Miles above us jets speed through the skies carrying their freight of Titians and Poussins, Van Dyks and Goyas. Below, meanwhile, curatorial staff in museums and galleries scattered over much of Europe and Unites States are supervising the transfer of pictures that usually hang on their walls to inaccessible or crowded storage rooms and are busy preparing large new explanatory labels. Accountants are checking the impact likely to be made on this year’s budget deficit and are deploring the failure to settle for Monet or Van Gogh, while elsewhere printer works overtime to make sure that bulky catalogues are ready on schedule, hotel clerks are eagerly accepting, or regretfully refusing a spare of extra bookings, and academics are putting the finishing touches to the papers that they will shortly read at the inevitable symposium. The Old Masters exhibition is by now as well established among the institutions of the western art word as are the public museum and the illustrated monograph – both of which sometimes seem to depend on the popularity of this comparative newcomer to the field for their own continuing vitality. Indeed, the holding of an Old Master exhibition to commemorate the centenary of an artist’s birth or death has become a moral imperative – to be neglected at the cost of scholarly and public opprobrium.

But much more significant (though much less obvious) than the economic and the political impact of exhibitions – on tourism, for instance, or on publishing or on promotion of national or personal prestige – have been the many changes introduced by them to the ways that we now look at art. The bringing together, from public and private collections scattered across much of the world, of many of the pictures painted by a single artist over the course of his career allows us to scrutinise his development (or the lack of it) with a rigour that neither he nor his patrons can ever have envisaged (even though retrospective prints based on their major works may have been available): perfunctory drawings and rough sketches can be hung next to highly finished paintings and sculptures so as to reveal successive stages in his creative process; contrasts can be demonstrated between ‘the unique hand of the master’ and that of the follower or anonymous apprentice in his workshop. In addition, barely known artists, and, indeed, whole schools of art, can be introduced to the public and, as a consequence, be granted an assured place alongside others whose status has long been established by tradition, while the complexity of some iconographical theme can be illustrated by examples chosen from the ‘oeuvre’ of painters whose lives were as decisively separated by time as they were by place. The ephemeral presentation in London, Paris or New York of exotic, and sometimes only recently excavated, sculptures – whose permanent sequestration in the museums of these or other western cities would not be possible today – can radically change our perception of even the most renowned orthodoxies; national glory can be propagated, and political causes can be promoted, by judicious displays in well-chosen exhibition galleries; dealers and forgers can make impressive profits by venturing into beautiful (or, sometimes, merely fashionable) territory, whose contours have not yet been fully mapped. Moreover, a semblance of permanence can be given to what is, by definition, only temporary through the production of superb, but misleading, catalogues – misleading, because by necessarily having to confine themselves to what can be borrowed for the occasion, while not being able to take into account such relevant new information as may emerge either from the exhibition itself, or from papers delivered at some conference arranged in connection with it, these catalogues can provide only an incomplete and unbalanced view of the subjects apparently promised by their titles, while, at the same time, perhaps discouraging the market from books that might have been able to fulfil those promises.

It is true that, well before the calculated juxtapositions made possible by Old Master exhibition, many or the revelations, distinctions and comparisons that will be explored in ‘The Ephemeral Museum’ were not unfamiliar to small number of well-travelled connoisseurs endowed with good memories and capacious notebooks; but their observations could not have been upheld with real cogency and, above all, could not (as they can today) have been conveyed to a wide public with such assurance that even monumental works of art, still to be seen in the churches and other public buildings for which they were produced, are appraised by criteria not hitherto generally accessible. However, it took a very long time – some two generations – before even those closely involved with organising Old Master exhibitions either began to appreciate or had any desire to exploit some of the remarkable potentialities of this new invention, which first became regularly established during the second decade of the nineteenth century in England.

Well before then, however – as early a the seventeenth century – exhibitions of contemporary art had become institutionalised in various cities in Italy (usually on special saint’s day) and in Paris (under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). Their standing was ambiguous almost from the first: as a means of attracting attention to the work of young and unknown artists they were obviously welcome – necessary indeed, once the constraints imposed by a rigid system of patronage began to loosen; but by exposing artists to the criticism of malicious rivals and journalist and to the indignity of deferring to the judgement of ill-informed public opinion, they could also be deeply humiliating. In any case, whatever their benefits and drawbacks, such exhibitions dominated the lives or artists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards and played an epoch-making role in the development of modern art – beginning, perhaps, with the showing of David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ in the Paris Salon of 1785, and continuing with such famous occasions as the ‘romantic’ Salon of 1824, the Salon del Refusés of 1863 and the Impressionists exhibitions from 1874 onwards in Paris, the various Secession exhibitions in Germany and Austria during the 1890s, the Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London of 1910 and 1912, the Armory show of 1913 in New York, and many more. It is therefore hardly surprising that their functions have been extensively discussed in recent years.


This is part of the ‘Introduction’ of The Ephemeral Museum : Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition by Francis Haskel. New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 2000.

Copyright © 2000 by Yale University Press
Used by kind permission of Yale University Press