MuseoMag: MuseoMag 2024_02

Metadata

Periodical

Title:: MuseoMag

Periodical volume

Title:: MuseoMag 2024_02

Article

Title:: New perspectives on past exhibitions: The history of Kutter's exhibitions through a digital lens

14 MuseoMag N°II 2024 The latest exhibition on Joseph Kutter at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart sheds light on different aspects of the artist’s life and work. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON PAST EXHIBITIONS The history of Kutter‘s exhibitions through a digital lens As our current exhibition on the many faces of Joseph Kutter demonstrates, the ties between the Nationalmusée and Kutter have always been strong. Indeed, this marks his fifth solo show at the museum. Looking at these exhibitions and their context not only illustrates how the museum played a crucial role in establishing Kutter in the canon of Luxem- bourgish art, but might also give insights into how he was used to solidify and celebrate a sense of national identity after the Second World War. The first way to approach these questions would be to compile source material on the exhibitions and to read it closely. This might include exhibition reviews, texts from the exhibition catalogues or archival do- cuments. Such documents tend to exist in physical form, especially in the case of exhibitions staged be- fore digital communication and media became the norm, where correspondence wasn’t yet done by email and reviews weren’t published online. Howe- ver, the fact that some of them have been digitised makes them easier to find and access. The reviews of the exhibitions published in Luxembourgish news- papers, for example, can be found on the National Library’s website eluxemburgensia.lu which provides access to a great number of digitised Luxembourgish periodicals. The museum’s Library Department has also digitised all the exhibition catalogues published by the museum through to 1980 (the others will be digitised in the following year) and made them avai- lable on the platform MNAHA Collections. Among them are the catalogues of the first two Kutter ex- hibitions from 1946 and 1961. These digital resources make it easier to conduct traditional research based on engaging directly with the source material. THE POTENTIAL OF DIGITAL Yet, the availability of digital data also allows us to approach the source material in a different way and answer different questions. We could, for example, study the reception of Joseph Kutter at the Natio- nalmusée by using the available metadata on the museum’s collection and past exhibitions. Having this data in digital form not only facilitates qualita- tive study, but also enables quantitative analyses. It © MNAHA

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: MuseoMag 2024_02

Periodical

Periodical volume

Article

Table of contents