The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition.(Review)

Francis Haskell The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. Yale University Press, 208 pages, $25

The precipitous decline in museum standards over the course of the last quarter century has many sources, the most immediate of which is the uncritical absorption of politically correct values from other so-called disciplines in the humanities. This journal has chronicled these developments with manifest dismay. It is thus with a certain pathetic glee that one can now point to the two titles under review as corroborating evidence of the sheer drop we have witnessed. Of course, those who would benefit most from these fine studies are unlikely to consider their lessons.

In this context, the primary lessons are that we have effectively forsaken the enduring rationale of public museums and that we have foolishly replaced a tragic sense of history with a more playful, experimental approach to exhibiting art. By a tragic sense of history, I mean to suggest the attitude toward the past that motivated earlier generations of museum directors and curators to be sensitive to the extreme fragility of unique objects, as well as their ignorance of today's temptations of PR coups and the financial pressures that put a premium on multi-destination loan exhibitions and blockbuster shows. Works of art are perishable, and slackened museum policies enabling them to be sent hither and yon court disaster.

The late Francis Haskell, Edgar Wind's successor at Oxford, was one of the very few advocates of restraint regarding lending from one collection or institution to another. He, more than many in the upper reaches of the contemporary museum world, was an outspoken defender of the preciousness of the works themselves; he also understood that massive monographic exhibitions, and their catalogues, often have unintentionally negative results distorting the state of research for a generation or more--largely because the opportunities and tradeoffs involved in museum lending at any given time present potentially artificial, or at least arbitrary, reference points. When the word is out that the Met is mounting a major show on "X" uninvolved museums and curators tend to look in other directions for subjects.

The tale Haskell tells is that of the emergence of temporary exhibitions of Old Master paintings, a tale that begins with the display of private paintings during feast days in seventeenth-century Italy. From these civic demonstrations, the temporary arrangement of pictures (the "ephemeral museums") came to serve more explicitly political and commercial purposes, which only accidentally helped to stimulate the close scrutiny of established artists and their oeuvres, first through criticism and later through connoisseurship and scholarship. Chapters on the unconscionable propagandistic uses to which art was subjected under Napoleon's reign, the commercial vectors involved in the international dispersal of private and princely collections in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the rise of more explicitly political and nationalistic pretenses for such exhibitions offer a richly instructive series of episodes that condense his larger themes into discrete events. This has always been a hallmark of Haskell's scholarly approach: exactingly concrete examinations of the social dimensions of artistic practices without a hint of what is now de rigueur--leftist ideological sermonizing.

Of course, the core element of Haskell's story is the concomitant emergence of an entire category of art objects ("Old Master" paintings) and its intellectual corollary, high art. While the notion of an Old Master and the modern concept of art came into being contemporaneously and reinforced one another in many ways, an account of these intellectual forces remains terra incognita.

Haskell's point of view is an inductive, object- and event-based account. James Sheehan's fine ...