Kathleen Curran's book The invention of the American art museum: from craft to kulturgeschichte, 1870–1930, investigates the founding and institutional history of a number of America's large municipal museums, looking at how American museums were initially indebted to—and different from—European museums of the 19th century. Utilizing considerable archival and institutional research, Curran has reconstructed the goals and the challenges facing early museum leaders as they formulated the architecture, organization, and mission of their institutions, looking to best fit the needs of their collections and audiences.

Beginning in about 1870, the year that both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Art were incorporated, Americans were drawn to the model of the craft or industrial museum, based on the influential South Kensington Museum, with its teaching mission and promotion of the mechanical arts and industrial education. This was an appealing model for British and American museums in the 1870s and ‘80s, but by the late 1880s some found this model flawed. In this period there was a shift away from antique sculptural casts and other copies, which were a mainstay of the craft museum, and a focus on only acquiring and exhibiting original works of art. Additionally, the classification system within craft museums, based on materials and techniques, came to be seen as monotonous and limited. The tendency to place all metalwork together, for example, regardless of date or culture, left visitors unable to fully appreciate the context in which an object was created.

Around 1900, American museums sought a different model, and found it in new national or “land” museums such as the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich (opened in 1898), the Bayerisches National-museum in Munich (opened 1900) and the Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (opened 1906). These were Kulturgeschichte, or “cultural history” museums focused on local culture, and they provided a locus for emerging American museums, offering principles for how to design and organize an institution, as well as how to display and contextualize objects. Museums in Germany and Scandinavia pioneered Kulturgeschichte display, with integrated installations on regional culture or a particular period. This approach seemed ideal for American museums, with a model that was more relevant and accessible than older European survey museums with origins in princely collections, such as the Louvre, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Munich's Alte Pinakothek, which were in a different league from America's young collections.

The goal of Kulturgeschichte display was to convey the spirit of an era through the juxtaposition of different types of objects in period rooms and in composite displays, recreating historically appropriate architecture and interiors, such as Romanesque courtyards and galleries housing medieval architectural fragments, sculpture, paintings, and decorative arts. As Curran notes, American knowledge of Kulturgeschichte initially came from the report published by the Boston MFA, whose trustees had sent a commission abroad to extensively study European museums. Their four-volume report was tremendously influential and the ideas embraced by the MFA quickly spread to multiple institutions thanks to strong communication and a sense of shared goals between museum professionals. It was a small world but a growing one. The years between 1900 and the 1930s saw tremendous growth in the consolidation and professionalization of the museum field, as administrators met and formulated regular procedures for accessions, labels, and classification. It was in these years that the museum bulletin was born, along with the first museum studies courses, and the founding of the American Association of Museums in 1906 to found standards and shared information for museums across the United States.

Kathleen Curran's book moves chronologically, organized by institutional case studies. The book opens with a chapter on the European beginnings of museums and the variety of models they offered for Americans. Then chapter two presents the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a critically important institution in this discussion. The construction of the MFA's Huntington Avenue structure in 1909 was a watershed moment, the first museum to be carefully planned with a Kulturgeschichte design and interior. Chapter three focuses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which embraced Kulturgeschichte at about the same time as the MFA Boston. The Met's Hudson-Fulton Celebration exhibition (1909) utilized the composite display and the period room—important elements of Kulturgeschichte—and the Met established a decorative arts wing the following year, championed by J. Pierpont Morgan.

A number of important Midwest museums followed the innovations of the MFA Boston and the Met, and chapter four traces their influence, looking at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Chicago Art Institute, and at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts, both modeled after the Boston MFA. Chapter five looks at Kulturgeschichte as an agent of American nationalism, focusing on the formation of the American Wing at the Met, which opened in 1924. The next case study examines the Pennsylvania Museum (later the Philadelphia Museum of Art) under the leadership of the influential Fiske Kimball, who brilliantly combined all of the elements and display tactics of Kulturgeschichte, shifting the museum away from its craft origins with the construction of a new building in 1928, embracing a variety of new approaches.

The legacy of Kulturgeschichte tactics are addressed in the final chapter, although the discussion does not delve as much into the later twentieth century as I had hoped. In the book's introduction, Curran aptly observes that “the legacy of Kulturgeschichte is as relevant for museums today as it was during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when it formed such a critical turning point in the philosophy and development of the American museum”. Precisely where and how this legacy plays out in current museum practice remains outside the scope of this book, but many discussions and quotes from the 1890s and 1910s seem remarkably current, reminding of us of their continued relevance.

Kathleen Curran is not alone in her interest in this formative and influential period in museum history, heavily informed by German scholars and museums. The Bard Graduate Center's journal West 8th: a journal of decorative arts, design history, and material culture is in the process of translating a series of German essays published in the Museumskunde between 1906 and 1910, primarily by Otto Launder and Oswald Richter, offering scholarship that is relevant and applicable to museum studies today.

Curran's exploration of Kulturgeschicht offers an important and previously under-acknowledged principle grounding and connecting numerous American institutions, adding to the scholarship on the history of American museums. With thorough and detailed research, Curran's text offers much food for thought, important for museum professionals today and those studying history, art history, and museum studies.