ABSTRACT
Lewis Mumford has argued that public museums are "a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory culture." But the impulse to create and contribute to art museums was more complex. Nevertheless, philanthropic motives were complex and many factors entered into the impulse, the appeal, and the justification. This complexity was revealed whenever museum leaders from across the nation gathered to publicly pat themselves on the back. Concern for improvement and uplift involved many philanthropists in a paradoxical justification of their activities: museums were viewed as both utilitarian instruments and antidotes to life in modern America. Similarly, disinterested altruism was often complicated by yearning for social status and prestige and, in the twentieth century, by a desire to control the destiny of surplus funds and estates rather than to allow the government to do so. Nineteenth-century meliorism, the doctrine of improvement, played a major role in providing museum philanthropists with justification and encouragement.
