MIECZYSŁAW TRETER, CONTEMPORARY MUSEUMS

In 2019, the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections in cooperation with the Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy published the 1917 book by Mieczysław Treter titled Contemporary Museums as the first volume in the Monuments of Polish Museology Series. The study consists of two parts originally released in ‘Muzeum Polskie’ published by Treter in Kiev; it was an ephemeral periodical associated with the Society for the Protection of Monuments of the Past, active predominantly in the Kingdom of Poland, but also boasting numerous branches in Polish communities throughout Russia. The Author opens the first part of a theoretical format with a synthesized presentation of the genesis of the museum institution (also on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), to later follow to its analysis in view of its collecting and displaying character, classification according to the typical factual areas it covers, chronology, and territory (general natural history museums, general history ones, technological ones, ethnographic ones, historical-social ones, historical-artistic ones); moreover, he tackles questions like a museum exhibition, management, a museum building. In Treter’s view the museum’s mission is not to provide simple entertainment, neither is it to create autonomous beauty (realm of art), but it is of a strictly scientific character, meant to serve science and its promotion, though through this museums become elitist: by serving mainly science, they cannot provide entertainment and excitement to every amateur, neither are they, as such, works of art to which purely aesthetical criteria could be applied. The second part of Treter’s study is an extensive outline of the situation of Polish museums on the eve of WWI, in a way overshadowed by the first congress of Polish museologists, and in the perspective of the ‘museum world’ of the Second Polish Republic. It is an outline for the monograph on Polish museums, a kind of a report on their condition as in 1914 with some references to later years. Through this it becomes as if a closure of the first period of their history, which the Author, when involved in writing his study, could obviously only instinctively anticipate.