This is the first of two volumes of essays concentrating on ephemeral exhibition spaces, between 1750 and 1918, in various European countries, Russia, and the United States. The term refers to a wide and stimulating variety of spaces, both public and private, the fixed, the portable, or the foldable. We shall see that the term also materialized in written and visual-textual sources, for example, catalogs, travel accounts, or politico-religious documents. As material spaces, they accommodated temporary shows or exhibits that were, either deliberately or otherwise, short-lived, quickly abandoned, or constantly under construction. They could function as alternative, unusual, or unexpected exhibition venues. As ephemeral exhibition spaces, they represented and tried to stabilize realities that were explicitly elusive and fragile, on either a personal level or the level of “other,” vanishing cultures behind fragmentary museum objects, or political entities that tried to establish or imagine themselves in these spaces.

Initially, studying these ephemeral exhibition spaces makes it possible, firstly, to recognize the role of ephemerality in exhibiting, collecting, and preserving as such in the period studied. Additionally, it also makes it possible to understand how these activities were embedded in a world that, on a much broader scale, had to deal with ephemerality, and that, moreover, had become fundamentally museal, as Alexandra Stara has shown for the iconic case of Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments Français.