Preface
List of Plates
List of Figures
INTRODUCTION
1. Picturing the national gallery
Budapest 2012
Embarking on a new journey
Defining the national gallery
Redefining and complicating the definition
Boundary institutions
Putting the nation in the gallery
Nations, the national and the international
The political agency of national galleries
The national gallery and the art-nation
ART NATION GALLERY
2. Entangling art and nation
Oslo 2011
Isolating artists
Subjects and essences
Citizens and foreigners
Inscription and entombment
Making up stories
Respecting the nation
3. National and international art
London 2013
Accumulating masterpieces
An authored geography
An idiosyncratic inheritance
Appropriation and moral purpose
The nation as a moral good
The psychology of taste
HISTORIES GEOGRAPHIES
4. The Invention of national galleries
London 1629
The National Gallery
The Louvre
Nationalising the royal museum
National galleries as projects of unification
National galleries and the fight for independence
State art museums, ideology and control
Fanaticism and the national gallery
National galleries and fragmenting nations
Diverse invention
5. An idea in global translation
Mexico City 2000
Latin America
The British model abroad
Speaking to the world
Censorship, propaganda and freedom
The independent nation
Building a better world
ARCHITECTURE CURATION
6. Buildings in cities
Canberra 2010
The curated city or the body of the nation
An aesthetic paradigm
A functional ideal
Galleries for the nation
Function and nation
Brutalism, blandness and bling
Strange appropriations
7. Performances in space
London 2013
Harmonic agency
Movement and culmination
Scale, spectacle, transcendence and the sublime
Inserting the nation
Storied space
Political maps of culture
Convention and invention
NATIONAL GALLERIES NATIONAL ART
8. Making national art
Tirana 2012
State realisms in Russia, Germany and China
Academic nationalism in Poland
The Prado and the invention of the Spanish tradition
National art perfected: Canada’s Group of Seven
9. Admitting complexity
Guernica 1937
Impressionism, Australia and the national artist
Internationalism and the Hungarian Fauves
Contesting New Zealand’s Colin McCahon
America’s inclusive abstraction and Latino art
Beyond nation, beyond art: Indigenous Australia
Biography
Simon Knell is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, UK.
"The book is a welcome contribution to the project of ‘making strange’ the naturalized cultural forms, practices and assumptions associated with national galleries. In an eminently readable and engaging compendium of thematic perspectives and critical accounts, Knell reveals some of the vast and usually unremarked differences between national galleries. Through a comparative framework he attends sensitively to their situated peculiarities and to their political contexts and roles, providing new insights into the ways in which interrelated ideas of art and the nation have historically been constructed in the institutional remits, rhetoric, collections and space of museums. Achieving a uniquely wide and comparative perspective only available to the near-constant traveller, Knell has provided a landmark study for the understanding of national galleries." Christopher Whitehead, Professor of Museology, Newcastle University, UK
"A welcome survey of the development and meaning of national galleries of art beyond the familiar institutional histories of western Europe and the United States of America." Professor Helen Rees Leahy, University of Manchester
"Covering a broad range of histories and institutions, Knell tackles the subject of national galleries with clarity and aplomb. The text is supported by 41 black-and-white images and 15 color plates, many taken by the author, a thorough index, and ample notes... Useful to those interested in museum studies, collecting histories, national identity, material and cultural heritage, and related fields in the fine arts.Summing Up: Recommended"— J. Decker, CHOICE Reviews
