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4 ArtWatch UK Journal 22, Autumn 2007

Blockbuster Exhibitions: the Hidden Costs and PerilsA Report, in Honour of James Beck

By Michael Daley and Michael Savage

Introduction

In 1962 France’s first Minister ofCulture, André Malraux flamboy-antly made a personal loan of the“Mona Lisa” to the President of theUnited States, Jack Kennedy, andhis wife Jacqueline. Despite fierceopposition from the Louvre Muse-um’s conservators, the centuriesold, crack-susceptible panel crossedthe Atlantic on the S.S. France andwas put on public show by the Presi-dential couple first in the NationalGallery Washington and then at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in NewYork, early in 1963. At both venuespeople queued for hours to snatch aglimpse as they shuffled past thepicture, marshalled by guards toprevent any loitering.The exercise was deemed a greatpopular, political and technical suc-cess: several millions of people had“seen” the most famous painting inthe world; Europe’s finest and mostrevered had embraced America’smost gilded and dynamic; and, de-spite being subject to the strains andrisks of travel, a precious and frag-ile panel painting had, by courtesyof state-of-the-art packaging tech-nology, suffered no (discernible)harm.

Success spawned imitation andsomehow, an art-world monster hasemerged in our times: the exhibitionhas taken over the museum. Eventhe “Mona Lisa” could be movedgreat distances with impunity, whynot anything? In truth the Louvrehad got lucky. An incipient split,which runs down the centre of thepanel passing through the famoussmile (as terrified conservators hadwarned) had not, in the event,opened.Other carefully cosseted pictureshave not fared so well. In 2000 theMuseum of Fine Arts in Bostonfound its Turner oil painting “Slav-

ers throwing overboard the dead anddying – Typhoon coming on” (- pre-viously considered one of the fewTurner masterpieces in good condi-tion) to be damaged and “extremelyunstable” on return from the TateGallery. Despite having been“glazed and sealed against changesin relative humidity, the picture[had] reacted significantly to thevoyage” and lost flakes of paint. ATate spokeswoman said in responseto disclosure of the damage: “It ar-rived here safely where it was exam-ined thoroughly. Its condition wasstable…However, Turner’s paint-ings are notorious for becoming un-stable.” Then why was a chancetaken? (See below and “Masterpieceby Turner Damaged on loan to theTate”, The Times, October 28 2003.)

As will be shown, the remorselesstrend towards ever-bigger, bolder,more numerous, temporary travel-ling exhibitions – the so-called“Blockbusters” - has been widelycriticised by scholars, critics andconservators in recent years, but itsinstitutional apologists contend tothis day that as the blockbuster exhi-bition draws crowds and fills cof-fers, it remains an unequivocallyGood Thing.Our report counters this complacentdeception by bringing into the openthe physical costs to works of artand the cultural costs to museums,their staffs and their visitors. Wedepart from the common fatalismthat accompanies the sometimessnobbish criticism of the blockbust-ers. We believe that anyone can de-velop a meaningful appreciation ofart but that gimmicks and sideshowsdemean us all.

Part One: Physical Costs

There are three essential areas ofrisk associated with travelling exhi-bitions.

First. Accidents and losses duringand associated with travel: disman-tling, packing, transit, unpacking,re-hanging and so forth.Second. Injuries suffered duringotherwise unnecessary conservationtreatments required either by theexigencies of travelling and insur-ance, or in indulgence of the aes-thetic prejudices and predilectionsof curators, conservators and publi-cists.Third. Thefts.

The Dangers of Travel

Contrary to impressions fostered bymuseum and gallery administrators,the possibility of losing great mas-terpieces in a shipwreck or a plane,lorry, train or car crash remains realand ever-present. Modes of trans-port, particularly aircraft, are im-mensely safer than previously, buteven with aircraft, as airline pilotswill tell you, near misses are morefrequent than admitted. NicholasPenny, former Renaissance paint-ings curator at the National GalleryLondon, and present curator ofsculpture at the National GalleryWashington has pointed out that norebuttal of Francis Haskell’s case(seen below) against loan exhibi-tions was made for fear of bringingto public notice “the near accidentsof recent years” and the risk ofdrawing “public statements” fromsenior figures, like Sir Ernst Gom-brich, known privately to oppose thepractice.Moreover, with the great increase intravelling exhibitions, risks, ofwhatever magnitude, are taken moreand more often. Some acknowledge-ment of these risks is evident todayamong exhibition organisers them-selves: three of Ghiberti’s gildedbronze panels from the FlorenceBaptistery doors currently on trans-atlantic tour through Atlanta, Chi-cago, New York and Seattle, are

5ArtWatch UK Journal 22, Autumn 2007

travelling on separate planes be-cause “They’re too valuable to riska crash”. Similarly, the 20 terracottafigures sent (in wooden – and there-fore flammable - crates) to the Brit-ish Museum’s Chinese Warriorsblockbuster were flown in on twoplanes “to reduce risk”. Mathemati-cally literate persons are quick topoint out that avoiding the possibil-ity of total loss in this manner tri-ples the possibility of some loss.And actual losses do still occur. Aswe write, a China Airlines Boeing737-800 was destroyed by fire onlanding at the Japanese island ofOkinawa. Passengers and crew es-caped but possessions and cargo didnot (- see Fig. 1.)

In 1997 the British Museum flewall of its Graeco-Roman encausticportraits to Athens in a single plane.An entire class of objects at theMuseum could have been lost in asingle disaster.

On September 2, 1998, a Swissairjet carrying a Picasso oil painting(“Le Peintre”) valued at £1m, and asecond unidentified painting,crashed into the sea off Nova Scotiaat 300 knots, on a 20 degrees down-ward path and almost upside downin a 110 degree bank turn. All 229people on board were killed in-stantly as the plane and its contentsbroke on impact into millions oftiny pieces.

On July 12, 2001, the then directorof the National Gallery in London,Neil MacGregor, claimed that it hadbecome safe at some point in “thepast five to ten years” to jet worksof art around the world becauselittle widgets in modern packingcases alert handlers to any shifts ofcondition inside.Three months later, in the aftermathof the September 11 hi-jacked air-liners terror attack in New York,four Vermeer paintings that hadbeen loaned to the National Gallerywere stranded in London because ofthe reluctance of American mu-seum couriers to fly to Europe tocollect them. The Department ofHomeland Security in Washingtonhad received intelligence indicatingthat Al Qaeda terrorists were plan-

On August 20th 2007 this China Airlines Boeing 737-800 was destroyed byfire shortly after landing in Okinawa. All passengers and crew (narrowly)escaped. China Airlines has had four fatal accidents in the past 13 years inwhich 700 people have died.

Crowds queuing to view the Mona Lisa at the Washington NationalGallery in 1963 – from the 1969 memoir “Self-Portrait with Donors” by theGallery’s former Director, John Walker.

Former Barnes Foundation student Danni Malitzski captured this picture ofthe arrival of Matisse’s mural, La Danse, at the National Gallery Washingtonon April 5 1993 on a flat-bed truck – and not a climate-controlled vehicle aspromised to a court hearing called to overturn the terms of Barnes’ bequest.For a full account of the damage suffered by the mural in transit, see pages34-35.


ning to hi-jack cargo planes to crashthem into nuclear plants, bridges ordams.

In September 2001, an elaborate,richly carved and gilded fifty feethigh Baroque altar was wrenchedout of its architectural and spiritualcontext in a Benedictine church inBrazil and despatched to New Yorkfor exhibition as the glittering cen-trepiece of a blacked-out and artifi-cially lit Guggenheim Museumexhibition “Brazil: Body and Soul”.(See back cover)

In 2003, British Airways suspendedall flights into Saudi Arabia for threeweeks following the arrest of a ter-rorist with an SA7 anti-aircraft mis-sile. In July 2007 the US homelandsecurity chief Michael Chertof an-ticipated more summer attacks inBritain or America: “Al-Qaeda hasto some degree regenerated itself.”In 2003 the fine art insurance spe-cialists Hiscox disclosed that fine artinsurance premiums had increasedby 25 per cent in the two years fol-lowing the events of September 112001.

