Krzysztof Pomian, Dr.

Project

Histoire des musées, deuxième moitié du XIXe au XXe siècle

Dans le cadre d'un travail consacré à l'histoire des musées depuis la naissance de cette institution à la fin du XVe siècle, j'envisage de me concentrer cette année sur les deux dernières périodes, en gros de 1850 à nos jours. Les principaux thèmes sont : les innovations britanniques, allemandes et scandinaves (1850-1914), touchant plus particulièrement le musée des arts décoratifs, le musée des sciences et des techniques, le musée d'histoire, le musée d'ethnographie, le musée de plein air ; la multiplication de musées aux États-Unis (1870-1970), leur démocratisation, les métamorphoses du musée d'art ; le musée dans les régimes totalitaires (l'Italie fasciste, l'Allemagne nazie, l'URSS de Lénine et de Staline) ; l'impact des musées américains sur les musées européens après la Seconde Guerre mondiale ; la propagation des musées dans le sillage de la colonisation européenne, l'assimilation du musée par les cultures différentes de la culture européenne et les adaptations qu'il subit à ces nouveaux environnements avec l'étude de différents cas (la Turquie, l'Inde, le Japon et la Chine ; l'espace islamique ; l'Afrique ; les sociétés amérindiennes et océaniennes) ; les problèmes du musée aujourd'hui : l'entrée de nouvelles techniques, les relations entre le musée et les médias, les pressions du marché, l'impact de la globalisation (notamment le problème des restitutions).

Lecture recommandée :

Pomian, Krzysztof. Des saintes reliques à l'art moderne. Venise-Chicago, XIIIe-XXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.
-. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris-Venise, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
-. L'Ordre du temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Colloquium, 24.05.2011

The Museum: A World History

The museum as an institution is more than five hundred years old. Its history during this period can be studied at different levels: as a history of one specific museum, be it internationally famous or important only for a small neighbourhood; as a history of museums in a single country; as a history of one type of museums: of art museums, of ethnography museums or, more particularly, of open-air museums or maritime museums, etc. My project, which I have been working on for many years, is to study the museum as an institution in all its diversity at the global level and through the more than five centuries of its existence. The difficulties of such an approach are obvious. But it promises to open up new vistas on the history not only of museums themselves, but also of the globalization of culture. Or, to be more precise, on the emergence of a new cultural layer characterized by institutions and behaviours common to people belonging to cultures with differing religious creeds, languages, memories, habits and traditions etc. This new layer superimposes itself upon this plurality of cultures. It modifies each of them to a variable extent and, at the same time, is assimilated by them in a way specific to each one, some invariants being however preserved. To avoid empty generalities, one can study this process in the example of the propagation of the museum from its place of birth to the lands geographically and culturally most distant from it, looking for changes that the museum underwent during its travels through space and time and for new meanings it was invested with by those who recreated it in its new settings.

The heuristic interest of the world perspective for the history of museums resides in the comparative approach it leads to. It resides moreover in the unveiling of general trends that span the period under study: of the increase in the number of museums, of their propagation in space, of their diversification and specialization etc. Cultural environments modulate these trends; what is true at a definite moment for one country may be false for another one. The world perspective, moreover, leads us to assume a strong connection between a society's acceptance of the museum and its level of literacy and of secularization, the erosion of its centuries-old social hierarchies, the degree of its implementation of local self-government, equality before the law, and political democracy, which latter increasingly entails cultural democracy. Already in the early 1850s, the great architect and theorist of museums, Gottfried Semper, foresaw that "the history of collections will be a sort of index to the history of culture". He was right.

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Pomian, Krzysztof ([Paris], 2020)

Le musée, une histoire ... ; 1 ; Du trésor au musée Le musée, une histoire mondiale ; 1

Pomian, Krzysztof (Warszawa, 2016)

Wśród ludzi, rzeczy i znaków : Krzysztofowi Pomianowi w darze

Pomian, Krzysztof (2011)

Portrait de Carlo Ginzburg : une esquisse

Pomian, Krzysztof (2011)

Geschichte heute

Pomian, Krzysztof (Leverkusen, 2011)

Deutsch-polnische Beziehungsgeschichte : Prof. Dr. Klaus Zernack zum 80. Geburtstag Historie ; Folge 4.2010/2011

Pomian, Krzysztof (2010)

Les trésors : sacré, richesse et pouvoir

Pomian, Krzysztof (2010)

Sciences humaines, sciences sociales : crise ou déclin?

Pomian, Krzysztof (2010)

Patrimoine et identité nationale

Pomian, Krzysztof (Warszawa, 2010)

Przeszłość jako przedmiot wiedzy Communicare

Pomian, Krzysztof (2009)

World history : histoire mondiale, histoire universelle