The “unfortunate exhibition”?

The 1910 Munich exhibition is renowned for its innovative ‘white wall’ display of Islamic objects, elevating individual pieces from an element within the faux-oriental ‘fairytale’ set-pieces of earlier exhibitions to works of art displayed in a gallery. At the time, though, perhaps this wasn’t so clear.

EM Troelenberg suggests that: “[t]he best way to proceed is to take a little tour through [the 1910] exhibition. Immediately after entering we find ourselves in an elegant foyer with pointed arches and mashrabiya. Yet this is a mere prelude to the monumental entrance hall designed by the Munich architect Ernst Fiechter, whose plan follows the general outlines of Persian iwan architecture, with wide pointed arches and shallow niches.” This ‘hall of honour’ is one of the two images of the exhibition most commonly included in modern (and contemporary) books.

It was also where the tapestries newly ‘rediscovered’ by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria were displayed. These were very definitely one of the stars of the show: as well as being in pole position, display-wise; they were selected to be shown (as only 23 of the objects were) in spectacular collotype colour in the mammoth catalogue.

Sigismund/Muratowicz/Rupprecht’s tapestries were woven with reference to a design brought from Poland; with more than a hint of the Polish King Sigismund’s Swedish crown (which he’d just lost); and then sent as part of a dowry to the Elector of Palatine/House of Wittelsbach; before being ‘rediscovered’ in Munich. Troelenberg has suggested that the European aspects of their history were “erased from the exhibition’s presentation”.  She describes them as being “returned to their ‘Islamic’ context”.

Certainly, the ornamental motifs Fiechter used for his great hall were inspired by monuments in Ardabil or Isfahan – via illustrations in Sarre’s book Denkmaler Persischer Baukunst.

Incidentally, the other commonly-reproduced image from the exhibition display is of the other vaguely ‘Oriental’ setting (although this made not even most cursory of attempts at historical or locational accuracy).  A so-called ‘mosque’ was set up in a central room with a low suspended ceiling, where the steel beams were disguised as columns. The carpets on display came from nearly every region and period, although “most of them were probably of minor quality”.

This raises (at least) two questions for me:

There was a huge academic push at the end of the nineteenth century to get the ‘so-called Polish’ carpets and tapestries understood as actually having been made in Persia. While they were clearly not made in Poland; perhaps the insistence on their Persian-ness ignores the European and other influences on their manufacture?

Then, maybe Munich wasn’t quite such a thought-through paradigm shift as I, in my naivete, had believed?  A harassed Sarre wrote to Bode about the “unfortunate exhibition . . I would rather see the exhibition not take place, but one must not give up now”.