, July, 1917, 76. When a new wing
was built in the 1950’s, the cost was borne entirely by philanthropists. Bulle
tin ..., XLVIII, June, 1959, 115. The Cleveland museum does receive annual
grants from two public school systems for special teaching services.
130. deForest, “Museum Policies...,” 7.
131. Robert Koehler, “Some Ideas on the Founding of an Art Museum,” Proceedings
o f the American Association o f Museums, II, 1908, 130.
132. Paul M. Rea, “Educational Work of Museums,” reprinted from the Reports o f
the Commissioner o f Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1916,401; Paul M.
Rea, “Conditions and Needs of American Museums,” Proceedings o f the Ameri
can Association o f Museums, X, 1916, 31.
133. Edmund Cooke, “A Survey of the Educational Activities of Forty-Seven Muse
ums,” Museum News, XII, June 15, 1934, 6.
134. John Cotton Dana, The Gloom o f the Museum, (Woodstock, 1917), 9.
135. Carpenter, Rowe, Sherwood, 21.
136. Ford, 9.
137. Theodore L. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument (New York, 1942), 34.
138. John Price Jones, ed., Philanthropy Today, (New York, 1949) 69-70. It is note
worthy that private universities, with the aid of Carnegie Foundation funds, only
began to examine carefully the role of public funds in their operation at the end
of the 1950’s.
Chapter Four
139. A good example of the theory of art education in the late nineteenth century
occurs in Charles M. Kurtz, ed., Official Illustrations from the Art Gallery o f the
World's Columbian Exposition (Philadelphia, 1893), 8: “Primarily, the object of
the Exposition may be assumed to be educational... opportunity is afforded for
study and comparison. Each exhibitor may learn something... which may lead
to the improvement of that which he produces, whether it be in the domain of art
or manufacture. At the same time, the general visitor to the Exposition may gain
new ideas and correct impressions that have been formed upon insufficient or
erroneous data.”
140. Howe, I, 200.
141. Ibid., 204.
142. Lynes, 149.
Notes 89
143. Kent, 147; cf. Frank Jewett Mather, “An Art Museum For the People,” Atlantic
Monthly, C, December, 1907, 729-40; “For the People nothing had been done
except to open the doors. Dazzling statistics of attendance and acquisition only
meant that more stones were being provided for an ever-increasing throng that
wanted bread.”
144. Howe, II, 172, 203,207; Ramsey, Educational Work..., passim; Thomas Munro
and Jane Grimes, Educational Work o f the Cleveland Museum o f Art (Cleveland,
1952), 13, 25.
145. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 114; Rea, 123.
146. The bibliography on settlements is extensive; only a few works can be cited
here. On settlement workers attitude toward art and philanthropy see Jane Addams,
A Function o f the Social Settlement (Philadelphia, 1899), Twenty Years at Hull
House (New York, 1910), The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (New York,
1930), passim; Mary K. Simkhovitch, Neighborhood (New York, 1939), passim;
Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York, 1915), passim; Robert
A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, The Settlement Horizon (New York, 1922)
passim.
147. Munro and Grimes, 36, 45; John Andrew Myers, “Music at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts,” Edward Robinson, “Music at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art,” Museum Work, II, February, 1920, 145ff.; Laura W. I. Scales, “The
Museum’s Part in the Making of Americans,” Proceedings o f the American As
sociation o f Museums, XL, 1917, 133. Museums, like settlements, were also in
terested in music as a “sociological force,” a means of binding people more
closely together. More important, the concerts were an attempt to extend musi
cal opportunities “to people who could not afford.. .regular orchestra concerts.”
The Cleveland Music School Settlement Orchestra performed at the Museum. In
New York, museum concerts were conducted by settlement leader David Marines
about whom Robinson wrote, “Marines was admirably adapted to direct...
because of his experience not only with audiences of the finer class but also
among the music loving people of the lower East Side of New York.”
148. Helen Hart, “Social Settlements and the Trend Toward Specialization,” Social
Forces, IX, June, 1931, 526.
149. “The Cost of Small Museum,” The Nation, XLIX, November 21, 1889,406. An
example of a former settlement worker influencing museum education directly
is cited by Munro and Grimes, 45; Mrs. Louise M. Dunn, a former settlement
worker who was Associate Curator of Education at the Cleveland Museum for
many years, managed to convince her colleagues that children could be allowed
to visit museum galleries by themselves without seriously endangering the works
of art.
150. See below, p. 60-61. Museums still provide more education for children than for
adults: see “Museums Expand Service in Nation,” The New York Times, Decem
ber 25, 1961.
151. Frederick A. Whiting, in Bulletin o f the Cleveland Museum o f Art, III, April,
1917, 59.
152. Ibid, 43-44.
153. For special museum activities during the First World War see “War Time Ser
vice by Museums and by Museum Men,” Museum Work, I, November, 1918,34;
for industrial design see Richard F. Back, “Museum Service to the Art Indus
tries,” Industrial Art Monograph #3, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York,
1927).
154. Morris Gray, “The Real Value of Art,” reprinted from The American Magazine
o f Art, August, 1920, n.p.
155. Robinson, 148.
156. Ella Lyman Cabot, “The Museum as a Center for Americanization and Nation
Study,” Museum Work, I, June, 1918, 20.
157. Scales, 33.
158. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 181; Low, The Educational Philosophy..., 68;
R.L. Duffus, “The Museum Takes Off Its High Hat,” The North American Re
view, CCXLII, Autumn, 1936, 30-44.
159. Coleman, Museums in America, I, 182.
160. Low, The Educational Philosophy..., 66.
161. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 18 Iff.
162. Rich, “The Art Museum and the Community Art Center,” 9.
163. Thomas R. Adam, The Civic Value o f Museums (New York, 1937), 102; cf. Francis
Henry Taylor, “Museums in a Changing World,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXIV, De
cember, 1939, 785-92.
164. Taylor, “M useum s...,” 791; similarly, Coleman, Museum in America, I, 90,
quotes Frederick R. Keppel, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York
who had fallen into the easy explanation: “I cannot say that we have actually
seen the fine arts in the United States swing from oligarchy to democracy in ten
years, but I can say that oligarchy was the word that naturally came to mind ten
years ago and that democracy is the word one thinks of today.” I have been
unable to discover the context of Keppel’s remark. It is possible that since the
Carnegie Corporation was contributing a great deal of money to college muse
ums for educational purposes, Keppel may have been contrasting the relatively
smaller interest of public museum donors in education with what the Carnegie
Corporation was doing.
