Museums and Institutions in Germany

For several years now, and notwithstanding its historical significance, the institution of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts (Kunstverein) has been increasingly placed into question.

While its sharpest critics would dispute even such a Society’s right to exist, others point out the institution’s important function as a non-commercial, experimental stage for contemporary artists.

Especially in times of rampant cultural event fever, they say, the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, with its programme conceived free from the concern with the sheer head-count of visitors, could supply a decisive deficit. The fact is that, owing to the changed exhibition landscape, particularly the increase of forums for contemporary art, the co-ordinate points have considerably shifted.

If up to the eighties, even in some big cities, the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts was the sole stronghold for the presentation of current art, it now has to share this role with exhibition halls, art spaces, off-spaces, municipal art galleries and above all classical museums. Do Societies for the Promotion of the Fine Arts thus find themselves in a permanently downward spiral, as many critics would like to believe? Hardly, yet one can sense a sharp difference between those institutions which are very traditional and those which reflect critically upon the status quo. No question about it: one of the oldest forms of citizens’ initiative, founded to serve the communication of art, is obliged to seek a new profile. 

A venerable tradition

The history of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts began about 1800 when societies for patronage were set up in diverse European states on the pattern of such institutions as, for instance, the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The founding years of the German Societies fell between 1818 and 1840. The nascent middle-class called associations for the promotion of contemporary art into life. Their concrete intention was to furnish a bridge between artist and art-interested layman, and so to dedicate themselves to a task that had hitherto been reserved to the nobility. In this light, activities within these Societies, especially the organisation of sales exhibitions and thus in effect the steering of the art market, could be looked upon as precursors of democratic processes.

Sources of financing and organisation

In their statutes and articles, most Societies for the Promotion of the Fine Arts were formerly listed as stock corporations or lottery associations. To this day their main means of financing remains membership fees, which the local city as a rule then matches in the form of subsidies according to the size of the membership. There are Societies with no more than 20 members which receive a grant of about 150 Euro per year, and others with 5,000 members and a budget of 500, 000 Euro. In accordance with the law governing the right to form associations, the Societies have a managing committee elected by the membership. In all the bigger institutions, a full-time director in the person of a curator conversant with art theory is hired by the managing committee and assumes responsibility for the exhibition programme. Now as ever, next to an ambitious travel programme, an important bait for luring new members into a Society is the ‘yearly donations’. Before Christmas, the Society holds a group exhibition of younger artists whose works members can purchase for a considerably reduced price.

Ensuring survival

Meanwhile, the number of institutions listed in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (i.e., Association of German Societies for the Promotion of the Fine Arts) has grown to about 250. Shining examples of possible re-orientation are the Societies for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Frankfurt/Main, Hanover and Stuttgart, which have established themselves as sites of vital artistic discourse but also pursue a daring aesthetic concept for exhibitions. The Societies in Bonn, Cologne and Dusseldorf, too, have for several decades now been able to make solid contributions to the establishment of unknown artists in the art market. In Hamburg and Munich, the local Societies have also succeeded in taking the great step forward by becoming serious competitors of that most important of German exhibition halls for contemporary art. Yet one ought not ogle only the biggest, oldest and most famous German Societies for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. In recent years the new federal states have founded a whole series of smaller institutions that will undoubtedly ensure the survival of regional art scenes.