Collecting and Collections

Ubiquitous and impossible to avoid, Chinese propaganda posters were mass-produced, easily and cheaply available at the Xinhua (New China) bookstores. Posters carried normative or political messages, but they also brought some color to the places where people lived. Posters reached all levels of society: they adorned offices and factory workshops, houses and dormitories. Schools used posters for teaching; factories, Party offices, People’s Liberation Army meeting rooms, shop floors, community rooms, etc., all had posters on their walls. Some images were turned into bookmarks, appeared on biscuit tins, mirrors, cigarette packages or matchboxes; a few even were made into postage stamps.

The Department of Culture of São Paulo and the importance of Mário de Andrade's work have been extensively studied and debated in Brazil. In this paper I'll mention the training activities for researchers and fieldworkers created by Mário de Andrade and Dina Lévi-Strauss during his tenure at the Department of Culture and the role of Society of Ethnography and Folklore in developing ethnographic collections.

The field of art market studies is based on a famous opposition, coined by Harrison and Cynthia White in 1965, regarding the "academic" system, as opposed to the "dealer-critic" one. Published in 1965, their book, Canvases and Careers, Institutional Change in the French Painting World, was qualified by Patricia Mainardi and Pierre Vaisse, but their criticism dated back to the 1990s. In the meantime, the development of digital methods makes possible a broader reassessment of Harrison and Cynthia White's theory. Based on a corpus of Parisian auction sales, from 1831 through 1925, this paper uses econometrics to call into question the antagonism between the academic and the dealer-critic system, and comes to another conclusion: the academic system was crucial to determine the value of artworks and its efficiency did not collapse in the 1870s, nor in the 1880s, but rather after the Great War.

Il Real Collegio Carlo Alberto di Moncalieri conserva ancora oggi una straordinaria raccolta archeologica formata da centinaia di reperti, riconducibili a epoche e aree geografiche anche molto lontane tra di loro.
La collezione è indissolubilmente legata alla figura di Luigi Bruzza, barnabita e studioso di archeologia, che nella seconda metà del XIX secolo acquisì sul mercato antiquario e tramite donazioni vasi di ogni genere, lapidi con iscrizioni, selci preistoriche, frammenti di intonaco dipinto, monete e molto altro ancora.

This dissertation approaches collections of Andean mummies in European national and university museums as the focus to understand the relationship between objects, documents, and the practice of collecting in the period from 1850 to 1930. Over 200 mummies, kept by 18 different museums in Western European countries were analyzed.The comparative examination of these mummified human remains and their associated documentation kept by the museums has highlighted the importance of considering the process of formation of collections.This research details the changes that some of these collections have undergone over the years, and the importance of using interdisciplinary approaches within archaeology, including museum archaeology, physical anthropology and paleo-imaging, to understand them. A discussion on the ethical treatment of human remains in archaeological practice and museum collections is undertaken as an important framework for the information presented on the dissertation.Looking at timeframes, actors and places of collecting, as well as the information recorded about all three by museums, can result in vital information not only about the process of collecting itself, but also about the motivations and contacts between source countries and the European repositories of these remains.

While offering an overview of Byzantine compilations of poetry, this paper argues for their role as autonomous literary works situated in different sociocultural contexts and emphasizes their significance for the transmission of the texts. It distinguishes anthologies from collections, having as a criterion the number of authors represented in a compilation. Collections are divided into two categories on the basis of the compiler’s identity: the poet himself or an admirer of his work. It further proposes to differentiate “Classicizing” and “Byzantine” anthologies on the basis of their content. The Greek Anthology and the anthologies related to it are understood as “Classicizing” while anthologies of occasional poetry are classified as “Byzantine.” It argues that authorship was important for compilers only if they wished to emphasize the importance of a text. Finally, it is suggested that these compilations represent a group of aesthetic values that can be considered “canonical.”

Los objetos de Humboldt: una colección para un mundo global cultura.nexos.com.mx/ Como parte de la actual revaloración historiográfica de la vida y obra de Humboldt, el siguiente ensayo -- una versión de la conferencia magistral celebrando el aniversario 250 de Humboldt en el Humboldt Forum en Berlín -- ilumina el camino tortuoso que tuvo que recorrer su colección y reivindica su trabajo como obra colectiva y bulliciosa, contraria a la de un héroe y científico solitario.

