The league of curators: museums, internationalism, and war in 1930s Europe

Abstract

After the Great War, the League of Nations worked to foster international cooperation among museum curators, focusing first on professionalising the sector itself. As an affiliate of the League’s International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, the International Museums Office moved decisively to standardise curators’ practice, boost the role’s stature, and build professional networks that transcended national borders. This particular initiative of the oft-maligned League proved unassumingly effective from 1926, but it did so ultimately to the detriment of the most idealistic internationalism. As extreme nationalism, civil war, and then the threat of another world war overtook Europe in the 1930s, curators began turning their improved skills and prestige to assisting their own countries’ war efforts, revealing the unexpected outcomes of international initiatives like the League’s Museums Office.