The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition - Hardcover

Haskell, Francis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300085346 ISBN 13: 9780300085341

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Synopsis

When and why did large-scale exhibitions of Old Master paintings begin, and how have they evolved through the centuries? In this book an eminent art historian examines the intriguing history and significance of these international art exhibitions.

Francis Haskell begins by discussing the first “Old Master” exhibitions in Rome and Florence in the seventeenth century and then moves to eighteenth-century France and the efforts to organize exhibitions of contemporary art that would be an alternative to the official ones held by the Salon. He next describes the role of the British Institution in London and the series of remarkable loan exhibitions of Old Master paintings there. He traces the emergence of such nationalist exhibitions as the Rembrandt exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1898, the first modern “blockbuster” exhibit. Demonstrating how the international loan exhibition was a vehicle of foreign and cultural policy after the First World War, he gives a fascinating account of several of these, for example the Italian Art exhibition held at Burlington House in 1930 (Botticelli in the Service of Fascism). He describes the initial reluctance of major museums to send pictures on potentially damaging journeys and explains how this feeling gave way to cautious enthusiasm. Finally, in a polemical chapter, he explores the type of publications associated with exhibitions and with the criticism and scholarship that have centered upon them.

About this title

About the Author:

Francis Haskell, who died in January 2000, was one of the most original and influential art historians of the twentieth century. His books included Patrons and Painters, Past and Present in Art and Taste, History and Its Images, and, with Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, all published by Yale University Press. He retired as professor of the history of art at Oxford University in 1995.

From Publishers Weekly:

The late Oxford art historian Haskell (Patrons and Painters, etc.) produced permanently valuable books on the social climates that produced great art in earlier centuries. This study is based on various lectures, and was put into final shape by Haskell's coauthor on Taste and the Antique, Nicholas Penny. It describes how international blockbuster museum exhibits aroseDfrom 17th-century "old master" retrospectives in Italy and the bureaucratic "salons" of France beginning in the 18th century, to the 19th-century nationally based shows (Rembrandt in Amsterdam) and today's global extravaganzasDalong with some of their worst excesses. In nine chapters devoted to specific exhibits, Haskell goes behind the scenes, delving through miles of source material to explain the political context for many of the shows. In a striking chapter, "Botticelli in the Service of Fascism," he describes a landmark 1930 London exhibit of Italian art that turned into a propaganda platform for Mussolini. Haskell is openly horrified at the risks museum directors now habitually run in order to win brownie points with their trustees and other art world honchos, putting their irreplaceable artworks in harm's way: "Miles above us jets speed through the skies carrying their freight of Titians and Poussins, Van Dycks and Goyas." Throughout, Haskell's clear prose brings what is often a highly detailed and specialist discussion into clear focus, though it won't make it much past the art and art historical worlds. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0300085346
• ISBN 13: 9780300085341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224