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
