museum sPOtliGHt
The outbreak of the Second World War suspended
the Völkerkundemuseum’s activities and its
holdings were gradually transferred to protected
sites outside of Vienna. After the war, it took nearly
a decade to reconstitute the museum. Its director,
90
who had been a partisan of National Socialist
ideology, was removed and a new orientation was
adopted. Beginning in 1955, under the direction
of Etta Becker-Donner (1911–1975), the museum
underwent a twenty-year period of expansion,
which included the renovation of its installations,
the promotion of many research projects, and a
broadening of its public programming.
In the 1980s, the museum’s dynamism faded
due to fi nancial diffi culties, declining attendance,
and a questioning of its role in society.
THE RENOVATION
At the dawn of the third millennium, the Völkerkundemuseum,
like other European ethnology museums,
such as those of Frankfurt, Berlin, and Tervuren,
was faced with having to make itself more
attractive, to confront Europe’s colonial past, and
to defi ne new directions in a post-colonial society
in which restitution demands were also on the rise.
In light of the ever-increasing success of fi ne arts
museums, which are popular because they are directed
toward the general public and are less associated
with the now negatively connoted/perceived
colonial discourse, a substantial number of ethnological
museums, including the Musée du Quai
Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris and the Weltkulturen
Museum in Frankfurt, have come to “redefi
ne what was ‘ethnographic’ as ‘artistic’” (l’Estoile
2010: 285) by reconceiving themselves essentially
as art centers. Given this perspective, it is not surprising
that the Völkerkundemuseum came under
the aegis of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum
(Museum of Art History) in 2001. Initiatives aimed
at modernization were begun during this decade
under the directorship of Christian Feest.
When the museum’s next director, Dutchman Steven
Engelsman,2 began the current work of revitalizing
the institution in 2012, the path he chose was
similar to that taken by other European museums,
which is to say to make it a “museum of the world’s
cultures” in keeping with a desire to promote multiculturalism.
The most obvious manifestation of
this intention was changing the museum’s name
to Weltmuseum (Museum of the World), thus distancing
it from any specifi c disciplinary defi nition.
This aligned it with other institutions with similar
approaches, including the Weltkulturen Museum in
Frankfurt, which took its name in 2010, and the
Museum Fünf Kontinente (Five Continents Museum)
in Munich, so named in 2014.
This project of redefi nition was seen through
despite a lack of political support, the most obvious
manifestation of which were the budget cuts
imposed on the project by the Ministry of Culture
in 2014.3 This resulted in the recent opening
of Weltmuseum Wien being on a somewhat
reduced scale than initially planned. The redesign
and modernization of the Corps de Logis by architectural
fi rms Hoskins Architects (Glasgow) and
Ralph Appelbaum Associates (New York) provide
2,500 square meters for the permanent collection
and another 1,400 square meters for temporary
exhibitions. The galleries are spread out over two
fl oors, facing the popular Säulenhalle event space,
which dates to the beginning of the twentieth century.
A total of 3,127 objects—1.5% of the museum’s
entire collection—are now displayed in the
permanent exhibition’s fourteen adjoining galleries,
which were designed with the input of acting
curators.4
Each gallery has a specifi c
theme (see inset at the end
of this article). The regionally
organized ones are centered
around a focal piece or
a highlighted group of objects
and features graphics and an
interactive interpretative and
informational media system.
For example, the gallery called
“1873—Japan Comes to Europe”
(fi g. 16) is constructed
FiG. 16 (above):
Gallery view of “1873—
Japan Comes to europe.”
FiG. 17 (below):
Gallery view of “At the
threshold of the Orient.”