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| Picture: MS |
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| Picture: MS |
This is the view from the Titian exhibition in Rome. Throughout the exhibition there were large crowds entirely filling the rooms, with sometimes ten or twenty people trying to catch a glimpse of the same picture. The exhibition itself is a stupid idea. It's only a few years since the major Titian exhibition at the National Gallery in London; another Titian show adds nothing to our appreciation or understanding. This lunatic overcrowding just deprives almost everyone of any opportunity to see these works.
The exhibition includes lots of large paintings that should never have been subject to the stress of transport, and which are hardest of all to see in a crowd, where you can either inch your way to the front of the queue to see the foreground, or stand back to see the top of the panel above the sea of bodies.
Coincidentally Blake Gopnik has just written an excellent article for The Art Newspaper about the exhibition phenomenon. I can't commend it strongly enough; it's absolutely spot-on. I suspect that many in the museum world will agree wholeheartedly with him, but the institutional imperative towards more and bigger exhibitions seems unstoppable.
Italian museums, arrive late to carry out exhibitions of their major painters (Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci ...). No problem. A few years after of major exhibition of Italian Painter, they make one in the Quirinale. Empty their museums, and moving works, that never should move (The Miracle of the Slave by Tintoretto), direction to Rome. Foreign museums always give his works (in return for their loans) and exhibitions are always bigger and with better works than before. But the catalogs are never reference works of these authors. Something will mean this. In four years, do not miss the exhibition of Barocci, in the Quirinale.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Gopnik's is an excellent article! I've had a similar experience myself at the Luxembourg Museum, in Paris. The Chagall exhibition resembled a shopping mall during the sales.
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