Proceedings of the American Association of Museums Volume 5-7 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 Excerpt: ...school, technique, or art ideal, and, for the sake of good design as well as success with the public, even among objects of a kind, some one or more gems should be the focus about which the whole exhibit centers. One does not particularly enjoy wading through gallery after gallery, picking up here and there the few choice examples of a kind or a school to try to patch together a connected story. It is my belief that every visit to the museum should result in impressions which stick. Hence, the exhibits must have cumulative force. Every one should exemplify some ideal of color, tone, composition, or interpretation which is clear-cut. The recent German exhibition in America was of this type. Throughout, one found evidence of an uncanny sense of pattern underneath a rich, brutal color, even in the service of morbid, of times degenerate, themes. Even to the layman it was a distinct group of pictures, and consistent. An exhibit such as this may not please or satisfy, but it puts its message across the footlights just the same. And this is exactly the thing most exhibits do not accomplish because they dp not represent any one idea--an epoch or movement in art history, an historical sequence, or an ideal. There is another point in this connection. The exhibit influence is furthered immeasurably when the pictures or sculpture or artifacts are supplemented by adequate, illuminating, written or spoken description, and by this I mean a description not so much of the pictures as of the time and conditions of which they are a reflection. You are, of course, familiar with those admirable essays of Taine which paint in no ordinary way the growth of art in the Netherlands, Greece, and Italy. In the first paper on art in the Netherlands, the stolid frank Dutch character and...