It is generally acknowledged that museums were an essential part of the national project in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—and some retain this function even today. Classic works in nationalism studies, such as Eric Hobsbawm's, have highlighted the role they played in the birth of modern nations.Footnote 1 Subsequent studies that focused on specific national contexts help us better understand the mechanisms by which museums contributed to the invention of national traditions as well as to the formation of historical consciousness, historical memory, and the functioning of modern states.Footnote 2 As these and other scholars of museum history also demonstrate, museum founders, directors, curators, and the broader public were driven by agendas and aspirations other than nation-building within these larger processes. Analyzing how these agendas mixed with the aims of the national project in a specific locality in the making of museums can generate new insights into the formation of modern subjectivities in this period.
With the exception of Viennese museums—the institutional history of which has been analyzed as part of the study of Habsburg imperial self-representation—much of the scholarship on the emergence of museums in Central Europe has been researched from the perspective of how their creation contributed to the making of nations.Footnote 3 For Cracow, the city whose history was shaped by its symbolic status as a former capital of Poland in this period, Maud Guichard-Marneur's study is the only one that aimed at revising and going beyond the national narrative in the creation of museums.Footnote 4 This scholarly lacuna is significant given that, in nineteenth-century Habsburg Central Europe in particular, the imperial state and the empire's diverse nations were not necessarily mutually exclusive. The multiethnic Habsburg Empire was home to several nascent nationalisms that had their own view on art and culture that often contrasted with the official Viennese vision.Footnote 5 A fairly well articulated Habsburg state ideology—which sought to make the population governable—certainly existed, but to speak about it without taking these nationalisms into account would be misleading. At the same time, it was possible and politically profitable to be a patriotic Pole and a loyal Habsburg subject, in Cracow for example, and combine these two allegiances with many other identities related to one's locality, status, profession, and gender. And in fact a number of people in the middle of the century did not feel the need to decide ultimately which “national” camp they belonged to and simply remained loyal subjects and local patriots at the same time.Footnote 6 Furthermore, as Pieter Judson has argued, in their urge to construct a coherent narrative, historians disregarded an essential element of “national indifference” that prevailed among the people of Central Europe and beyond.Footnote 7
The fact that both the “state” and the “nation” existed and functioned on several distinct levels—from an abstract, broader geographical one to a very concrete, local one—was certainly not limited to Austria-Hungary. For example, historical scholarship on “Heimat”—that particularly troublesome concept for every translator, the closest equivalent to which in English is probably “homeland”—demonstrated many different local dimensions and workings of German nationalism, regional sentiment, and local patriotism, as well as those of the empire.Footnote 8 Many nineteenth-century “national” museums across Europe emerged out of earlier, aristocratic collecting initiatives of regional and local character and continued to tread a fine line between all these different allegiances at the century's close. Cities were not just mere locations for the emergence of museums but had their own complex agency as well. They displayed the multiplicity of local interests ranging from the official position of the municipality to the agendas of private collectors (aristocratic and nonaristocratic), the increasingly professionalized art, academy, university, and heritage protection circles and the attitudes of diverse urban publics. As Guichard-Marneur has shown, the active support of the Cracow City Council was essential for the institutionalization of several local initiatives as museums, and the belief in the central role of the museum as a nation-building institution consolidated divergent views about the nation among the local elite.Footnote 9 However, to trace the developments of museums in relation to some abstractly defined nation is particularly difficult in smaller cities such as Cracow, whose cultural importance within the region went far beyond their administrative function but whose elite's aspirations also firmly remained within the cultural orbit of the imperial center. Relying on and critically reevaluating the work of Guichard-Marneur, Nathaniel D. Wood, and others, this article traces such divergent agendas on the local level and aims to identify the role of the city and the broader urban public in the creation of museums in late-nineteenth-century Cracow.Footnote 10 In so doing, it aims to revisit the understanding of the national project at this time and the extent to which it may have been more of a local Cracovian or Galician affair than most historians have hitherto assumed.
Cracovian Histories and Communities
Many events in Cracow's nineteenth-century history contributed to a peculiar perception of the role of the city in the region of Central and Eastern Europe and the comparably consensual nature of the museum initiatives there. Traditionally a royal seat where the Polish kings were crowned since the Middle Ages until the mid-eighteenth century, Cracow became part of the Austrian province of Galicia following the Partitions of Poland in 1772–95, was given a free city status at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and was finally incorporated fully into Austria after the unsuccessful uprising in 1846.Footnote 11 Cracow's situation was also peculiar in that it not only had to adhere formally (and often wholeheartedly) to its loyalty to Vienna, but also had to accept that many decisions concerning its present and future would be decided in the Galician administrative capital in the province's east, Lemberg (Lwów/Lviv). Significantly smaller in size, Cracow was often explicitly in competition with Lemberg as an attractive location for institutions of science and culture.Footnote 12 The presence of a large Austrian military garrison in the city and the construction of numerous new fortifications, including those on the Wawel Hill—the site of the Royal Castle—was perceived as oppressive. While the local elite saw it as one of the most sacred places in the history of Poland, Austrian rule sometimes caused much frustration and resentment, even though it was also more liberal than the one the Poles endured in the Prussian and Russian partitions.Footnote 13
Parallel with the events that led to the signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Galicia's autonomy within the monarchy increased as well. This gave the Polish elites a freer hand in ruling the province and provided a chance for the Stańczyks—Cracow's ruling conservative political party loyal to Austria—to transform Cracow—which was granted self-government in 1866—into their vision of a modern “Polish Mecca,” the historic capital of all Poles.Footnote 14 Institutions of science and art were founded and monuments erected to achieve this goal, and the Great Fire of 1850 that destroyed a large section of the historic city center provided a further impetus and sanction for municipal intervention. Parallel with these activities, many illustrious, mostly aristocratic Poles also relocated there or returned from abroad and brought along their rich collections and founded several museums. The municipality actively engaged the local elite and the former émigrés in the organization of celebrations that, like elsewhere in the monarchy, collected large crowds and fostered diverse loyalties among Cracovians.Footnote 15 To paraphrase Wood, Cracow was not only turning into the “Polish Mecca” but also into the “little Vienna on the Vistula,” and the role of the municipality was central in this transformation.Footnote 16
At the same time, in just a few decades, Cracow would become a modern metropolis with a ring road, broad boulevards, modern apartment houses, and newly incorporated suburbs. The creation of “Greater Cracow” in 1910–15 would serve as a culmination of this process. As Wood has shown, in their attempt to integrate their recent experiences in the city, the increasingly heterogeneous migrant population would find identities other than national more compelling and attractive. Through the reading of the illustrated and boulevard press, he demonstrates that these new Cracovians would see themselves as metropolitan and European first and as Polish only second, and the vision of the new urban community created by this press would be much more inclusive than that created by the historicizing initiatives of the conservative city fathers.Footnote 17 Large segments of the local public were excluded from the making of the official image of Cracow, until late in the first decade of the twentieth century when this press would start reporting in detail on the events like the National Museum.Footnote 18 This, of course, had administrative reasons, too. Until the incorporation of working-class suburbs, such as Podgórze, were completed in 1915, their inhabitants could not expect to be treated as a sizeable urban constituency both in terms of their everyday and their symbolic needs. Hence, for the majority of the period discussed in this study, people in the growing suburbs largely lived a parallel life unconcerned with a group of enthusiasts in the municipality, the university, and the aristocratic circles who initiated the creation of public art museums to display their vision of Polish history and the place of Cracow in it.