Sea travel is no safer.The great collector Sir William Bur-rell, who had made his fortune inshipping – and therefore fully appre-ciated its risks – insisted that none ofthe many works he left in bequest tothe city of Glasgow between 1944and, the year of his death, 1958,should ever cross any water – but in1979 a Parliamentary commissionrecommended the overturningof theterms of his bequest. (Legislation toenact this has not followed.)

Henry Clay Frick stipulated thatnothing should be lent from his col-lection, which was to be preservedin perpetuity at his (exquisite) NewYork mansion. But this was subse-quently deemed by administrators tocover only Frick’s own purchasesand not artworks purchased for thecollection after his death.

Where risks are involved, what ac-counts for such differences of atti-tude and behaviour between privateindividuals and public administra-tors? The collector/donor Andrew

Mellon stipulated that none of thepanel paintings he gave to the Wash-ington National Gallery should everbe loaned. Chester Dale went fur-ther, insisting that nothing whateverfrom his bequest to the Galleryshould go out on loan. Although aformer director of the WashingtonNational Gallery, John Walker, fa-voured such provisions and in 1969expressed the wish that “other mu-seum benefactors would similarlyinhibit loans of fragile material”,nonetheless, as Director, Walkerconfesses involvement in loan exhi-bitions he believed never shouldhave taken place.One difference between the twogroups would seem to be this: suchcollectors, having spent their ownmoney “bagging” a desirable, cov-eted object, revelled in its posses-sion and took no chances of losingit. Whereas, arts administrators whowork with other people’s moneyand/or possessions, may well havefewer qualms about risks involvedin, say, loaning or restoring works ofart. They have the luxury of indulg-ing in horse-trading, showmanshipor in playing impresarios and beau-ticians with possessions not theirown. Traditionally, as a check onbehaviour, administrators were no-tionally answerable to their Trustees- in whom ownership of, and re-sponsibility and liability for the artwas vested. As shown below, thatrelationship has effectively beendissolved leaving the Trustees freeto “sign off” their responsibilities onto (possibly reckless) museum ex-ecutive staffs.

Certainly, Kenneth Clark testified tohis own recklessness. A rich man,not needing to buy his own furni-ture, and free to buy the art he stud-ied and sometimes coveted, hefound himself at an absurdly tenderage, Director of the National Gallery- in which capacity he indulged hisadmitted giddy, “careless and irre-sponsible” nature. When he saw “in-conceivably reckless” risks beingtaken with his Gallery’s “NationalTreasures” by art handlers when onloan at the Louvre, he found theexperience “rather exhilarating”.Under his directorial hat, he

launched the Gallery’s Great-Make-over-by-Cleaning with an assault ona Velazquez. The fruits of that still-running campaign, he later claimed,had left the collection “incompara-bly more exhilarating” than the onehad inherited.

British Council apparatchiks crowedin their 1983-84 annual report about“spectacular success stories” and“huge crowds” generated by large-scale travelling exhibitions “fromMexico City to Madrid and Peking”.One such at the Grand Palais inParis - “The most ambitious Turnerexhibition ever staged abroad” - at-tracted over half a million visitorsbetween October 1983 and January1984. The 267 works loaned by theTate, the British Museum and othercollections, and insured (with Treas-ury assistance) for £70m, were des-patched in wooden crates by twolorries to be carried on consecutivedays from Dover to Calais by Seal-ink on board The Spirit of Free En-terprise. On March 6, 1987, hersister ship, The Herald of Free En-terprise, carrying 47 lorries, cap-sized and sank with a loss of 191lives in calm seas.

In November 2004, a curator at theWallace Collection, Stephen Duffy,warned: “It is only a matter of timebefore a major work is lost when aplane crashes or a boat sinks. Wemust ask ourselves if it needs such atragedy before we stop.”

It was reported on July 12, 2007 thata plot to blow up (by car bomb) aBrittany Ferries vessel, the Pont-Aven, carrying thousands of Britishtourists and a crew of 183, had beenthwarted when an Eta terrorist wasarrested carrying detonators for avan packed with explosives. An ear-lier Eta attempt to destroy a ferryleaving Valencia failed when theintended van-bomb broke down andhad to be abandoned.

Turner left his finished pictures tothe National Gallery on conditionthat they be kept together in a singlebuilding expressly and solely con-structed for the purpose. That condi-tion has not been honoured. Indeed,the Tate itself, as (eventual) recipi-


ent of almost the entire bequest, hasbeen accused of carelessness with itsown Turners. Far from achievingsafe haven on his death, Turner’spaintings have been taken by theTate to be its most eminently “swap-able”, “dispatch-able” assets. In the1953-54 Parliamentary debates onthe National Gallery and Tate Gal-lery Bill, one M.P., a Dr Stross,joked: “I have heard it put this way:‘Do not send out our Rembrandts;take a risk with your Turners, andknock your Picassos about a bit.’ ”Kenneth Robinson drew attention toa Turner landscape that had beendamaged while on loan to an em-bassy. By 1974, when museums andgalleries were still not as obligingwith their wares as today, the thenChairman of the National Gallery’sTrustees, John Hale, disclosed thatthree of the Gallery’s Turners had“travelled extensively – one or moreof them has been seen in Amster-dam, Berlin, Berne, Brussels, CapeTown, Chicago, Liege, New York,Paris, Rome, Rotterdam, Torontoand Venice.(We are greatly indebted to Dr SelbyWhittingham, Secretary-General ofDonor Watch, for this – and muchother relevant [email protected])

The perpetual recycling of Turner’soeuvre is increasing. The next pro-ject of Dr James Hamilton, the or-ganiser of the 2003-04 travellingshow, “Turner: The Late Seascapes”sent by the Clark Institute of Wil-liamstown, USA, to Manchester andGlasgow in the UK is “Turner andItaly”, an exhibition planned for2008-9 at the National Gallery ofScotland and the Palazzo dei Dia-manti, Ferrara. (For an account ofthe much-criticised restoration ofthe Clark’s Turner “Rockets andBlue Lights” made in preparationfor the tour, see ArtWatch UK Jour-nal 19)

In 2004, the art insurance companyAXA-Art disclosed that it alonepays out around £3m a year for artdamaged in transit. The true scale ofdamages is even larger, as museumsand galleries generally repair (un-disclosed) travel damage to worksthemselves to avoid increased insur-

ance premiums and unwelcomepublicity.

In 2006, the British Museum packed251 Assyrian objects - including itsentire, incalculably important, set ofmassive, fragile, wall-mountedNimrud Palace (easily scratched)alabaster relief carvings – in tissuepaper and foam filled woodencrates, and sent them in two cargojets to Shanghai for the “Assyria:Art and Empire” exhibition. TheMuseum’s director, Neil MacGre-gor, claimed in a television pro-gramme on the Museum’sworkings: “It’s easier to transportthese big valuable objects now – butit’s just as important to be certainthey’ll be safe at the other end.” Theother end was a long way away. Theonly flight capable of transportingall of the massive carvings to Shang-hai left from Luxembourg to wherethe crated objects had to be movedby lorry/ferry/lorry. The planesstopped over in Azerbaijan duringtheir 16 hours flights – giving a totalof four landings and four take-offson the round trip.On arrival in Shanghai, it was dis-covered that the recipient museum’slow doorways and inadequate liftsrequired the crates with the largestcarvings to be “rolled in through thefront door – which meant that wehad to get a mobile crane to get themup the stairs” said Darrel Day, theBritish Museum’s senior heavy-ob-jects handler. The Laurel and Hardypantomime was not over: “Eventhen we had to unpack three of thecrates to get a bit more clear-ance…[one carving] was still tootall, so we had to lay him down onhis side”. (See also page 34)

When the collection was finally un-packed (- delay occurred when re-placement had to be found for themuseum’s ancient, unsafe forklifttruck), it was found that “a few littleconservation things had to be done”and that a support had broken offone of the carved reliefs. Nic Lee,head of the Museum’s Stone, WallPaintings and Mosaics ConservationSection, was breezily unfazed: “thatwas a bit of nineteenth-century res-toration that I’d been wanting to getrid of for ages anyway”.