165. Cooke, “A Survey...,” 6.
166. For statistics on foundation grants to museums to the mid-1930’s, see Eduard C.
Lindeman, Wealth and Culture (New York, 1936), 90-91; for more recent fig
ures, John Price Jones, Philanthropy Today, passim. ; for detailed figures and
description of the Carnegie grants see Carnegie Corporation of New York, Re
port o f the President and the Treasurer (New York, 1931, 1935, 1939, 1940,
1941, 1942), passim.
167. Alfred M. Frankfurter, “Nationwide Gifts of Italian Art by the Kress Founda
tion,” Art News, XXXVI, February 15, 1938, 15ff.
168. Rich, “The Art Museum...,” 10; Parker, “Community Art Centers,” 8; United States
Federal Art Project, Federal Sponsored Community Art Centers, W.P.A. Technical
Series, Art Circular #1, October 8, 1937,4; Cumulative WPA figures on expendi
tures for Centers and Museum Projects by the Federal Government and philanthro
pists were published in Museum News, XVIII, February 15,1941,2.
169. Lydia Powell and Thomas Munro, The Art Museum Comes to the School (New
York, 1944), passim.
170. Rich, “The Art M useum ...,” 10.
171. Whiting, 59.
172. Thomas Munro, “The Art Museum in War-Time,” Bulletin o f the Cleveland
Museum o f Art, XXIX, February 1943, 1.
173. Ibid., 2.
174. Taylor, Babel’s Tower, 50.
175. Gilman, Museum Ideals..., passim, Dana, The Gloom o f the Museum, passim.
Notes 91
176. Perhaps the best example of the bitterness of the controversy is Meyer Schapiro’s
review of Taylor’s Babel’s Tower in Art Bulletin, XXVII, December, 1945,272-76.
A more recent position, which tends to straddle the problem by leaving educational
work to the museums and scholarship to university people, can be found in John
Coolidge, Some Problems o f American Art Museums (Boston, 1953).
177. See note 37 above.
178. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York, 1927), 183; Art as Expe
rience (New York, 1937), passim; Albert C. Barnes, Art in Painting (New York,
1937), passim.
179. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 142, 183.
180. See note 38, above.
181. Letter from Reverend Dr. Henry W. Bellows to the Executive Committee of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, quoted by Howe, I, 121.
182. Letter from John Taylor Johnston to William T. Blodgett, quoted Ibid., 145.
183. von Bode, Mein Leben; Koehler, Art Education and Art Patronage; Laurent, La
Republique et Les Beaux Artes; Joel H. Duveen, The Rise o f the House ofDuveen
(New York, 1937); Edwards, Administrative Economy...', John Pye, Patron
age o f British Art (London, 1845), passim.
184. Behrman, 248.
185. John Cotton Dana, The New Museum (Woodstock, Vermont, 1917), 14, 31.
186. Koehler, 24.
187. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Loan Collection o f Painting and Sculpture (New
York, 1882), 20.
188. Bessie L. Pierce, A History o f Chicago (New York, 1957), III, 296, 475.
189. James W. Pattison, “Municipal Art in Chicago,” Proceedings o f the First Annual
Convention o f the American Federation o f Arts (Washington, 1910), 67.
190. Brimo, 182.
191. Koehler, 4.
192. Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals..., 128.
193. Walt Kuhn, The Story o f the Armory Show (New York, 1938), 15; Walter Pach,
Queer Thing, Painting (New York, 1938), 180ff.
194. Smith, “The Museum of Art in the United States,” 305.
195. William Sloan Coffin, “The Museum’s Service to the Community,” Museum News,
XI, December 16, 1933, 6; Coleman, Museum in America, II, 295.
196. Reports o f the Director and Treasurer o f the American Association o f Museums,
1929, 6; Coleman, Museums in America, II, 295.
197. An account of a Cleveland publicity program for modem art appears in I.T. Frary,
At Large in Marble Halls (Philadelphia, 1959), 25ff.
198. San Francisco Museum of Art, Art o f Our Time (San Francisco, 1945), passim',
A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum o f Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New
York, 1943), 39.
199. Edgar J. Bemheimer, “To American Museums,” Art Digest, VI, June 1, 1932, 1,
is a dealer’s plea for museums to rescue private collectors (and, incidentally,
dealers); Taylor, “Museums in a Changing World,” 792, regards the inflated art
market as immoral.
200. Whitney Museum of American Art, Catalogue o f the Collection (New York, 1939),
passim; John Sloan and Forbes Watson statements in Whitney Museum, Julian
Force and American Art (New York, 1949), 37, 55.
201. Whitney Museum, The Whitney Museum and its Collections (New York, 1954),
passim; J.M., “Plans, Payments and Purchases,” Arts, XXXII, May, 1958, 15.
202. John D. Morse, ed., The Artist and the Museum (New York, 1950), 4.
203. Ibid, 6-7.
204. Ibid., 8,10,20,59ff.
205. Taylor, “The Moral and Intellectual Responsibilities...” 245.
206. Pach, 162.
207. Canaday’s numerous articles on the problem are listed in the New York Times
Index since 1957. Of special interest are his remarks on March 6,1960, II, 13: 1;
May 8, 1960, II, 11:1; September 4, 1960, II, 8: 1-2; Also, Lynes, 264 takes the
Modem Museum to task for being a “vested interest...jealous of its position.”
Pach, 162ff., believes that museums should be concerned with “enduring val
ues,” not contemporary patronage.
Chapter Five
208. For example, Adam, The Civic Value o f Museums, 24; Coleman, The Museum in
America, I, 89; Dana, The New Museum, 31, The Gloom o f the Museum, 13, A
Plan fo r a New Museum, 10; Oscar Handlin, “The Modem City as a Field of
Historical study,” (Paper presented at the opening session of the Harvard Sum
mer School Conference on the City and History, Monday, July 24, 1961), 16;
Mumford, Sticks and Stones, 149, Pach, 42.
209. For a summary of museum charters see Coleman, A Manualfo r Small Museums,
324ff., 343-44.
210. Howe, I, 152.
211. Metropolitan, Report..., 23; cf. George F. Comfort, “Art Museums in America,”
504: “An edifice which is to contain public galleries of art should be located
away from the noisy and dusty thoroughfares of a great city.. .to prevent shad
ows and light reflections which will min the galleries... where room exists for
expansion... it should be within easy access o f the great mass o f the population
o f the city. All of these conditions can be met only in the public parks.” (My
italics.)
212. Metropolitan, Annual Reports, 128.
213. Robert Koehler, “Some Ideas on the Founding of an Art Museum,” 130. Al
though Dana seems to bear the major responsibility for the belief that museums
were deliberately built in inaccessible places, he was aware of the practical rea
sons for building in parks, even though he discounted them. See The Gloom o f
the Museum, 13.
214. Ford, “The New Public M useum...,” 9.
215. Coleman, Museum Buildings, 10.
216. Dana, The New Museum, 32; Frary, 16; Mumford, 150.
217. Coleman, Museum in America, I, 197-217; Museum Buildings, 3.
218. Behrman, passim; Saarinen, 64.
219. Cf. Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger, America’s Symphony Orchestras
and How They Are Supported (New York, 1940), passim; Irving Kolodin, The
Metropolitan Opera (New York, 1936), passim.
220. See Note 142, Chapter Four.
Index
Akron, Ohio, art museum, 48 relations with museums, 71, 74, 79

