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Recalled to Life: Plundered Art Discovered |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Eric Gibson |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1995 |
| Size: 2,689 Words, 16,513 Characters |
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More and more these days, it's hard to find an exhibition that doesn't come with a great deal of baggage. The circumstances surrounding a show are often upstaging the works of art it contains.
In New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art has just opened its biennial exhibition of contemporary art, a show routinely looked at not for its aesthetic interest so much as an indicator of how much a hostage the museum is to certain dealers, or to the forces of political correctness or artistic fashion.
In January, the Kitaj retrospective seen in London last summer arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unfortunately, the artist's hysterical response to the flurry of negative reviews the show spawned in London, in which he accused his critics of being motivated solely by anti-Semitism, has now become as important a feature of the exhibition as the art itself.
Two years ago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington opened Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation, a loan show from a small museum outside Philadelphia known for its prohibitions on lending. The major subtext of the show was the debate surrounding the ongoing effort of the foundation's trustees to alter significant portions of the founder's deed of gift in order to reshape the museum.
The list could go on and on. The point is that these days it is getting more and more difficult to "see" the art in our art exhibitions. And nowhere is this more true than in the show that opened in March in St. Petersburg, Hidden Treasures Revealed.
The exhibition consists of some seventy-five Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by some of the most...
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...overnments too terrified to let their treasures out of the country, lest they be seized. Without arguing against a settlement, therefore, it is possible to observe that if one is reached, we are likely to find that the world has become a more complicated rather than a simpler place, just as it has in the wake of that other, much-longed-for development, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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