A restorer at the Museum of Mod-ern Art, New York, has claimed thatwithin the museum world there is aprofessional concept of “acceptablepotential loss” when consideringworks for loans. There would cer-tainly seem to be a high tolerance offailures to “forward-plan”. The in-coming (Morgan Stanley spon-sored) exhibition of Chineseterracotta figures at the British Mu-seum produced another art-handlingpantomime. The more than two-dozen (wooden) crates requiredwere delayed for two days in Bei-jing because they would not fit intothe holds of the two chartered cargoplanes. When they finally arrived atthe British Museum, they would notpass through the door of the roundReading Room (from which PaulHamlyn’s gifted library has beenevicted for the six months durationof the show). Even after the Read-ing Room’s main door frame hadbeen removed, the largest crates stillcould not enter the temporary exhi-bition space built above the famouscircular desks of the library, and hadto be unpacked outside the exhibi-tion space in the Great Court. Itwould seem that entire libraries ofbooks (even when only recently be-quested), architecture (listed and re-stored), historical associations andauras, count for little today at theBM - where staff swooned overadvance bookings to the ChineseBonanza running “four times higherthan those for the Michelangelodrawings show”. (See also page 35)

Last year the British Museumloaned over four thousand objects.Mr MacGregor has said that he seesno reason why any work might notbe loaned abroad providing it can bemoved “safely”. The difficulties ofsuch arrangements are frankly dis-cussed by one of his predecessors,David Wilson, in his “The BritishMuseum: A History”, (The BritishMuseum Press, 2002 - pp 334-336,“Exhibitions – A Vicious Circle?”).Mr Wilson admits that objects occa-sionally get damaged and some-times “go missing” and that thenumber of loans from the Museumdoubled between 1985 and 2000, inwhich year 114 separate loans of


individual items or groups of objectswere made within Britain and a hun-dred foreign loans sometimes ofonly two or three “objects of highimportance” but sometimes withlarge groups of images - usuallyprints and drawings that are highlysensitive to light.

Although less spectacular than ac-tual crashes, the net incremental ef-fects of widespread and repeatedtravel cause much harm. Every timea painting is lent it is subject tochanges in atmosphere that causestress to its support. It is subject tothe vibration of transit, and to therisk of careless handling – not nec-essarily an arm through the canvas,but the ongoing effects of brushingagainst it as it is taken down, crated,carried and, most vulnerably of all,hastily unpacked and re-hung at theother end in unfamiliar venues.

We know of some recent cases ofsuch damage coming to light.In 2000, pages of the Book of Kellswere damaged by vibration whenthe precious illuminated manuscriptwas flown from Ireland to Australia.In 2004 a Raphael was found onarrival for the National Gallery’s“Raphael: From Urbino to Rome”show to have suffered “a raisedcrack” in transit.

Thefts

Accidental damage is not the onlyrisk incurred when transporting art.Every year, more than £2bn of art isstolen, some of which is art on themove.

In November 2006, the Toledo Mu-seum’s Goya “Children with a Cart”was stolen en route for an exhibitionat the Guggenheim Museum in NewYork.

In 1994 the Tate Gallery loaned twoof what it holds to be Turner's “mostsignificant works” and had insuredfor £24m, “Shade and Darkness - theEvening of the Deluge” and “Lightand Colour (Goethe's Theory) - theMorning after the Deluge - Moseswriting the Book of Genesis”, to theSchirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. “Wewill not be sending a courier”, Tatedirector, Sir Nicholas Serota, told

the museum, “but as the works havehigh values we would like a memberof your staff to supervise the arrival/depalletisation of the cases at Frank-furt [airport] and their transit to theSchirn Kunsthalle”.The pictures were stolen from theFrankfurt museum on the day ofarrival and only returned to the Tatein December 2002 after payment ofa more than £3m ransom to thethieves in 2000.

Even when stolen art works are re-covered, they are typically damagedas a result of careless handling. TwoPicassos recently recovered from atheft in Paris were found to havebeen rolled so tightly that the painthad flaked. Two stolen Munchpaintings were found on recovery in2006 to have been scraped, punc-tured and to have suffered dislodgedpaint.

Such current risks and injurieswould surely suggest that a veryhigh bar should be set before thefinancial or other benefits of anyproposed travelling exhibition bedeemed sufficiently high to out-weigh the costs of travel. Similarly,the manifest shortcomings of thepresent system of stewardship byTrustees suggests that some consid-erably more effective method ofscrutiny and oversight is required toensure that all travel damages befully documented and reported if notaltogether prevented.

Secrecy and Cover-ups

While it is self-evidently the casethat paintings and other fragileworks of art are susceptible to cata-strophic damage whenever theytravel (as, for example, in the firethat destroyed most of the paintingsfrom Osterley Park en route to Jer-sey in 1949, including the great Ru-bens “Duke of Buckingham”), therisk of smaller damages from han-dling, which may never come tolight as they can be swiftly coveredby deft restoration – masks muchcumulative harm that takes place.Although known instances of suchdamage are legion, given the se-crecy of museums, these likely com-prise the tip of an iceberg.

Francis Haskell noted in his surveyof exhibitions (“The Ephemeral Mu-seum”, Yale University Press, 2000,p. 147), that “many of the conserva-tors best qualified … are obliged tocomply with the policies of the mu-seums that employ them and arevery much more eloquent in privatethan in public.”

Nicholas Penny, disclosed in 2000that: “museum employees areobliged to stifle their anxieties.” (Itis our understanding that the over-exposure of drawings to light duringrecent extended loans has been asource of considerable distress andanger among British Museum staff.)

In 1993, the New York Times artcritic, Michael Kimmelman, re-ported the loss of a Boucher paintingwhen loaned to a retrospective exhi-bition that travelled from New York,to Detroit to Paris. Plane crashes andacts of God, he added are not theonly issues: “There are countlesslesser kinds of damage – paintingsthat flake, sculptures that chip, artvandalized, bumped or dropped inthe course of being moved…” Notsurprisingly, Kimmelman added,museums invariably seek to concealmishaps: “no museum, either aslender or borrower, wants the taintof irresponsibility or carelessness.Although conservators, curators anddirectors privately raise doubts allthe time about fragile and importantworks of art being moved around byother institutions, they virtuallynever speak out. When they do, it isas one chorus: nothing goes wrongwhere they are.”

The fact that Copley’s “The Deathof Major Peirson” was damaged in1965-66 when loaned by the TateGallery to the National Gallery ofArt, Washington, only emergedthirty years later when minutes ofthe Tate’s Picture Cleaning Com-mittee were released at the PublicRecord Office, (now the NationalArchives) and spotted by the artsjournalist Martin Bailey. The Com-mittee learned that when the picture“had been removed from its framewithout authority, probably inWashington the canvas had beentorn away from the relining canvas


at the edge of the picture and a por-tion of the original paint was miss-ing.” In 1996 the Tate again lent thesame Copley to the Washington Na-tional Gallery. It is not knownwhether the Tate’s Trustees weremade aware of the earlier injuries.

Dangers of Restoration

For ArtWatch it is axiomatic that:restoration and so-called conserva-tion treatments alike, carry risks ofinjury to works of art; that works areput at additional risk of aestheticdamage whenever they travel; andthat it should, therefore be a clearlyaccepted principle of good museumpractice that the fewer restorationtreatments a work undergoes, thebetter.

Proof of the risks incurred duringtravel is seen in the claimed “preven-tive” need for works to “conserved”or “restored” precisely to make themmore capable of facing the traumasof their jaunts. (If travel constitutedno threat or hazard at all, it wouldnot matter what condition a workmight be in – it would arrive entirelyunaltered at its destination andwould return in like manner.) That“preventive” measures notwith-standing, many works of art sufferdamage in transit is a fact widely ifquietly noted within the museum andgallery circles.

It is common to spruce things upbefore showing them, in order to addto the novelty of the exhibition andto make pictures look their best, as ifmannequins at a fashion show.Between January 1960 and May1962, eleven paintings at the Na-tional Gallery, London, were, in thewords of the then director, Sir PhilipHendy, “put into condition andcleaned in order that they mighttravel safely abroad and look theirbest in exhibitions.” What Hendytook to be a picture looking at itsbest was a picture free of any yel-lowed varnish. But varnishes yellowas dogs scratch – it is their nature.The obsession with stripping var-nishes with solvents to “bring out thecolours” and then immediately re-varnishing with resins dissolved insolvents is perhaps one of the most

regrettable museum administrationindulgences.