The contribution of others was less evident, visible, or acknowledged. Cracow Jewry was certainly a visible and sizeable constituency in the city; however, the attitude of the official “exhibitionary” discourse toward Jewish legacy of Cracow was ambivalent. The degree to which it was often unprepared to embrace this legacy can be illustrated with the following example: When a decision was due about the content of the antiquarian section at the Provincial Agrarian Exposition in Cracow in 1887, the exposition board decided to dedicate the entire section to Catholic art (sztuka kościelna). To this end, the Bishopric of Cracow printed an appeal to all Roman Catholic clergy requesting that they assist the organizers with the artifacts in their possession.Footnote 19 This—together with the fact that the exposition was accompanied by the exhibition of Polish art organized by the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych)—ensured that a regular visitor would leave with an impression of a Christian and Polish Galicia.Footnote 20 Some attempts to exhibit material artifacts of Jewish culture were made, for example, at the Provincial Exposition in Lemberg in 1894, but the work of a historian Feivel Hirsch Wettstein (1858–1924) and the Ezra Judaic Library, founded in Cracow in 1899, on the preservation of specifically Cracovian Jewish legacy, was even much more representative.Footnote 21 It can be argued that, in the mind of the exhibition organizers and the ruling Stańczyks elite, Jewish historical legacy and its material culture had no place in the Polish national narrative but rather belonged to the sphere of parallel initiatives of the Jewish community. In this worldview, a “Polish” museum was not expected to appeal to a local Jewish audience or to actively seek out their participation. It is ironic that at the time when the eminent Jewish historian Majer Bałaban and others lamented on how the best ancient books, artifacts, and even entire private libraries and archives were being sold to foreign entrepreneurs or irreparably lost, the Cracow gentile community employed the identical argumentation when they attempted to preserve Polish artifacts from the same fate.
At the same time, however, the fact remains that many powerful individuals within Cracow's Jewish community contributed to the city's major planning and renovation projects, such as for example, the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice).Footnote 22 While their presence was much less placated during the inaugurations, an increased number of Jewish municipal officials also cooperated with the Polish elite in many areas of municipal concern.Footnote 23 There is evidence to suggest that many Cracow Jews not only eagerly embraced Polish history—especially in its local, urban version—but also contributed to the making of local museums in many different ways. Perhaps one of the most telling examples is Adolf Sternschuss (1873–1915), board member of the Society of Lovers of History and Monuments of Cracow (Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa) and several other organizations, who initiated tours of the historic city center and the Wawel Hill to visiting students.Footnote 24 He authored an important book on Cracow's historic houses, Godła domów krakowskich (Cracow Houses’ Emblems).Footnote 25 A lawyer by profession and a passionate collector and art patron, Sternschuss donated to several Cracow museums and was involved in turning the home of the leading historical painter Jan Matejko into a museum. An Austrian army officer, Sternschuss would join the Polish legions in 1914 and die from the Russian bullet a year later—which in retrospect made him not only a true Cracovian but also a Polish national hero.Footnote 26 If the nation could be conceived as both local and universal, as the Heimat scholarship argues, then the number of people in the Cracow Jewish community and also possibly in other groups who ascribed to its more fluid and flexible definition, like Sternschuss, is likely much larger than national histories would let us believe.
Early Initiatives
The changing dynamic between the activities of the municipal government, philanthropists, the intelligentsia, and the emerging broader public in the making of Cracow museums is already apparent in early initiatives. Early on, the municipal representatives seemed to have favored a close collaboration with a select circle of leading individuals in the city's institutions of science and culture over broad public participation on the one hand and, on the other hand, the spirit of the antiquarian movement over more forward-looking and popular middle-class initiatives. As would become even more evident later, the city was particularly hesitant to embrace these latter initiatives precisely because of their much broader and more diverse public base.
While the first attempts at the institutionalization of art and science collections date back to the creation of Cracow Scientific Society (Towarzystwo Naukowe Krakowskie) in 1815 and its activities during the following three decades, these attempts fell more into the framework of earlier initiatives at collecting art that had regional and local significance. The society—established on the initiative of Walenty Litwiński (1778–1823), the rector of the Jagiellonian University—was originally conceived as an internal university institution, and although this changed later, the strong link between its activities and those of the Jagiellonian University remained characteristic in the later decades.Footnote 27
The Museum of Antiquities, the idea for which first emerged in 1850, and the first Antiquarian Exhibition (Wystawa starożytnośći), which took place in the Lubomirski Palace in 1858, demonstrated a tendency that would be characteristic of many subsequent initiatives in the realm of art collecting and art museums. A significant overlap between the representatives of the municipality, the university, the private aristocratic and middle-class collectors, and the initiatives of public art institutions was partly due to, in a city as small as Cracow, many initiatives that were undertaken by a group of intricately connected public enthusiasts. However, they also shared some formative life experiences. Though of different status and social position (some aristocratic and some we would call middle class), many of them shared the experience of the revolutionary events of 1848 (and, if often indirectly, of the Polish January Uprising in Russia in 1863) and the subsequent exile. Many were also prominent Stańczyks. Dignitaries from the City Council, the municipal administration, as well as professionals employed by the municipality—who were often the same people active in the university networks or other public initiatives—played a fundamental role in the establishment of art museums in Cracow. Due to the shortage of buildings that could provide space for such initiatives, several locations in the city would repeatedly reemerge as well. The overlap of different institutional representatives and locations further accentuated just how small the cohort of enthusiasts was within the city's population. As urbanization proceeded, this cohort that ultimately decided on how the new museums should look became even smaller proportionately.
