Why Are So Many Once-in-a-Lifetime Art Exhibitions Happening in Our Lifetime?

Bloomberg - Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 08:00 CET

Rafael. Donatello. Leonardo. And now Vermeer. So many huge retrospective exhibitions of the West’s most important artists are happening at museums seemingly all at once.

Johannes Vermeer’s output was so scant that for the past 350 years it’s been almost impossible to exhibit his work at any scale: Each of his about 37 known paintings was thought to be too valuable, too fragile—and, ever since The Concert was stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990, too jealously guarded by its owners—to travel much. Instead, the Dutch baroque master’s exhibitions tend to be padded with work by other artists. This results in shows that Taco Dibbits, general director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, calls “Vermeer ands”: “Vermeer and the Delft School, Vermeer and letter writing.”

But this month, for the first time in its history, the Rijksmuseum opened a show without any qualifications. Running from Feb. 10 to June 4 and titled simply “Vermeer,” its 28 paintings are the largest gathering ever showcased, with loans from around the world. “Museums realized that something like this would never happen again,” Dibbits says.

The thing is, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions have been happening a lot lately. There was the Louvre’s 2019-20 Leonardo da Vinci show in Paris, which featured more than 160 objects, including 11 out of fewer than 20 acknowledged paintings by the artist; it attracted more than 1 million visitors, shattering records. In 2022 in London, after a Covid delay, the National Gallery opened a massive Raphael exhibition pegged to the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. Its 90 objects included 29 paintings, a tapestry on loan from the Vatican and two bronze roundels from Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace, never before shown outside of Italy.

Nearly simultaneously, in Florence, the Palazzo Strozzi—best known for contemporary art shows—somehow persuaded 60 institutions to lend it 130 works for “Donatello: The Renaissance.” It even included a panel made for a baptismal font in Siena that hadn’t left the church since Donatello installed it 600 years ago.

“It was unprecedented, and an unrepeatable exhibition,” says Arturo Galansino, director general of the Palazzo. “It was not only a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, it was a once-in-history exhibition.” (Separate versions of the show traveled to Berlin and will be at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum this month.)

Mega art shows are nothing new. But as the number of museums around the world has ballooned, from what Unesco says was 22,000 in 1975 to 95,000 today, and the category of fine art has expanded to include everything from videos to graffiti, museumgoers have become, if anything, more selective. That could be one reason, directors say, for this superlative new crop.

“I think audiences are more discerning,” says Gabriele Finaldi, the director of London’s National Gallery. “Audiences will give you short shrift if you’re trying to make a big noise, and maybe the show isn’t quite cracked up to what it should be.”

This flowering of so-called bucket-list exhibits could also be a natural product of increased intra-museum collaboration at the highest level, which “makes sense financially, because you’re working with the same smaller number of institutions with whom you can do ongoing projects,” suggests Peter Miller, the dean of Bard Graduate Center in New York. Shows that include prime works from a select group of global museums, he continues, are akin to “the attempt by a few football club owners to create a European superleague. It’s the best of the best playing against each other for their own mutual benefit, and presumably to delight audiences.”

Given how long each of these shows has taken to assemble, the phenomenon is not strictly “recent.” It took more than 10 years to organize the Leonardo show, according to a news release. Planning for the Donatello exhibition began, Galansino says, around 2015, seven years before it was unveiled. The Raphael show took nearly as long—five and a half years.

The Vermeer exhibition, in contrast, was conceived comparatively recently, when Dibbits heard whispers that the Frick Collection, a lavish house museum filled with old masters on New York’s Fifth Avenue, would finally close for a multiyear renovation and expansion. The Frick’s Vermeers “haven’t been in Europe for a hundred years,” Dibbits says. “They’ve always been in the building, and they could never leave.” With the museum turning into a construction site, suddenly the paintings were free to travel. “There was just one time slot, and we had to do it now,” he says.

The Rijksmuseum has four Vermeers of its own. Dibbits first turned to the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, which has three, including his most famous work, Girl With a Pearl Earring from 1665. That conversation, he continues, was relatively easy—“they said it would be great”—at which point he began to contact everyone else. A total of 13 separate lenders “reacted incredibly positively,” Dibbits says. “Washington’s National Gallery immediately said it would lend and cooperate.”

According to Dibbits, a painting might not have been able to make it to the show for reasons that include being too fragile to travel or being considered “such a core of the museum that it can’t leave.” A donation may also stipulate that it could never be loaned out. “It’s a bit like the world championships in football,” Dibbits adds. “The evening before the match, everyone was talking about which players weren’t in the field.”

Vermeer’s paintings are famously nuanced and detailed, which from the standpoint of exhibition design presents a hurdle: His art “is so popular partly because, when you stand in front of his paintings, there is such a direct intimacy, and in a sense time stands still,” Dibbits says.

As a consequence, even though an estimated 800,000 people will try to attend, the Rijksmuseum plans to limit visitors to a fixed number every day. “It will be more like 400,000 visitors than 800,000,” says Dibbits. “We won’t be able to host them all, because that would be an impossible viewing experience.” The museum has already pre-sold more than 150,000 tickets, its all-time record.

In that respect, Dibbits hits on a paradox of these once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions: They aren’t always profitable.

“Normally we don’t talk about money, but I can tell you that ‘Donatello’ was the most expensive show we ever produced,” says the Palazzo Strozzi’s Galansino. “We are a private foundation, and our budget is basically 45% sponsors, 40% to 45% ticket sales, and roughly 15% is public money, so the success of every show is very important.”

Despite the high costs, he says the attendance of more than 150,000 was about average, but with a high percentage of international visitors. (Roughly 170,000 people came to the Strozzi’s Jeff Koons show in late 2021.) “We had people coming from all over the world,” Galansino says. “The numbers were similar, but the demographics were different.”

The Raphael show was also fairly costly to organize, says the National Gallery’s Finaldi. “Loans from faraway countries are generally much more expensive”—transport, insurance—“but also, with an exhibition like ‘Raphael,’ which had such a variety of objects, there was a lot of cost for the design of the exhibition,” he says. Special vitrines, structures to hang rare tapestries, “all of those contributed to what ended up being quite a large budget.” And yet ticket sales didn’t exactly set records.

“It was a successful show, but bear in mind this happened in the immediate aftermath of Covid, so our visitor numbers were impacted by that,” Finaldi says. “These are not fundamentally about raising revenue, they’re about sharing our enthusiasm for great art. If we lose sight of that, it’s a sad thing.”

They’ve also been an occasion to conduct new scholarship. The Rijksmuseum has done extensive scans of various works in advance of the Vermeer exhibition, yielding, among other discoveries, the knowledge that its own The Milkmaid (1658–59) contained an underpainting with preliminary sketches that the artist later painted over. (“The general assumption was that the artist produced his small oeuvre very slowly and always worked with extreme precision,” the museum said in an announcement. “This view is now being revised.”)

The museum also published a biography of the artist written by Gregor J.M. Weber, the co-curator of the exhibition, and it’s publishing a catalog with new scholarly essays. “These are all things that reach beyond the exhibition itself,” Dibbits says. “That’s why we allocate these kinds of resources to it.”

He declines to say exactly how much the show cost, other than to note that exhibitions usually amount to “several millions” and that “insurance costs were high” (surely an understatement). But there’s no doubt in his mind that it’s worthwhile. “I don’t believe in doing a blockbuster exhibition because it’s a blockbuster,” Dibbits says. “It’s our duty as a museum to show the best works to the public.”