Such cosmetic treatments can back-fire. Of the National Gallery’sAbbey-sponsored 2006-2007 Ve-lazquez show, Adam Raphael com-plained in the Guardian (Diary,December 9, 2006): “…a cleanerversion of the past isn’t always animprovement. Just look at the Ve-lazquez exhibition at the NationalGallery. There are paintings therethat have been cleaned so much theyare dirty. Sometimes glazes are puton for a reason.”The Gallery’s earlier cleanings of itstwo portraits of Philip IV of Spaineach triggered furious protestsshortly before and after the SecondWorld War. Its Velazquez “Philip IVhunting Wild Boar” had been disas-trously restored and relined at someindeterminate point in the 19th cen-tury. In 1833 a restoration, attempt-ing to “undo” and “redo” the effectsof the previous treatment was carriedout. It was again restored in 1846prompting (with several other pic-tures) one of the first and mostheated cleaning controversies at theGallery. It was re-re-re-restored in1950; re-re-lined, de-varnished andre-varnished in 1969; but then, lessthan forty years later all of this cu-mulative work was undone and re-done once more for the 2006-07blockbuster.

The National Gallery, Londonboasts in press releases that manypaintings will be ‘specially cleanedand restored’ for its Siena exhibitionfrom October 2007.

A particularly striking case of suchill-judged actions is detailed here inNick Tinari’s account (page 35) ofthe Barnes Collection dispersal, dur-ing which some thirty or more pre-cious and historically untouchedpaintings (each judged by the Metro-politan Museum’s Everett Fahy toconstitute “a dream of what an Im-pressionist picture should look like”)were threatened with (and only nar-rowly avoided) hasty restorationsimmediately prior to their lucrativewhirlwind blockbuster tour in 1993.

In Washington in the 1950s, DuncanPhillips was less lucky. He sent hisfamous and most precious Renoir“Luncheon of the Boating Party” tothe restorers Sheldon and CarolineKeck for a tiny remedial repair withspecific instructions to “iron out asmall blister on the surface and thenforward the canvas to Paris for amajor exhibition at the Louvre.”Phillips was distraught to discoverthat the Kecks had not only cleanedhis picture (then as pristine as thoseowned by Barnes) without permis-sion but had even made a film oftheir unauthorised intervention. Init, Phillips told the art critic Alexan-der Eliot, colour stains are seencoming off the picture and on torestorers’ swabs. The picture was sobadly damaged that on arrival inParis, curators at first “refused toaccept the resultant ruin as a Re-noir”. Phillips implored Eliot“please don’t report this tragedy. It’stoo dreadful.”

Large museums offer, as “political”inducement to private collectors(and to take up slack capacity inlarge conservation studios?), to re-store and conserve works for free.The Getty Conservation Institute of-ten restores paintings free of chargefor hard-up museums, in frank ex-change for loans to the Getty Mu-seum. Given the institution’s wealthand influence, this behaviour willdisseminate their ‘house’ conserva-tion approach very widely. This is aparticularly regrettable developmentas paintings in private collectionshave often escaped the systematicand intrusive restoration campaignsfavoured by museums with largeconservation departments. As theNew York restorer Marco Grassi haspointed out, the condition of worksby minor artists (which attract littleattention from conservators) is oftensuperior to that of major artists whoattract the most attention.It is almost a commonplace today tonote that when large wide-rangingblockbusters are assembled, thegreatly differing appearances ofworks by the same artist – and oftenfrom the same altarpiece or commis-sioned suite of works – testify to thevarious and cumulative injuries suf-


fered by what restorers euphemiseas works’ individual “conservationhistories”. (See Martin Gayford’s“How Clean is Your Art?” whichappeared in the Autumn 2004 issueof Art Quarterly. Viz, on the VanDyck blockbuster at the RoyalAcademy: “the comparison of pic-tures of precisely the same period,but from different museums was soglaring as to verge on tragic.”)

By exposing variations of conditionwithin artists oeuvres, blockbustershighlight a striking paradoxicalasymmetry in the world’s pictures:while within an artist’s oeuvre, therange of conditions forever widensaccording to the varying treatmentsimposed by different owners, withina given museum, paintings comemore and more to resemble one an-other because of the homogeneity ofthe given house style of treatment.On seeing the National Gallery inLondon for the first time, a profes-sor of restoration from St PetersburgAcademy of Arts, AnatolyAlyoshin, expressed disbelief at theway “all the paintings seemed tohave been painted in the same studioat the same time”.

Such is the scale and apparent hasteof pre-exhibition “conservation”frenzy today that works in showsoften bear strikingly different ap-pearances from their own photo-graphic illustrations in exhibitioncatalogues.In the recent National Gallery Ve-lazquez show catalogue, for exam-ple, the entry on the portrait of theartist’s mentor, Don Gaspar de Guz-mán, Count-Duke of Olivares, re-fers to the subject’s hands, notingthat one “grips the table, while theother is poised on his sword hilt, astance which amplifies his massiveform and animates its contours, re-flecting his lively, tireless persona.”What is not mentioned is that thehand-on-sword in the accompany-ing catalogue illustration no longerexists – that hand has evidently beenrepainted.

Virtual injuries

It would appear that we are enteringan era where especial vigilance is

becoming necessary; that a new andadditional means of falsifying pic-tures has fallen into the hands ofmuseum staffs: the digital manipula-tion of photographs.The catalogue for the Rothschild-sponsored 2006-2007 “Americans inParis, 1860-1900”, blockbuster (or-ganised jointly by the National Gal-lery, London, the Museum of FineArts Boston, and the MetropolitanMuseum, New York) carried twolarge full colour images of JohnSinger Sargent’s stunning portrait ofMadame Pierre Gautreau, the notori-ous “Madame X” now at the Metro-politan Museum, one on the cover,and a full page detail inside. Thatportrait had been celebrated for itsaudacious profiled depiction of thesubject wherein from “head to toe,the form ‘draws’ itself – in onestroke it becomes a harmony oflines”.

The profile of the head that featuresin the exhibition catalogue reproduc-tions differed strikingly from onereproduced only a few years earlierby the Metropolitan Museum on thecover of its own (Spring 2000) Bul-letin. The profile of the hair hadchanged dramatically in two re-spects: the bun on the top of the headhad become sharper while, contrar-ily, the facetted back of the hair hadbecome flatter, duller, and less ana-tomically expressive. (See page 30)

In 2000, alarmed by the picture’sthen recently restored appearancewe had asked the Metropolitan Mu-seum’s director, Philippe de Monte-bello, to see its conservation records,but without success. (See “X LESS”,Jackdaw April 2006) In 2006 notingfurther, apparent changes to the pic-ture in the exhibition catalogue, weasked if it had been restored again.Not touched it since 1996, said therestorer, Dorothy Mahon. But thenwhat accounts, we asked, for theclear changes evident in the latestcatalogue illustrations? In support ofthe question, a scanned image show-ing the differing portrayals in thetwo publications was sent to theMetropolitan Museum conservationdepartment. Ms Mahon replied, of-fering the explanation:

“After reviewing the two images yousent I can see for myself the discrep-ancy which is the cause of yourconcern.” Colour proofs had beensent to New York [i.e. to the Metro-politan Museum, the owner of thepainting]…and colour correctionnotes on the proofs had been made infront of the painting in the gallery.The annotated proofs had been sentoff to London. “How the image mayhave been altered during colour cor-rectng at the Italian printers I cannotsay, but sometimes this process in-volves digitally masking off separateareas, Perhaps this could explain thecontour shift in the hair.”