The project for the establishment of the museum of antiquities, allegedly modeled on the Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, was drawn by the Municipal Building Director and member of the Scientific Society Karol Kremer (1812–60) in 1850. A prominent architect and conservator of architecture, Kremer directed the renovation works on most of the precious historic monuments in the city in the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote 28 He was an active member of the local community and partook in a number of other preservationist and charitable organizations. When it came to the establishment of the committee for the selection of worthy artifacts for the museum, Kremer was an obvious choice.Footnote 29 Apart from Kremer, who was also involved in the organization of the Exhibition of Antiquities in 1858, university rector Józef Łepkowski (1826–94) would reemerge later as another important personality.Footnote 30 Similarly, current or former university professors who were politically active would continue to be engaged, including prominent conservative politician Paweł Popiel (1807–92)—cofounder of the academic magazine Kwartalnik Naukowy (Scientific Quarterly) who also sat at the City Council in 1848–53—and Wincenty Pol (1807–72), a respected writer and geography professor.Footnote 31 The host of the exhibition, Count Jerzy Henryk Lubomirski (1817–72), was a conservative politician and a curator of the Ossolineum Library in Lemberg. One of the four rooms of the exhibition was dedicated to the collection of the Lubomirski family, where family portraits were displayed along with other family regalia and historic weapons. Illustrative of early antiquarian exhibitions across Europe at the time, this arrangement nevertheless highlighted how important the representation of local aristocracy (szlachta) would be in the subsequent antiquarian exhibitions.Footnote 32 Stored in Popiel's residence for two years, the exposition was moved to the newly constructed headquarters of the Scientific Society on Sławkowska 17 in 1864 along with the collection of antiquities from the Jagiellonian University Library, effectively becoming the first public museum in Cracow. The second exhibition of antiquities took place in 1872 in the Bishop's Palace on Franciszkańska, a venue that would host a few more art-related institutions and exhibitions in the future.Footnote 33
At virtually the same time when the Scientific Society was established and the first exhibitions of antiquities took place, a different initiative was born largely outside the scope of municipal authority. The Society of the Friends of Fine Arts was founded in Cracow in 1854 by Walery Wielogłowski (1805–65), also a former émigré and the descendant of a wealthy landowning family.Footnote 34 Like other such societies abroad, however, the Friends of Fine Arts primarily strove to popularize art and to support Cracow artists financially through organizing large commercial art exhibitions.Footnote 35 Antiquarian pathos and aristocratic sentiment were essentially absent. The Society of the Friends of Fine Arts was responsible for the growth of some of the leading Cracow painters’ reputations, including Matejko, Artur Grottger, and Henryk Rodakowski, and later the modernist movement “Young Poland” (Młoda Polska). It was through its exhibitions that their paintings were bought by wealthy families across the borders of partitioned Poland. The Society of the Friends of Fine Arts was also an increasingly professional organization. In its early years, the society was dominated by aristocratic landowning families, such as the Sanguszkos, the Czartoryskis, and the Potockis, few of whom had professional interest in the arts, and directed by a nobleman, Edward Aleksander Raczyński (1847–1926). However, the nature of the society soon changed, and its second, long-term directory board (1858–1926) included almost all notable artists and experts of local significance.Footnote 36 In contrast to the antiquarian exhibitions that, though well attended, catered primarily to the aristocracy and the local elite of artists, writers, and academics, the Friends of Fine Arts exhibitions attracted a much broader public including the wealthy middle class from Cracow and far beyond. It seems, however, that the municipality hardly concerned itself with the activities of the organization precisely because of the society's increasingly professional nature, broader public appeal, and initial commercial success. It would be more appropriate to speak of only minor, indirect involvement, such as the membership of Popiel, who sat on the City Council in 1848–53 and was appointed the conservator of historic monuments in 1854. Originally housed in the Larisch Palace on Bracka, renovated in 1854 after the destruction by the Great Fire and donated to the city, the society amassed a collection of more than two hundred paintings by the early 1870s, moved to the Bishop's Palace in 1871, to the Cloth Hall in 1877, and finally inhabited its own purpose-built Palace of Art (Pałac Sztuki) in 1901.
The difference between how the city treated the Antiquarian Museum and the activities of the Friends of Fine Arts is striking and highlights how much more value and prestige the antiquarian movement, dominated by the leading aristocratic collectors, had in the eyes of the educated public in contrast to exhibitions of larger popular appeal. It also shows that another reason for the municipal involvement in and support of the antiquarian movement was its aristocratic flair, with which many in the City Council wished to associate. This attitude would gradually change in the following decades as the leading academic painters that the Friends of Fine Arts brought to fame became centerpieces for new museums. And yet the aristocratic residues can also be seen in the municipality's involvement with the three major public art collections in the city that were initiated in 1860s: the Museum of Technology and Industry, the Czartoryski Museum, and the National Museum.
Adrian Baraniecki, the Industrial Museum, and Municipal Ambivalence
On 25 August 1868, a year after the signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the establishment of Galician autonomy in the reformed monarchy, Adrian Baraniecki (1828–91), a medical doctor by education and a passionate collector, returned from three years of traveling in France and Britain, where he became particularly impressed with the works of John Ruskin and Henry Cole.Footnote 37 A model of Polish Positivism, Baraniecki believed in modernity, progress, and dedicated work rather than historicizing initiatives like that of the antiquarian movement or the Cracow municipality. Informed by Western experiences, he initiated the first industrial exhibition in the Cracow Town Hall, which was to display his collection of industrial artifacts. Baraniecki's choice of Cracow was deliberate; it was not motivated by the local tradition of industrial design in any way, as Cracow certainly lagged behind more industrially advanced regions of Austria-Hungary, but rather Baraniecki saw the exhibition as a means to foster awareness in the Western industrial design and the development of local crafts. The exhibition thus became an occasion to attract those within the Cracow community who, unlike the Stańczyks and the conservative intelligentsia, supported the development of Cracow into a modern metropolis, rather than an antiquated historic capital, and who saw modernity—in art, design, and elsewhere—as a point of local pride. Another decisive factor for Baraniecki was his spiritual affinity with the current city mayor Józef Dietl (1804–78), with whom he shared not only professional allegiance (both were medical doctors by training) but also general goals for the development of the city.Footnote 38 But as the attendance of the exhibition testified, a new larger public that supported such initiatives was also emerging. At the same time, the industrial exhibition highlighted not only how one individual's enthusiasm could eventually result in the establishment of a new cultural institution in the city and facilitate its development in a new direction, but also how the municipality's public declarations of their commitment to foster local industries and industrial design contrasted with what they were willing to contribute in reality.
