Period Room

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A period room , epoch room or style room is a special exhibition room in a museum in which works of art of various genres are presented together in an ambience that is based on a contemporary space. In Period Rooms, paintings, sculptures, handicrafts and furniture are exhibited on an equal footing in rooms that are fully or partially equipped with original wall coverings, ceilings, floors, portals, chimneys and cornices and should thus show an ideal overall picture of an era.

In terms of museum didactics, Period Rooms serve less to depict individual works than to convey “historical styles, collection trends and decoration techniques”. The underlying exhibition concept is intended to remove the separation of the individual genres such as painting, sculpture and handicrafts and show the museum visitors that one should always see each individual work of art in the context of its time.

history

The exhibition principle of the Period Rooms developed from the presentation of art by aristocratic or upper-class art collectors.

The Bavarian National Museum in Munich presented when it opened in 1867 Art in elements of space architectures from Bavaria from, especially blankets locks, but also two interiors, a painted room of the weavers' guild in Augsburg from the 15th century and the so-called Fugger little room in Donauwörth .

In the 1870s, similar exhibition spaces were opened in arts and crafts museums and cultural history museums in London, Salzburg, Nuremberg, Berlin and Paris and Zurich. Since the late 19th century, the period room spread to museums across Europe and then North America.

An important example of this is Wilhelm von Bode's idea of showing paintings and sculptures together in a new museum building and integrating them in an optical environment that roughly corresponded to the creation time of the works of art shown in the rooms. A first sample for the new concept was implemented in 1883 at an exhibition of paintings by old masters from private collections at the Royal Academy of Arts. In order to be able to realize his plan for the Berlin museums and to get the necessary support, he redesigned the art collection of Empress Victoria in Schloss Friedrichshof in 1896 according to this principle and thus earned the goodwill of the ruling family who henceforth made his plans for the establishment of one Renaissance Museum, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (today Bode Museum ) opened in 1904 . To implement this project, Bode in Italy had increasingly purchased original portals, chimneys, chests and other architectural parts, which were integrated into the new museum building. Bode also transferred the concept to the holdings of Old German and Old Dutch art, which was also implemented in 1930 in the newly built Deutsches Museum in the north wing of today's Pergamon Museum .

While period rooms proved to be a great success in other countries, this exhibition concept was considered antiquated in post-war Germany, especially the Federal Republic. In the GDR, however, especially in the Bode Museum, the concept was adhered to. After the unification of the Berlin museum holdings, a dispute arose over their presentation, in which the traditionalists insisted on sticking to the period rooms when displaying the works of art on Museum Island. While the opponents of this traditional presentation initially prevailed and cemented it with the new building of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie , Peter-Klaus Schuster, a new general director of the Staatliche Museen Prussischer Kulturbesitz, took over the management of the museums and again suggested a return to the old exhibition tradition , the has been visible again in the Bode Museum on a small scale since 2006.

Period rooms in museums are not only available for collections of ancient European art, but also for Asian, ancient and ethnological collections.

Museums with Period Rooms (selection)

Period Room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, around 1855, in the Rococo style

Web links

Commons : Period Rooms  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Penny Sparke, Brenda Martin, Trevor Keeble: The Modern Period Room. The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870 to 1950 , London and New York 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Änne Söll: Evidence through fiction? The narratives and animations of the Period Room . In: Klaus Krüger, Elke A. Werner, Andreas Schalhorn (eds.): Evidenzen des Expositorischen: How knowledge, insight and aesthetic meaning are generated in exhibitions . Transcript, Bielefeld 2019, ISBN 978-3-8376-4210-0 , p. 119 .
  2. ↑ Peter J. Schneemann, Barbara Biedermann: History spaces / narrative spaces. The contemporary period room as a model for reflection on the construction and appropriation of history. In: Christine Göttler, Peter J. Schneemann, Birgitt Borkopp-Restle, Norberto Gramaccini, Peter W. Marx, Bernd Nicolai (eds.): Reading Room. Re-readings of the interior . De Gruyter, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-11-059125-5 , pp. 108 .
  3. ^ A b c Benno Schubiger: Period Rooms as a Challenge. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . November 1, 2014, accessed April 15, 2020 .