Perhaps it could. But it does notmitigate the failure of anyone at theMetropolitan Museum to noticechanges made to the design of onethe Museum’s most famous - andindeed “iconic” - pictures. It comesas no surprise to regular restoration-watchers that changed images gounspotted and unpunished within amuseum – restorers have been redo-ing profiles and much else with im-punity for decades. A restorer at theNational Gallery of Scotland an-nounced his intention to “improveTitian’s contours” on the Gallery’sSutherland Titians. Arthur Lucas re-did the contours of Bacchus’s andAriadne’s hair in the National Gal-lery’s great Titian in 1969.But there is a most disturbing twistto this latest incident. If sloppy su-pervision of digital technicians wereto render reproductions in futurecatalogues unreliable, then any visu-ally corroborated criticism of restor-ers would be greatly handicapped.The veracity of the photographic re-cord of pictures is essential to anyproper appraisal of pre and post-treatment states of restorations be-cause in producing the restored state,the pre-restored state is destroyed.It should be understood that thosewho bought the show’s catalogue(£40 hardback, £25 paperback) paidfor a misleading, artistically falsify-ing record. Perhaps, like misprintedstamps, the catalogues will becomecollectors’ items. But it would benicer to think that they might yet bewithdrawn from sale.

7 11ArtWatch UK Journal 22, Autumn 2007

Pressure to lend

Even curators who recognise therisks find it difficult to resist them.As we saw with the “Mona Lisa”,loans of great, valuable and fragileworks of art do not arise easily. Of-ten prior pressure is applied from thehighest quarters. The Royal Acade-my’s Italian Art Show of 1930 waswidely taken to be a celebration ofItaly herself made at Mussolini’sbehest via Lady Chamberlain, wifeof the former British Foreign Secre-tary – Kenneth Clark considered it acalculated piece of Fascist propa-ganda. Many, including BernardBerenson, were appalled at the ideaof sending over three hundred ofItaly’s finest works (including six-teen Titians, eleven Raphaels, elevenBotticellis, six Giorgiones and thirtysix Leonardo drawings) on a singleship, the “Leonardo da Vinci”. Wal-ter Sickert protested “If providencehad elected to sink the good shipLeonardo da Vinci in the gale in-stead of, as it did the other day, acargo of modern paintings, Societywould have said ‘Oh! Hard lines!’and passed on to more congenial oc-cupations.“That the Royal Academy shouldhave succumbed to a sporting stuntis disappointing. The English adora-tion for taking risks, for the fun ofrisks, sometimes our own, and al-ways somebody else’s, is ineradica-ble. But the Academy surely exists,one might hope, to say the becomingand scholarly word at the right mo-ment.”

Leonardo’s “Annunciation” is beingsent to Japan as part of an Italiantrade fair, a loan again opposed bythe institution itself. In March 2007an Italian Senator chained himself tothe Uffizi railings in protest.

In 1995, Sir Ernst Gombrich dis-closed to ArtWatch UK that theKunsthistorisches Museum in Vi-enna had come under enormouspressure to release Vermeer’s greatand celebrated Art of Painting for anexhibition to be held at the Maurit-shuis, the Hague, and the NationalGallery of Art, Washington: “…in-deed in the end the Queen of theNetherlands rang the President of

Austria (who had no idea what shewas talking about!). So the Museumcalled in ‘experts’, including a re-storer from Germany, who all saidthat the picture was not in a condi-tion to travel. So even restorers cando some good.”But not for long: in 2001 the paintingtravelled over land and sea to theMetropolitan Museum in New Yorkand the National Gallery in Londonin a Vermeer-fest held in replicationof the 1995-96 Mauritshuis/ Na-tional Gallery, Washington show.Many Vermeers travelled to all fourvenues in the two shows. Many hadbeen “restored” – to dreadful, per-manent effect - for the temporaryoccasions. (The London/New Yorkshow had been made possible by anindemnity from the US FederalCouncil on the Arts and Humanities,and by the sponsorship of Ernst andYoung.)(See page 31)

Curators are not above politicalmachinations themselves. ThomasP. Campbell, curator of tapestries atthe Met notes that. “no one but theMet could have pulled off the exhibi-tion of Renaissance tapestry we hadhere a few years ago, where therewere forty-five tapestries on show.The politics involved, the financinginvolved, the leverage, and the ex-pertise involved: No one else hadthat. We bribed and cajoled andtwisted the arms of institutionsaround the world – well, we didn’tbribe, of course – but politically itwas very complicated negotiatingthe loan of these objects” (ThomasP. Campbell in “Danziger”, p. 40)

Lawrence Kantner of the Metropoli-tan Museum of Art explains that theyhesitate before requesting panelsover 90cm, but notes that “it’s oftena real song and dance to persuadeanyone to let them go. But I wouldsay the Met has a cachet that fewmuseums can complete with: notonly are we big and prominent, butalso we’re in New York, and a lot ofpeople want their things seen in NewYork. It’s exposure on the bigstage.” (“Danziger” p.107). He alsonotes that: “Your stock suddenlyrises” (“Danziger” p. 108).

Plautilla Nelli’s large altarpiece,Lamentation with Saints is beinglent from San Marco to the NationalMuseum of Women and the Arts inWashington D.C. This 113.5 inhigh canvas has been restored twicein recent years. Jordana Pomeroyboasted in the Museum’s bulletin:“In 2003 the Florence Committee ofthe National Museum of Women inthe Arts sponsored more expensiveconservation of the painting, effec-tively becoming its second patronfour centuries after its completion.”

In 1996 the American ambassador tothe Netherlands gained the reluctantrelease from the Stedelijk Museumin Amsterdam of a Max Beckmannpainting for an exhibition at theSoHo Guggenheim in New York.The dealer Richard Feigen said thatwith the Beckmann exhibition,which he instigated, he had had – aswith other cases of museum “hard-ball” – to promise loans from hisown collection in exchange.

Today governments are promotingloan exhibitions to East Asia as theytry to promote themselves in a fast-growing part of the world. Over fiftypaintings from the Prado - includingmasterpieces by Titian, El Greco,Velazquez, Tintoretto, Rubens, VanDyck, Tiepolo and Goya – will besent to Beijing and Shanghai be-tween September and November2007.Britain’s Neil MacGregor some-times seems to be perpetually jettingto China, occasionally in attendanceon the Prime Minster, and usuallywith a journalistic Boswell (or twoor three) in tow.

As mentioned above, in his eager-ness to bring to the British Museuma mammoth exhibition of life-sizeterracotta tomb figures, Mr MacGre-gor converted the recently and ex-pensively restored Reading Roominto a gallery by building a falsefloor over its historic circular con-figuration of desks. The fact of thisarchitectural, cultural and historicalviolation is being used to “proveneed” and launch a proposed £70-100m extension to the Museum thatwill accommodate both the world’slargest blockbuster exhibitions and a


conservation centre: “Knowing thatnothing squeezes corporate heartslike a blockbuster exhibition,MacGregor has timed his proposedextension to musical perfection, an-ticipating that the great fund-holdersof the 21st century will be chal-lenged by the ambitions of an arche-typal oligarch [- the First Emperorof China]”, purred the EveningStandard’s Norman Lebrecht, onJuly 27, 2007.

Here the perhaps unguardedly adu-latory Lebrecht lays bare “blockbus-terdom’s” naked politico/powermechanisms: “MacGregor, 61, hasgone the extra 20,000 miles to makethis exhibition happen, flying toBeijing twice in a week on one occa-sion to convince officials that Lon-don was worthier than Paris, Berlinand other bidders. He blitzed theChinese with London’s core advan-tages – its selection as 2012 Olym-pic city in succession to Beijing; itsnew Eurostar terminal that will drawcrowds from all over the continent;its access to English-speaking cy-berspace, not least its free-entry mu-seums that allow the glories of theancient world to be seen by the in-ternational proletariat without pro-hibitive expense.” (There is to be£12 entrance charge.) “It’s going tobe London’s biggest attraction sinceTutankhamun 40 years ago”MacGregor said.