Alpers, Svetlana, 19 Art News, 54
Altman, Benjamin, 36-37, 39, 52 Arts, economics and sociology of, 2,20
American Art Union, 84n58 history of, 1-2, 17, 20
American Association for the Advance politics of, 2
ment of Science, 82n31 public policy on, 5-8
American Association of Museums, 36, Association of Art Museum Directors,
36, 49, 53-54, 56-57, 63, 65, 71, 17
86n85
American Historical Association, 4 Bache bequest, 64
American Social Science Association, Bailyn, Bernard, 20-2 ln5
32 Ballet, 7
Architects, of museums, see Museum Banfield, Edward C., 13, 16
architects Barnard, Frederick A. P., 32
Art, collectors, and collecting, 17, 27- Bames, Albert C., 67-68
28,30-31,36-39,45,50,55,59,69- Bames Collection (Philadelphia), 28
71, 73, 79 Bazin, Germain, 12, 23n32
artists, attitudes towards, 69 Behrman, S. N., 38
historical societies as, 28 Bellows, Henry, Reverend, 69
museums as advisors to, 45-46, Bierstadt, Albert, 70
78 Book of the Month Club, 39
contemporary (nineteenth century), Boston (city government), 55
69 Boston Athenaeum, 55
dealers of, 17, 38, 50, 70 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 28,32,36,
entrepreneurs of, 7, 17 38, 46, 55-56, 75-76
Impressionist, 70 Bridgeport, Connecticut, art museum, 48
market, 1, 9, 18, 30, 50, 79, in Old Brimo, Rene, 27-28
Masters, 69-70, 72-74 British Museum, 77
modem art movement, 28, 50, 59, Brooklyn Museum, 53
70-74 Bryant, William Cullen, 36
Armory Show, 70-72 Bryce, James, 5
social protest in, 72 Buffalo, New York, art museum, 29
Art commissions, municipal, 43 Bureau of Education, United States, 53
Artists, 17, 38, 59, 69-70, 72, 79 Business corporations, 3,16,43,47-48,
American, museums as stimulus for, 60
33, 36, 59-60
industrial, museums as stimulus for, Cabot, Ella Lyman, 63
35, 59-60, 63, 82n29 Canaday, John, 74
patronage and subsidies for, 5-7, Carnegie, Andrew, 35, 39, 60
22n26, 72-73 Carnegie Corporation, 90nl64
93
Carnegie Endowment for International Dunlap, William, 26

