The establishment and organisational history of museums in Austria
MúzeumCafé 45.
Like books, museums have their own stories. These stories are linked to the history of the communities, peoples and nations establishing them. Only the history of many museums, of a country’s organisation of museums can be potentially more interesting then the story of individual museums, since countries themselves change: empires cease to exist, borders are moved. The article is the first of MúzeumCafé’s new series on the history of museums, which will review how museum systems and their organisations developed in Europe. The initiative could well be useful for Hungarian museum specialists and visitors alike, sometimes revealing surprising insights, like the article about Austrian museums. It becomes clear what aims guided museum founders, who they were, how individual collections came into being and since when museums have existed in each country. Why were national museums established? What did they mean in the past and what do they represent today? What can a community do with public collections it desired and created, what does it think about them today? How much does it devote to them and what relationship does a country have with its own museums? Initially Austrian museums could be described in a great variety of ways, except for being Austrian. In the late 18th century the vast Habsburg Empire reflected general European tendencies concerning the establishment of museums. Private collections did indeed exist and new museums were closely connected to them. However, it was not the imperial or the Austrian provincial centres that were in the vanguard concerning the foundation of museums. For example, the Hungarian National Museum, established in 1802, was the first museum of the Empire. Other national museums were successively established across the Empire in the early part of the 19th century.