Baraniecki's collection consisted mostly of artifacts that he acquired a year earlier at the Exposition Universelle and was donated to the city of Cracow on the condition that it would form the foundation of the industrial museum, be maintained by the city, and remain in Cracow permanently.Footnote 39 The exhibition in the Town Hall laid the foundations for the establishment of the Museum of Technology and Industry (Muzeum Techniczno-Przemysłowe, further in the text the Industrial Museum). Modeled on London's South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) founded a decade earlier, it aimed to serve as a center of learning and foster the development of local crafts through the improvement of technological skills among the craftsmen.Footnote 40 Entrance tickets to the museum collection were kept deliberately low to allow entry for the local middle and lower middle class. It was also designed to serve as a place of study—initially for the students of the fine arts and later for local craftsmen. The museum initiated public lectures for a wide urban audience where local luminaries such as Pol and Matejko, art historians Marian Sokołowski (1839–1911) and Karol Estreicher (1827–1907), and even future mayor Ferdynand Weigel (1826–1901) presented.Footnote 41 Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–87), one of the most prolific writers of his generation, was also among the lecturers.Footnote 42 As reported in 1872 by a popular Warsaw weekly Tygodnik ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly) that was widely read in Cracow and was particularly popular with the conservative educated middle class: “The audience that gathers for those lectures is variable in number, from 80 to 200 persons … belonging to the most diverse social layers and ages: serious people and academics sit side by side with the retinue of craftsmen and boys … barely ten years of age. The number of the youngest attendees is usually dominant. Sometimes one finds a stray priest, or a soldier, a clerk, and one even saw a Jew from the Kazimierz District once.”Footnote 43
This was clearly a very different public from the one that was present at the events of the antiquarian movement. The museum was particularly welcoming to a much broader Cracovian community, including the poorer groups and the local Jewry. Apart from the anonymous Jew from the Kazimierz District and others like him who attended the lectures as reported by the journalist of Tygodnik ilustrowany, personalities of Jewish origin were prominent in the museum's committees and other initiatives. For example, architect Józef Sare (1850–1929), who would later serve as a long-term vice-mayor and elected delegate to the Galician Parliament, features repeatedly in the Industrial Museum's committees.Footnote 44 In the early twentieth century, Sternschuss taught art history at Baraniecki's Higher School for Women (Wyższe Kursy dla Kobiet), founded the same year as the museum, and was also involved in the institutional reorganization of the museum.Footnote 45 Baraniecki's museum was not on the map of an average Habsburg dignitary nor a typical patriotic tourist; however, it attracted sizeable groups of visitors from Cracow and beyond who were particularly interested in sciences, applied arts, and industrial design, including larger student groups from Cracow schools or those who stayed in the city for a longer period.Footnote 46 The museum also had a broader international outreach and reputation within the scientific community, as illustrated by visits by the delegation of Austrian Society of Engineers and Architects in 1885 and Rudolf Virchow in 1902.Footnote 47
Despite its popularity at home and abroad, however, the City Council found only sparse funds to support its existence. The position of the museum's director remained unpaid, voluntary, and for life, and one of the peculiarities of the early years was that Baraniecki also functioned as a custodian and a gatekeeper. While the museum was supported by a small yearly municipal subvention and later by the Galician Parliament, many items of the daily expenditure were covered from Baraniecki's own funds due to the inefficiency and often the lack of understanding on behalf of the municipality. The location in the Franciscan Cloister—where the museum, a number of service rooms, and the residence of the director were accommodated until finally moved to the elegant new building on Smoleńsk 9 in 1913—was small and hugely inadequate. By the early 1900s, the collection amassed during the first decade of the museum's existence was kept in piles of boxes so enormous and disorganized that not even the director nor the curator could keep proper records any longer. Visitors were reportedly repulsed by the miserable look of the dilapidated entrance gate and the odor of mold from the exhibition premises, and the director's own cramped office, far from being suitably representational, offered a humiliating view of a dirty wall in the backyard.Footnote 48 The shortage of municipal acknowledgment and material support thus ensured that the museum remained a civic, nonaristocratic initiative, set quite apart from the newly instituted historicizing rituals of the municipality. For example, during Emperor Francis Joseph's tour to Galicia in 1880, the visit to the Industrial Museum was crossed out from the final itinerary drafted by the municipality. By contrast, the full program included a route from the train station to the Market Square with numerous locations of symbolic significance that gave an impression of the Emperor casually meeting different representatives of the Galician society, but the encounters were preplanned and entirely controlled by the Stańczyks. Additionally, a series of paintings, such as Juliusz Kossak's Entrance of His Majesty the Emperor to Cracow (1881), were commissioned specifically for the event and celebrated these elites and the event as their exceptional achievement.Footnote 49 For the local tour organizers in the municipal government, personalities like Baraniecki—or the artifacts from his museum—did not belong to this political narrative.