In 1930 and 1931, a public auction was held at the Murska Sobota Castle in the far east of the Drava Banate in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The movable property of the Hungarian citizen and landowner Ladislav, Count Szapáry, the owner of the Murska Sobota Castle, was being sold off. At the end of World War I, Prekmurje and Murska Sobota were annexed to the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (after 1929, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), which imposed special taxes on the owners of castle buildings and tried to introduce an agrarian reform to large estates. Count Szapáry, who was the third largest landowner in Prekmurje, accumulated substantial debts even before World War I. After his estate in Prekmurje came under state administration in 1920, he was forced to sell the entire property in Murska Sobota at the end of the 1920s. From the catalogue of his real estates, which encompasses more than 2000 lots, one can gather that he kept a great deal of furniture, paintings and other equipment in the castle in Murska Sobota, while a more detailed examination of the material connected to the Murska Sobota Castle and Count Szapáry reveals that it had one of the most high-quality castle inventories and, consequently, that its auction was one of the most important sales of castle furnishings in Slovenia during the interwar period.
The analysis of the sales records, auction catalogue, and other material connected to the auction, produced valuable information about the Count’s collection and illuminated the way through which the works of art left the castle in Murska Sobota. It also presents the starting point for finding out their subsequent fate and, oftentimes, their present location. It was thus possible to compile a complete list of the objects that Josip Mal, the director of the National Museum in Ljubljana, purchased at the auction in 1930, and present them in detail. Individual pieces were chosen by Josip Mal and conservator France Stele, whose critical evaluation demonstrates that the selection was deliberate, far-reaching and valid, since it primarily consists of exceptional works of art that deserve greater attention than they have received so far.
The museum obtained a great number of objects from the Szapáry collection, among other things, an important Rococo sofa set made of black, partly gilded wood with a corresponding table made of green marble; another set made of gilded wood and consisting of a folding screen and a mirror in an old, carved Baroque frame, a gilded corner console table with a cabinet, a table with a marble top, a Rococo sofa, a chaise-longue, two chairs with backrests, and two armchairs. A precious mirror in a figuratively carved, gilded Baroque frame, originating from Loredana Countess Morosini-Gatterburg,s collection in Venice, bought by Count Szapáry at the auction of the Countess, legacy in 1894, was also chosen.
At the auction in Murska Sobota, which lasted until November, the museum also bought a chest of drawers made of burnished rosewood veneer, richly decorated with an ivory marquetry, copied after graphic prints, at the initial bid of 35.000 dinars. The purchases allowed Mal to successfully enrich the collection of the Arts and Crafts Museum that he planned to establish.
The analysis of the circumstances in which the sale was executed indicates that the museum director acted hastily when buying the items and spent rather irrationally the means that were at his disposal. Moreover, in unclear circumstances several months after the auction was finished, he greatly overpaid for the The Holy Kinship and Ecce homo paintings, which were bought at the auction by a private person, and thus caused further damage to the museum’s or the Banate's fund.
The complex circumstances, in which interwar sales of castle inventories occurred, undoubtedly contributed to such proceedings, whereas Mal's treatment and presentation of a large number of the purchased items in the museum guide, published in 1931, shows that he was proud of them and thought the purchases were entirely justified. The time and means that he invested in these acquisitions attest to his honest interest in the material and the living culture of the former nobility. Based on the evaluation of the purchased items, Mal's notes, and the data in archival sources, it is possible to attribute to him excellent knowledge of relevant literature and comparative material, which enabled him to place quality pieces in the museum’s collections. Owing to their representativeness, these pieces are generally still presented in the most exposed places in the museum’s exhibition areas, and at the same time, represent a rounded collection of artworks that allow at least a glimpse into the collecting practices of former Hungarian high nobility.

El presente artículo reexamina las pinturas de los cuartos de las frutas de la Alhambra y reivindica su papel precursor en el desarrollo del bodegón español. Aunque las pinturas de los cuartos de las frutas han sido estudiadas solo en relación con el Renacimiento italiano, este artículo las considera desde la perspectiva de su emplazamiento en el marco arquitectónico y simbólico de la Alhambra, así como en el contexto de la utilización del naturalismo como lenguaje pictórico al servicio de la ideología imperial, poniendo de manifiesto conexiones entre estas pinturas y la historial natural, el pasado islámico y la ideología imperial.