Two days ago I visited the Musée d’Orsay.
This place is absolutely humbling. Within hang some of the most famous paintings and sculptures ever known to mankind.
The list is incredible. Here’s a brief—brief—sampling:
* Camille Pissarro — White Frost
* Édouard Manet — Olympia, The Balcony, Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets, The Luncheon on the Grass
* Edgar Degas — The Parade, also known as Race Horses in front of the Tribunes, The Bellelli Family, The Tub, Portrait of Edouard Manet, At the Stock Exchange, L’Absinthe
* Paul Cézanne — Apples and Oranges
* Claude Monet — The Saint-Lazare Station, The Rue Montorgueil in Paris, Harmony in Blue (Cathedral series)
* Pierre-Auguste Renoir — Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre
* Vincent Van Gogh — Self Portrait,The Church at Auvers, Starry Night Over the Rhone
* James McNeill Whistler — Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, also known as Whistler's Mother
I walked the halls in sheer astonishment, seeing the very paintings that were in my artbooks at fine arts school, subjects of my art history classes, probably unseen only by a third of this planet, right there in front of my face. I literally gaped in awe.
I mean, Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass”? Renoir’s “Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre”? Could anyone—anyone—put a price on these paintings? Two hundred million? Five hundred million? A billion?
I was even more astonished, therefore by the fact that they were literally right in front of my very face! Inches away! “Ah,” you say, “inches away through the protective glass barrier.”
No. No barrier. In fact hardly any barrier at all—just an ankle-high black wire about four feet from the wall. I could have stepped over it and in two seconds be feeling the texture of, say, Van Gogh’s “Self-portait.”
This painting alone must be worth over a hundred million dollars. A hundred million dollars.
Okay, there were men with machine guns stationed at every door, or at least beefy security guards with guns in each room.
Try university grads. That’s right, as I type, a university grad is protecting Whistler’s Mother. One in each room, to be sure, but these kids couldn’t guard a Starbuck’s.
But then it hit me in a flash: I knew why this was the case. They had expert reproducers paint from the real painting and have the real ones all locked safely away in a vault in the basement.
That, my friends, is all I can figure.
Maybe I should have stroked Vincent’s face, because he's turning in his grave.
The lack of protection for the paintings doesn't surprise me Nick. It's the same in almost every major gallery in every country. At the National Gallery here in London (the one on the north side of Trafalgar Square) they don't even have the ankle-high black wire you encountered at the Musée d’Orsay . That would be much too high-tech to actually implement. As a result it's possible to get really really REALLY close to millions of pounds worth of canvas.
ReplyDeleteBack in the late 1970s I was studying for a History of Art examination and I went into the National Gallery with two fellow students to have a look at some of the paintings featured on the course. At some point in the afternoon we found ourselves in front of "Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife" by the Dutch painter Jan van Eyck. This is the famous portrait, also known as the "Arnolfini Marriage", in which a convex mirror in the background shows the reflection of both the couple and the artist. Possibly because we'd arrived at the gallery via the pub I felt it was important to explain certain critical aspects of the artwork to my friends from a vantage point of six inches in front of the portrait, using an open felt tip pen as a pointer. In the middle of my exposition on lighting this and perspective that my pals had to physically pull me backwards before I added a couple of new elements to the picture. The only other occupant of the room at the time was an elderly security guard who appeared to be asleep, and this of course was in the era before ubiquitous CCTV, so I'd have got away with it if the worst had happened. And yes, I could have lived with my conscience.....
I'm actually very surprised that most art escapes damage on a daily basis. Or does it? We'll never know, but occasionally something happens that can't be swept under the carpet. In January 2006 a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge tripped over his shoelaces while coming down a staircase and lurched into £75000 worth of Qing dynasty Chinese porcelain vases that were on open display in a low-level window recess. He was subsequently arrested by the police in case it was a deliberate act of vandalism rather than an obvious dereliction of duty by the museum in not putting the vases behind the glass of a protective cabinet, and upon his release he was promptly banned by the museum (in a continued desperate and ultimately futile attempt to avert criticism) from ever going in there again. Here's a link to the story which may or may not be clickable:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/7087084.stm
I think one of the reasons most works of art have lasted this long relatively unscathed is because galleries don't often put up notices saying "Please Do Not Touch". This might be because it's assumed that not touching should go without saying, but it could also be seen as a brilliant example of reverse psychology because if such notices were commonplace we would all of course feel a strange compulsion to do exactly the opposite. God only knows how many priceless pieces have been saved in this way.
Actually, you're probably right. If you posted a sign saying "Don't touch these priceless one-of-a-kind works of art or they will deteriorate irretrievably" they'd have their grubby hands all over them.
ReplyDeleteEven though there was a sign saying "No flashes please" there were flashes going off everywhere.
People are so incredibly stupid. (Steve Irwin, anyone?)
Oh, and I'd have liked to have seen the museum people try to put £75,000 worth of Humpty-Dumptys back together again.
ReplyDeleteHere we have a case of mutual morons.
Nick, I had a similar reaction the first time I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I had just spent two weeks driving around Provence, following some of Vincent's routes, visiting some of the places he had gone to, looking at postcard reproductions of paintings (then) while the real scene lay before my eyes (now), etc. In Arles, I even had a lady from the tourist bureau spend an afternoon showing me the locations where he had stayed and painted.
ReplyDeleteSo I was on a Van Gogh high, almost a pilgrimage.
I was flying home via Amsterdam, and I had half a day to explore the city before my flight. So I went to the VG Museum, early, on a cold October morning. I think there were maybe five other people there besides me.
Holy mackerel! There they were! The real McCoys that I had gotten to know so well through cheap reproductions. And they didn't even have glass over them!
Yowser! At one point I was standing in front of one of the portraits and I though to myself "I could stick out my tongue and lick this."
Good thing I didn't, as I'd probably still be in a Dutch prison!
I appreciate the museums' desire to have these unique and irreplaceable artworks out for the general public to admire up close and of course I know I (or anyone I know, for that matter) would never do something to damage them, but all it takes is one deranged individual to irrevocably destroy one of them (people go on shooting rampages--why not a white paint rampage, or acid bath rampage?)
ReplyDeleteWhoops, there goes Luncheon on the Grass.
Paint and acid rampages have already been done as this article testifies:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.freehomepages.com/jumac/17/vandalism.htm
And only a couple of months ago some rugby fans took their frustration out on a Monet, in the very same Musée d’Orsay that started this topic off:
http://www.diaryofanartist.com/2007/10/monet-masterpie.html
Basically if somebody wants to damage a piece of art then they'll damage it, and there's usually nothing that anyone else can do about it before the event, apart from ramping up security or putting paintings behind glass as they do with the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.
Ultimately galleries just have to trust in the sanity of their visitors, although even that's a bit of a moveable feast. I consider myself to be relatively sane, but every time I see Michelangelo's David I think of Magic Marker pens. Maybe it's all that expanse of flawless white marble, or maybe it's that I just know (as we all do) that he'd look much better with a pair of spectacles.