Abstract
In the US between 1910 and 1940, several philanthropic art collectors were networked through dealer/agent Martin Birnbaum (1878-1970) who required his American collector-clients to share their collections with public. Birnbaum was an art agent for 15 years for America’s most prominent philanthropic collectors who promised to donate their collections to public institutions and who were often trustees or executives of those same public institutions. The works Birnbaum purchased for them laid the foundations for the then-emerging Midwestern art museums in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Cincinnati, and also expanded established East Coast museum collections in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. While museum administrators were building local cultures and networking with wealthy merchants and industrialists in their cities, their growing museum collections, thanks to the vision of Birnbaum and of local collectors and curators, were quickly becoming global, first pan-European and then in the 1930s-40s expanding to include works from Asia and Africa. I examine this process of the intertwining local and global identities among collectors during this culturally expansive period in the US, as collectors, dealers, and curators began to travel abroad extensively to seek new cultural forms of knowledge and to develop an American culture that went beyond local pride to become national and world renowned.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
KEYWORDS
Martin Birnbaum, Collecting, Museums, Art, Public Good, USA
