Full Description
Are national galleries different from other kinds of art gallery or museum?
What value is there for the nation in a collection of international masterpieces?
How are national galleries involved in the construction national art?
National Galleries is the first book to undertake a panoramic view of a type of national institution - which are sometimes called national museums of fine art - that is now found in almost every nation on earth. Adopting a richly illustrated, globally inclusive, comparative view, Simon Knell argues that national galleries should not be understood as 'great galleries' but as peculiar sites where art is made to perform in acts of nation building. A book that fundamentally rewrites the history of these institutions and encourages the reader to dispense with elitist views of their worth, Knell reveals an unseen geography and a rich complexity of performance. He considers the ways the national galleries entangle art and nation, and the differing trajectories and purposes of international and national art. Exploring galleries, artists and artworks from around the world, National Galleries is an argument about how we think about and study these institutions. Privileging the situatedness of each national gallery performance, and valuing localism over universalism, Knell looks particularly at how national art is constructed and represented. He ends with examples that show the mutability of national art and by questioning the necessity of art nationalism.
Contents
Preface
List of Plates
List of Figures
INTRODUCTION
1. Picturing the national gallery
Budapest 2012
Embarking on a new journey
Defining the national gallery
Redefining and complicating the definition
Boundary institutions
Putting the nation in the gallery
Nations, the national and the international
The political agency of national galleries
The national gallery and the art-nation
ART NATION GALLERY
2. Entangling art and nation
Oslo 2011
Isolating artists
Subjects and essences
Citizens and foreigners
Inscription and entombment
Making up stories
Respecting the nation
3. National and international art
London 2013
Accumulating masterpieces
An authored geography
An idiosyncratic inheritance
Appropriation and moral purpose
The nation as a moral good
The psychology of taste
HISTORIES GEOGRAPHIES
4. The Invention of national galleries
London 1629
The National Gallery
The Louvre
Nationalising the royal museum
National galleries as projects of unification
National galleries and the fight for independence
State art museums, ideology and control
Fanaticism and the national gallery
National galleries and fragmenting nations
Diverse invention
5. An idea in global translation
Mexico City 2000
Latin America
The British model abroad
Speaking to the world
Censorship, propaganda and freedom
The independent nation
Building a better world
ARCHITECTURE CURATION
6. Buildings in cities
Canberra 2010
The curated city or the body of the nation
An aesthetic paradigm
A functional ideal
Galleries for the nation
Function and nation
Brutalism, blandness and bling
Strange appropriations
7. Performances in space
London 2013
Harmonic agency
Movement and culmination
Scale, spectacle, transcendence and the sublime
Inserting the nation
Storied space
Political maps of culture
Convention and invention
NATIONAL GALLERIES NATIONAL ART
8. Making national art
Tirana 2012
State realisms in Russia, Germany and China
Academic nationalism in Poland
The Prado and the invention of the Spanish tradition
National art perfected: Canada's Group of Seven
9. Admitting complexity
Guernica 1937
Impressionism, Australia and the national artist
Internationalism and the Hungarian Fauves
Contesting New Zealand's Colin McCahon
America's inclusive abstraction and Latino art
Beyond nation, beyond art: Indigenous Australia