A few years later, the City Council was more willing to reframe the museum as an imperial institution though it was still unprepared to incorporate it into its larger museological initiatives. In 1888, the Cracow municipality requested permission to construct the new building for what it now wanted to call the Museum of Technology and Industry in the Name of Francis Joseph (Muzeum Techniczno-Przemysłowe imienia cesarza Franciszka Józefa), to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Emperor's rule. However, Vienna rejected it as insensitive claiming the actual founder of the museum, Baraniecki, was still among the living.Footnote 50 Vienna's rejection ironically highlighted the municipality's lack of tact in dealing with Baraniecki and his initiative.Footnote 51
One of the museum's most interesting and progressive initiatives, the Higher School for Women, was funded entirely by Baraniecki.Footnote 52 It is particularly striking that the municipal government found no funds to assign to the management of such an important institution, even though it supported numerous symbolic historicizing initiatives. Located in the House of Female Teachers (Dom Nauczycielek) on Karmelicka 36, the school was often jokingly referred to by its pejorative name “Baraneum” (a derivative from the founder's surname in effect implying that the school was producing “rams,” i.e., idiots). Nevertheless, it was virtually the only institution in Cracow to offer professional education to women at the time. Until 1894, when the Jagiellonian University allowed women to enroll as students, its role and status in Cracow was unprecedented. Shortly before Baraniecki's death in 1891, the press reported the news of Baraniecki's plan to close the school due to his poor health and the lack of funds. On that occasion, Cracow correspondent of Dziennik Poznański (Poznań Daily) appealed to the wider public, rather than to the city of Cracow, to support “the institution sustained though so many years by the power of will and energy, and even, in significant part, Dr. Baraniecki's own funds, which turned out to be so extremely useful.”Footnote 53
It is also ironic that the museum's founder and benefactor needed to die for the City Council to stop seeing it as a civic institution and finally to incorporate it into its funding programs. In 1891, funding from the Ministry of Culture and Education was secured and the museum staff increased considerably under the directorship of the former custodian Jan Wdowiszewski (1853–1904). However, plans for the design and construction of the new building only proceeded after Wdowiszewski's death in 1904, which was followed by a short interregnum when the museum was subordinated to the National Museum—then the leading Cracow institution with an ambition to absorb other collections—and the appointment of architect Tadeusz Stryjeński (1849–1943) as director.Footnote 54 The timing is significant as it marked the beginning of the energetic and progressive mayoralty of Juliusz Leo (1861–1918), who would be remembered as a creator of “Greater Cracow” as well as for the removal of the Austrian military from the Wawel Hill. Under Leo, Cracow municipal government expanded its scope of activities to include more cultural initiatives.Footnote 55 In 1906, Cracow finally chose to implement its own 1888 decree to construct the new building and to take the Industrial Museum under its administrative wing. It urged the municipal savings bank to contribute to the purchase of the plot on Smoleńsk and to its construction. Stryjeński and a fellow architect Franciszek Mączyński (1874–1947) designed the splendid Art Nouveau edifice, following the façade drawing by painter Józef Czajkowski (1872–1947), and the works were carried out in 1910–14.Footnote 56 Despite this municipal success, the earlier history of ignorance and neglect left a bitter aftertaste and continued to accentuate the limits to which the municipality wished to recognize the Industrial Museum and incorporate it into its official narratives and programs. Extraordinarily successful with the new public, Baraniecki's institution fundamentally lacked that essential element that mobilized and engaged the local elites: aristocratic and antiquarian ethos, which fitted their vision of Cracow and its public institutions much better than international industrial design and the idea of modern Cracow.
Władysław Czartoryski, the Aristocratic Lobby, and the Emperor
In the historiography on Cracow, the signing of an ownership agreement between Cracow municipality and Count Władysław Czartoryski (1828–94) regarding several properties in the city center on 13 November 1874 marks a symbolic union between the Stańczyk elites in the Town Hall and the émigré community, of which Czartoryski was one of the most prominent figures.Footnote 57 After some deliberation, the count decided to move his library and art collection from the Hotel Lambert—his property that functioned as the Polish émigré headquarters in Paris—to Cracow, rather than to Lemberg or Vienna, which he apparently also considered. Returning them to his former home residence in Puławy, which fell into the Russian Partition, was obviously not an option.Footnote 58 Lengthy negotiations, in which both parties attempted to secure control over the new institution, preceded the municipal sanction in 1874 and the creation of what would become Cracow's largest and most prominent aristocratic art collection. The central property provided by the municipality was the city's former armory, Arsenal Miejski. It would form the core of the future museum, along with a cluster of other neighboring buildings and structures, including an adjacent building, the Florian Gate (a section of the fortification walls), and a section of Planty (Cracow's green belt surrounding the inner medieval core).
Amid scrupulous restoration work under the supervision of Viollet-le-Duc's student architect Maurice Ouradou (1822–84), the museum opened its doors in 1876. Despite its public status on paper, catering for the broader public was the not among the museum administration's priorities. As Guichard-Marneur has argued, the museum rather used “its objects as mnemonic tools to remind those individuals privileged enough to see them of the glory of Poland.”Footnote 59 The collection was often unavailable for viewing even for the representatives of the most educated and respected Cracow personalities. In May 1878, Estreicher, a leading art historian and a member of a respected local family, intended to show the collection to Czech composer František Ladislav Hovorka (1881–1929). To his astonishment he found it closed. Following much tension between Czartoryski and Estreicher, Łepkowski—the museum's director who was formerly the rector of the Jagiellonian University involved in the Antiquarian Exhibition—instituted a book of visitors and regularly informed the public about the opening hours of the museum in the local press.Footnote 60
The pronounced aristocratic nature of the collection—which Czartoryski acknowledged in his lecture at the Historical and Literary Society in 1882—meant that its public—which included Cracow's aristocratic philanthropists, the academic elite, other local luminaries, and municipal employees from the outset—was very different from that of the Industrial Museum, even after the collection was opened to the public.Footnote 61 Czartoryski's affiliates in Cracow such as Dionizy Skarżyński (1820–1903), also formerly an émigré aristocrat, were instrumental in the successful establishment of the museum and formed a powerful aristocratic lobby themselves. Dietl's successor as mayor, Mikołaj Zyblikiewicz (1823–87), who was in office from 1874–81 and served as Speaker of the Galician Parliament from 1881–86, was also more supportive of the initiative, which received further support from the powerful lobby at the Academy of Learning.Footnote 62 A graduate of Lemberg University, Zyblikiewicz is remembered as one of the most resourceful Cracow mayors who reshaped the city into an historic artifact imbued with national symbolism.Footnote 63 Under Zyblikiewicz's mayoralty, the construction of the new building of the Academy of Fine Arts on the Planty (1879–80) across from the Barbican and the Florian Gate created an important cultural cluster by bringing several institutions in the vicinity to each other. To accomplish his goals, Czartoryski used his leverage as a born-and-bred aristocrat who corresponded with the emperor directly.