It may not hold the record for long,however. In November Tutankha-mun II opens in London at O2 (theformer Millennium Dome). Its or-ganisers are confident of betteringattendances at the 1972 British Mu-seum Tutankhamun exhibition(1.7m) with an anticipated 2m pay-ing at least £15 per head partly inorder to “assist” Egypt’s archaeo-logical services. Dr Zahi Hawass,the secretary general of Egypt’s Su-preme Council of Antiquities, saidthat the show’s various outings areexpected to earn at least £50m toprotect and preserve his country’sheritage. The nearly 3,500 years oldTutankhamun artefacts, he threat-ens, will crumble to dust unless theyare “conserved”, better displayedand protected from “the ravages ofmass tourism”. The famous death

mask shown the last time will not becoming. Dr Hawass told Radio 4'sToday programme: "It is unlikely toever leave the Cairo Museum now.It’s far too fragile and it is too risky”.

Terracotta, lacking tensile strength,is one of the most fragile sculpturalmaterials of all – where a droppedbronze might dent, a dropped terra-cotta object smashes, and yet, a num-ber of (smaller) groups of theChinese terracotta figures have al-ready recently been, as Lebrechtnoted: “crated up and shipped toWashington, Moscow, Rome andother pressure points on the globalnerve system”.

Part Two: Cultural Costs

The hidden costs of the blockbusterphenomenon fall principally on themuseum-goer, in whose name thisall takes place. Great museums arebeing debased and trivialised, theircollections dipped into as raw mate-rial for exhibitions, their curatorsdemoted to entertainers. People cantravel thousands of miles to see acollection, and find dozens of keyworks missing. Not only do we losethe chance to see specific artworks;we also lose a sense of the coherenceof the collections.

Museums beg for acquisition fundsto ‘fill gaps’ or enrich particularparts of their collections. But oncethe purchase is completed, the coher-ent collection described in the grantapplication is broken up again intofragmentary exhibits. Sometimesthis is an enriching process. But thescale of the exhibition phenomenonmeans that permanent collections arepermanently disrupted, and manyexhibitions are designed to be spec-tacular rather than illuminating.

This obsession with the temporaryand the transient has deep roots, butas we will see the phenomenon todayis qualitatively different and moreworrisome.

Growth of Exhibitions

Francis Haskell’s “The EphemeralMuseum” chronicles and criticisesthe rise of exhibitions. His masterlyhistory sets out developments from

the earliest loan shows in seven-teenth century Rome to the gro-tesque spectacles of our own age.The earliest shows were essentiallyceremonial. It was only in the nine-teenth century, with the exhibitionsat the Royal Academy, or the greatManchester Art Treasures exhibitionof 1857, that the art itself became thefocus. The striking aspect of theseexhibitions is that they had the char-acter of a ‘mini-museum’. Theseexhibitions borrowed the best theycould get from inaccessible privatecollections. There was no particularunifying theme. They were organ-ised independently of museums,which did not put on temporary ex-hibitions until much later.

Arguably the first truly modern exhi-bitions occurred from around the1890s, with more specialised art-his-torical shows, such as Rembrandt inAmsterdam and London in 1898 and1899, and Flemish Primitives inBruges in 1902. There were earliermonographic exhibitions, includingDurer and Rubens, but the late nine-teenth century exhibitions involvedgreater art-historical seriousness.This was perhaps the golden age ofexhibitions, when art was much lessaccessible than today and reproduc-tions were much poorer, so theseexhibitions represented a real leapforward for art-historical scholarshipas well as providing a truly uniqueopportunity for the visiting public.Another change was that museumswere increasingly involved in exhi-bitions, both as hosts and as lenders,as the great private and aristocraticcollections were increasingly sup-planted by museums after WorldWar I, through nationalisation andpurchase.

Later exhibitions grew to elephan-tine proportions, such as the crimi-nally negligent Italian Art exhibitionat the Royal Academy in 1930 men-tioned above

More recently there has been a dis-tinctly qualitative shift within, aswell as quantitative growth of exhi-bitions. The focus of many institu-tions has subtly moved from concernwith its collection to a focus onexhibitions. The common term “per-


manent collection” separates out thedowdy old stuff from the more excit-ing new roles of putting on shows.Famous exhibitions, such as Tutank-hamun in 1972, captured the head-lines. But it is the constant stream ofexhibitions, with programmes ar-ranged for years ahead, which hastransformed museums more pro-foundly, changing the responsibilityof the curators from looking after thecollections to putting on shows.

David M. Wilson, a former directorof the British Museum, identifies thepressures on curator as the main costof exhibitions in his history of themuseum: “Occasionally an object isdamaged; very occasionally some-thing goes missing. But the prob-lems tend to reside elsewhere; thestrain on the curatorial staff has in-creased enormously” (“The BritishMuseum: A History 2002”, The BMPress, p. 335).He notes that between 1985 and2000 the number of exhibitions atthe British Museum doubled. WhatWilson saw as a problem, is nowtaken by some museum directors tobe a positive opportunity. MarkJones at the Victoria and Albert Mu-seum aims to show all dozen or so ofhis museum’s exhibitions each yearin at least three venues, six in Britainand six abroad.

Once, temporary exhibitions weremodelled on ‘permanent’ collec-tions; they most commonly aimed togive an encyclopaedic display of anaspect of the history of art, whethera national school, a regional ten-dency or an artist’s oeuvre. Todaypermanent collections are modelledon temporary exhibitions. As men-tioned above, collections are oftenarbitrary, quirky and, repeatedly re-hung. London’s Tate Modern hastaken this furthest. It now has spon-sored re-hangs of its permanent col-lection (“UBS Openings”),announced with all the fanfare of atemporary exhibition. Great worksare often not on display; others aredemeaned by inappropriate juxtapo-sition. But it has the virtue of beingnew, which some seem to imagine isthe only reason anyone would everreturn to a familiar gallery.

Even acquisitions are made with aneye to peripatetic roles as much as totheir place in the permanent collec-tion. A rare early panel by Cimabueacquired by London’s National Gal-lery in 2000 has already been inthree exhibitions, in Naples, NewYork and London. The cataloguingof permanent collections is oftenneglected, whilst streams of exhibi-tion catalogues are produced. TheNational Gallery of Scotland pub-lished a catalogue of its Italian andSpanish Paintings in 1993, but itsfabulous French and Dutch paint-ings are still un-catalogued. Mean-while the Gallery continues toproduce catalogues of its regularsummer blockbusters, timed to coin-cide with the Edinburgh Festival.

Professional power shifts are dis-cernible in the little-regulatedscramble. Tate Director Sir NicholasSerota writes: “The gallery or mu-seum has become a studio, prompt-ing a significant change in theconventional relationship betweenthe artist, the work of art and thecurator. No longer can the curatorbe seen solely as the dispassionatejudge of quality, who visits the stu-dio or private collection to selectworks and to assemble a body ofmaterial which will be presented tothe public in the museum. Insteadthe curator is a collaborator, oftenengaging with the artist to accom-plish the work.” (“Experience ofInterpretation: The Dilemma of Mu-seums of Modern Art”, p. 36). Herewe see the curator elevating himselfto the status of artist’s equal, aggran-dising the creative role of the custo-dian through changing exhibitionpractices. Many art world dealersand exhibition secretaries have pre-posterously taken to dubbing them-selves “Gallerists”.

The Koninklijk in Antwerp has donemuch worse, allowing a contempo-rary artist to play around with itsincomparable collection of Flemishart, interspersing the artist’s ownwork and using the permanent col-lections as part of his own installa-tions. The effect was to make itimpossible to appreciate the Kon-inklijk’s established collection,which – unlike the brutal upstart

brought in to shake it up – has stoodthe test of time. The Tate allowed aconceptual artist to make Rodin’s“The Kiss” her own work by bind-ing it with string. And now evenLondon’s National Gallery is fol-lowing: Yinka Shonibare has beenallowed to create a fatuous installa-tion to commemorate the abolitionof the slave trade, a trite intrusion ofshallow politicking into the vener-able halls of the National Gallery.The very character of the museumis, as Francis Haskell described it,‘ephemeral’.

