We talked a little bit last week about how art museums will loan out their works to travelling exhibits that go all around the world, and allow people in one place to see art from another place that they may never get to see otherwise.
Sometimes there’ll be specific kind of exhibit entitled something like “Treasures of the National Museum” of this place or that, and these do something distinctive. It’s really like going to another museum somewhere else in the world. At least until you go back outside.
Ten years ago, there was an exhibit that toured the United States called “Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland.” I saw several paintings that I figured then that I’d never get to see in person again. Sir John Leighton was then the director of the National Galleries. As the exhibit was being put together, said he hoped “visitors to the exhibitions will be enchanted by the range of superb works on show, and we encourage them to visit Scotland and see the rest of the collection at the three sites in Edinburgh.”
Here's a little bit of what I said about it back then.
It’s a long way from Edinburgh, Scotland to Fort Worth, Texas, but the current exhibit at the Kimbell Museum of Art has made the trip. This isn’t a huge exhibit, not a “blockbuster,” but it’s a pristine one. Nothing ties the pieces in the exhibit together other than where they currently reside—that is, in one of Scotland’s three main museums.
There are 55 paintings in all and several of them have never been to the United States. A few of the painters you may not have heard of. A couple, for instance, are celebrated as national artists in Scotland but have a smaller reputation elsewhere. You’ll recognize some of the tartan patterns, if not the people wearing, or painting, them.
One of the more crowd-pleasing pieces is a massive landscape of Niagara Falls by Frederick Edwin Church. When you stand back from it you can almost hear the roar of the water and feel the spray. It calls to mind his masterpiece “Icebergs” hanging only 30 miles away at the Dallas Museum of Art. It’s a curiosity of the art world that these two big, stirring paintings by the same artist have briefly wound up so close together, maybe for the first time ever.
Travelling exhibits do that: they bring together people and paintings in combinations that may have never existed before, at least in a way that you’ve never experienced before. An exhibit from a particular museum someplace else, if it comes to a place close to you, is a way of seeing the entire art world from a different perspective.