In the age of mega-institutions and competitive building, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk pays homage to the more personal places, like his own Museum of Innocence, whose character and content evoke a deeper experience.
My favorite museums tend to be small, the kind that showcase the inventiveness and the life stories of private individuals. Though I admire national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, when I'm traveling and whenever I set foot in a new city, the first places I rush to see are not these institutions that fill me with a sense of the power of the state and of the history of its people, but those that will allow me to experience the private world and the vision of a passionate individual. I have so much respect for the efforts of those creative people who devoted the final decades of their lives to the task of turning their homes and their studios into museums for the public to visit after their deaths. These small museums are usually hidden on side streets just outside the center of large Western cities. They have the power to make us rediscover a feeling that the big national museums, looking more and more like fun-filled shopping malls with each passing day, can no longer make us feel, and that we have begun to forget. Museums must not confine themselves to showing us pictures and objects from the past; they must also convey the ambiance of the lost time from which those objects have come to us. And this can only happen through personal stories.
The newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, is a dazzling demonstration of the sophistication of Dutch culture and collecting, and of the creativity of contemporary museum design. But only places like the small and equally innovative Anne Frank House can be like novels in their ability to make our hearts beat faster with the emotional depth of a personal story. When we visit larger, grander museums, it is always with a commentary, a historical explanation running in the backs of our minds. But small private museums are more open to individual stories.
When I was little, I had no interest in museums. At the time, museums in Istanbul tended to look like cheerless government offices designed to exhibit and preserve archaeological artifacts, and the leftover splendors of the Ottoman era. These were boring places, little more than storerooms. During the 1990s, around the time when my books began to get published in the West, the first places I went to on my travels outside Istanbul were major museums like the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the State Hermitage. These massive and highly symbolic institutions did, of course, convey a sense of the creative energy and the wealth of history behind them. But it was only in the smaller museums that I was able to find the fragile histories of individual human beings, to experience the pleasures of that depth of meaning that results from the connection between objects and personal dramas and to feel that metaphysical sense of time that museums must be able to convey.
There is also a political side to the matter. Turning the Louvre from a private residence of the Bourbon royalty to a national museum for the people of France was a liberating transformation, both from a cultural and from a political point of view. This transformation had a democratic aspect, not unlike the move from epic histories describing the feats of kings to novels focusing on the lives of ordinary people. But in the more than 200 years that have passed since the Louvre's conversion into a museum, these large state museums have turned from catalysts for greater freedom and democratization to tourist destinations acting as symbols of state and national power. The massive, Louvre-like state museums that are being set up, at great expense, in non-Western cities like Beijing and Abu Dhabi, where individual rights and freedom of thought are often suppressed, do nothing to nurture the efforts of local artists and individuals. Instead, these monumental new structures seem to crush the area around them, overwhelming the nearby neighborhoods and the city itself, and acting as smokescreens for the crimes of authoritarian regimes.
The economic growth that we have witnessed in non-Western countries over the past 20 years has brought with it the formation of a middle class. In order to experience the personal stories that come from within these emerging, modern middle classes, what we need are not huge state museums, but small and innovative museums focusing on individuals. The ingenious developments we've seen in museums, in regard to curating and architecture over the past 20 years, can turn small museums into wonderful tools through which to investigate and express our shared humanity.
Gustave Moreau Museu, Paris
Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was an early starter among those who make plans to turn their homes into exhibitions of their own possessions. At 36, upon the death of his father, Moreau wrote across the bottom of a sketch: "I think of my death and of the fate of all those works and compositions I have taken such trouble to collect. Separately they will perish, but taken as a whole they give an idea of what kind of an artist I was and in what kind of surroundings I chose to live my dreams."
What makes this museum so unique is this sense of wholeness, that particular atmosphere that is generated from the coming together of Moreau's paintings with his sketches, his collection and his worldly possessions. This atmosphere draws me to the museum every time I go to Paris — more than his own Delacroix-inspired illustrations of mythological, historical and biblical scenes. On the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one will look twice at what is perhaps one of Moreau's most striking works, "Oedipus and the Sphinx," displayed there a few steps away from the van Goghs and the Cézannes. But here in Moreau's own museum, you might find that you can't get enough of his many preparatory sketches for "Oedipus and the Sphinx" and countless other drawings. In the 1930s, both André Breton and André Malraux used to go to the Gustave Moreau Museum for a taste of its particular ambiance.
Upon entering the rooms on the museum's first floor, where the painter lived with his mother and architect father for many years, we immediately become aware of a singular sense of isolation from the outside world. The writer J. K. Huysmans, known for his decadent sympathies, wrote that Moreau was "a mystic locked up at the heart of Paris." The walls are cluttered with framed paintings, photographs, family portraits, knickknacks and souvenirs, just as in the museum of Mario Praz, who was a fan of Moreau's. It is the same mood as that which characterized Napoleon III's oppressive Second Empire.
