Musée imaginaire

A musée imaginaire or imaginary museum is a collection of works of art that a person holds as essential or favourite, so that given the opportunity he or she would bring them together in a single ideal museum.

The term is closely associated with André Malraux's Musée imaginaire, an essay from 1947 in which the principle it refers to is dramatised.[1][2] Other personalities have since made their own selection known, such as Michel Butor in Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor, published in 2015 and republished in 2019.[3]

More recently, Nicolas Malevé has compared the scale of Malraux's Musée imaginaire to that of datasets for training computer vision, such as ImageNet. As Douglas Crimp noted, Malraux's Musée imaginaire depends upon the existence of photographs. In Malavé's words, Crimp argued that "art history cannot produce a universal plane of comparison without another organising device: photography.[4]

Mikhail Chemiakin's musée imaginaire

Mihail Chemiakin's musee imaginaire - a research project of the artist Mihail Chemiakin, who considers the history of art from the point of view of the transformation of images. The basis of the research methodology is the interpretation and systematization of visual images.[5] The studies are presented in the form of sheets with images pasted on them, grouped according to the principle of visual generality — thematic, stylistic, figurative, iconographic.

Mihail Chemiakin's project was inspired by an essay by André Malraux,[6] who first formulated the concept of the Imaginary Museum. He proposed juxtaposing works of art from different cultures and eras to analyse the changing image or, as Malraux wrote, metamorphosis. In addition, he suggested that everyone should compose their own personal museum, selecting works without relying on the opinions and limited choices of major institutions.[7] This was made possible by the mass proliferation of photography.[8]

"Musee Imaginaire" appears as an alternative to the classical museum in the evaluation of contemporary art, for which no clear aesthetic requirements have been defined.[9] Mihail Chemiakin has chosen the aim of his personal museum to analyse the forms of artists from different cultures and eras in order to find their original source. For example, he comes to the conclusion that the Christian iconography of Lazarus of Bethany and the ancient Egyptian mummy are the primary sources for a large number of works of art using the image of swaddling, bandaging and wrapping.

Bibliography
  • Malraux, André (1996). Le musée imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 9782070329489. OCLC 1126353728.

References
  1. Grasskamp, Walter (6 February 2017). "The Museum in Print: André Malraux's Musée Imaginaire and André Vigneau's Photographic Encyclopaedia of Art". Images of the Art Museum: 301–316. doi:10.1515/9783110341362-015. ISBN 9783110341362.
  2. Allan, Derek (2 April 2020). "Has André Malraux's imaginary museum come into its own?". Apollo. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  3. Butor, Michel (2019). Le musée imaginaire de Michel Butor : 105 oeuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (in French). Paris: Flammarion. p. 368. ISBN 9782081450752. OCLC 1089413748.
  4. Malevé, Nicolas (2021-12-01). "On the data set's ruins". AI & Society. 36 (4): 1117–1131. doi:10.1007/s00146-020-01093-w. ISSN 1435-5655. S2CID 228883701.
  5. "About Mihail Chemiakin's Musee Imaginaire".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. Смольный, В. "Вселенная шарообразна!". Новое русское слово: 35.
  7. Спивак, Д. "Музей: память и проекции будущего". Международный журнал исследовательской культуры: 87.
  8. Мальро, Андре (2012). Голоса безмолвия (in Russian). Saint Petersburg: пер. с франц. В. Ю. Быстрова под ред. и с прим. А. В. Шестакова. pp. 10–18.
  9. Бирюкова, М. В. (2016). "Музей воображаемый vs музей реальный: концепции гипотетических музеев второй половины ХХ века". Международный журнал исследований культуры. 3: 87.
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