In dealing with the question of turning Czartoryski's private aristocratic initiative into a public museum, the city exhibited both restraint and calculation. On the one hand, it publicly demonstrated goodwill by relieving Czartoryski from property tax, lowering it significantly on another occasion, and eventually offering him the honorary citizenship of the City of Cracow. On the other hand, it insisted on a measure of control over the future museum. Article 4 of the Act of Donation of the properties explicitly stated the municipality had the right to buy them back in case of sequestration or if the count would decide to move his collection out of Cracow. Article 4 was a matter of some bitterness and frustration for Czartoryski, who was involved in a twenty-year legal battle with the city over it.
Members of the university faculty, who sat on the City Council and frequented the museum for research purposes, attempted to incorporate the benefactor into larger urban schemes. For example, they included Czartoryski on municipal organization committees and other academic and public initiatives. In return, he was expected to contribute to them financially or in kind, including the funding of studentships. Every such gesture was immediately applauded publicly and in the press. The city also used the count's status and authority to impress the central government and legitimize itself in front of Vienna whenever possible. For example, Czartoryski was invited to the organization committee of the Emperor Francis Joseph's visit to Cracow in 1880. The visit to the museum was given a prominent place in the program and the fact that the emperor signed the book of visitors with his name written in Polish as “Franciszek Józef” was widely trumpeted in the press.Footnote 64 As a consequence, the museum was firmly put on the route of a visit by an important Austrian functionary, such as Minister President of Cisleithania Eduard Taaffe, or a distinguished foreign aristocrat, such as Italian ambassador to Vienna Count Costantino Nigra.Footnote 65 As far as municipal interest in and support of the Czartoryski Museum were concerned, the prospects of turning it into a showcase to display for Vienna's appreciation and forging a link between the conservative local elites and the émigré aristocracy played a much larger role than concern over its the significance of its collection to the broader local public or to all Poles.
The City, the National Museum, and Public Engagement
The idea of a national museum in Cracow was voiced for the first time in 1868, and although the discussions were often colored with patriotic pathos and spoken from a broader national horizon encompassing all territories of partitioned Poland, the emphasis was often simultaneously on the local, regional, and urban significance of such a museum. At the same time, the project involved a great number of people at its various stages and was thus a matter of negotiation within and without the very urban elite that created it.
Incidentally, the initial idea was not far removed from the collection of antiquities that featured in the local discussions a decade or so earlier. This is evident from Pol's suggestion at his lecture on the preservation of monuments of the past during the meeting of the Scientific Society on 18 March 1868. Pol argued for the creation of a province-wide public collection (zbiory krajowe publiczne) that would encompass both excavated artifacts and other historic memorabilia.Footnote 66 The role of the official city representatives in shaping the future museum was crucial early on. At the meeting of the City Council two years later, on 5 January 1871, Dietl argued for the establishment of the national museum in the project for the “improvement of the city of Cracow” (uporządkowanie miasta Krakowa). This was one of the last initiatives of the frail mayor who spent his extensive time in office on much more mundane issues of infrastructure, road improvement, restoration after the Great Fire of 1850, and the encouragement of local trades and industries. That Dietl would think it timely to establish a national museum in the city is significant as it marks a threshold for many other prominent public figures of his generation. The improvement project concerned itself with the city's most urgent needs, and Dietl suggested the restoration of one of Cracow's landmark buildings, the Cloth Hall, as the last item on its agenda, which followed the expected issues of canalization, road management, water provision, school education, hospitals, slaughterhouses, and the council headquarters. There, he envisioned the “gallery of Polish Kings, Heroes, Scholars and Artists” (galleria Królów, Bohaterów, Uczonych i Artystów polskich—capitalization in the original) where “historical paintings memorializing the great deeds of the nation … ethnographic collections [and] figures of past Polish armies” would create a “true National Museum.”Footnote 67 It is easy to mistake the national pathos for a comprehensive program encompassing the representation of all Polish lands within the museum. As a matter of fact, Cracow's specific historical and artistic heritage found its way as a prominent narrative within the wider national discourse.
Although the location of the new art museum in such a prominent building in the historic medieval and Renaissance center might appear obvious, it was far from being so to its contemporaries. Several other important “contenders”—historic buildings in a state of disrepair due to what the local intellectuals often perceived as deliberate neglect by the Austrian administration during the earlier periods—were actively discussed in the municipal government meetings and in the press. Prominent architects such as Tomasz Pryliński (1847–95) were involved in the renovation of many of them and the fact that they were restored in the first place was due to Zyblikiewicz's efforts.Footnote 68 The restoration of the Cloth Hall and the Wawel Castle complex—the medieval seat of Polish kings that had been in the possession of the Austrian army since 1846—a decade later fundamentally transformed the visual appeal of the city in the eyes of its inhabitants as well as visitors.Footnote 69
In 1875, Pryliński, who would become one of the most influential architects and conservators in Cracow, submitted his project proposal on the restoration of the Cloth Hall to the City Council. It received support from Zyblikiewicz, who was much more willing to engage with symbolic politics and generally a very different kind of politician from his predecessor. Pryliński finished the works within four years with a spectacular inauguration of the renovated building on 3 October 1879. In the same year, the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts moved from its previous residence in the Bishop's Palace to the beautifully renovated Cloth Hall to share an office with the National Museum and its art collection.
The Kraszewski Jubilee of 1879 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the writer's creative career and marked the symbolic beginning of the museum's public collection.Footnote 70 Following the ceremony, during which Zyblikiewicz led the revered writer to the Cloth Hall, hours-long speeches and odes in Kraszewski's honor, and a literary-artistic feast and ball, painter Henryk Siemiradzki surprised nearly everyone by donating his enormous Nero's Torches (1876) to the city of Cracow. Further donations followed. The City Council's resolution from 7 October 1879 to establish the National Museum “as a property of the Cracow community for the benefit of the whole nation” is illustrative of both the crucial role of the municipality in the foundation and functioning of art museums in a specific urban setting as well as the ruling political and cultural elite's special vision and desire to shape cities as showcases for their imagined nations.Footnote 71 Guichard-Marneur reminds us, however, that although it is presented as a straightforward and consensual act in national historiography, the National Museum was created “in an atmosphere of dissent, debate and strong opposition.”Footnote 72 Furthermore, the early years of the museum were clouded by the degree of ambivalence about its purpose and directions. The ambivalence is evident in the restraint with which Cracovian conservative elites embraced Kraszewski, whose views were far too radically nationalist to Stańczyks’ liking, and the caution with which Siemiradzki's donation was presented in the press as dedicated to “kraj” rather than the nation. “Kraj” was another peculiar term that conveniently blended definitions of home locality, region, province, and homeland that rendered it at least as difficult to translate as the German Heimat. Employing the term might have been a useful tool for the city fathers to avoid angering the imperial center while still being able to claim some allegiance to the national project. But such terminology was not unproblematic or without limits, and in this situation, the city of Cracow was framed as the main denominator of this important museum initiative.
