I can’t prove it (yet), but it seems to me that the renewed focus by museums on their permanent collections during these years of financial worries is producing some very fine results — not innovations, really, but new applications of some practices in different places to excellent effect.
I just learned of another example: The St. Louis Art Museum, in reinstalling its permanent collection, has created a separate gallery for Max Beckmann. This seems long overdue. By its own admission, the museum owns the world’s largest collection of Beckmann paintings, sculptures and prints.
The new gallery holds 14 works by Beckmann spanning his career and including two enormous works, “Scene from Destruction of Messina” and “The Sinking of the Titanic,” which according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “are on view for the first time in years.”
Simon Kelly, the SLAM’s Modern and contemporary art curator, told the paper that gallery is among the largest in the museum, and that the museum will hang more Beckmann paintings in other galleries.
The central goal of this reinstallation was to showcase that part of our collection that is internationally known…When you go to Europe, people talk about St. Louis because of Beckmann. We haven’t showcased it sufficiently.
Indeed. This pleases me, as a Beckmann fan, but it’s also important because the new gallery helps give the museum its own personality. (Too many museums, with cookie-cutter, one-of-each collections, look alike.)
The reinstallation involves 18 galleries, all told, and it includes 12 new acquisitions, plus “45 works that have not been on view for a decade or more and several other pieces that have undergone extensive conservation.” The museum has a video of it on this page, but I couldn’t download it without setting off security because it’s too big.
I’ve mentioned what some other museums are doing here, here, and here, among other posts.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Post-Dispatch