Peace, 3 Dunn, Louise M., 61, 89nl49
Carnegie Foundation, 65, 88nl38 Duveen, Lord, 38, 70, 78
Chambers of Commerce, 48
Charity Organization Society (New Education, art, theory of (nineteenth
York), 87nl02 century), 88nl39
Chicago Art Institute, 28,33,44,53,55, faculty psychology of, 59
60, 70, 75-76 history of, 10
Chicago School (economics), 22n27 industry, 1
Cincinnati, Ohio, art museum, 29, 85- medical, 10
86n85 philanthropy, 29,39,59, and govern
Civil War, 9, 25, 32 ment support, 58
Clark, Thomas, 45 public policy on, 5-6
Cleveland Museum of Art, 41, 44, 46,
56, 61, 66, 78, 88nl29, 89nl47, Feldstein, Martin, 16
89nl49 Fine Arts Funds, 48
Cleveland Music School Settlement First World War, 46, 50, 59, 61-63, 66,
Orchestra, 89nl47 72, 78, 84n58, 85n72, 86n85
Cold War, 3-4 Fisher, Philip, 19
Coleman, Lawrence, 48, 54, 77, 85n79 Fleming, Donald, 5, 8-9
Columbia University, 67 Fletcher, Isaac D., 45
Columbus, Ohio, art museum, 47-48 Fogg Museum (Harvard), 17,29,85n85
Community Chests, 48 Force, Juliana, 73
Congress, United States, 3-4, 53 Ford, Edsel, 46, 57, 77
Coolidge, John, 17-18 Ford Foundation, 3-4, 9
Cooper, Peter, 39 History of Philanthropy Project, 3-
Corcoran Gallery (Washington), 28 4, 8, 10, 14
Crane, Diana, 15-16, 18 Foundations, 3, 17, 43, 48-49, 59-60,
Culture and Taste, ideas of, 30, 32, 34- 65, 86n87
35, 56 Freer, Charles Lang, 46
Cummings, Milton C., 16 Freidel, Frank, 5
Curti, Merle, 3-4, 8-11, 14 French, Daniel Chester, 70
Frey, Bruno S., 16
Dana, John Cotton, 57, 61, 67, 70 Frick, Henry Clay, art collection of, 40
Darwinism, Social, 83n31 Friends of the Museum organizations,
Defense industry, 1 45, 73
DeForest, Robert, 37, 39,45,52-53,63
DeHaas, M. F. H., 70 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 11
DeKay, Mrs. J. H , 70 Gardner Museum (Boston), 28
Democratic party, 4 Gilded Age, 31, 44
Detroit (city government), 46, 64 Gilman, Benjamin Ives, 36, 50, 56, 67,
Detroit Institute of Arts, 29, 46, 56-57, 70
63, 77 Girard, Stephen, 39
Dewey, John, 67-68 Goodrich, Lloyd, 74
DiMaggio, Paul J., 15, 18 Government, 17, 51-58
Directors, of museums, see Museum philanthropy and, 11-12, 14,44-46,
directors 51,55
Donors, to art museums, see Museum private sector and, 10-11, 14
donors, Philanthropists see also Museums, government sup
Duncan, Carol, 19 port of
Index 95
Great Britain, 7 Karp, Ivan, 19