Even permanent collections are nolonger permanent. Increasingprices and decreasing budgets haveencouraged museums to club to-gether to buy major works. ThomasHoving revealed that the Metropoli-tan Museum of Art discussed thepossibility of a joint purchase ofVelazquez’s “Juan de Pareja”, be-fore buying it alone. More recently,Van Dyck’s unusual portrait ofFrancois Langlois was jointlybought by the Barber Institute, Bir-mingham, and the National Gallery,London. The National Gallery andthe National Museum of Walesjointly bought, and now passPoussin’s “The Finding of Moses”between themselves at eighteenmonths intervals – though even thisshifting arrangement is subject tofurther disruption, as when the pic-ture was shown in Poussin exhibi-tions in Paris and London. And eventhe Getty Museum, with its fa-mously deep pockets, has bought aDegas and a Poussin jointly with theNorton Simon Museum, the paint-ings travelling between them everytwo years.

Walter Annenberg’s valuable col-lection of French impressionistswas moved between his home inCalifornia and the MetropolitanMuseum of Art every six monthsuntil it finally moved to the Metpermanently upon his death. It wasa lapse in judgment by the Met topermit this collection, includinglarge paintings, to be subject to suchupheaval twice a year.

The treatment of Antonio Canova’sThree Graces, one of the greatest


masterpieces of neo-classical art, isparticularly shocking. The first ver-sion is in the Hermitage in St Peters-burg. A second, commissioned forWoburn Abbey, its installation in apurpose-built temple being person-ally supervised by Canova, re-mained intact and pristine with itshighlights beautifully preserved un-til its recent sale, jointly, to the Vic-toria and Albert Museum andNational Gallery Edinburgh. Thuswrenched from its original context atWoburn, it is carted between the twolocations every seven years.In 1998 it was moved in a purpose-built, climate-controlled crate, firstby lorry from Edinburgh to Ports-mouth, then by ferry from Ports-mouth to Bilbao, and finally fromBilbao to Madrid by lorry. On arri-val it was found to have suffered acrack. The journey to Madrid was a“thank you” to Baron Hans HeinrichThyssen-Bornemisza, whose£800,000 donation made the pur-chase possible.

But worst of all is the behaviour ofthe Louvre, surely the greatest mu-seum in the world. It now leases outlarge parts of its collection to out-posts, most recently in Abu Dhabi,where it is being paid for its ‘brand’and for the loan of masterpiecesfrom its collection. This follows aprevious lease deal with Atlanta,Georgia. These are purely commer-cial deals where a selection of worksfrom the Louvre will be used to cre-ate ‘mini-museums’, taking themout of the larger context of the Lou-vre and allowing the highest biddersto establish their own museums.

The risk of damage arising fromthese grubby transactions is uncon-scionable. The new outposts dull theimpact of the Louvre, depriving it ofworks that its visitors ought reasona-bly to expect to see. The moneywould better be spent on scholar-ships to allow Arabs and Georgiansto travel to Europe to study the art insitu, rather than subject great art toongoing strains of travel. Unfortu-nately this trend is catching. TheHermitage is setting up outposts,including one in Somerset House,London and in Italy. Mark Jones has

proudly announced that the V&A isforging partnerships with museumsin San Francisco, Bombay and Bei-jing.

By pursuing the temporary, the trav-elling exhibition to such excessivedegrees the museum has (in Britain)made a political rod for its ownback. A philistine Labour Govern-ment has decided that it too can playthe touring game. The great nationalart institutions are unacceptably“London-centric”, one arts minister(-Estelle Morris, who fired herselffor incompetence) has claimed: “Wewant to see the cultural centre ofgravity start to move from the capi-tal.” Ever close to Governmentthinking, the Tate was by then al-ready operating an exchange andexhibition scheme with five galler-ies. Fifth-columnists in the politi-cised and public sector unionisedentity known as “the Museum Serv-ice” lend eager support to suchmoves: in 2006 the Museums Asso-ciation report “Collections of theFuture” called for museums to loanand tour their objects “more often,more widely”.

The cost to the “ museum goer”

If the cult of the blockbuster hasproved subversive to the institutionof the museum, the cost to the visitoris high indeed. Too often we find thepaintings we had gone specificallyto see in a permanent collection areout on loan. Too often also the dis-rupting visiting temporary exhibi-tion itself proves to be grosslyover-crowded and/or inane in con-tent. David Lee’s account of histypically grisly and frustrating expe-rience at the recent Raphael exhibi-tion at London’s National Gallery(see page 37) gives plangent expres-sion from one frequent, most dedi-cated “museum-goer” to a cryuttered by many others.

In key respects, the blockbuster isbecoming victim of its own success.As more and more exhibitions aremounted by more and more muse-ums and galleries in haste (often indirect competition among them-selves) and with hurriedly ill-pre-pared catalogues and accompanying

literature, the inherent risks and thecosts involved increase proportion-ally.

Among museum-goers, a coverttwo-tier system is emerging, whereselected experts, apparatchiks, sym-pathetic journalists, politicians,business sponsors and the institu-tionally favoured few enjoy specialand congenial out-of-hours viewingswhile the paying hoi polloi mustbrave the crowds, viewing heads andbacks at every turn rather than paint-ings and works of art.In 2001 the (then, now ex-) Timescolumnist, Mary Ann Sieghartshowed how valuable a perquisite afavoured viewing can be: “Yester-day I had the rarest treat: a chance towander alone around the Vermeerexhibition at the National Gallery. Ihad been once already, but I sawmore of the backs of other people’sheads than the delicate paintwork ofthe master. Then I received out ofthe blue, an invitation to a pre-break-fast viewing.“I deliberately arrive a little earlyand feasted myself before anyoneelse joined me. The stillness of thepaintings cries out for silent, solitaryviewing…Catch it if you can.”From 1997 to 2002, Ms Sieghartserved as a trustee on the NationalHeritage Memorial Fund, which in1994 had been given responsibilityto administer (through the HeritageLottery Fund) the heritage share ofthe National Lottery funds. Al-though not an arts journalist, MsSieghart frequently declared an in-terest and participated in art fundingand policy controversies in herTimes column. On July 17 2002 shedefended money poured into theconverted Gateshead flour mill gal-lery know as “Baltic”: “What housescontemporary art has become as im-portant as the art itself…Baltic is afabulous building with no collectionat all, just a rolling series ofShows…Here the building is thebrand. The art will change everymonth but the edifice remains thesame. People will visit not becauseworld famous paintings can be seenthere but because the Baltic has abuzz…However variable the qualityof the art inside, Baltic will blast an


air of excitement and creativity intoan area which, until very recently,was blighted and depressed. Thanksto a subsidy of £15m a year from theArts Council Lottery Fund on top ofits £33.4m capital grant, Baltic hasfree entry. Already Newcastle’s andGateshead’s taxi drivers and hair-dressers have been given a preview[brain-washing?] evening of theirown, so that they can spread theword to their customers.” In her col-umn of May 26 2005 Ms Sieghartpraised the creation of “a renais-sance [of Northern cities] that istruly inspirational [by means of] anexplosion of cultural investment,thanks mainly to the National Lot-tery.”On December 31 2004 she revealedthat: “When I was a trustee of theHeritage Lottery Fund and we prom-ised the Victoria and Albert Mu-seum many millions of pounds torestore its British galleries, we stipu-lated that the end result had to beenjoyable as well as educational.”(Italics added.)Popular shows such as the Vermeerare often packed throughout their‘run’; museums often operate timedentry to restrict numbers, but seemto consider a ratio of three or fourpeople to even the tiniest exhibit tobe quite acceptable. Indeed, the artitself is seen as less important thanthe ‘experience; the New YorkTimes reported on the ‘Atlanta Lou-vre’ that, “Many visitors found thelong lines as gratifying as the art”.Being part of the crowd at a block-buster brings a qualitatively differ-ent – a debased and poorer –experience than the unhurried con-templation of art that museumssometimes still and always ought topermit. The fairground and its bark-ers ought never to have been takenas operational paradigms by the mu-seum and gallery worlds. So whyhas it been?It is now time to consider the bal-ance sheet, explicitly to assess theclaims made for the blockbuster, andto summarise our criticisms.

The Case for the Blockbuster

Temporary exhibitions have cleartheoretical attractions to visitors,

museum administrators and govern-ments.They provide:

- PublicityMajor exhibitions grab the attentionof the critics and provide opportu-nity to publicise the institution.•Carefully orchestrated publicitycampaigns trickle details to the pressmonths in advance, taking selectedjournalists on overseas trips to seethe treasures to be brought to themasses, providing special previewsto journalists, and advertisingwidely. The theory is that peopledrawn in to see a particular exhibi-tion will return to the museum againand again.

