25/1/07 - History of Art - Selecting Exhibitions: Argument versus Display

This lecture will discuss the process of selection of exhibitions, how shows are conceived, how works are chosen. What makes a good exhibition? Should the exhibition show fine objects, or fine objects with an argument?

It must be considered who the exhibition is for. Is it for the public? The elite of art historians? Or students? Anybody? The public might be too large and crowded. Depending on what the exhibition is showing, different publics will be attracted. For example, at the Royal Academy's Van Dyck exhibition, the main public was over 50, and when the Royal Academy had a pop art exhibition, there were mainly teenagers. The museum has to cater for different publics and attract sponsorship to make a profit. It is difficult to get sponsorship. Is the exhibition worth more than the permanent collection? Scholars are the biggest audience: exhibitions should provoke ideas and knowledge in them to be mot valuable. Local museums have more reason for exhibitions than larger museums (because it is the smaller museums that educate people the most).

Questions about nineteenth century art raised wider ramifications. The Hayward Gallery and Boston Museum of Fine Arts housed an exhibition on Renoir. This could be a distorting name due to lack of variation in the exhibition, which had only paintings, no sculptures. One masterpiece was placed beside another, giving a false impression. Is an exhibition reason enough for bringing pictures such long distances? Yet, they could be valuable for showing the progression of the artist, or contrasting the style of one artist with another. Pictures may be too fragile to travel. Bequests may restrict the movement of pictures. Renoir was only a partial exhibition, since only paintings were shown, and of those, only masterpieces.

At the National Gallery in London and The New York Metropolitan Museum, an exhibition, Ingres Portraits was shown. There was a single theme: showing different media and different levels of finish, including drawings. Different rooms were used so the lighting could be adjusted according to the media used: paintings need strong light and drawings only dim light. This demonstrated how the artist worked. On the sketch for Mme Moitessier, we can see that Ingres worked on the background first. Why did he abandon the drawing? The exhibition was therefore educational, but was it only for students or also for the public who had little knowledge of art?

Another exhibition at the National Gallery in London was shown in 1997: Seurat and the Bathers. This exhibition was based on a single picture. The artist had preserved the preliminary work for the final painting. Sketches and oil sketches were shown. The sequence of sketches was unknown, but was debated for the exhibition. Seurat and the Bathers was making an argument about how Seurat made up the final picture. Poussin's painting was put alongside Seurat's, supposedly to highlight his influence. Other influential pictures were hung, such as those by Corot and Lhermitte, and pictures that contrasted with Seurat's were hung, e.g. Loir. A painting by Cornet of the same scene was hung, as well as Seurat's subsequent painting, La Grande Jatte.

The Royal Academy in London and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, showed an exhibition called 1900. The original idea was to show works from the Exposition Universelle of 1900. However, some of the paintings that were needed couldn't be loaned out, so they showed paintings from the years outside of 1900, and paintings from outside of France. It was a daring juxtaposition. It was known that Picasso saw the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and was impressed by it; his Absinthe Drinker was shown in the exhibition. Degas's daring pose and subdued colour of After the Bath was placed beside Carolus-Duran's Danaë. At other times, the exhibitionists were suggestive rather than daring, for example by hanging Monet's Morning on the Seine next to Hofmann's Sunset on the Sea, both of which paint water and mist. Conventional themes were used, like landscape and portrait. There were also sub-categories like bathers and social scenes.

At the National Gallery of Scotland in 2003, an exhibition was held called Monet 1878-1883. These were paintings of the time when he was at Vétheuil and Normandy. The subject was not fully explored. There were high quality contrasts. It was shown that Monet often painted the same scene over and over again. Paintings from other artists who showed at the Exposition Universelle 1878 were hung beside Monet's. The exhibition was akin to a survey of mid-century French landscape painting. Many such artists died before Monet's paintings were finished, the artists that Monet considered to be his idols. Perhaps he wanted to show himself to be their successor. Monet's suggestion of binocular vision in his paintings was also highlighted in the exhibition.