Great Depression, 7, 57, 59, 63-67, 78, Katz, Stanley, 14
84n58 Kent, Henry W., 60-61
Guggenheim Museum (New York), 29, Keppel, Frederick R., 90nl64
67 Kiwanis clubs, 48
Koehler, Robert, 76
Hall, Peter, 3, 14 Koehler, S. R., 56, 70
Handlin, Oscar, 5, 8 Kress bequest, 64
Hanover Bank, 46, 54 Kress Foundation, 65
Harris, Neil, 8, 10, 15, 17-18 Kunstvereine (Germany), 84n58
Harvard University, 2, 5, 6, 11, 17, 50,
55 Labor unions, 3
Havemeyer, H. O., 52 Liberty, in American experience, 5
Havemeyer, Louise, 11, 40, 45 Libraries, public, 18, 29, 59-62, 78-79
Health care, industry, 1,2, 14, 18 Los Angeles County Museum, 54
public policy on, 5,7, national health Louvre Museum, 12, 26, 77
insurance, 6 Low, Theodore L., 57
scholarship on, 18-20, 23-24n40, Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 35
24n41, Lynes, Russell, 30
effect of, on practice, 20
Hiss, Alger, 3 Making and Effacing Art, 19
Historians, intellectual, 11, 13 Malraux, Andre, 19, 68
social scientists and, 11 Marines, David, 61, 89nl47
Hoeber, Alfred, 51-52 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, 15 55
Hospitals, 3-4, 7, 18 McCarthy, Kathleen, 10-12,
executives of, 18 McCormick, Edith Rockefeller, 11, 40
history of, 10 Mellon, Andrew, 29,45,54, bequest, 64
intensive care units, 7 Merk, Fred, 5
Housing, public policy on, 6, 7 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 12-13,18,
Hoving, Thomas, 18 28,34,36,39,44-45,47,51-53,55-
Hutchinson, Charles L., 60 56, 59-61, 63, 66, 69-71, 74, 76,
85n74, 85n85, 89nl47
Immigration Restriction League, 82nl9 Miller, Perry, 1, 20n2
Imperialism, 82n23 Minneapolis Museum, 56, 76
Improvement, doctrine of, 34-35, 56 Morgan, J. P., 37-38, 40, 55-56, 78,
Independent Sector Studies, 2, 14 83n40, 85n85
Morse, Edward S., 38-39, 82-83n31
James, Henry, 38 Morse, Samuel F. B., 70
Jamestown, New York, 29 Movies, 7
Jarves, James, 55 Mulcahy, Kevin, 16
Jersey City Fine Arts Council, 48-49 Mumford, Lewis, 31
John Herron Art Institute (Indianapolis), Museum architects, 17
47 Museum directors, 17-18,25,27-28,31,
Johns Hopkins University, 14 33-36, 39,41,45, 52-53,55-57,59,
Johnson, Eastman, 70 63,66-68,70-72,74,76,85-86n85
Johnson, James G., 45 professionalization of, 49-50,61,78,
Johnson, John Taylor, 69 86n85, 86n89
Journal o f Cultural Economics, 23n31 Museum donors, 46-47, 49-50, 63-64,
Junior Leagues, 48 79
artists as, 70 Museum trustees, 17,28,33, 39,46,49,