Moreau spent his last years fine-tuning his plans for turning the rooms of his home into a museum, and he also brought in copies of paintings, the originals of which were displayed in other museums. Climbing the impressive spiral staircase up to the new floors that were added when the house was turned into a museum, we reach the biggest exhibition room and experience a phenomenon that is also apparent in many of Moreau's paintings: the illusion that there is light pouring out of people and objects. The joys of smaller, personal museums don't end with the transformation of space into time, but also allow the opportunity of seeing artifacts and paintings in the context in which they were created and that brings forth their true significance. "Now that Gustave Moreau is dead, his house is to become a museum," Proust wrote, upon hearing the news of the bequest by the painter he had so frequently mentioned in his novels. "This is as it should be. Even during his lifetime a poet's house is never quite a home."
Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, Milan
When reading "War and Peace," we tend to forget that it is a historical novel. Tolstoy wrote the story slightly more than 50 years after its starting date of 1805, relying on other authors' memoirs and history books. Part of the reason why we hardly notice the 50-year gap while reading the book is that Tolstoy was very much in his element when writing scenes set in ballrooms, in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy and inside people's homes. We could say the same about the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in the center of Milan, between Via Gesù and Via Santo Spirito. This museum took on its current appearance of a 15th- or 16th-century Renaissance mansion during the 1880s, when two wealthy aristocratic brothers decided to furnish and decorate their family home in the style of a Renaissance prince's mansion. The brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, who continued to live in the mansion with their families throughout this process of transformation, didn't merely collect Renaissance-period paintings, sculptures, tables, doors and swords, but also found and put to use all sorts of objects, from scissors and nutcrackers to candleholders, cutlery and stools. The rooms are a testament to the truth that what makes a museum unforgettable is not just the collection it houses, but also the ambiance envisaged by those who set it up.
Frederic Marès Museum, Barcelona
The Catalan sculptor Frederic Marès (1893-1991) was a truly extraordinary collector. The ground and first floors of his museum in Barcelona hold his collection of religious sculptures from old Spanish churches, which Marès assembled during the first half of the 20th century, and which I will not claim to understand. I would recommend that visitors go up as quickly as possible to the second and third floors, though, which hold a vast and stunning array of day-to-day paraphernalia and which, in today's academic discourse, would be described as a "poetic museum." Throughout his lifetime, Marès assembled incredible collections of a wide variety of objects from daily life in Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including playing cards, hand-held fans, scissors, matches, cigarette holders, snuffboxes and pipes. Displayed in thick-set wooden frames like cabinets of curiosities, the assembled objects — various restaurant menus, Christmas cards, photographs, postcards, views of Barcelona, miniature portraits, bouquet holders, lighters, ashtrays, calling cards — result in a stunning creation that Marès aptly termed a "sentimental museum." The unique aura created by these everyday objects and the cabinets in which they are displayed hints to a future where the efforts of passionate, visionary collectors could, through the medium of small museums, preserve the richness, the beauty and the complexity of the way we live today.
Rockox House Museum, Antwerp
Nicolaas Rockox (1560-1640) came from a wealthy Flemish family, and was a patron of the arts and a collector of artworks and coins. He was mayor of Antwerp for a time, as well as a humanist and a friend of Peter Paul Rubens, who painted portraits of him as he was posing in his house among his collections of objects, paintings and furniture. When I entered this house museum for the first time, what affected me most was the strange sense of another time. I could hear the noises of the city, the sound of a tram turning a corner and children in a nearby primary school, but at the same time, as my gaze would travel over the objects, the paintings, the furniture, the rooms, I would also feel as if I were in a completely different time. His tiny, wonderful museum, situated on a side street a stone's throw from Antwerp's main square, was not, of course, conceived as such during Rockox's lifetime. But today, this well-curated space, displaying a passionate art lover's collection in his own home, among the objects of his day-to-day life, his ornaments and his furniture, provides visitors with a deep insight into a particular culture and era, and into the private world of a man who happened to live during that period.
Mario Praz Museum, Rome
If you happen to be walking along Via Giuseppe Zanardelli in Rome, at a slight remove from the crowds of tourists in the Piazza Navona, you will come upon the Mario Praz Museum, which tends not to draw much attention from passersby, but which is a very special place that will surely figure prominently in the pages of any future book on the history of small museums.
