민속품과 미술품 사이에서 : 뮌헨 오대륙박물관과 노르베르트 베버의 1926년 기증품

Abstract

Museum Five Continents in Munich originates from the royal ethnographic collection of non-European World established by the Wittelsbachs, the ruling house of Bavaria. The appointment of the 3rd Director Lucian Scherman in 1907 marked a turning point for the Museum of Ethnology, which is named Museum Five Continents since 2014. This caused an explosive increase in the number of collections, visitors and acclaimed exhibitions. In the expansion of its Korean collection, a gift in the spring of 1926 made by Norbert Weber, archabbot of the Missionary Benedictines in St. Ottilien, who visited Korea a second time and purchased Korean artifacts in 1925, played such a crucial role. Weber became a special adviser with his expert knowledge and experiences of Korean culture for Scherman, who evaluated his travel book, Im Lande der Morgenstille (in the Land of Morning Calm) published the first edition in 1915, as one of the most important standard works for Korea. The stereoscope pictures, which were founded at the archive of Museum Five Continents in the Summer of 2021, based on Weber’s Korean photos. They might have vividly conveyed the Korean people in ordinary clothing, everyday life, and religion, before the eyes of German visitors to the Munich Museum using a modern visual technique. The correspondence between Scherman and Weber suggests that their relationship did not remain as a personal acquaintance but also enriched the exhibitions of the Munich Ethnological Museum.<BR> Furthermore, in the early 20th century when Scherman started in his role as museum director, avant-garde artists such as Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) began to find their artistic inspiration at the ethnological museums. As art historian Wilhelm von Bode’s Plan and the Berliner Museumskrieg (Berlin Museum War) illustrated, there was a tendency to separate the artworks from the ethnographic collections. However, Scherman, who understood one specific culture as an organic synthesis of folklore articles, arts and crafts and artworks in that region, stayed away from the rearrangement of museum exhibits in Berlin. In addition, he insisted that the role of the Museum of Ethnology in Munich was to promote the aesthetic taste of the public and guide the artists and craftsmen. Consequently, by resisting to divide high culture and the primitives Scherman deviated from the colonial ideology permeated in many ethnological museums in Germany. In this respect, the ethnographica Weber purchased his second trip to Korea and donated to the Museum, were primarily ceramics, such as celadon, responses Scherman’s ideal, collecting not only daily necessities, also the unique artworks which are able to show Korean culture in the reopening of the Museum of Ethnology in the Maximilian street. Notwithstanding, the lack of detailed explanations of the Korean collections or then contemporary criticism of Weber’s donation apparently demonstrates the German’s indifferences towards Korea. Such a phenomenon was caused by the late opening of Korea to foreign countries, in comparison with other eastern Asian neighbours, the absence of valuable antique art under the censorship of the Japanese government in Seoul, and the short stay of German art historians and researchers in Korea. It is hoped that Weber’s collection, which is still silent in the dark storage in Museum Five Continents, discovers a way out as it presents a harmonious combination of ethnology and art under Scherman’s tradition.