collaborations with museum staff, 52, 57, 59, 61-62, 68, 73-76, 85-
28, 44-45, 78 86n85, 86n87
collective, 45, 73, 84n58 influence on professionals, 50-51
collectors as, 36-40, 68-71 Museum visitors, 17, 62-63, 66, 76
contemporary art and artists, atti Museum volunteers, 49
tudes towards, 69-74 Museums, 3, 4
corporate, 43, 47-48 acquisitions, 30, 49-50, 70, 72, 74,
education programs and, 59-62,65- 78, 85n53, 89nl43
66, 90nl64 public subscriptions for, 45
families of, 40, 70 administration, 50, 86n85, 86n87
financial aspects of donations, 30, admissions policies, 43, 52-53, 55-
37-38, 40, 45 56, 75, 85n72, 87nl02
goals and purposes of donations, 25- aesthetic purposes of, 17-19,28,67-
33,35, 37,39-41,67,69,74-75, 69, 71, 79, 91nl76, 92n207
78 American cultural values and, 26-27,
government, partnership with, 53- 30, 32-36, 41, 59, 66-67, 79
55,57-58 national prestige and, 26-27, 30,
patterns of giving, 43-49 35-37
philanthropic interests, other, 39 quality of life and, 27,31,36,62-
restrictions on gifts and bequests, 63
45-46, 50 Americanization of immigrants, in
social range of, 44 struments for, 33, 61, 63, 82nl9
sources of wealth, 36-37 analogies to, 10, 60
see also Philanthropists, Philanthropy annual reports, 43, 75
Museum founders, art exhibitions in, 18-19,27,34,47-
artists, attitudes towards, 69 48, 63, 70, 79
governments as, 29, 53, 65 contemporary art, 59, 70-74,
governments, interaction with, 51- sales, 74
54, 76, 78 temporary loan, 38,44-45,49,71
historical societies as, 28-29 art market and, 1, 9, 16, 18, 30, 70-
patronage museums of contemporary 72,79, 84n61
art, of, 73 artists and collectors, stimulus for,
philanthropic donations and, 16, 17, 33, 35-36,59, 63,65, 67, 70, 79,
25, 28-30 82n29
private galleries, of, 28-29, 40 artists, living, recognition of, 70-74,
public libraries as, 29 79
purposes of, 9, 25, 27, 31-33, 44, arts policy and, 16
75-77 attendance, 59, 67-69, 76, 89nl43
self-image of, 51-52, 57, 69 buildings and architecture, 16, 27,
women as founders and patrons, 11- 33,52,75-77
12, 15 as church surrogates and sources of
see also Philanthropists, Philanthropy moral improvement, 29, 33-35,
Museum of Modem Art (New York), 48, 66, 81n7
54, 72, 74 collections, organization and display
Museum officials, 22n27 of, 17, 19, 27, 45, 59-60, 68-
Museum staff, 17, 38-39, 44-46, 50- 74
52, 56-57, 65, 78-79 as community cultural centers, 43,
Museum trade press, 17 52-53, 63, 68, 81n8
Index 97
criticism of, as elitist, 9, 62-65, 67, social science analysis and, 15-
75-77 17, 19-20
as insulated, 74 income and endowment, sources of,
as market-oriented, 9, 49 44, 47-49, 51-52, 63, 87nll6
as popular or publicity-oriented, interest group politics and, 8-9, 13
49, 67-68 location of, 75-77, 92n211, 92n213
as solace to the unfit, 35 membership programs, 33, 38, 43,
donors, independence from, 49 47, 56, 62-63, 85n72
education programs of, 1,17,26-28, industrial, 48
30.34.43.48- 50,53,56-57,59- as merit goods, 16
69, 72-73, 75, 77-78, 85n72, neighborhood branches of, 61, 65
88nl29 patronage museums, 73-74, 79
armed services, for, 63 pluralism and, 63, 82nl9
children’s and students’, 61-62, public image and public relations,
6 5 ,89nl49, 89nl50 49-50, 67, 79
financing of, 60 as public services or utilities, 16,27-
museums as popular universities, 28, 57, 60, 67, 78-79, 82n21
66 public support, reliance on, 25-28,
as entrepreneurs, 9, 13, 16, 18 44,52-57, 63,68,72,75, 78-79,
European, 23n30,25-27, 30, 34,50, 86n87
5 2 ,84n58 sales, books and reproductions, 39,
in France, 15, 26 45,48-49, 79
fund-raising campaigns, 38-40, 43- scholarship and, 75, 78, 91nl76
45.48- 50,61,68,74,79,87nl02
social elites and, 15-16, 38-41, 44,
government support of, 1, 8-9, 12- 67, 75
13,15-16,22n26,23n34,25,27- university museums, 29, 90nl64
28, 30,41,44-47,49-58,60,63, Music, 7, 37, public concerts in muse
65,68,7 5 ,7 7 -7 9 ,85n79, 86n87, ums, 28, 61-63. 78. 89nl47
87nl06, 87nll6, 88nl29
city management, 46 Nation, 62
city or state charters, 50, 75, National Bureau of Economic Research,
87nl06 16
Federal contributions to construc National Endowment for the Arts, 9, 16
tion, 53 National Endowment for the Humani
to education, 65, see also New ties, 16
Deal National Gallery of Art (Washington),
tariff policy, 53,71, tax policy, 29, 32, 54
45, 48 National Institute (forerunner), 32
land grants, 43, 51, 55-56, 76 National Gallery of London, 26
state legislation, 53 National Museum (United States), 34,53
taxation, tax exem ptions as Neal, David, 70
source of, 12, 23n30, 28, 43, Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City), 64
