Mohonk Courier
International Association of Museums of Art and Military History
(note: a table of contents of this issue is given on the back)
Greetings from the President of IAMAM:
Dear IAMAM members,
A lot has happened since our last Mohonk Courier, the No.7 issue of March, 2000. This will all be dealt with in this issue.There have also been some exciting developments and we are looking forward to our next triennial congress to be held in Norway in June 2002: 'IAMAM XVI Oslo'. Some details of this congress will be given in paragraph 5.
The present issue of the Mohonk Courier has been largely prepared by IAMAM's Secretary General, Jan Piet Puype, whom I must praise for all his time and effort, done beside a busy museum occupation. I am stressing this point, because we have been receiving complaints by a number of members who feel that they do not hear very much from our organisation. A number of them have also said that they were not informed by us about recent events which IAMAM co-ordinated with certain museums, for instance the symposium 'Behind the scenes of the Museum', dealing with storage problems of arms and armour & related objects, organised by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from 24-26 January 2001.
We are very sorry that this has happened and we will do our utmost to prevent forgetting to inform certain members in the future. The chief problem behind this is our List of Members, which has to be updated continuously and frequently, which is not easy. If the List is full of errors (which can easily be the case when you consider than we have almost 300 members!) or if it is not up to date, the announcement may not reach some members. As to the complaint that we do not inform our members more frequently, I regret that one Mohonk Courier per year, sometimes two, is the best we can do under the circumstances. Another problem is that our mailings sometimes do not reach those colleagues who represent their institutionat IAMAM events, especially when large museums with many departments and/or with two or more different postal addresses are concerned. In principle, we send our mail to the directors of all member institutions in the hope that they will pass it on to the people concerned.
It is only with a lot of effort, largely done in our private time, that we can prepare and attend meetings with various organisers of congresses, seminars and symposia, exchange letters with our members, update our List of Members, put together the Mohonk Courier and, not to forget, mail it. Please realise that we do not have the benefit of a professional IAMAM office secretariat, although I am happy to acknowledge the good administrative support by some of our members. I am pleased to add that we owe it to one of them that IAMAM is now on the Internet, too. Information on our site is given in paragraph 12.
This Mohonk Courier can be found on the IAMAM website (www.klm-mra.be/ICOMAM), on which you can also find and download the other documents we want you to have: the List of Members (29 pages in A4 size), a voting form ‘IAMAM-ICOMAM’ (1 page), and the regulations of the Justus Lipsius Award (2 pages). The contents and the significance of the three other documents are explained elsewhere in this issue.
All four documents will be sent per regular mail to all members of whom we have no e-mail address. We cannot be sure that they have access to the Internet. The Secretary General and myself will be using our respective museum facilities and divide the number of envelopes in two equal shares. We intend starting to send the mail from the end of April. If you receive it after weeks, maybe even some months, we beg your pardon. But we are confident that you will understand the sheer amount of work involved in this major undertaking. And, in order to cut down the mailing cost, we have to send all this mail per surface post. We hope you understand this, too.
We urge you to send us as soon as possible any corrections and additions you think are necessary. We would especially point out the usefulness of e-mail and urge you to use this means of communication whenever possible. It does not only make correspondence cheaper, easier and quicker, but all kinds of attachments can be sent, too, without the nuisance of using envelopes and stamps.
If you do not have e-mail, then send us your mail by regular post (which is often better than using the fax machine). All address corrections should be sent to the Secretary General, whose postal, fax & e-mail addresses are given below.
I regret to say that many of our members never show up at our meetings and we also do not hear very often from them, if at all. I fully realise the financial burden involved when travelling to and from overseas, sometimes from the other end of the world, to western Europe or the western hemisphere, in which areas our activities almost exclusively seem to happen. This emphasis on the western world is also reflected by the constitution of our Executive Committee, in which only a few members from the Asian, African, Arab (& other near or middle eastern territories), Australian or South American cultural areas and nations are to be found.
We all feel that this should be changed. The richness and heritage of most of these cultures is so vast, that IAMAM as a whole could only benefit by their influence. The distant goal, of course, is the exchange on an equal basis of museum experience, activities and research in the field of arms and armour and its many related subjects, partly pertaining to military history, partly to culture, and both. We all know that in actual historical reality over the centuries this exchange has always been intensive. Trade, commerce, wars and politics have always happened and there is nothing new or special in it when we, as museum colleagues and as scholars, try to follow up these historical events with reflection, research, publications and a fruitful and respectful exchange of opinions and research results.
I welcome any suggestions from any members, wherever you live and work, as to how we could set these things into motion.
Let me finish by hoping that all your wishes may come true and that we can meet or renew our acquaintance soon, if not in person than per correspondence. Hope to see as many of you as possible in Norway next year.
Dr. Claude Gaier, President of IAMAM
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1. IAMAM Executive Committee
President: Claude GAIER, Director,
Musée d'Armes, LIÈGE (Belgium)
Secretary general: Jan Piet PUYPE, Senior curator,
Koninklijk Nederlands Leger- en Wapenmuseum, DELFT
(Netherlands)
Members: Général Bernard DEVAUX, Director,
Musée de l'Armée, PARIS (France)
Walter J. KARCHESKI Jr., Curator of Arms and Armor
Frazier Historical Arms Museum;Curatorial, KY LOUISVILLE (U.S.A.)
Markku MELKKO, Director,
Military Museum of Finland, HELSINKI (Finland)
Leif TÖRNQUIST, Superintendent,
Statens Forsvarshistoriska Museer, STOCKHOLM (Sweden)
Georgij VILINBAKHOV, Deputy Director,
State Hermitage Museum, ST.PETERSBURG (Russia)
Guy WILSON, Director,
Royal Armouries Museum, LEEDS (U.K.)
Rolf WIRTGEN, Curator,
Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung, KOBLENZ (Germany)
Stephen WOOD, former Keeper, Edinburgh Castle,
LONDON (U.K.)
Honorary life president: William REID, CBE, FSA, RICHMOND, Surrey (U.K.)
Honorary members: Col.(Rtd.) Franklin Brooke NIHART, MCLEAN, VA (U.S.A.)
Prof.Dr. Zdzislaw ZYGULSKI Jr., CRACOW (Poland)