Celebrated visionary or naive egotist? Populist promoter or elitist intellectual? The creative legacy of Alexander Dorner as laid out in the five essays in Why Art Museums? reads as a struggle between provincialism and internationalism, idealism and ideology, success and failure. If you ever wondered how worthwhile it was giving care and attention to writing your board report, think again.
Alexander Dorner (1893-1957) became the director of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, in 1938 and began a radical makeover of the galleries, drawing on theories he had developed with modernist artists during his directorship of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (now Landesmuseum Hannover), Germany. 
The essays delve into the historical archive of the Rhode Island museum and shine a light on personality politics, racism and the struggles between public success and private perceptions. The essayists excavate primary and secondary sources to reveal a story that still has relevance. What are museums for? How can experimental leadership be supported?  
It emerges that Dorner, a German émigré who fled the Nazis, had significant innovations to offer museum practice after an experimental period in Hannover. Most notably, he commissioned the Russian suprematist artist El Lissitzky to make his Abstract Cabinet (1927), which proposed a 3D, all-encompassing method of displaying modern art.
 
Dorner was fascinated by the visceral possibilities that museums could offer through the use of colour, sound, light and new types of interpretation. Promoted by prominent figures such as the Bauhaus School’s founder, the German architect Walter Gropius, Dorner secured the position of director of the Rhode Island museum, but he lasted just three years.  
Daniel Harkett, an associate professor of art at Colby College in Maine, reveals some of the underlying social tensions behind this in his chapter, Tea vs Beer: Class, Ethnicity, and Troubled Tenure at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Drawing on board reports, newspaper articles and file notes from the museum, a matrix of patronage, social subscription and expectation of gentlemanly behaviour emerges. I wanted to know what happened after his dismissal. Did they dismantle his multi-sensory “atmosphere rooms”?
 
The US historian Dietrich Neumann looks at architectural collaboration. He notes that shortly after Dorner left, his friend – the American historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock – curated a show of modernist art, which suggests the museum continued to advance Dorner’s ideas.
This chapter, All the Struggles of the Present: Alexander Dorner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Rhode Island Architecture, reveals how the émigré creative community was using fresh eyes to promote a radical aesthetic.  
The subtext of these essays is that the clash of cultures and complexity of the historic moment in a US recovering from the Great Depression, combined with the parochial location of Dorner’s activities in bourgeois Rhode Island, led to an important figure not achieving the international recognition he deserved.
 
Dorner emerges as a creative disruptor and social activist. Prioritising the museum as a centre for education rather than a receptacle for taste presents itself as a central strategy in which Dorner had success and failure. His successes included an experimental schools programme, and foreign-language texts on art in the local newspapers of new immigrant communities. His failure is that his tenure was not renewed.  
One of the core aims of this book is to right a wrong. On his departure, Dorner left an unpublished text from which this volume takes its title and which is reproduced here. It is overflowing with ideas of museums as producers of progressive social energies. He ushers in a modern vision to sweep away the romantic model of viewing art on which museums were, he suggested, previously structured.  
In the final essay, The Way Beyond Museums, Sarah Ganz Blythe, the deputy director of exhibitions, education and programmes at the Rhode Island museum, inserts Dorner firmly into a lineage of thinkers such as John Cotton Dana, author of Should Museums be Useful? (1927) and John Dewey, who wrote Art as Experience (1934).  
Dorner’s approach to the museum as a site of education, which not only pioneered a new department in his own museum but also became a template for others, is testimony to his impact.  
 
Laura Sillars is the director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Edited by Sarah Ganz Blyth and Andrew Martinez, The MIT Press, £30, ISBN 978-0-262039147