47, 53, 56, 84n61 Netzer, Dick, 16
historiography of, 12-13,15, conser New Deal, 3, 5-6, 63-66, 77, 79
vative, 13, Marxist, 12-13, revi American Guide Series, 5
sionist, 19-20 Arts Centers, 53-54, 65, Arts
cultural studies and, 19-20, Projects, 5, 63, 65,
23n31 Federal Writers’ Project, 5
economic analysis and, 16,22n27 Museum Projects, 54, 65
New England, hostility to public support social philosophy, influence on, 33-
of museums, 53 35, 82n23, 82-83n29
New York City, 9,12-13,16,51-52,54- voluntarism and, 4-5, 12, 29, 57
55, 65, 73, 76 Philosophy,
Board of Estimate, 52, Park Commis aesthetic, influence on museums, 67-
sion, 52, 76 69
New York Historical Society Museum, social (19th century), influence on
29 museums, 33-35, 82n23
New York Public Library, 76 see also Culture and Taste, Darwin
New York State Legislature, 53 ism, Improvement, Progress,
New York State Museum, 29 Public Service
New York Times, 74 Physicians, 18
Newark Museum (New Jersey), 29, 57 Poetics and Politics o f Museum Display;
Newark Public Library, 61 The, 19
Non-profit organizations, history of, 2, Pommerehne, Werner W., 16
14-15 Portland, Oregon, art museum, 29, 44
North Carolina state art museum, 53 Poverty, issues of, 9
Notable American Women, 12 Power, history of museums and, 2
in public affairs, 1
Opera companies, 78 Prendergast, Maurice, 70
Orosz, Joel, 15 Princeton University, 50
Print Clubs, 45
Pach, Walter, 51 Professional associations, 3-4
Painting, 7, 41 Progress, idea of, 34, 72
Palmer, Mrs. Potter, 37, 44 Progressive Era, 77
Pareto, Vilfredo, 73 Public health, history of, 10
Pepsi-Cola Corporation, 48 Public Service, in charitable tradition,
Perkins, Charles C., 32, 55 39
Philadelphia, 55, 65 economic determinist critique of, 65
Philadelphia Art Museum, 28, 33 government support and, 53
Philanthropists, 26n, criticism of, 72
and public officials, 10 Quinn, John, 70
and public service, 39
women as, 11-12 Race and ethnicity, issues of, 9
see also Museum donors, Museum Rea, Paul M., 36
founders, Museum trustees Reagan Administration, 14
Philanthropy, Reed, F. T., 60
Christian stewardship and, 38 Religious philanthropy, 29, 39, 49
influence on museums, 25, 27-30, Report on Public Libraries, 53
34-36, 50-51, 74-75, 79 invest Republicanism, 4
ment and, 37-38 Rich, Daniel Catton, 54-55
large-scale donations, shift to, 30 Rivera, Diego, Friends of, 72
mythology of, 51-52, 57 Robinson, Edward, 83n40
politics of, 1-2, 9 Rockefeller, John D., 63
public policy and, 6-7, 10, 14, 27 Rogers, Jacob, 36-37, 44
purposes of, 29, 31-36, 40 Rotary clubs, 48
reform, source of, 3, 6-7, 10 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 70
scholarship on, 2-3, 9 Ryerson, Martin, 37
scientific concerns, lack of interest
in, 37 Saint Gaudens, Augustus, 47
Index 99
St. Louis City Museum, 29, tax support Trustees, of museums, see Museum
for, 53, 56 trustees
Salisbury, Stephen, 2 Tweed, William Marcy, 52
Salomon, Lester, 14 Twentieth Century Fund, 13
San Francisco Art Museum, 45, 72
Santa Fe art museum, 45 Uffizi Museum, 77
Schapiro, Meyer, 67-68 Union League Club (New York), 69
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 5 Universities, 3 -4 ,7 ,29,49,58, 88nl38
Science, in American culture, 37 University of Wisconsin, 3, 8
Scitovsky, Tibor, 16 Utah Art Institute, 53
Sculpture, 7, 41
Second World War, 40, 45, 47-48, 57, Valery, Paul, 19
59, 66-67, 74, 78, 84n58 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 55
Settlement houses, 59-63, 65, 78-79, Victoria and Albert Museum (London),
89nl49 82n21
and art education, 61-62, and music, Virginia state art museum, 53
89nl47 Visitors, to museums, see Museum
Sherman, Daniel, 15 visitors
Simon, John, 14 Voluntarism, 4-5, 29, 51, 57
Smithsonian Institution, 46, 53
Social security, 6, 7 Weinberg, Albert K., 82n23
Social welfare philanthropy, 29, 39,49, Welfare state, 3-8
78 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 11, 73
Societe de Amis d’art (France), 84n58 Whitney Museum (New York), 29, 73-
Stanford University Museum, 29 74
Surrey, Stanley, 22n26 Studio Club, 73
Sweeney, James J., 67 Widener bequest, 64
Sweeney, Peter, 52 Williams, Raymond, 35
Symphony orchestras, 48, 78, 87nll6 Wisconsin Historical Society Museum,
29
Taft family of Cincinnati, art collection Worcester Art Museum (Massachusetts),
of, 40 29, 55
Tammany Hall, 52-53 Works Progress Administration (WPA),
Taylor, Francis Henry, 66-68, 74 see New Deal
Technocratic solutionism, 2 Wyllie, Irvin G., 8
Theater, 37, 48, 78
Tiffany and Company, 47 Yale Program on Non-Profit Organiza
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4 tions, 14

