The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. - Review - book review

Art in America, May, 2001 by Andree Hayum

The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, by Francis Haskell, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000; 208 pages, $25 cloth.

Francis Haskell, starting around 1960, invariably pursued topics concerning the reception of works of art. With energy, erudition and wit, he delved into cultural activities such as the collecting and exhibiting of art and concomitant responses--critical writings, artist's copies--that inform a history of taste, as the titles of some of his previous books indicate: Patrons and Painters (1963), Rediscoveries in Art (1976), Taste and the Antique (1982), Past and Present in Art and Taste (1987), History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (1993). In keeping with those interests, The Ephemeral Museum, published nearly a year after the Oxford art historian's death, takes as its subject the temporary exhibition of old-master paintings. Haskell distinguishes such displays as bringing "together in a clearly defined space works of art ... that had originally been designed to be seen in wholly different locations." Of relatively recent origin, these temporary exhibitions are more or less concurrent--as his definition can be understood to suggest--with the growth of the museum as an institution. Because we have come to take old-master exhibitions for granted, this book, importantly, asks precisely when and where they began. By whom were they organized? In what did they consist? What were their purposes, and what effects did they have?

The first two chapters trace various "prehistories" of the old-master exhibition: to the showrooms of dealers and auctioneers in 17th-century Holland and 18th-century England, where, for example, Christie's sale of works from the collection of the Duc d'Orleans occasioned a shilling-per-entry viewing that attracted "vast crowds"; to the special displays at the Musee Napoleon of works brought back from conquered territories. But, surprisingly, England was the place where the kind of temporary exhibition Haskell focuses on first became a regular feature, when, during the second decade of the 19th century, the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom started arranging a series of displays. This is worth contemplating in light of England's hesitant and delayed entry into the arena of the public art museum.(1) That these temporary exhibits consisted exclusively of works drawn from private collections, reminds us, at the same time, that a large number of extraordinary Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces had found their way into the homes of Britain's wealthy and aristocratic families during the course of the 18th century. Furthermore, insofar as these acquisitions were the result of personal choices, the first English exhibitions seem to us remarkably unencumbered by established values or canons of artists and styles that in one way or another prevailed in more permanent institutions like the academy or the early museum. However mixed the motivations behind putting changing selections on view for the public--possessive pride or public spiritedness, esthetic edification or enhancement of market value--it meant that ever-increasing audiences could have access to works by a most diverse range of masters: Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Titian, Raphael, Poussin and subsequently such 15th-century artists as Botticelli and Bellini. By 1857, as Haskell tells us, the French critic Theophile Thore could remark that, except in the area of Italian Renaissance, the impressive array of works assembled in Manchester for "Art Treasures of the United Kingdom" was "about on the level of the Louvre." Certainly at the time it outstripped the holdings of the National Gallery, which were still far from comprehensive.

Both artists and general viewers were becoming accustomed to art exhibitions, which laced the 18th and especially the 19th centuries at venues like the Salons and Worlds Fairs in France, but these shows were devoted exclusively to works by living artists. Accordingly, a highlighting of the old masters was perceived in certain quarters to be at cross-purposes with the healthy development of contemporary artistic production. In France and other European centers, the choice and, above all, the arrangement within the museum context of works of art from previous eras served to reframe the persistent problem, also inherited from the academy, of how best to accommodate past artistic traditions and exemplars to the art of the present time. As for the category "old master," a usage that became popular in England, one should emphasize that it most often applied to painting as a medium and to those examples by deceased artists that were collected and/or catalogued and displayed in exhibitions and sales. Haskell calls it ironic that, in England, where the notion of old master was most common, the term frequently designated those earlier artists who were foreign, i.e., non-British. But this can also be understood to reflect the fact that English art lacked any continuous history of the kind that, especially through the medium of painting, could be charted--from pre-Renaissance to modern--for the Italian or Northern European schools.