The visitors of the Alte and Neue Museum in Berlin 1830 -1880

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Bernhard Graf; Dr. Elsa van Wezel
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 376429796

While we are by now well-informed about the architecture, the history of the collections and their presentation in the first two Museums to be built in Berlin, the Alte and the Neue Museum, as well as the ideas underlying their foundation, the opposite is the case with our knowledge of the visitors to these institutions at that time. This is especially the case with the initial period. This leads to the subject of this research project. The aim is to identify the visitors of the two first Art Museums in Berlin, the Alte (1822-1830) and the Neue Museum (1841-1859), in their original museum layout. The issues intend to discuss are, who were these museum arrangements at the Alte and Neue Museum aimed at and how were they perceived by the visitors? The second object is to discover out whether the public for the museum came predominantly from a cultural elite or whether attendance also included representatives of less well-off social classes. With regard to the contents of the study, the main question is the extent to which the museums lived up to their principled humanist programme and the means they used to approach their public.The opposite side of the question will also be explored, namely the degree to which visitors responded to the possibly pedagogical concerns of the museum officials, what exhibits appealed to them in particular and whether these preferences changed over time and, if so, why and when. This approach should result in a comprehensive history of the reception of the original layout of the first two Art Museums in Berlin.Because the collections of the applied arts, the prehistoric and the ethnographic collections were outsourced from the Neue Museum from the 1880s onwards, resulting in drastic encroachments on the original concepts, this project will concentrate on the period between 1830 and 1880.The studies at our disposal show that the museum officials of both the Alte and Neue Museum in Berlin were persuaded of the morally uplifting function of their museum layouts. This research proposal aims at a systematic examination of these high moral claims, something that has hitherto not been carried out.This study will provide important new information for international historians in the field of museum history, substantially adding to contemporary research into the public of these institutions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants