Walter Liedtke,curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, responds to my comments about his Frans Hals show in yesterday’s post, The Whit/Met: Holland Cotter Thinks Outside the Breuer Box:
A few quick points about your piece: The “Laughing Cavalier” is in the Wallace Collection, which can never lend.
Manet‘s pastel of “George Moore” could not have been displayed at the required low light levels while in the same galleries with the paintings on view in “Hals.”A big Hals show—yes, I could have done that. But I know that my colleagues at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, plan a big show on Hals and his Haarlem circle in the near future.
So much of what I read in the press seems to suggest that curators could do this or that if only museum policy or wisdom or vision or investment would allow it, and yet for 30 years I and every colleague I know in the Met have done precisely or pretty nearly the exhibitions they wanted to do, with a great deal of independence.