Mario Praz (1896-1982) was a historian of art and literature. Among literary scholars and art historians, he is best known for a book translated into English as "The Romantic Agony." It is an erudite and sensible study of themes of death, sexual idiosyncrasy, Satanism, sadism and other horrors in romantic literature. In one passage Praz discusses "The Picture of Dorian Gray," claiming that Oscar Wilde failed to construct an atmosphere of anguish in that novel. This is because in the middle of the book's most horrifying passages, Wilde suddenly forgot about the plot and started to describe nearby objects — a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, for example, or a gold-latten matchbox. Praz sees this approach as decadent and superficial, and points out that the author's main interest is "decorative." Ironically, Praz's other well-known work is titled "An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration." This book is one of the best examples of the kinds of books that address the need to discover the ties that bind artists and thinkers to the places in which they live. Praz takes great pleasure in guiding us on an illustrated tour of the inner worlds of artists and writers, exploring the rooms and objects that surround them, and never failing to entertain us, to educate us and to arouse our curiosity.
He does the same in his autobiography, "The House of Life." What makes this book, which Edmund Wilson considered to be Praz's masterpiece, so unique among autobiographies is that it doesn't tell its story chronologically, but rather through the furniture and paintings that occupied the apartment where the author lived for 30 years. As the narrative moves from room to room, object to object, painting to painting, the book fills the reader with the same sort of pleasure that is to be had in a visit to a small museum guided by the sensitive and knowledgeable voice of the person who set up the museum in the first place.
In 1969, Praz moved his home and his collection from the Palazzo Ricci to their current location on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, and spent the rest of his life painstakingly curating this apartment that he envisaged as a posthumous museum. Those who have read his autobiography will know the sentimental value behind each object; they will remember the author's love stories, his changing emotions and how he put together his collection, piece by piece. But this wonderful museum, this wunderkammer of sorts, has the same effect on those who are unaware of the author's other works when they first set foot in the apartment, just as I was on my first visit. As we wander around its rooms, we are reminded that a museum is, above all, a place where paintings, objects, stories and sentiments engage in conversation with one another. In all museums, and not just small ones, the atmosphere that this conversation creates — the museum's overall ambiance — is much more important than the individual significance of each object.
The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul
Between 1995 and 2005, while visiting some of the small museums I have been describing in this piece, I was also nursing a dream of setting up a small museum of my own. When I first began to work on the museum, I had the same enthusiasm of people who discover novels for the first time, and are so taken by this fantastic medium that they go on to read as many more novels as they can, dreaming all the while of the novel they will one day write themselves.
Instinctively, I started collecting objects from day-to-day life in Istanbul in the 1960s and '70s, buying them from flea markets or taking them from friends and acquaintances, with the excuse that "someday I might make a weird museum out of it." An old DDT pump for mosquitoes, manufactured in Turkey; a meter like those that used to be near the left rear-view mirror of Istanbul taxis; a large, thick brass tap, of the kind I'd last seen in childhood; a locally made toy train set: All of these objects and more filled my office and my home, but while I boldly told my close friends that these things would become part of a museum collection one day, I still wasn't entirely sure who or what should be the subject of this museum.
Those inventive museum-makers who spend the last years of their lives turning their homes into museums provided the answer. In 1999, I purchased an aged and frayed four-floored little 19th-century house on a back street near my office in the poor neighborhood of Cukurcuma. If this house was going to be a museum, then the imaginary people who lived in it should use the objects that were now piling up in my office. So I began to imagine a story that fit in with the street the house was on, with the neighborhood itself, and with the objects I had collected. Over the course of eight years, this story evolved into a novel, rewritten over and over again as I found new things to display in the museum, until it was finally published in Istanbul in 2008, and in English in 2009 under the title "The Museum of Innocence."
At first I picked up things from nearby markets and used bookstores because they caught my eye. But later, I saw in my mind's eye a love story that would connect all of these objects. Kemal Basmaci, from the Nisantasi neighborhood where I was born and raised, and from a well-off family similar to mine, is soon to be married to the right kind of girl, until he falls in love with Fusun, a girl who wants to be a film star and who is the daughter of a distant relative who works as a seamstress. As this love turns into obsession, Kemal spends the next seven years visiting Fusun — who is married to someone else — and her family in their home, which he will eventually transform into a museum dedicated to her.
The fundamental difference between the Museum of Innocence and the other small museums that have inspired me is the fact that, unlike Gustave Moreau or Mario Praz, the people whose objects and images we look at in this museum are not real, but fictional. I love to see visitors tricked by the reality of the imaginary characters' slippers, playing cards, cutlery, ID cards and even their cigarette butts, to the extent that they forget that the characters in the novel are invented. And whether they've read the novel or not, I'm always glad to see visitors discovering firsthand that what is being displayed in this museum is not simply the plot of a novel, but a particular mood, an atmosphere created by objects. And when they ask me why I've set up this kind of museum, I respond that it is because I love small museums that bring out our individuality.
Text translated by Ekin Oklap
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