Museum of Museums in Cologne

In honor of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf (1748-1824), the 200th anniversary of whose death falls this year, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum has developed a special exhibition entitled “Museum of Museums”. The exhibition takes visitors on “a journey through time through the art of exhibiting and seeing”, as the subtitle of the show adds. Visitors will learn about the beginnings and early forms of today’s museums and the WRM spans an arc from there into the future by asking about the museum of the future.

The history of the museum’s development is traced in nine halls and seven chapters. Starting with the chambers of art and curiosities, which were initially maintained by nobles and later also scholars, visitors are taken on a journey through time. From the late 16th century onwards, princes and princesses began to build chambers of art and curiosities, which were to last well into the 18th century. In the second room of the “Museum of Museums” exhibition, the curators have recreated a chamber of art and curiosities. These early collections brought together works of art (Artificialia), natural objects (Naturalia), objects from distant lands (Exotica), curiosities (Mirablila) and scientific instruments (Scientifica) from all parts of the world known at the time. All objects were exhibited side by side and on an equal footing. The aim at the time was to explain and depict the world, as curator Dr. Anne Buschhoff explains. However, this early form of museum was not accessible to everyone, but reserved for an elite circle. With new discoveries, such as new continents, the collections continued to grow, making it increasingly difficult to structure and organize them. A new concept was needed: natural history cabinets, antique collections and picture galleries were created. Gallery pictures, which were created in Antwerp from the beginning of the 17th century, give visitors an insight into what these picture galleries looked like. It is interesting to note that both real and fictitious collections of paintings were created by the artists. Using a gallery painting by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), part of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1672) can be reconstructed in the exhibition: The painter and the Archduke stand together in a room in which the paintings crowd close together up to the ceiling in the Petersburg hanging. But it was not only the nobility who collected art; the bourgeoisie also increasingly began to collect art and arrange it in a similar way, albeit on a smaller scale than the nobility. One example of this is the miniature collection of the Frankfurt master confectioner Johann Valentin Prehn (1749-1821).

The fourth room of the exhibition is dedicated to Franz Ferdinand Wallraf, who can be described as the founder of the Cologne museums. Wallraf, the son of a Cologne tailor, studied medicine, law and theology and began collecting while still a medical student. The objects he collected included minerals, books, coins, antique marble sculptures, paintings and drawings. His collection initially served a universal educational purpose in the sense of a cabinet of art and curiosities. The French occupation of the Rhineland brought about a change. Above all, he rescued works of art that had become ownerless due to the disempowerment of the nobility and clergy and added them to his collection. During Wallraf’s lifetime, a new idea of the museum emerged that came very close to the museum as we know it today. Museums became public, but this meant that they had to be exhibited differently so that the public could wander freely through the museum without a guide. They therefore began to organize their collections according to schools and eras, as the exhibition shows. Wallraff’s passion for collecting was to bear fruit: after Wallraf’s death, the Wallrafianum opened, which presented his collection to the public from 1827.

The sixth room of the “Museum of Museums” exhibition shows that museums are always subject to change. From the 1910s onwards, artworks began to be presented differently in Cologne too; the Petersburg hanging, which often made it difficult for visitors to maintain an overview, was replaced by the progressive hanging. The artworks were now hung on light-colored walls at a distance and in significantly smaller numbers.
However, the Cologne show is not only dedicated to exhibiting, but also, as the subtitle announces, to seeing. More and more artists showed how visitors acted in the museums. The public was often exposed to the artists’ mockery when they depicted the public in their caricatures as uneducated but nevertheless very ignorant.
In the 20th century, avant-garde artists developed experimental approaches to museums. Daniel Spoerri (born 1930) developed the “Musée sentimental”, which he presented in 1977 at the invitation of the Kölnischer Kunstverein in a new presentation in Cologne. Under the name “Musée sentimental de Cologne”, works of art and relics met everyday objects that recorded and depicted the stories of the cathedral city. The composer and artist John Cage (1912-1992) designed the “Rolywholyover A Circus” and the museum concept was premiered in 1991. The concept involves a museum asking its neighboring museums to randomly select pieces from their own collections. These are then placed in the exhibition space by means of random operations. The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum has taken up this concept and asked its neighboring museums for loans. These are now presented as chance would have it, with a computer program taking over this task.
The exhibition also raises the question of the future of exhibiting. As early as the 19th century, with the advent of new technical possibilities, the museum left its walls. This development continued in the 20th century, and even today, exhibiting and viewing art is no longer limited to museum or private collection rooms. The final chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to this development.

The “Museum of Museums” exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne will take place from October 11, 2024 to November 9, 2025. It will be accompanied by a catalog edited by Anne Buschhoff, Wulf Herzogenrath and Ricar