Aim and field of responsibility
Odense City Museums, including the Hans Christian Andersen/Carl Nielsen unit, is responsible for collecting and registering artefacts as well as research and popularize the knowledge connected to Hans Christian Andersen. To a great extent, the department area functions as a documentation centre for the writer.
The aim of the unit is to disseminate the knowledge of its area. This is achieved via two forms of activity: studies and systematic basic research; broad presentation, and exhibition activities.
Work area
The unit's field of responsibility covers The Hans Christian Andersen Museum and Hans Christian Andersen's Childhood Home. Hans Christian Andersen occupies so important a place in the history of world literature that the museums are not only local and national in their orientation but appeal to an international audience with a great variety of prior knowledge. This means that the unit communicates both with the museum visitor with virtually no prior knowledge as well as with the determined researcher. Exhibition and research are naturally closely connected, yet they are opposites in the sense that research delves far deeper and has a different purpose than the dissemination which is based on it. To spread knowledge of the subject area requires taking account of the person without prior knowledge, whereas studies and research are aimed to those who demand complexity and specialisation.
Apart from the exhibitions, the unit seeks to communicate its field in concrete form via popular and academic book publications, the annual issue of Anderseniana, articles, lectures and events in order to put the central subject into new perspective. The public is also provided with professional knowledge about, and access to, the collections. This service is based on research, examination, and digitalisation of museum artefacts and is mainly communicated on the basis of the museum's website.
The unit services a number of external professional partners both at home and abroad and also takes part in external cooperation, exhibition activity, international network (for museums of literature) etcetera.
Hans Christian Andersen: Jumping Pierrot
The Hans Christian Andersen collections mainly comprise objects that have belonged to the author himself, and items that document his oeuvre including manuscripts, annotations, and letters. The writer's original drawings and papercuts are also among the most important elements of the collection. The comprehensive book collection of Andersen editions from all over the world is the museum's most important documentation of Andersen's worldspread authorship as well as the wide-ranging collection of illustrative art exposes the history of tradition. In addition, the collections include an extensive number of contemporary portraits of the poet, painted and graphical as well as photographed.
The unit places great importance on completing the huge collection of preserved manuscripts and therefore gives high priority to the acquisition of letters to and from Andersen, literary manuscripts and private memoranda. As the museum's collections of the writer's papercuts and drawings as well as personal items are without comparison the most exclusive in the world, the museum is most eager to acquire such effects, also including books from the writer's own shelves.