On 13 November 1879, the full session of the City Council approved the Committee of the National Museum (originally Komisja dla utworzenia Muzeum Narodowego w Krakowie, later called Komitet Muzeum Narodowego), whose aim was to work out the structures and functioning mechanisms of the future institution. The committee consisted of twelve members—six of whom came from the City Council and six who were independent. The composition reflected the Stańczyks’ arrangement that favored working closely with the select academic elite to avoid including those who disagreed with their vision of Cracow's development. The municipality was represented by professors of the Jagiellonian University, among them one of the leading Stańczyks historian Stanisław Tarnowski (1837–1917), the president of the Academy of Learning Józef Majer (1808–99), and the president of the Notary Chamber of Cracow District Court and the city's future vice-mayor Stefan Muczkowski (1832–95).Footnote 73 Independent members included Sokołowski, the long-term president of the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts, Marceli Czartoryski (1841–1909), as well as Łuszczkiewicz and Popiel, the latter at that point a conservative Member to the Galician Parliament.
Despite the fanfare of the spectacular inauguration during the Kraszewski Jubilee, the museum's doors remained effectively closed for the next four years. Conflicting ideas within the city elite about what should be exhibited there and how as well as the inadequacy of the existing collection led to intense discussions within the City Council and delayed the publication of the revised version of the statue until 1883. For example, in September 1883, an exhibition dedicated to the 1683 Relief of Vienna and celebrating the legacy of King Jan Sobieski III was organized in another wing of the Cloth Hall.Footnote 74 This exhibition, according to Patrice Dabrowski, was an occasion to distract the public attention from a rather mediocre state of the museum's art collection, an opinion shared among the local elite, including Zyblikiewicz.Footnote 75 Apart from large events such as the Relief of Vienna Exhibition, which incorporated artifacts from other collections and celebrated the empire as much as the Polish nation, the struggle to bring order and logic or any unifying rationale to the large and fast growing collection through permanent display in the first years was only partially successful.
Although a number of “outstanding and serious personalities” (wybitne i poważne osobistości) from the province of Galicia and from abroad were invited to express their views during the public discussion of the statute in 1881–83, the sheer number of local actors, from the members of the Committee of the National Museum to all the City Council delegates, ensured that the museum also had an important local dimension that suited the Stańczyk elites in its statute, collecting practices, and institutional arrangement.Footnote 76 According to the approved statute, the museum became the property of the city community (Gmina), which was obligated to finance it and to foster the growth of its collections through purchases as well as through gifts and bequests. It was financially supported by an annual donation from the city, a smaller donation from the Galician Parliament, and further contributions from the local institutions, such as an insurance fund (fundusz asekuracyjny), which increased over time.Footnote 77 It was governed by a committee consisting of eight experts from Cracow and ten remaining members selected from the trusted members of City Council and artists. The first committee, appointed in 1883, included many familiar names representing the university, the arts academy, the Friends of Fine Arts, as well as municipal employees, who belonged to the small cohort of the involved personalities in previous museum initiatives. Cracow's mayor and vice-mayor were also involved. Prominent art historian Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, who was appointed director, also belonged to this small circle.Footnote 78
The resonance of the museum's foundation quickly extended beyond Galicia to other partitions and even further afield, and several important art patrons and collectors outside of Cracow donated works to the museum. Konstanty Schmidt-Ciążyński (1818–89), a well-traveled collector and a member of cosmopolitan Polish circles who at that point resided in London and had a reputation as a respected antiquarian, was the owner of a large corpus of paintings, sculptures, etchings, books, applied arts, gems, and cameos. Originally intended for the Polish Museum in Rapperswil in Switzerland, it was donated to Cracow's National Museum, which for Schmidt-Ciążyński and others served as the depository of national traditions. Others followed suit, and their actions were praised in the local press.Footnote 79 The symbolic importance of the National Museum for émigré intellectuals is further emphasized by the fact that Schmidt-Ciążyński did not think of splitting his collection and donating the items of applied arts to Baraniecki's Museum of Industry. At the same time, it is equally evident that many more donations, which arrived between 1879 and 1883, were either from Cracow or were on Cracow-related subjects (such as Marcin Jabłoński's Krakowianka).Footnote 80
This tendency persisted. For example, in 1901, Adolf Schernschuss and others from the Society of Lovers of History and Monuments of Cracow organized the exhibition of an important painter of the Romantic period, Michał Stachowicz (1768–1825). The exhibition catalog presented him as a Cracovian painter above all and praised his contribution to the city's churches as well as to the commemoration of important historical events.Footnote 81 Stachowicz's many versions of Tadeusz Kościuszko's 1794 oath at the Market Square in Cracow, some of them now in the archives of the National Museum, as well as his many other paintings firmly linked Cracow to Polish history in a particular way and celebrated the city's historic preeminence in the former Commonwealth. The City Council had already donated their 1821 copy of Stachowicz's gouache depicting Kościuszko's oath to the National Museum in 1884. On the occasion of the exhibition, Sternschuss, among others, also contributed with some of the artist's etchings from his own collection, a large part of which would be donated to the National Museum after his death.Footnote 82 His contribution shows that the museum engaged more local benefactors than is generally recognized as he tried to appeal to both local patriotism and the greater Polish nation across the partitioned territories. Cracow was becoming one of the primary symbols for the nation, with much of the exposition either based on local artifacts or celebrating the place of Cracow in larger events pertinent to national history and in a specific situation when free expression was so much more limited in the Congress Kingdom.
