The Role of Art Museums – the Finnish case

This article is one part of an ongoing process to collect the entire history of Finnish Museums to be published in 2010. It has it roots in my dissertation about our art museums’ buildings. The final presentation will widen to consist of all kinds of museum buildings and also reflect on relationships between architecture, collections and exhibition design. Unlike many European countries in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Finland – then a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire – did not posses the basic infrastructure of the art world, such as public collections, an art academy or organized trade in works of art. The field of art began to take shape, in practice, around the Finnish Art Society, which was founded in 1846. It was at first a kind of public collector in addition to the University, founded in 1640. The art museum sector was a forerunner in the museum field and it also created both the classical and modern prototypes for the ideal museum building in Finland.