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Engines

Published 1995 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business

New material this edition copyright© 1995 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 94-11045

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Author’s note vii

I wrote Engines o f Culture in 1961 and 1962 for the History of

When the first edition of Engines o f Culture appeared, in 1963,

had a commission that permitted me to learn about the theme of power

The Commissioning of Engines

The scholarly and autobiographical accounts of why Merle Curti com

Curti has been an extraordinarily influential historian. His many books

tion to Americans’ unique commitment to voluntary associations in a

race or ethnic group. But philanthropists were eventually overwhelmed

Thirty years later, having expressed my skepticism about both the

understating their veneration of works of art, mainly because practical

list she includes Engines] either mention women in passing or provide

mitted its founders to “symbolize their class’s domination of the state.”

Engines and Contemporary Scholarship

Like other products of Curti’s History of American Philanthropy

me is how people who lead public, non-profit and investor-owned orga

aspired to another. This assumption persisted even in studies, like those

A few scholars have begun to insist that the study of museums be

Society (Cambridge, Harvard University Press). Bailyn’s book was especially

ums and Art Galleries” (61-77) attempts an international comparison of sources

edge of biomedical science. I examine the consequences for policy of a relativist

Museums for the Public

The development of art museums in America since the 1870’s has

the most significant voluntarily supported cultural institutions in mod

In 1845, William Dunlap, historian of art and design in America, saw

Brimo also described some indirect results of dependence on private

Guggenheim and Whitney Museums in New York, for instance. A third

donor’s personality, museums were affected by the twentieth-century

Impulse and Justification

Lewis Mumford has argued that public museums are “a manifesta

social assumptions, and personal considerations which were reflected in

Although the first genuine public museums were founded in the de

tially evident in England, they had a greater impact in late nineteenth-

Most important, they hopes that museums, by stimulating undiscovered

New factors have stimulated art philanthropy in the past generation.

predicted that, “it will become fashionable to visit museums, be ac

Sources and Patterns of Museum

Public Museums have been a partnership between men of wealth and

Some Patterns of Voluntary Giving

In general, museum philanthropists in the nineteenth century had no

Museum members have been an increasingly important source of in

were invited through Rotary and Kiwanis clubs.76Nevertheless, in 1939

Fine Arts Council planned to establish a museum financed by public

Similarly, some museum leaders at mid-century were concerned about

Gifts of time, though less important in museum philanthropy than in

museum’s collection seems to have been an exception.84 Until the First

Alfred Hoeber, a staff member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

The story of Boss Tweed’s henchman Sweeney telling the Metro

procity of public service and government support; more public service,

Centers and Museum Projects persuaded most municipal governments

Despite this firm policy, Boston staff members argued in favor of

tions received direct municipal support.132 Twenty years later, an Asso

Theodore L. Low, an expert on museum education, put it more suc

of American philanthropy has long been an extension of assumptions

Philanthropy and Museum Policy

In two areas of museum activity, education and the exhibition of con