At the same time, the degree to which the museum wished to engage with the broader public was changing. One extreme example from 1879, reported by Dabrowski, might illustrate the elitist nature of the future museum and its initial averseness to reach out to the countryside in particular. During the Kraszewski Jubilee, Maciej Szarek—a peasant who the venerated writer knew personally and who greatly contributed to the popularization of the anniversary in the countryside—was promised but eventually refused an entry ticket to the celebration by the municipality. To Kraszewski's great displeasure, the city authorities—in a typical Stańczyk attitude—argued that they would not allow entry to a peasant “when so many dignitaries had to be refused.”Footnote 83 By contrast, during the Relief of Vienna exhibition, it was decided to make the museum permanently open to the public. Furthermore, village school groups were allowed free entry from 1892, and as part of the centennial of the Kościuszko Insurrection in 1894, free admission was granted to all visitors. A significant increase in the number of peasants and school groups visiting the museum was reported. Nevertheless, it would be an overstatement to suggest that, by the early twentieth century, the museum became, as Guichard-Marneur put it, “a point of contact between the ruling class and the people” for the simple reason that the culture of exhibitions at the time did not involve active engagement with the broader public except in very abstract future terms.Footnote 84 For instance, commenting on the state of the collection of the National Museum in 1904, Galician illustrated paper Ilustracya polska (Polish Illustration) simply argued that much more time and a more adequate location “where objects could be adequately exposed” was needed until “the broader layers of our society would know that … they can and should turn to the National Museum.”Footnote 85
This certainly set limits on the effectiveness of the museum's activities locally. Even in the early twentieth century, the Jews, the mass of the newly migrant suburban populations, and others who did not belong to the nation as imagined by Cracow's conservative elites were largely absent in the reports. At the same time, these groups were becoming increasingly aware of the activities of the museum and its prominence in the city as well as the imagined nation. In this, they were assisted by their press. For example, in the early twentieth century, Cracow's popular illustrated weekly Nowości Illustrowane (Illustrated News), which catered predominantly to suburban readers, started to inform on the activities of the National Museum, and dedicated a long article about it on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1909.Footnote 86 Such news reports—along with the activities of those within the Jewish community who, like Sternschuss, understood the Polish nation in much broader, more inclusive terms and contributed to the functioning of the museum in so many different ways—testified that the museum's popular outreach was becoming much broader than the gentlemen of the City Council, the academic circles, and the museum's curatorium would be prepared to admit.
Conclusions
Focusing our attention on museums as urban institutions challenges us to revisit their role and function, which has often been indiscriminately narrowed to the familiar story of nation-building. Furthermore, it encourages us to rethink the nature of the national project. At the time when groups of enthusiasts at the municipality, the university, and the aristocratic, educated, and émigré circles initiated the creation of public museums to display their vision of Polish history with Cracow as its centerpiece, the story of their foundation and the first several decades of their functioning are a much more complex one. As institutions, they—and the individuals involved in their creation—needed to reconcile regional and local identities and aristocratic and antiquarian values with the interests of the municipality, the educated elite, and the broader public. They also needed to respond to the challenges of modernity and the imagined needs of the nation rather loosely defined. Originally created by and for a small elite, museums ended up serving a number of different purposes in the life of the nation and the Cracovian community in the subsequent decades.
Some understood that nation as exclusive, elitist, and imbued with aristocratic grandeur and the memories of former glory, while others conceptualized it in much more inclusive terms of heterogeneity and modernity that was the characteristic of the time. However, beyond the nation imagined in broad abstract terms, there was also its local, specifically urban, Cracovian characteristic. The clear preference given to Czartoryski's aristocratic collection as opposed to the Industrial Museum not only shows that it was much more instrumental for the municipality as it pursued its own agendas vis-à-vis the local population, the national project, and Vienna, but also reflects the survival of conservative antiquarian values among the local elite and their peculiar understanding of Cracow as a historic city until the early twentieth century. For Stańczyks, the small cohort of academic elite who worked with them on the making of Cracow museums, and the aristocratic émigré community, Cracow meant antiquity and not modernity. At the same time, the number of those within the municipal government and the larger public, who like Dietl and Baraniecki, understood Cracow not only as a reliquary of Polish national traditions but also a modern metropolis, was not negligible. The lack of municipal support for Baraniecki's initiative until after his death is unfortunate, but together with the museum's popularity with the new public, it also highlights tensions between those in the municipal government who, along with the aristocratic donors and the political elite, favored the historicizing project and the public who imagined Cracow differently.
One finds moments of ambivalence in the history of the National Museum in the first decades of its existence. Involving a much larger number of actors who shaped its collection and display, the National Museum attempted to speak with several voices to its diverse imagined publics—the national, the local, the aristocratic, and the peasant one—and the resulting message was often lost behind the cacophony of those voices and reached out only to the fraction of the local public. The museum struggled to define itself and to bring forward a comprehensive permanent collection with a clear concept and agenda. And yet here, too, there emerges an important local, urban dimension. It seems that, even though the city had not been the capital of the Polish Commonwealth since the sixteenth century and most of the national uprisings had played out primarily in the Congress Kingdom, Cracovian art and culture at the National Museum was becoming the culture of the national project. This was due to several factors, from a particular constellation of the Habsburg monarchy that allowed free expression in contrast to the other partitions to the nature of the museum donations and the predominance of the historicizing vision of Cracow among its curatorial board. It demonstrates an interesting—and until now insufficiently researched—dynamic within the Polish national project that might have further parallels in Central Europe and beyond.
Furthermore, the museum's public was clearly evolving from the elitist and exclusive one in the 1870s that was typical for the earlier antiquarian movement to include the peasantry, high school students, and individuals of Jewish origin by the early twentieth century. This suggests that looking at the national project from an urban standpoint might prompt us to include more Cracovian communities than those typically included in standard national histories. Of course, segments of the city's suburban population and others within the local public for whom the national project remained less important than living the modern city were still excluded at the time. However, even those new Cracovians who preferred indulging in riding modern trams, going to the cinema, and reading the cheap boulevard press rather than going to a museum were made aware of its activities, sometimes through the publication in the press that catered specifically to them. This suggests a deepening of national culture to include urban classes and the rural population that might well have made Cracovian museum culture paradigmatic of a new trend in Polish self-identification.