- RevenueGlamorous exhibitions entice gener-ous sponsorship, provide ticket reve-nue and raise money frommerchandise and catalogue sales.• Afew blockbusters per year can makea vital contribution to the costs ofrunning a museum. For independentmuseums without government sup-port, this can be a matter of survival.(But even powerful state-sponsoredinstitutions with fabulous collec-tions, can be pressed into presentingstrings of blockbusters by bullyingand philistine paymasters. Dr AlanBorg, the then director of the Victo-ria and Albert Museum [V&A], wastold by Alan Williams MP that:“When you have one of the highestgrants-in-aid per head per visitoryou have to have a duty to the tax-payer to try and get more peoplethrough your doors. The idea is toget people into the museums.” In arude, hectoring interrogation he ob-jected: “Your blockbusters do notbust many blocks, do they?” Againand again Dr Borg was told that hemust present more Faberge exhibi-tions, if that is what people will payto see.)

- AccessMillions of people attend exhibi-tions, many of whom would not oth-erwise have visited the museum.Exhibitions create a buzz aroundmuseums, attracting people to a‘one-time only’ experience. A mu-seum with a changing programme ofexhibitions attracts people to return

to see what is on, even if they wouldnot be attracted to see the permanentcollection again and again.

Museums are increasingly expectedto reach out to sections of the publicdeemed to be 'excluded'.• Targetedexhibitions provide opportunity toreach out to these sections of thepublic.• Dr Borg of the V&A justi-fied the absence of major blockbust-ers by pointing to the exhibitionArts of the Sikh Kingdoms, whichappealed to a particular minoritygroup. Borg’s successor, MarkJones, contends that the V&A “lostits way” when it tried to become anart museum. Today it offers exhibi-tions of personal bric-a-brac fromKylie Minogue and The Supremes,accompanied by free catwalk showsand music to attract the sort ofcrowd that is put off by art.

- ScholarshipExhibitions provide the opportunityto make comparisons that are notpossible when works are thousandsof miles apart. They can make ussee artists in a new light when theirwork is brought together, revivingflagging reputations (or highlightlimitations not hitherto apparent).And they can help clarify the attri-butions of problematic paintings.Exhibition catalogues have becomethe mainstay of the art publishingindustry.•

The Downside of the Blockbuster

The problem with the blockbusterlies not so much in theory as inpractice. There is a law of diminish-ing returns. For the visitor, thepromise is rarely forthcoming.

Overcrowded exhibitions are utterlymiserable. Visiting the Tate’s Hol-bein exhibition on a weekday morn-ing over a hundred people werecrowded into the first room, half adozen jostling to see each of thesmall drawings.

The overcrowding problem is not atrivial example of the busyness ofgreat cities, like a crowded tubetrain. The experience of seeing acrowded exhibition is not just a littleworse than seeing the same exhibi-tion in more serene circumstances;


it is, as Mary Ann Sieghart testified,an altogether different and self-defeating exercise.• It utterly negatesthe stated purpose of exhibitions, towit, the ability to make fresh com-parisons.• Instead of considering onepainting in the context of the next,one has to queue up to see first oneand then the other.• One can standback and view the top of the tallerpaintings, and then look moreclosely at the lower parts, but cannoteven see the whole from a distance.

Neil MacGregor, Director of theBritish Museum has acknowledgedthat: “contemplation requires still-ness”. Yet he said of the Museum’sMichelangelo Drawings exhibitionin 2006, “If you love Michelangelo,what you really want to do is standin front of the work and contemplateit. That will obviously never be pos-sible in an exhibition of this nature”(Rupert Smith, “The Museum”,BBC Books, 2007, p. 50 – italicsadded.) Indeed, Mr MacGregor isnow fundraising for an extension sothat even more can get in to see suchexhibitions. But more space willjust mean even more people in frontof each exhibit, and an even moretrivial experience. Visitors are in-sulted and cheated with an experi-ence that expects them simply tonote what is there and move onswiftly so that the next person canget a glimpse.

Exhibitions are often crass

The implication is that permanentcollections are inescapably dull, andcurators must create novelty.• Theyseem not to allow that we might findfor ourselves new meaning in olddisplays, or indeed choose the solaceof the familiar over the hype of thenew.• Of course exhibitions do nothave to be crass, and some are excel-lent.• But it is not incidental that somany are so crass, appealing to fun-ders and publicists rather than actu-ally adding to our appreciation andunderstanding.• Great cumulativeeffort is devoted to displaying anddescribing the many temporary exhi-bitions, whereas permanent collec-tions are neglected, the wall textsrarely updated (sometimes referringto paintings no longer on display).•

The exception to this is where per-manent collections are themselvestreated as temporary exhibitions, asat the Tate Modern.• It is a bad trend;permanent collections themselvesare now whimsically shuffledaround to make them moreexciting.•At the Tate, themed quick-stop tours of unspeakably insultingcrassness are sign-posted – tours forthe recently dumped or depressedand such.

In 2004 the then Surveyor of theQueen’s Pictures, ChristopherLloyd, bluntly attributed ever in-creasing demands for internationalexhibition loans to: “The tendencynow is to regard museums and gal-leries as extensions of the mall, theclassroom or an official datingagency. No longer are they run bycurators but by accountants, retail-ers, restaurateurs and education de-partments.” Christopher Lloyd madeclear that his views were his own -the Queen is a big lender of pictures.

Even the claims about the benefits ofscholarly exhibitions are question-able. Exhibition catalogues focus onthe works included in the exhibition,creating a partial impression of thesubject because it systematically ex-cludes works that cannot be lent.And whilst grand retrospectives canshow us artists in a new light, theyare generally wearying. Seeing doz-ens, or even hundreds of works bythe same artist is deadening, even forthe greatest artists.

Exhibitions are a distraction for thecurators

Museums employ curators to be re-sponsible for their collections. Theymust be knowledgeable experts ableto research and present art objects tothe world. But increasingly they arerequired to divert their attention tothe sausage factory of exhibitioncreation. Years of planning andpreparation are required. Instead ofresearching and presenting their col-lections, they are required to horse-trade for loans and attend to the ur-gent deadlines of the next temporaryshow rather than attend to their col-lections.

Conclusions

Lots of people have criticised block-busters. Weary insiders will recog-nise the problems we are flagging.But their laments are too often de-spairing and fatalistic. It appearsthat we are repeating a familiar tale,but in fact we are defending the mu-seum as something intrinsicallythrilling, which is in fact dulled bythe manufactured spectacle of theblockbuster.

John Walker of the National Gallery,Washington noted that “Communityrelations have been given such im-portance that the distinction betweenan art centre and an art museum isvanishing. For those who loveworks of art for their own sake theresult is heartbreaking” (“Self-Portrait with Donors”, 1969, p. 284).He continues, “Some museumsshould exist for the vast audience ofcultured and culturally aspiring peo-ple, who have rights as well…Theyshould not be denied the pleasure ofcontemplating works of art, of com-muning privately with a favouritepainting or piece of sculpture…Thechance for serenity of contemplationis of consequence. [People] musthave an opportunity to reflect onnoble works of art without distrac-tion. It is the duty of museums to seethat this is possible. Museums donot exist solely for the noise andturmoil of hordes of schoolchildren”(p. 303-4). Some indication of thescale of the invasion of “the Mu-seum Service” by professional “edu-cationalists” can be seen at theNational Gallery, London: in 1972 ithad a single lecturer; today it hasfifteen.

George R. Gouldner at the Metro-politan Museum of Art in New Yorkclaims: “Museums today are allabout getting people in through thedoor. And therefore the museumsthen have to buy and exhibit lots ofwhat the public want. It’s a strangetreadmill, like a bunch of hamstersrunning in a circle. No one is en-riched, so you wonder, What’s thepoint of it all?” (George R. Goldnerin Danny Danziger ‘Museum: Be-hind the Scenes at the MetropolitanMuseum of Art’ Viking 2007 p. 79)

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