Catherine the Great Collector

From NY Times:

Catherine [the Great] began buying for her museum in 1764. By 1769 she had bought two of the greatest collections of drawings in Western Europe. One of them belonged to Count Cobenzl, then living in Brussels, who was minister plenipotentiary to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and a leading figure in the administration of what was then the Austrian Netherlands.
With this single stroke, Catherine the Great acquired more than 4,000 master drawings by Western European artists. Sheets from the Cobenzl collection in the present show include examples of Poussin, Rubens, van Dyck, Primaticcio, Hans Holbein the Elder, Jacob Jordaens, Hendrick Goltzius, Guercino and Greuze. Every one of them is a touchstone of quality. In the Poussin ''Baptism'' -- a sketch for the painting of that name that is a part of Poussin's ''Seven Sacraments'' -- rigor and awe work as equal partners.
Catherine went on to buy 1,020 drawings from the collection of Count Heinrich Bruhl, who was at the time a minister at the court of Saxony in Dresden. Virtually on her own doorstep she also acquired the drawings -- almost 2,000 -- that had been collected by Count Butskoy, the president of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

Dirty Dick's

A colleague mentioned 'Dirty Dick's' today, I had never heard of the place. Intrigued I went straight off and googled it. Apparently there was rubbish 'displayed' everywhere, if people left things behind or dropped stuff on the floor it got stuck up on the walls.

from the website:

Nathaniel Bentley was an ironmonger who had a shop in Leadenhall Street. On the eve of his wedding, tragedy struck. His bride-to-be died. So distraught was Nathaniel that he locked up the room in which he had prepared the wedding feast, never to enter it again. A broken man, he neither washed or changed his clothes. When his cats died he just left them. It is thought that Dickens used this tale as the inspiration for Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. The English love an eccentric and his notoriety meant his business flourished. When Nathaniel retired in 1804, the landlord of the Old Port Wine Shop in Bishopsgate bought the contents lock, stock and dead cats. He put them on display at his pub and renamed it 'Dirty Dick's'. In 1870 the pub was rebuilt from ground level, the wine vaults are part of the original building. The 'dirty' contents were carefully relocated in the new pub. Sadly it was decided in the mid nineteen-eighties that a clean up was in order and the dirty artefacts were cleared away.

Archival

A DVD Collection

This bloke has a lot of DVD's!

Dictators who collected

• Saddam Hussein - Sci-fi fantasy paintings featuring menacing dragons and barely-clad blondes.


• Adolf Hitler - Bavarian 18th century furniture. Munich antique dealers were ordered to keep an eye out for him.


• Kim Jong II - 20,000 videos (Daffy Duck cartoons, Star Wars, Liz Taylor and Sean Connery flicks)


• Idi Amin - Several racing cars and loads of old film reels of I Love Lucy reruns and Tom and Jerry cartoons


• Joseph Stalin - Westerns with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and John Wayne. Stalin also inherited Joseph Goebbels's films.

The Psychology of collecting

Why do we collect things? here is a link to an article by Mark B. McKinley, Ed.D on the psychology of collecting.



Podcast from the Frieze Art Fair.

Museum of Curiosity

Museum of Curiosity on Radio 4

Horniman Museum

taken from the Horniman Museum website:

History of the Museum
Victorian tea trader Frederick John Horniman began collecting specimens and artefacts from around the World in the 1860's. Horniman's key mission was to bring the world to Forest Hill and he opened part of his family house to the public so they could view the riches he had collected. As the collections increased they outgrew the family home and in 1898 Horniman commissioned Charles Harrison Townsend to design a new Museum.
The Museum opened in 1901 and was dedicated with the surrounding land as a free gift to the people of London by Frederick Horniman forever for their recreation instruction and enjoyment. The original collections comprised natural history specimens, cultural artefacts and musical instruments. Over the last 100 years the Museum has added significantly to the original bequest with Horniman's original collections comprising only 10 per cent of current ethnography and musical instrument holdings.
Further buildings were added to the original during the course of the last century notably in 1911 when a new building was donated by Frederick's son Emslie. In 1999 the Museum demolished some of the later additions and embarked on a Centenary Development to create a new extension and several associated spaces, and opened in June 2002.

The Horniman is our local museum and I've been visiting it for nearly 10 years. There is a permanent natural history display and in the Centenary Gallery there is an interesting display about the collections and how they are clasified. I had a quick visit with my son recently and took some photos but will have to go back soon for a longer visit.

These type of displays are a favorite with my children, many an hour has been spent studying the life cycles of various animals.

Displaying your art

Thames Southbank May 2009


Tate Long weekend May 09

Turbine Hall, Tate

Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings

Cabinets of Curiosity

One of the things that has stuck in my head after the lecture for this assignment is 'Cabinets of Curiosity'.


I've been search the internet, seeing what comes up and came across this blog

not sure how clear this page from my sketchbook is, but I've been thinking about interactive cabinet's of curiosity, ones that the viewer can choose what to put in. Using an OHP the viewer can select slides and arrange them so they look like they are in a cabinet.

First Ideas

some random ideas after reading the brief

Display Assignment

This is our 4th assignment and I thought I'd try and keep an ejournal alongside a traditional paper based one.
I need to go through my journal so far, scan and photograph it and catch up before my brain runs to far ahead and I lose track.