Abstract: American art museums emerged from the intercultural transfers of concepts for art collecting and art exhibition, funding mechanisms, and architectural solutions from Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. English and German museums in particular informed American observers who searched of organizational models and inspiration. George Fisk Comfort obtained the role of an agent of intercultural transfer in the field of art museums. During his extensive travels in Germany, he visited and observed the creation of art museums and the founding of art associations as supporting institutions for these museums. He provided the knowledge he amassed to the circle of museum enthusiasts in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art emerged from this knowledge transfer. At the core of this transfer was the introduction of the German art association to American art museum funding. After American museums were founded, these museums attracted visitors and observes from the European continent. The most prominent visitor was the German museum director Adolf Bernhard Meyer. His report about museum in the United States provided a comprehensive text that informed museum reform in North America and Europe. The transfer of models for art museums was, thus, not a one-way street but worked in both directions, And Woldemar von Seidlitz’ claim that the museum association that he found in New York was an original American idea shows that the origins of transfer were often quickly forgotten and for strategic reasons often obscured by those involved in the transfer process.

This chapter was first published in The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums 1750– 1940, edited by Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2014, 103– 16.

Introduction

From the 1820s, wealthy Americans made the cities of the German Confederation their favored destination for purposes of education and enjoyment. Among the American visitors were students such as George Ticknor and John Lothrop Motley who attended the University of Göttingen as well as intellectuals and politicians such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and George Bancroft who came for the benefits of the rich cultural and social life in cities such as Dresden and Berlin. Industrialization had made some Americans very rich. The number of millionaires in the United States rose slowly but steady from just 20 in 1850 to more than 4,000 by 1892 and approximately 16,000 by 1916.